The site seems to suffer from **frivolous moderation** (closing questions as "opinion based" or "duplicate" or "off topic" without providing valid reasons), with lack of accountability and clear moderation policies.

The root cause I believe is a conflict of interest. Users who racked up reputation score sufficient to close questions are rarely ones with any moderation experience. This invites **bias** where users interested only in answering simple (for them) questions would close ones they have no experience in, or ones that take more than a minimum effort to answer.

I believe this is what happened in this case (read the comments for some context). This happened to me and to others more than a few times, and is likely a systemic issue:

[Inappropriate opinion-based closings][1]

This is regretful.

P.S. Moderators and I exchanged a few comments under the question, and most of them (all of mine and some of moderator's) were deleted w/o notice or explanation. Those deletions are also not showing up in the question history - at least not in one visible to me.

So in addition to closing a question as "opinion based" and then explaining that it was actually closed for a different reason ("hypothetical question") - the comments get deleted w/o notice or explanation either.

What a great site this is! :)


  [1]: https://meta.superuser.com/questions/11660/inappropriate-opinion-based-closings