My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow
First off, a caveat: I'm about to complain about a lot of people I respect and rather like. I'll probably take a lot of heat for it, but it needs to be said.<p>I feel like a lot of the closing of niche questions these days comes from the chat communities.  (By "chat", I mean: <a href="http://chat.stackoverflow.com/" rel="nofollow">http://chat.stackoverflow.com/</a>)<p>There's a huge rash of "cv-pls" in the chat rooms.  I don't have a problem with it in general, but the culture around it has become rather toxic. It effectively gives anyone there an automatic close hammer. Furthermore, it's not the current "dupehammer", but a close hammer for any reason, as you can pretty instantly get 5 votes to close.<p>Somehow, every question involving anything than popular web frameworks is apt to be closed as "too localized".<p>I can't count the number of times I've been in the middle of answering an admittedly niche, but well-phrased and on-topic question, when it's closed before I can answer.  The source of the sudden rash of close votes? Almost always a "cv-pls" in relevant tag's chat room.