Why was 'How can I deal with the cargo-cult programming attitude?' reopened?

Question

The post was closed yesterday by five community members as 'too broad'.

It has 34 answers, and it really becomes a poll/discussion of ideas. Very few of these answers are well thought out and serve to act against the second guideline of 'Great Subjective Questions' presented in Good Subjective, Bad Subjective:

Great subjective questions tend to have long, not short, answers. The best subjective questions inspire your peers to share their actual experiences, not just post a mindless one-liner or cartoon in hopes of being rewarded with upvotes for being merely “first.” Sharing an experience takes at least one paragraph; ideally several paragraphs. If I’m asking about how to bake cookies, don’t give me a list of grocery items: milk. butter. vanilla. eggs. There is virtually nothing I can learn from a short, static list of grocery items that make up a recipe. Instead, tell me what happened the last time you made cookies from that recipe! Share your detailed experiences, so that we all might learn from them.

If this is to be reopened, it needs significant curation of the content that is already present. However, as it is one of those old questions with lots of up votes everywhere, it makes it very difficult for 20k users to delete the poor quality answers in an effort to provide a suggestion of the standards for the answer that we want to have. This means that to actually clean it up, it requires some mods to step in and work on deleting the answers, adding a mod notice about the quality and such.

So, why is this reopened rather than historically locked?

Answer 1

The question had 257 up-votes; it was viewed 16 thousand times, and had some highly-upvoted answers (and one was accepted). I didn't see and recent discussions or policy decisions that might have changed the status of this post, but 2-1/2 years later, five people closed this rather suddenly as too broad.

We get periodic notices when popular questions are closed with no apparent stimulus, except that they were crazy popular. Unfortunately, we've seen situations where folks felt it was somehow helpful to scan the most-popular question list to see if any of them can be closed, so that's why we do these spot checks. It's a type of high-visibility activism that gives Stack Exchange the reputation for being a bit crazypants when it comes to closing highly-popular and engaging content.

In this case, I didn't really see any reason why this particular question need to be closed. But at least you're looking at it, so I'm fine with whatever you decide to do with it. Just be mindful that you're not targeting questions for closure simply because they grew to be wildly popular. It does not make the site any better.

Answer 2

I can appreciate the idea that sometimes popular questions can get closed simply because they are crazy popular. However, I strongly doubt this is an issue that would need to be addressed immediately.

If a highly upvoted question suddenly gets closed, to a point where it triggers red flags in the Community Manager system, the right thing for the Community Management team is to bring the question to us in Meta. Something like:

Hey guys, this question was closed, but we can't see any good reason to do so. Why did the community choose to do it?

And then there would probably be an answer from someone like @MichaelT like (these comments really deserve to be an answer):

We've been looking at some less than ideal tags for the site. One of those is teaching which this question has. It wasn't the 'wildly popular' that was the criteria. It was the 'questions of this tag are often poor fit for the Q&A format and often are either polling or education advice.' With the goal of cleaning up broken windows (because new users often use old open questions as examples) we endeavor to maintain the site's quality and that sometimes means revisiting old questions that don't fit well with the site's focus. Popularity isn't the selecting factor.

I would point out that its not 'five users suddenly' - it was 'one user cast a close vote on it, three more found it in /review, and well, then there's gnat'. This wasn't a coordinated closing. Just another question in /review that someone found. One should look at 'is this question too broad' when deciding to reopen a question that was closed by the community as too broad. We really try to provide good guidance on our close reasons that are available to all. While you (as a community manager) may have a different view into this you will generally find that we don't have people debating and denigrating if a question should have been closed or not. We would likely really like to have a place for discussions, but we recognize that the Q&A format that SE has provided doesn't work that way and when you get questions that can inspire dozens of short answers (and despite having an accepted one) we often find new users wanting to add their two bits to the content (and that can have a very poor experience when it gets down voted compared to not being able to ask because it is closed / locked).

I've generally found that, in most cases the pace of things getting done on Stack Exchange doesn't need to be very fast. A popular post was closed, it deserves to get it's time on Meta before being unilaterally reopened.