What's the point of a subjective site when "too localized" questions or unpopular questions are asked. You would expect to see LESS closed questions here than elsewhere.
Becoming very annoying and un-enjoyable. Is it really THAT bad to have this board be of programming discussion with the original catalyst as the question?
Because this is not a "subjective site." Programmers.SE's purpose is to handle questions of interest to programmers which are not directly related to coding (Stack Overflow is about coding, explicitly). Those questions will tend to be more subjective than the topics on Stack Overflow, so we set up some guidelines for asking subjective questions which fall within the scope of good Q&A: Good Subjective, Bad Subjective.
If questions cannot fit within the "Guidelines for Great Subjective Questions," they need to be closed.
What's the point of a subjective site...
Yeah, that's the crux of the issue. There is no point to a subjective site. "Subjective" is not a topic. You don't major in subjective. You cannot become an expert at subjective.
This has been covered extensively. If folks really want to hang out at a site which hosts fairly stupid water-cooler nonsense, Stack Exchange simply is not the best venue. You'd be much better off setting up a phpBB forum somewhere.
The site is subjective regardless of what some of the posters might think. When we start having a site that caters to programmers' interests, that becomes subjective and subject to up/down voting as expressed by whoever constitute the mass of posters with the power to vote up/down.
Some questions are valid but closed because of being too localized, but then you have these inane questions that continue to exist despite logic dictating to close the damned thing. People vote up and down on a whim as if they were in Myspace (with many of the posters being just out of HS and still pretending to be the second reincarnation of Dijkstra.)
So what you have is a combination of the worst posting elements of Yahoo!Answers, MySpace and slashdot, all mixed in a cabalistic abomination, semi-moderated by whim rather than procedure.
You cannot help yourself from being annoyed, but don't let it get under your skin either. For every gold nugget of info you get here, you'll get a bucket of crap with crawling roaches on it. You have to determine if the signal-to-noise ratio makes it worthwhile the reading.
There is something to do with the site's name: Programmers
People think it's about coding, and when they get there, they see soft ethereal questions, about ethics, and many onstartups-like questions.
Developers and marketing responsible could either do something clever to solve it.
Ok, yes, it's good to enforce the usefulness of the forum by cutting out dead weight, but when you see things like this getting closed, while the equivalent Stack Overflow question is still open...
Might that not be a sign that you're being just a tad overzealous on the Programmers board? Especially since the question in question is arguably a better fit for Programmers than SO (subjective, non-coding, programming related).
