Why were some historical non-constructive questions undeleted?

Question

I notice that What is the single most influential book every programmer should read? and Strangest language feature have been undeleted by a Stack Exchange developer.

After long months of framing these pieces of garbage, the Stack Overflow community, with the help of moderators, had finally managed to close those close-worthy questions and delete them as part of a cleanup of the worst upvoted garbage questions.

Does this represent a sudden change to the principle that real questions have answers? Or that bad questions get closed then deleted?

I must say that when I see this, my first reaction is Why should I bother cleaning up the trash when it gets shoved back into my face? Should I continue to vote to close and flag posts on Stack Overflow?

And my second reaction is to wonder whether I really want to participate on a site that thinks that being able to write 10[a] in C is strange (if you know C, it's not strange) and that every single programmer must have read all of about 500 different books including The Alchemist and the Tao Te Ching. As a programmer, do I even want to be associated with Stack Overflow? If I show my SO activity on my CV, will this brand me as a second-rate programmer — meaning that Careers is targeted at second-rate programmers?

What is the change in policy that now justifies having these questions on the site? Does it affect only Stack Overflow or other Stack Exchange sites?

Answer 1

Self-serve second rounds, otherwise known as vomiting up your lunch or slight acid reflux, can only be a good thing. It shows us where we've been and how much things will not change or improve despite a community waking up and coming to its senses as it rolls over and smells the funk wafting in their face, ears beholden to the sound of thighs.

Do these Lazarus questions make the Internet a better place? By no longer being broken links from the Stack Exchange blog, they must surely do. Since when is linkrot of any kind useful? This is Pendleton reaching through the streams of time to communicate with Jesus that will forever validate its existence.

Stack Overflow is not some kind of Yahoo! where they float or bring up content and then sunset them when they no longer fit with the community sense. They hold tight and muchly to these; close to the breast and free from the waves of the ocean.

Can you spend countless hours reading through these lists and see the corner of your mouth turn up in a wry sense, drooling with mirth of times gone by? That's the best kind of quality indicator there is.

"List of book covers", "Hidden features of X" and "Strangest language feature" are now what you would call the fresh point of call for those to RTFM as to why a certain programming quirk is the way it is or does as it says it doesn't or how a hookah can help you refactor code like a snicker-snack.

As the 8-track repeats for us all, because there is no better place to host these, not even some curated blog or archive space, they must belong on Stack Overflow by way of default. You can try and flush it all you want, but that history is backing up on you with a megaton spin and no plunger is ever going to know victory.

Answer 2

I'm getting really tired of the "framing garbage" argument that you keep throwing out. I've personally deleted over 38,000 posts on Stack Overflow, so I already know what to do with garbage, thank you very much. The discussion that we're having is about what to do with good content that doesn't fit perfectly within the guidelines of the FAQ, not garbage. If you don't understand the difference, then please stay out of the discussion.

Answer 3

Deleting useful content is not a good thing, especially when that useful content has thousands of links to it.

Dogma is one thing, but overall: Don't break the internet.

We ask people to post blurbs from linked answers so that if the link fails we still have the content, yet what you're proposing would make us as bad as those we're trying to overcome.

If a question has useful information, it should be locked, and a historical blurb should be placed at the head. That way we won't break the internet, and we can still let people know that questions like that are not tolerated any longer.

There are a good number of questions that do not contain useful programming content, and should be deleted.

Also: Just because you wrote a meta post saying we should delete old content, doesn't mean that was the position adopted by the community or by the moderators. It's a little disingenuous to act as if you've been betrayed by the community when there isn't any community consensus around these questions.

Answer 4

The referenced posts were undeleted and locked by an SE employee. That is their prerogative.

The pecking order goes like this:

Low-rep users --> High-rep users --> Moderators --> SE Staff

Think of the SE Staff as the Supreme Court. They are the final word. Note that reversals of this kind (made by SE employees) are exceptionally rare.

As to why the decision was made to undelete these posts, it would appear that, in SE's judgement, the value of their content outweighs their negative characteristics.

Answer 5

I think the reason this post has attracted such angry responses—from me and others—is because it seems to suggest that the existence of these old, popular questions is a personal affront to you. That un-deleting these posts constitutes throwing "trash in your face"

Instead of seeming so offended by these posts, can you instead point out actual, concrete problems that these posts present to the site? The posts are locked, so they can't be edited and bumped; new, silly answers can't be added, which would also bump them. They can't even be voted on.

The only possible problem is that they would create broken windows: people would see these posts, and think similar ones could be written today. But of course there's an historical banner intended to disabuse people of this notion. Naturally though there's nothing stopping people from ignoring the banner, or just not seeing it (it really should be more prominent, for what it's worth).

So with that I can only ask the following: is there any evidence that these old posts create broken windows? Can you show us floods of Meta posts from users whining that their new list question got closed, while that list question over there exists? I'm on meta more often than I probably should be, and I honestly have never seen a post complaining about a closed question with the justification that the "weirdest programming language exists", so my question should too.