When every question pertaining to Software Engineering has been more or less asked, do we broaden the scope of questions allowed to be asked?

Question

Have other Stack Exchanges run into this, where activity slows due to the lack of novel questions remaining? Is that even seen as a problem?

If and when it does happen, would there be greater consideration for broadening the scope of this SE to include frequently upvoted yet closed questions?

Answer 1

This is why we close as duplicate. If we link the questions the new ones act as signposts pointing at the old ones. As we grow that should happen more and more. If you are instead saying we should be more tolerant of say education advice questions or resource requests I'll hit you back with two points:

1. Closing off topic questions defines what we're about
2. Closing, say, let's-take-a-poll questions remembers who this site is for

Lose sight of these and we become reddit, or 4chan. * Shudder *

My personal big push here isn't to see us have a wider topic. It's to have a wider user base that understands the rules here. I try to teach people the rules rather than just shut them down. I try to salvage the valuable parts of a question rather than look for any excuse to junk it. Sometimes I go so far as to reframe the question into a valuable one so it can be answered.

But I'm not changing what were about just because we're old. We got old because we did something right.