I'm a moderator of a small stackexchange site. When we got started, there were all kinds of "this isn't an appropriate question for our site" arguments. I war

I'm a moderator of a small stackexchange site. When we got started, there were all kinds of "this isn't an appropriate question for our site" arguments. I warned people that if you were too strict about what questions could be asked, nobody would want to stay. The counter-argument was you had to push for high quality questions early on to have a high quality community. Nobody seemed able to know what a high quality question was, nor could come to an agreement on what topics specifically would be allowed. I left the community and became a mod a year later because stackexchange asked me to - given that I had a high reputation on the site and the site itself was in danger of dying out. The site still exists today IMO, in spite of the users who are quick to criticize other peoples questions instead of answer them - and really because the topic itself is something a lot of people are interested in without a lot of other communities to go to for support. Stackexchange's system encourages people to be bitchy and put down other people's questions. They are in the position they are because of SEO - and because google and yahoo's alternative solutions were short sighted. If the monetization model was really all that strong they would lose their market position very quickly.