That's funny; it was on hold when I saw it last, a few hours ago. Apparently whoever happens to be around with mod powers decided to hate fun a little less than usual. I'm sure it won't last.

I feel Stack Overflow mods have to a least some degree a different purpose in the site than the average user. Far too many times, I find that the answers judged bad by mods or close-voted are the ones that ended up helping me. Isn't that the point?

It was pretty close. It had 4 close votes earlier in the day which seem to have disappeared now.

Stackoverflow current objective is to answer precise technical questions related to programming. Open ended questions are generally frowned upon because they tend to be argumentative and generate debate, which SO is not well equipped to deal with. In the very beginnings of stackoverflow, the goals weren't as clearly defined and because of the overwhelming need for such a place, it quickly became flooded with any question related to computers. This is why serverfault and superuser were created along clearer rules regarding their respective content.

I am not sure why this question made it through, but "what do they have in common" generates a finite set of answers while "what are their differences" does not. The "real" place to ask such questions should be programmers.stackexchange.com. Unfortunately, it has 30 times less users and frankly, no one really cares about it. Moderators should use "Migrate question to [...]" instead of simply closing it.

I think everyone will agree that a question with 500 upvotes and 150k page views is interesting. The full problem is that SO has not managed to fit it anywhere.

You think stackoverflow has too many good questions being closed? If anything I think more could be closed.