At least one problem is that overzealous moderators seem to be clamping down on every tiny little deviation from perfection.
A thread, an old thread on Stackoverflow, was linked from HN the other day, and was in fact now dead, but it was closed as not appropriate, two or so years after being opened, closed by a flock of moderators, for some utterly spurious reason. I believe it was marked (my paraphrase) as 'may cause discussion, closed as not appropriate'.
I can't speak for other people, but since the rise and rise of moderation like this, I am much less motivated to post or answer questions on Stackoverflow.
Interesting, seeing that these /overzealous/ moderators do not actually browse the 2M+ questions. They respond to flags that are brought to their attention. Alot of these old questions are not bumped to the front page unless they get heavy traffic and when they do, new users take it upon themselves to answer the question. Thus resurfacing an old historic question which will be closed, but not deleted. The information is still there.
These are users flagging questions. Whether they are overzealous or not is a next question altogether. Moderators respond to flags not perfection. If 10 users flag a question as not constructive because of the new scope, then the moderators must listen to the community. The community at one time accepted these questions, now based on discussion in meta.stackoverflow.com , they don't. Communities change over time.
Also a flock of moderators cannot close a question. Ideally one. What you may have seen as a flock could be one of the following options
* 1 moderator (his/her vote is binding)
* 1-4 users + 1 moderator (remember a moderator vote is binding)
* 5 users
These users are ordinary community users not moderators. If their decision was wrong to close a question, it will be reopened by 5 other /regular/ users.
Additionally it would help to show these example questions that you feel were closed justly so that a /community/ user not a mod can tell you why it was closed or what chance it has to be opened.
So if you can reply with the question that was closed wrongly, maybe some of us /ordinary/ users can help you.
Otherwise I feel your accusations towards moderators are misdirected as most times these questions are closed by regular users just like you and me.
How is this even slightly related to the problem of hard questions not getting answered? Stack Overflow isn't designed for the kind of questions that frequently get closed as "not constructive." There are plenty of other places on the internet to have discussions.
A thread, an old thread on Stackoverflow, was linked from HN the other day, and was in fact now dead, but it was closed as not appropriate, two or so years after being opened, closed by a flock of moderators, for some utterly spurious reason. I believe it was marked (my paraphrase) as 'may cause discussion, closed as not appropriate'.
I can't speak for other people, but since the rise and rise of moderation like this, I am much less motivated to post or answer questions on Stackoverflow.