But the too-broad questions aren't usually very interesting. Most of them are just pure crap. If you have enough SO karma, try https://stackoverflow.com/review/close/?filter-closereason=t... — what I see just now is someone who wants help with his java/spring thing and isn't very detailed about it, someone who's "been trying to learn how delegation" works, someone who "would like to know how can i mock diffrent user request behavior pattern" and those aren't unusual. The intellectually interesting questions are unusual in the "too broad" morass.
If people are to moderate SO, the rules have to be simple and quick to apply. Of course people don't have to do that, but I fear that without moderation, the interesting questions would get no answers because they would be completely flooded by questions like those three. So the open-ended, intellectially interesting questions lose either way.
Well, yeah, I assume most non-broad questions are pure crap too. But they don't close all of the non-broad questions. (Or even a lot of the awful ones - I have tried to answer a few horrifyingly badly written Qs on math SE, that no-one else dared to go near, which weren't closed for months, for some reason) So I can't see how that was so relevant to talk about that.
So the answer is, There Is No Alternative? There's no possible way things could be different in that respect?
The close reasons ("too broad" and the others) are good descriptions of the typical bad questions. Anything which doesn't fit into any of the dozen-odd close reasons is not typically a bad question.
This summer I waited on a lot of six- and even twelve-minute batch jobs, and I spent some of those on the SO moderation queue (I'm one of the 3000-karma users, not an elected moderator). It didn't take much more than six minutes to learn that picking the interesting questions out of the flood of manure is a terrible chore.
It would be nice if the intellectually interesting questions could be left alive. But I don't think it's humanly achievable. People will post their job interview quizzes and first-year CS exercises and say, oh, mentally stimulating and please do leave open.
Also, what made this interesting wasn't the question but that the question won the lottery of someone contributing substantial time to craft a great answer.
I don't think you could've done a better job than linking that moderation queue of "toobroad" to make your point. It was a never-ending channel of straight shit. Ranging from "here's a copy and paste of all my unformatted code that won't work, whatever that means" to "how do i use python on windows".
Everything looks easy to someone that has no stake in the solution. We get so used to being end-users that we take everything for granted, as if our experience is the natural ordering of the universe, rather than the result of all the work that goes on behind the scenes.
Read enough posts from HNers condemning Stack Overflow and you'd think they believe Reddit/HN's "new" queue is the ultimate browsing experience.
But the too-broad questions aren't usually very interesting. Most of them are just pure crap. If you have enough SO karma, try https://stackoverflow.com/review/close/?filter-closereason=t... — what I see just now is someone who wants help with his java/spring thing and isn't very detailed about it, someone who's "been trying to learn how delegation" works, someone who "would like to know how can i mock diffrent user request behavior pattern" and those aren't unusual. The intellectually interesting questions are unusual in the "too broad" morass.
If people are to moderate SO, the rules have to be simple and quick to apply. Of course people don't have to do that, but I fear that without moderation, the interesting questions would get no answers because they would be completely flooded by questions like those three. So the open-ended, intellectially interesting questions lose either way.