I can not read their minds but from what I see, the only problem this site really has is a terrible flood of debugging / blatantly off-topic questions dumped by users who are banned or warned or simply scared off of Stack Overflow (my friends told me that "stack exchange" is undergraduate or master level, and "stack overflow" is PhD or research level, remember?)

Given above, it is only natural to assume that SE team looks for a cheap way to handle this, to make getting rid of this spam easier - and what can be cheaper than simply tuning close limit setting (to a value that was already tried and tested in the past, which makes it even easier).

The only thing to worry about in there was if it could have some undesired side effects... and, well, there were side effects.

These talks about trust / distrust and dreams on how meta visitors would suddenly reform from reading that post about experiment, I honestly can't take them seriously. Balance between tightening and broadening site scope is maintained by core community, not by management slogans.

And thing is, community over here could maintain the balance if site wasn't flooded by debugging spam. There are at least 8-10 members of core community who would be happy to vote reopen stuff "unfairly" closed by folks like you and me.

At the scale of our site, this would be more than enough to maintain a healthy balance without any management intervention. The only reason why this doesn't happen is flood of blatant garbage that buries questions worthy of wider community attention, like this bunch dropped at us today:

^{How to overcome the stack overflow problem?
Help: not able to compile C++ code
Injecting a java script to an iframe
Multiple viewpagers in one fragment
How do I increment a variable each time a program runs in C++?
Rewrite code snippet using ternary operators
Open cv help i m learnig open cv using youtube i get error when i try to run my frist program pls help
Android 6.0.1 couldn't enable wifi hotspot programmatically}

With the experiment they were probably hoping that lowering bar for reopening will make it easier for the other part of core community to keep the prior balance. This didn't happen, and I think the reason is just the same. Folks who could do this simply can't find questions they would vote on because these are buried under heaps of spam.

Note it's the third time I use the word spam, and it's intentional. I've seen Wikipedia defining spam as "unsolicited electronic message", and this fits here. It's easy even to a total outsider to see how much of the questions are blatantly off-topic (no matter how broadly one understands site topics).

If my understanding is correct, then there's nothing for SE to expect of us, because spam is not something we, as community, can control.

It is also unlikely that ignoring what's going on here is an option for them. As of now, site front page says it loud and clear: "hey, SE team can't control spam" - that's sort of damaging their reputation of top Q&A system in the world.

Few years ago, they could probably attempt to close the site, under the cover that it has failed to grow. But their current official position changed, and now they claim that smaller sites can be okay without exploding to SO scale (why wouldn't they, given that smaller sites combined started bringing more views than Stack Overflow). As a result, closing would look solely like giving up to spam.

I can not read their minds but from what I see, the only problem this site really has is a terrible flood of debugging / blatantly off-topic questions dumped by users who are banned or warned or simply scared off of Stack Overflow (my friends told me that "stack exchange" is undergraduate or master level, and "stack overflow" is PhD or research level, remember?)

Given above, it is only natural to assume that SE team looks for a cheap way to handle this, to make getting rid of this spam easier - and what can be cheaper than simply tuning close limit setting (to a value that was already tried and tested in the past, which makes it even easier).

The only thing to worry about in there was if it could have some undesired side effects... and, well, there were side effects.

These talks about trust / distrust and dreams on how meta visitors would suddenly reform from reading that post about experiment, I honestly can't take them seriously. Balance between tightening and broadening site scope is maintained by core community, not by management slogans.

And thing is, community over here could maintain the balance if site wasn't flooded by debugging spam. There are at least 8-10 members of core community who would be happy to vote reopen stuff "unfairly" closed by folks like you and me.

At the scale of our site, this would be more than enough to maintain a healthy balance without any management intervention. The only reason why this doesn't happen is flood of blatant garbage that buries questions worthy of wider community attention, like this bunch dropped at us today:

^{How to overcome the stack overflow problem?
Help: not able to compile C++ code
Injecting a java script to an iframe
Multiple viewpagers in one fragment
How do I increment a variable each time a program runs in C++?
Rewrite code snippet using ternary operators
Open cv help i m learnig open cv using youtube i get error when i try to run my frist program pls help
Android 6.0.1 couldn't enable wifi hotspot programmatically}

With the experiment they were probably hoping that lowering bar for reopening will make it easier for the other part of core community to keep the prior balance. This didn't happen, and I think the reason is just the same. Folks who could do this simply can't find questions they would vote on because these are buried under heaps of spam.

Note it's the third time I use the word spam, and it's intentional. I've seen Wikipedia defining spam as "unsolicited electronic message", and this fits here. It's easy even to a total outsider to see how much of the questions are blatantly off-topic (no matter how broadly one understands site topics).

If my understanding is correct, then there's nothing for SE to expect of us, because spam is not something we, as community, can control.

It is also unlikely that ignoring what's going on here is an option for them. As of now, site front page says it loud and clear: "hey, SE team can't control spam" - that's sort of damaging their reputation of top Q&A system in the world.

Few years ago, they could probably attempt to close the site, under the cover that it has failed to grow. But their current official position changed, and now they claim that smaller sites can be okay without exploding to SO scale (why wouldn't they, given that smaller sites combined started bringing more views than Stack Overflow). As a result, closing would look solely like giving up to spam.