On Stack Overflow, does the technology at question change how you vote?

Question

Note: I realized that the first draft of my question was too specific to a particular situation, so I've broadened it.

Several users have observed that, in practice, the "readership" of particular tags have subtlely different standards for defining and dealing with "problem" questions. Whereas tags with large readerships, such as c# and java, follow the site's rules and policies pretty much "to the letter", other tags with smaller readerships tend to be more lenient, forgiving or liberal in their interpretation of the close reasons, etc.

Because all questions from all tags appear on the home page when first asked, seriously off-topic questions are always closed. But some questions require more understanding of the language or tools to know the difference between on-topic and off-topic. These are the kinds of questions I'm referring to.

I'm trying to document the "voting culture" of SO and I'm curious if this is a "real" thing - the emergence of subcultures within tag groups - or if it's just the unsubstantiated opinion of a few people. Most discussions around this topic tend to be theory, and in theory the same rules should be applied equally across all tags. But is this true in practice? Do users who frequent niche tags, or newer technologies with few active members, feel obliged to stick to a "conservative" (strict) interpretation of the SO rules, or do they tend to be more "liberal" (loose) in their approach?

If you are active in a newer or niche tag, like f# or go, have you given a bit more leeway (not carte blanche) to questions that contain "grey" subject matter (subjective, off-topic, polling, etc) than you do for more established tags, like c# and java?

Put another way: do you personally vote differently based on the technology in question?

I am much more interested in how people actually vote rather than people's opinion of how we should vote, though both responses are welcome.

I've intentionally excluded a link to the original discussion as the comment was tangential to the larger discussion. I don't want to skew the votes on those posts, so I am bringing the discussion to a new question.

Answer 1

The age of the related technology has nothing to do with whether or not a given question is "primarily opinion-based" or not (or whether or not it meets any other close reason, for that matter).

Lots of people want to ask subjective questions at times like that, generally because there are less resources elsewhere on the internet that have answers to those questions, that's true. That in no way changes the fact that these questions aren't allowed on the site for a reason. Those reasons aren't eliminated just because the language is new(er).

If you do allow more of these questions, it is only an indication to others that these kinds of questions are allowed; this only encourages people to ask more and more of them, in ever expanding topics. This simply makes trying to clean the site up that much harder.

If you want to ask subjective questions that go beyond what is allowed on the site, go to chat, or another site that supports extended discussions, it's that simple.

Answer 2

The truth is, if you are more lenient with questions in a new technology, then that leniency will be immortalised in years to come. That is the nature of the web.

In 5/10 years when the new technology is the new standard (imagine!), those questions will still be found in SO and will still potentially lower the overall quality of questions.