Letting people ask these questions freely would destroy the community. They would grab all attention, and the focus would be on creating clever questions and answers, not providing good help for developers. Kinda how the biggest sub-reddits work; content that is easy to diggest grows quickly to the top.

There's only so many of 'these questions'.

There is especially no harm in letting the historical ones stay open.

And no use in leaving them open as well. What would a new answer buried away accomplish?

And closing them with the "historical" note makes it clear that similar questions should not be asked.

Yes, but this is fair comment and nicely put:

> question is now closed, I think 528 "answers" is probably enough, no? :) – Jeff Atwood

It is annoying, though, how so many useful SO questions get closed for various reasons when they are just the question I want answered. Perhaps the real problem is Google giving a lot of weight to SO answers, even when they are closed?

It's the kind of thread that really has no home. Proggit would shoot it down for being frivolous, HN would probably do the same if it was a self-post.

I'm glad that StackOverflow leaves closed questions visible. A lot of the value I get from SO comes from opinion-y questions getting answered by experts.

I once posted a question citing reason I thought it was not duplicate even citing each of the few similar 'duplicate' questions I could find which did not answer my specific question.

Of course it was closed immediately.

Yes, and deservedly so. It's not a question with an answer, it's not even a poll. Other communities would close it as "Chatfilter" or "GTKY". What's interesting is that it was ever allowed on SO, and that it stood as acceptable for so long. And I wonder if the fact that there was a time in SO's lifecycle where it was accepted was important to the site's success. It's the sort of question that fosters community and good will in a way that "MVC 4 Validation using Data Annotations and Jquery" does not.