Confused about 'chatty' questions

Question

The FAQ states,

You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face. Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page.

Your questions should be reasonably scoped. If you can imagine an entire book that answers your question, you’re asking too much.

If your motivation for asking the question is “I would like to participate in a discussion about ______”, then you should not be asking here. However, if your motivation is “I would like others to explain ______ to me”, then you are probably OK. (Discussions are of course welcome in our real time web chat.)

This question arose,

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/19284/how-could-i-benefit-for-home-virtualization-bare-metal-hypervisor

Selected quotes,

Of course, right now I don't have an actual USE for this

and

Basically, what are some uses (for the everyday linux/unix user) for turning old desktops into virtualized and networked machines?

Surely that's an open ended chatty question without a real problem at the core? I flagged the question as not-constructive, but that was deemed invalid.

In which case I'm confused. Are chatty open ended questions allowed, or is that question actually specific enough to be on-topic?

Answer 1

I don't think it's "not constructive" — it's not really likely to inspire debate or argument. It's more like "not a real question" — it's overly broad with no specific goal.

But that's semantics. I dismissed your flag, but probably should have said "valid but no action needed" rather than rejecting it as invalid. I think it's more the sort of thing to vote down rather than outright close. If the community closed it, I wouldn't reopen, but I didn't want to use the big moderator insta-close stick. I'd really prefer questions be edited, improved, and focused rather than shut out.

Answer 2

I agree, this looks like a textbook chatty question to me. It's basically asking “what's your favorite use for virtualisation at home”. Its score is medium six guidelines for subjective questions:

1. inspire answers that explain why and how: sort of.
2. long, not short answers: not particularly.
3. fair and impartial tone: ok.
4. experiences over opinions: ok.
5. facts and references: not particularly.
6. not just mindless social fun: no.

This is the kind of post that can degenerate into a long list of answers (not useful due to the lack of organization), or can be largely ignored (not useful due to the lack of answers). It feels very much like something that would be best discussed in a chat room. I voted to close as “not constructive”.