I'll start off with the irony of this question being tagged with a discussion and point out that meta is different.
Why don't discussion questions work in Stack Exchange? What is it about the software and the format that leads to people closing these questions as primarily opinion? or rejecting edits that invite discussion on the subject?
The first thing to realize is that Stack Exchange brands itself as a Q&A site. This is the very top of the content when you go to http://stackexchange.com. It calls out that this is something different than forums, that there are right answers.
When one goes to the tour page, note the wording of the text there:
This site is all about getting answers. It's not a discussion forum. There's no chit-chat. Just questions... and answers.
Going further into the help center, one finds What topics can I ask about here? which links to three other pages that goes into more about what isn't allowed on the site:
What types of questions should I avoid asking?
You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face. Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page.
If your motivation for asking the question is “I would like to participate in a discussion about
______”, then you should not be asking here. However, if your motivation is “I would like others to explain______to me”, then you are probably OK. (Discussions are of course welcome in our real time web chat.)
Good Subjective, Bad Subjective
Thus, questions that are not answerable — discussions, debates, opinions — should be closed as subjective. It seems simple enough: Fact good; opinion and discussion bad. But why?
Most forums and chat rooms have a scale problem. As in, they don’t. The more people that join the discussion, the more noise each of those connections bring. So the forums get progressively noisier and noisier, and suddenly one day … you stop learning.
The nature of a discussion is back and forth. Lines of communication. Look at sites that are intended for discussion and you will find threads and nested comments and a system that isn't designed around getting answers but rather to make connections with people.
Stack Exchange is different. As stated in the tour and time and time again in other documents, this is a Q&A site. As such it has intentionally made having these discussions difficult. Things such as limited sizes of comments, limited markdown in comments, the automatic move comment to chat feature.
Discussions make it harder to find the answer - you have to wade through all the other stuff.
As an aside, there is nothing worse than trying to go from reading a post, to reading the comments to going back to the post to see the reply, and back to the comments to see the next reply and back to the post... Don't do that. Remove the 'Edit:' and 'Update:' from your edit, make the entire thing a cohesive whole and leave a comment saying that the post has been updated to take this into account - people can read the revision history if they want to see what changed.</rant>
There are sites that do discussions very well... or, as well as discussions can be done. Jeff Atwood even went off to make another site model designed precisely for discussions (http://www.discourse.org)... and it's not a Q&A site.
It's not to say that one can't try to mix Q&A and discussions. But it's very hard to do both right. It's hard enough to do one of them right. Stack Exchange chose to get Q&A right.
If you do want to have a discussion there are some options:
The problem with discussions is that discussions can easily overwhelm the rest of the site. Unlike objective questions that have answers (and if asked again can be directed to the previous one asked that will answer this one too), discussions of the same topic are infinite in their variety based on the participants.
Stack Exchange is based on the premise that good questions and answers attract and retain the experts that answer them and that people come to find answers. The quality that Stack Exchange provides is unique within the Internet so far (quite a few clones, but none as compelling).
Furthermore, discussions tend to drive away experts. Not always, but it's the trend. This has been seen many times since the days of Usenet news... experts really don't want to spend their time arguing with someone who doesn't understand the topic at hand when they want to just answer a question... and if they do, there are ways to have that discussion via other channels.
This is not to say that there are experts who do enjoy discussions... and that Stack Exchange isn't exactly working for them. This is unfortunate, but it does not mean that discussions need to be allowed or that Stack Exchange needs to change.
I like the answer entitled "Why We're not a Forum". Having said that, I want to call attention to a particular kind of question that is somewhere between objective and subjective. I'm referring to design questions. There are numerous design questions that come up, concerning the design of object oriented systems, or the design of software packages, or the design of relational databases.
These questions are somewhere in the twilight zone. At first glance, they seem like the kind of straightforward Q&A that SE seems to handle well. And the asker usually wants an answer he or she can use, not an extended discussion.
Here's the problem. For every non trivial design case, there is more than one satisfactory answer. And which answer is "best" depends on the particular use case, and on what criterion is being used for "goodness". It's usually some kind of trade-off. So what ought to be a straight up Q&A turns into a discussion. Or the question gets closed before that can happen.
But most of us don't want to declare design questions out of bounds, even including those of us who very much want to avoid turning SE into just another forum community. This is not a simple problem, IMO.
The site likes questions whose answers are "definitive." That is to avoid questions that will likely solicit opinion, debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion And the reason is that such a quesion cannot be answered clearly and definitively using facts, references, or specific expertise."
One thing site is consciously trying to avoid is questions that could attract many "pretty good" possible answers but no one that stands out from all the rest.
The site's preference for a handful of answers that "converge" to a single, definitive, and presumably correct answer, is like preferring an infinite series that has a single, rather than "divergent," limit points.
It's quite easy to answer if one reflects about what one wants when a question arises right in the middle of daily programming work.
Regularly, one would just want a concise and correct how-to, best with a small, and down-to-the-point code snippet attached, and carry on with on own coding, and not open up for opinion, sentiment and other noise that "discussions" carry with them.
And imnsho delivering answers free of such noise is what SO excels in.
Got to laugh at the questions that have been upvoted a thousand times, favourited a few hundred, have a really popular and upvoted answer... and the mods have locked the thing because it doesn't conform to their view of what the Stack should be. They probably downvoted it too, a couple of times, out of spite. :P
So to answer your question, it is a mindset; not anything to do with software limitations. The entire concept of deliberately blocking others from answering questions is one without merit in the first place, of course.
Yes if it's on Software Engineering Exchange, it has to be an opinion-based question, no harm in discussing the opinions in a Software Engineering exchange.
The whole Subject "Software Engineering" is purely based on an opinion-based recommendations related to a given time,
I can understand if its only Stackoverflow exchange, it needs a definitive answer, Coding questions, Maths questions has only ONE correct answer, But "Software Engineering" is NOT a definitive answer, we have to weigh the pros and cons of each methodology and to know them we need to have opinion-based answers.
Besides if I ask "What is Software Engineering", am sure the answer will vague across the community, every single developer has their own view of "What is Software Engineering", Topic itself is a opinion based and its funny to ban it in this exchange,
If you don't agree just browse through the questions and answers in this Exchange, You will realize they don't have any definitive answer at all. All ideas questions are somewhat opinion based.
