It's a tough job. But if you disagree with the way the moderation works, bring it up on meta, and/or run for the position of moderator in the next election.
How many other sites offer either of those options?
The one thing that drove me away from participating in SO are the moderators. I swear, every time I get a google hit for a highly-relevant, informed discussion on a non-trivial programming topic, it's a question that has been closed by moderators for some stupid excuse.
You talk about there being other forums, like programming. or whatever else... Well, moderators should move the question instead of closing it. Why not do a mass query for these high-upvote yet moderator-closed questions on SO and move them to whatever other forum? Why gag the community for the sake of moderator ego?
Anyway. I gave up on the idea of proving I am a good programmer by participating and pumping up my SO score. Participation in SO is painful, moderators destroy good will. It seems they have an antenna that detects good discussion about programming and they step into it and destroy it.
So my response is: I don't care anymore. I certainly won't bring it up on meta, enough ignoring the userbase was done on there before when SE flip-flopped from for-profit, give us your money to "we'll dictate what q/a sites can be created" for me to go back and expect any consideration.
So no. For me SO is a great place to find answers by informed people on several topics, but it's not a place to invest yourself.
So either the site visitors are mostly stupid and cannot follow directions (see the number of votes on everything mentioned in that closed, "not constructive" thread), or Joel and you are forcing SE sites into an inferior subset of what the visitors actually want.
Moderators are there to protect the community from itself, as described in http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/01/the-trouble-with-popul...
It's a tough job. But if you disagree with the way the moderation works, bring it up on meta, and/or run for the position of moderator in the next election.
How many other sites offer either of those options?