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I don't think "keeping the site clean", as the linked author mentions, should be the goal of moderators, with the exception of obvious spam or questions so confusing they don't make sense.

Moderators who close questions they deem as "dirty" questions on SO (e.g. my question here [1]), remind me of the Wikipedia moderators who delete an article I'm explicitly looking for as not notable enough to be on the site.

I wonder if their psychological motivations are similar, as well.

1. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14779751/how-do-i-change...




That question is clearly not a programming question and, therefore, not suitable for a programming q&a forum. I think the moderators got it right on this occasion. You could argue that SO should be for all kinds of questions, or all kinds of questions that are anything to do with computers, but the founders chose to handle that with other sites in the Stack Exchange network.


That question is clearly not a programming question

Not programming? When the first and only answer contains JavaScript code? Looks like SO has a rather odd definition of "programming".

I don't use SO myself but often stumble across interesting bits of info on there from Google, and also a lot of the puzzling "is this really off-topic?" questions. That's mainly what put me off from registering and participating, even to answer someone else's question/leave a comment - the community looks far too rigidly moderated for my taste.


Fair point; you're totally correct. For some reason, I didn't see the 'from JavaScript' trailing words at first (i've seen a lot of genuine, 'how do I use this software' questions on SO before, which are definitely not programming)


No moderators were involved in the closing of your question, just normal users above 2-3k (can't remember) in rep.


Yeah, I think that's what he meant. The problem are often not the actual `moderators` in the strict sense of the word, but the moderating community members, the "hall monitors" of the site.




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