I recently asked a poll question on SO:  http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1109880/what-do-you-call-the-punctuation-marks-and-closed.

The question was created as community wiki, seemed (to me) concise and unlikely to spark controversy, and was at least peripherally programming-related.  I seeded it with a few very brief answers, hoping that would encourage others to do the same.  (I'm a relative newbie.  I may have failed to establish it as a poll at first.)

In SO FAQ terms, I felt that it

 - was not a duplicate
 - was detailed and specific
 - was written clearly and simply
 - was of interest to at least one other programmer somewhere
 - was _most certainly_ subjective
 - was not argumentative
 - did not require extended discussion

It was closed fairly quickly as "subjective and argumentative".  I'm **not** arguing that it should have been left open, nor asking that it be re-opened.  If the community feels that a question is not interesting or useful, then it ought to be closed.  

I'm afraid I still don't 'get' the social mores that govern SO polling.  Nearly all of the most popular questions are either polls or call for highly subjective discussion.  (Take a look at the "hottest questions this month"...)  There would appear to be right and wrong ways of conducting polls--I'd like to hear from some SO natives.

Thanks for your thoughts.

P.S.  Despite my own involvement with this question, I'd rather not see SO become a poll- and opinion-based site.  SO's main strength lies in its ability to distill the experience of its many users into clear, concrete solutions to real problems.  

**Edit**:  A follow-up question:  What kinds of polling questions do belong on SO?  Should all polls be discouraged?  (Please don't read that as sarcasm--it seems like a reasonable option.)

I suppose at its root this becomes a question of SO as programmer resource vs. SO as programmer community...