When searching for the best tool for the job, I often get pointed to SE and the questions are closed as "not constructive". I seem to recall, however, that they opened a separate site for such discussions?
best tool for the job is off topic on Stack Overflow.
They did open Software Recommendations Stack Exchange.
Closed answers get deleted in some regular interval. If they for some weird reason aren't, you could consider flagging them, there is always a response to that.
"Best tool for the job" doesn't sound like something that should be on SO. Far too subjective and likely to result in stupid opinionated arguments that go nowhere.
Except those are the hard questions in software engineering. "How do I draw a triangle with OpenGL?" is an RTFM question. "How do I decide between R and Python?[1]" is a much more challenging, but much more important, question.
I've said it before: SO is useful for the first 5 years of a software engineer's life. After that, it's occasionally useful when you need to pick up a new technology. The questions that are hard, for real senior software engineers, are rarely found on SE sites. Programmers.SE was supposed to fix it, but it hasn't worked, because of the same moderation.
This is a moderation problem, but the solution chosen was the easy solution: just don't allow hard questions because hard questions beget arguments. Instead, requiring people to have civil discourse, perhaps even requiring that people show they can have civil discourse before allowing them to participate, is much, much more difficult.
I'm not sure SE could survive the second type of moderation. But by not having it, it certainly makes it usefulness to somebody like me, with many years of experience learning and using various technologies, near zero.
>> "SO is useful for the first 5 years of a software engineer's life. After that, it's occasionally useful when you need to pick up a new technology."
That's what I find in my use and I don't think that's a problem. I think the harder to answer questions should be on their own Stack Exchange system. Moderation on that system would have different rules. I think if you keep it separate the second type of moderation you describe could work, however mixing the two types of moderation with Stack Overflow would lead to more problems imo.
