Stack Overflow has never been against subjective questions: Good Subjective, Bad Subjective
Yet it seems certain members are frequently close voting or commenting that things either Too Broad or Opinion Based and I am struggling to understand how they're coming to these conclusions.
Some of our best questions are of this nature:
- How can I improve my handwriting ability?
- How do I choose a good cover photo for my website?
- How do you break out of current creative mind sets?
- Why are the terms DPI and PPI so misunderstood?
- How can I improve my color selection skill?
- What's the best way to animate an illustration for the web?
In fact our top question of all time is arguably based on subjective qualities: What is wrong with Comic Sans?
Our 7th and 8th all time questions are more examples:
I'm struggling and frankly frustrated when people vote or comment to close things. I don't know if its because they don't know how to justify an answer to that particular question or are in a bad mood or what.
- How do I go about making more creative and engaging websites?
- Why is it that people are so surprised that graphics design can be hard?
- Is it appropriate to use lower quality design to make a product look cheap?
- Why is Verdana's lower-case pi symbol so similar to an n?
And while luckily many of these questions don't end up closed the comments and votes turn people away. Turns away new users, existing users, and casual users. It turns people away from answering because they figure it'll get closed.
In nearly every Meta discussion we've had on the topic as well as in chat long time members of the community have routinely tried for less "how do I do X in software Y" which often leads to questions like the ones I've posted here. Recently we lost a person that I felt was a valuable addition to our community and when asked in private he basically cited because everything gets closed. It's very frustrating.
So then the question is - why are those of you doing this doing it? Are you in a bad mood? Is it a topic you just happen to not know about? Are you unclear on whats on-topic still? Is there a better option for you personally to take, perhaps leaving the question alone for a few days? or asking for clarification without also casting a damaging vote initially?