B) Someone is gifting free interesting content to the site; even if it's imperfect does the reaction have to be so harsh? This is, personally, exactly why I never post on stack overflow. You're acting like you're doing them a favor by letting them post there, when they're doing you a favor by giving you interesting content in the first place.
The community, not moderators, closed the question. The community also had an answer based on "Pure speculation" which means they can't replicate what the OP asked.
A user can gift all the free interesting content they want. But if it's not scoped or on topic, then it's not scoped for the site or on topic and would be closed and/or deleted. Just because Rodney Dangerfield turns up to your bedroom and starts making jokes doesn't mean it's the time or place.
I think the point isn't who closed it, but the fact that this type of knee-jerk reaction is fostered within the community at SO. I see, time and time again, questions that are closed as off-topic because it's not a "1+1=X" problem/solution, even though there is much value to be gained -- within the programmer community -- of the question being asked, and the responses that are given.
If I have a problem that I can't reproduce but is related to programming, and there's a chance that someone else has also had a similar problem and found the solution, SO does not offer a way for me to connect with that person.
On the other hand, if an unreproducible problem is posted and allowed, and multiple answers are given, there's a good chance one of those will point the OP in the right direction, and in turn, someone else that faces that same issue. There should be nothing wrong with this type of interaction. If someone feels it's a waste of their time, by all means, move on.
I know this has been argued ad nauseam, both here and on meta, and is likely something that will never change, but that's not the point of my post here. I just think it's worth defending the stance that the SO community is too quick to close programming related topics that may not be completely black and white.
By the way, programmers.stackexchange.com also suffers from this same fate, and I don't think this question would have received a much different response there, even though it's supposed to allow more open-ended questions.
I agree, 1000%. Once every several months, I work up the gumption to ask another question there, only to see it down-voted and close-voted into oblivion. It's a pit of misanthropic hostility.
Your analogy is bad because it would be very hard to ignore Rodney Dangerfield in your bedroom, but it is very easy to ignore these sorts of questions. At worst it sits there and nobody comes up with an answer. We aren't running out of bits.
It's easy to ignore singular questions like this. It's harder to ignore such questions when they compose 99% of the content source you're interested in, without ignoring the entire source - including the 1% of signal you care about. We are certainly running out of mental bandwidth all the time, even if you aren't counting them as bits.
This sort of community moderation exists in an attempt to proactively ensure a high signal to noise ratio (SNR), by discouraging noise. While it's an entirely valid stance to say they're overreacting and that the ratio is fine, that there's no slippery slope, etc., here's another viewpoint:
I don't read from the raw Stack Overflow firehose of posts. It doesn't even have a 1% SNR to me. Higher SNR sources (searches, specific links from my communities) will occasionally take me there, but as a primary source of information I don't even think of consulting it. I took a stab at participating in one of the far more niche subtopics - gamedev, relevant to me both professionally and unprofessionally - and still found it didn't have a high enough SNR to hold my interest beyond gathering a few hundred internet points. I found myself ignoring the majority of these sorts of questions, and quickly progressed to the natural conclusion of ignoring the site entirely.
And that's fine: Not everything is for everyone. But there are presumably those who still participate in the site directly who would prefer to remain doing so, yet find the SNR low enough to be pushing their own tolerances.
Thanks, this is a great response. I see the problem now. The SNR is plenty high enough for my use case of searching for content and following links, but to ensure that a high number of the links that I follow have good answers, it's important to keep the SNR reasonably high for those who are looking through the firehose for things to answer. Makes sense.
Real-world analogies don't always work on virtual problems, even when they seem to on the surface. Unfortunately, this seems to be the standard way to respond [0].
"You have a lovely home, sir. A lovely home. It would be perfect if it weren't for the broken front door and putrid, bloody trail up the stairs to your bedroom."
"People say to me, 'Rodney, what's it like being a zombie?' and I say, 'It would be better if I didn't have to send half of every brain I find to my ex-wife!' No respect for the dead. No respect."
"People say you gotta hit zombies in the head. I definitely agree. All I know is that when I was alive, and someone kicked me, it didn't take me all night to find where my nuts landed. I get no respect."
The 'pure speculation' was merely because the answerer was not setup at the time with the tools/environment to replicate. It does not mean that the results could not be replicated under any tools/environment however.
Or that he's written low level display code that behaves exactly that way. I have. It was for a LCD display module on a 68HC11 microcontroller probably in the mid 90s. It was something like a 4x16 and you inevitably have to make some value judgements in your "display a string" subroutine about what to do when stuff doesn't fit on a line. It only had a quarter K of ram and not much more onboard eeprom so I never tried to display thousands of letters. My eventual strategy was overwriting (keep it small and simple).
What do you do with a quarter K? It was basically a very slow beamwidth analyzer for LEDs using a photodiode and a R/C servo. So the 3 dB down aka half power beamwidth of this integrated LED and diffusion lens system measures as X degrees. Kind of important if you're making LED based signs. I believe I was only using about 4 bytes of memory. No need for interrupts as it had a rather advanced hardware timer system that made excellent PWM for driving servos. The world is full of interesting problems that require lots of computation but very little stored state.
B) "Someone is gifting free interesting content to the site". That's the attitude that caused Yahoo! Answers. SE has a higher quality bar, so that there are good, answerable questions. If a question seems unanswerable to many (not due to incompetence but due to incompleteness/clarity/broadness/etc), then it is put on hold. It can be reopened if it gets fixed; putting it on hold lets it get fixed, whilst preventing answers (which might use the wrong interpretation, etc) while it is getting fixed. Saves time for all.
The question asker didn't gift free interesting content to the site. The question asker emptied their chamber pot on the front lawn. The answerer left interesting content and got rewarded for it.
B) Someone is gifting free interesting content to the site; even if it's imperfect does the reaction have to be so harsh? This is, personally, exactly why I never post on stack overflow. You're acting like you're doing them a favor by letting them post there, when they're doing you a favor by giving you interesting content in the first place.