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Comment by jimrandomh | Hacker News Reader

This is kind of an embarrassing failure mode to have, since old-style forums figured out the solution years ago: don't delete anything, but move things to an "offtopic" section where it's less likely to be seen. That way you get the nicely curated (unmoved) content, avoid offending anyone, and allow discussions to continue rather than cut them short.

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Right, the main problem here is that -- in many ways like the recording industry before them -- these guys are trying to apply all sorts of real-world analogies and metaphors to virtual problems.

I get it. They were actually right about the broken-window theory. The demand for quality has had an enormously positive impact overall and they should get a lot of credit for that. But they routinely close questions that simply do not need to be closed.

I do agree that our community sometimes misapplies the rules. We study this regularly and are continuously working on tweaking and improving the moderation system to reduce the incidence of good questions which are closed. But trust me when I say that 98% of the questions that are closed are not anything you would ever want to land on as the result of a Google search. Look here and tell me what you think:

http://stackoverflow.com/search?tab=newest&q=closed%3a1

There's no doubt this is true (and I think I said as much). I agree that the dial should be there. We're just arguing about how far to turn it.

Exactly; way too often in arguments like this (such as with Wikipedia) people point at the places where something worked while totally ignoring the costs of false positives, as if the people who want "different" or "slightly less" moderation are somehow calling for "no" moderation... it's a total strawman.

I guess that's why old-style forums are so successful and Stack Overflow doesn't work, right? :)

Sorry, that was unnecessarily snarky. People on the Internet tend to believe that if there is a TEXTAREA tag on the internet, they have a right to type things into that TEXTAREA and have them hosted on the Internet by somebody else until the end of time. This eventually leads to youtube, reddit, etc... very amazing things but nevertheless not necessarily good places to solve programming problems quickly.

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