Honestly, I don't think it is a useful or thought provoking question. As numerous people have pointed out, the entire premise is false. Intentionally or not, it's basically trolling for "programmers are great too!" type comments.

> Intentionally or not, it's basically trolling for "programmers are great too!" type comments.

Wow, this is not true at all. Just because you don't see the question as useful doesn't mean it isn't.

As an entrepreneur (and a programmer), I am genuinely curious about the situation. We don't pay our PMs as much as we pay our programmers. Does this mean we're doing something wrong? Did we decide this because of our technical bias and should we give our PMs more credit? Why do other companies do this?

This is the point; its a question based off of a faulty premise.

+1. But neither coding horror nor joel give a sh*t about that:

coding horror: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=4132668 - Basically says "If you're bitching about it, it's because it's working as intended"

Joel: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=4132020 - Says "Yeah, but look at the quality"

I just want a filter for high-activity closed SE Q/A's, that way I can read highly engaging and interesting topics.

create "mystackrunnethover.com" (or mystackoverfloweth.com) and just post those questions... use OSQA to keep the same format?

There's already a http://programmers.stackexchange.com/ but personally I find its answers woefully lacking compared to similar ones that happened on SO.

There seems to be a certain type of person drawn to a site dedicated entirely to program architecture which means the input from more practical programmers (and their sanity votes) gets lost.

Well, part of the funny thing about this story submission is that it's a programmers.se.com q/a that got still closed by mods.

Yes this is getting annoying.

I think when a site reaches critical mass, the pedants and moderati (play on illuminati) start screwing it up. Wikipedia is another fine example of this.

I've stopped contributing to stack overflow now due to this (I accumulated 20k karma to give you an idea how much I thought the idea was promising)

It's not really as easy as you make it sound. Incorrect moderation will cripple a site and prevent people from contributing, but moderation is necessary to prevent the site from declining in quality. Without moderation, a site's quality will decline with its increased size. The default subreddits on reddit are a good example of what will happen without sufficient moderation.

I agree but both SE and Wikipedia suffer from moderators being picked based on karma. Karma is achievable easily despite any motives and personality traits which are bad. They should be picked by humans as they are a better and more objective judge of who is fit to moderating a site to the site's standards.

AFAIK, SE mods are not picked based on karma, you can nominate yourself to be mod, and users will vote according to many indicators, not karma only.

Elections: http://stackoverflow.com/election

While this is correct, I think his complaint is about the privileges that high-reputation users get. Most moderation is done by ordinary users, not by elected moderators.

Your assumption is correct.

That's not strictly true.

Full moderators are elected... but high-rep users take on a ton of moderation tasks.

That's fine by me. IMO, Reddit (as an example) was a great site, until it became popular and the subject material moved to the lowest common denominator. HN would be ruined too if/when you can get away with posts that do not stay within the topics/style that the community was built up from (I would figure that's why politics/sports are explicitly disallowed, and I am happy that such topics are kept off here)

If programmers.SE is supposed to be a site for "professional programmers interested in conceptual questions about software development" and this question doesn't fit that description, turf it. Like I'd expect you to turf "Who are you voting for in the upcoming presidential elections?", no matter how popular that would be.

Here's that same false dichotomy again that was in the last StackExchange thread.

Listen, it's not a choice between "Let the moderators run wild" and "let the userbase run wild". It never has been. Those are the two silly extremes in an entire spectrum of possible policy choices.

StackExchange sucks because the moderation is too heavy.

r/programming sucks because the moderation is too light.

HN is somewhere in the middle but trending towards SE (if the number of good comments which were hellbanned are any indication)

It was closed after 2 pages of answers and hundreds of votes - not so problematic IMHO.

That's only due to the age of the question. If a similar one were asked today it would be shut down before it got 2 answers.

If there was no problem, why close it at all?

I disagree. Opinions change over time. Its a great place to observe that.