SO is a Q&A based knowledge base. Questions are supposed to be somewhat open-ended prompts that inspire experts to write detailed and informative responses. The OP seems to be an excellent example this.
> Questions are supposed to be somewhat open-ended prompts that inspire experts to write detailed and informative responses.
> open ended
I recently tried asking a question like that. Easy but effective optimization techniques for programming languages. Hell I included an answer myself and was going to add more. The result wasn't pretty. While I was typing up a second answer, the question was downvoted, closed, someone welcomed me to the site and then deleted the comment, the answer I included with the post was downvoted not for being wrong but for "enabling" a bad question, I got told to get out and go blog about it instead and then a few days later the entire thing was deleted like worthless spam.
I had the same experience myself, Stackoverflow isn't going down because of AI which they use as a scapegoat but because the community became more and more toxic to the point of no return and there's no blaming others for that.
Some of the greatest questions on StackOverflow are open ended like that.
I've gotten people to reverse closures before. They closed a Q&A pair I made on the finance site where I explained how I did something specific with the ledger software. Closed, then reopened with a positive score.
Not this time, I guess. I linked that question as an example but it didn't really convince anyone. I was frustrated but eventually I just accepted it, left it alone and went away for a few days.
Came back later to find they had just deleted the question along with the one answer I managed to write. That made me feel like shit. Certainly didn't expect that, especially not from a stack exchange site that's still in beta and thus in need of content.
That's actually a good example of why it happened, and may well be referenced in the meta threads when they talked about it - not only is there no correct answer, these usually acted like clickbait, farming for reputation to gain access to moderation tools.
There is no single correct answer. The answers posted can all be correct and they'll certainly help the people who ask these perennial questions since the question will show up on search results.
> these usually acted like clickbait, farming for reputation to gain access to moderation tools.
The reputation problem is solved by turning it into a community wiki so that votes won't be counted towards reputation. At least it used to be solved that way. Do those still exist? I wrote the posts on mobile and didn't see the usual "turn this into a community wiki" checkbox. I assumed they got rid of it. They've gotten rid of a lot of things over the years, I didn't really keep track.
Nothing you said explains why the post was deleted. They could've closed and locked it to prevent additional answers and voting if it's so problematic. They went the extra mile and completely trashed the answer I wrote. They trashed the efforts of other people who wrote helpful comments with references to additional papers on optimizations. Those comments taught me new stuff. They just deleted all of it. I discovered they had deleted the question because I tried to find those references and couldn't.
I can handle closures, downvotes, rude comments, even insults. Wikipedia style deletionism though? Yeah, that makes me think twice before posting anything there.
SO is a Q&A based knowledge base. Questions are supposed to be somewhat open-ended prompts that inspire experts to write detailed and informative responses. The OP seems to be an excellent example this.