Your thesis is that "StackExchange itself is becoming a little bit backward", but the statements you use to back that up have been part of Stack Exchange from the beginning. Also, the things you point out that are 'broken' are part of the formula that makes the network succeed.
Stack Overflow was not built for discussion. The FAQ says: "Not all questions work well in our format. Avoid questions that are primarily opinion-based, or that are likely to generate discussion rather than answers." I understand that you may want those types of questions to exist there, but that's not the original purpose of Stack Overflow. (Sidenote: different sites, depending on their topic or maturity do allow more open ended questions, but I believe you may be referring to 'closing questions' on Stack Overflow). I sympathize with this point though because I believe that there are probably a class of questions that could exist on SO, that are currently closed, but may need to be treated in a different way than normal Q&A.
Your second point about closing sites that aren't working is also intentional. Some of your complaint was about the fact that the data dump was not available, which was actually not true. It's also intentional that the data dump exists so that if we decide the site is not a good fit for our goals, everyone else can still reuse that data ( i.e. http://www.brightjourney.com/ ) This might be related to your first complaint which boils down to 'It's not hurting anyone, why not just leave it there?' The answer to that is more complicated than I can summarize here, but there are many different things that go into making a successful community, and one of them is defining what 'successful' (and 'not successful') means. And there is a process for dealing with 'not successful' which is transparent. The criteria is not arbitrary. It's reasoned.
I understand that it's intentional and what StackExchange perceives as being necessary, appropriate, etc.
The problem is that this approach is under-serving the needs of StackExchange's users.
I don't think that SE needs to be transparent here. It's up to you guys to decide how you want to run your site. I just think the current approach will result in the success of competitors that are less trigger-happy on shutting down questions.
Comments
Your thesis is that "StackExchange itself is becoming a little bit backward", but the statements you use to back that up have been part of Stack Exchange from the beginning. Also, the things you point out that are 'broken' are part of the formula that makes the network succeed.
Stack Overflow was not built for discussion. The FAQ says: "Not all questions work well in our format. Avoid questions that are primarily opinion-based, or that are likely to generate discussion rather than answers." I understand that you may want those types of questions to exist there, but that's not the original purpose of Stack Overflow. (Sidenote: different sites, depending on their topic or maturity do allow more open ended questions, but I believe you may be referring to 'closing questions' on Stack Overflow). I sympathize with this point though because I believe that there are probably a class of questions that could exist on SO, that are currently closed, but may need to be treated in a different way than normal Q&A.
Your second point about closing sites that aren't working is also intentional. Some of your complaint was about the fact that the data dump was not available, which was actually not true. It's also intentional that the data dump exists so that if we decide the site is not a good fit for our goals, everyone else can still reuse that data ( i.e. http://www.brightjourney.com/ ) This might be related to your first complaint which boils down to 'It's not hurting anyone, why not just leave it there?' The answer to that is more complicated than I can summarize here, but there are many different things that go into making a successful community, and one of them is defining what 'successful' (and 'not successful') means. And there is a process for dealing with 'not successful' which is transparent. The criteria is not arbitrary. It's reasoned.
Joel Spolsky elaborates on this in the following talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpGA2fmAHvM
(I work for Stack Exchange.)
I understand that it's intentional and what StackExchange perceives as being necessary, appropriate, etc.
The problem is that this approach is under-serving the needs of StackExchange's users.
I don't think that SE needs to be transparent here. It's up to you guys to decide how you want to run your site. I just think the current approach will result in the success of competitors that are less trigger-happy on shutting down questions.