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There is great number of legitimate, but closed questions on programmers.se, mainly because they are open-ended or off-topic (although this latter label is used too liberally in my opinon). There is clearly a demand for such discussions, and chats don't seem to be good enough for them.

Would it be possible to have another SE site for such content? Maybe without accepted answers. The intention of "what is the best..." questions is not to determine the "best" but to ask the community and see what ranks the highest.

Similarly, fun questions are often closed on programmers and SO which perfectly fine, but there is clearly an audience for them since those questions often receive an extremely high number of votes and views.

Edit: It's fine if you disagree with me, but you should not downvote this question unless you think it's poorly worded or off-topic. And even then I would be glad to get constructive criticism because simply bashing the down arrow doesn't help much.

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In short: no.

A longer answer is that Programmers was born out of the desire for exactly the site you describe. All the questions that were off-topic or otherwise closed on Stack Overflow were intended to find a home here. Shortly after public beta began, it became apparent that that doesn't work. It doesn't make for a good Stack Exchange site.

Don't get me wrong. "What's the best ..." and other fun discussions are fun, but they're not what Stack Exchange is built to do. Stack Exchange is built to host professional Q&A and all the systems it has (voting, accepted answers, transient comments, enforcing the fact that responses to questions should be actual answers, etc.) are built with that in mind.

There are tons of forums out there and sites like Reddit and Quora where you can participate in discussions and other open-ended questions. Stack Exchange is simply not the place for that.

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    I can't improve on this answer. Programmers SE was created to fill a need beyond coding as "another stack for programmers." I can appreciate, @Tamás, that you want yet-more programmer talk beyond the scope of Programmer's SE. But Stack Exchange was created for a certain type of Q&A. It wasn't designed to solve ALL the communication needs of programmers. The direction you want to expand into is, frankly, better-suited to other forums on the Internet.
    – Robert Cartaino
    Commented Nov 3, 2011 at 14:18
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    Just a note, since @TamásSzelei asks specifically for creating another Stack Exchange: Area51's faq advises against "Which is the best…" questions, so such a proposal will probably get summarily deleted.
    – yannis
    Commented Nov 3, 2011 at 21:16
  • In the spirit of being constructive, where would be a good place to route people to ask such questions? Blog post + twitter/fb sharing? Or some other method?
    – Danny Staple
    Commented Nov 4, 2011 at 23:54
  • @DannyStaple In general, it's hard to recommend places cause we don't want to make bad recommendations, but we usually redirect to Reddit and/or Quora. Our chat and blog posts would work, too. If/when we get a blog going for Programmers, that might be an outlet for some of the topics we're talking about here.
    – Adam Lear StaffMod
    Commented Nov 5, 2011 at 1:13
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    "Which is best?" works fine at dis.4chan.org/prog I'd bring body armor, a biohazard suit and a towel before going in there.
    – user28988
    Commented Nov 5, 2011 at 5:16
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    "...it became apparent that that doesn't work." Which is, was and will continue to be debatable.
    – Steven Evers
    Commented Nov 7, 2011 at 14:57
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    @SnOrfus Let me rephrase: "it became apparent to people in charge of Stack Exchange as a network". The issue is still debated, but I don't think it is realistically up for debate in the first place.
    – Adam Lear StaffMod
    Commented Nov 7, 2011 at 15:25
  • @AnnaLear: True enough. Sorry for sniping.
    – Steven Evers
    Commented Nov 7, 2011 at 16:11
  • @SnOrfus It's all good.
    – Adam Lear StaffMod
    Commented Nov 7, 2011 at 16:15

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