Stackoverflow sometimes annoy me in how aggressive some people can be at closing questions. So this is a question that's 3 years old, where Jeff Atwood himself weighed in. But somehow, just because it got a surge of popularity recently it was closed 40 minutes ago.
Typically questions linked from a news aggregate site are closed because the question is now a stage for people to shout "me too" without reading the other posts. We end up with dozens of comments that haven't added any value to the discussion. If one of my questions are linked, I request a mod lock it, because it's damn annoying to have my inbox flooded with that kind of feedback. Protected locks are removed after a short time, if you feel strongly that you had a meaningful contribution to the post.
When the site was younger there were lots of questions that were only relevant to programmers, not actually about programming. In small numbers these weren't bad, but they became increasingly popular compared with actual programming questions. That was not a healthy trend -- communities needs to keep their focus -- and the stricter moderation that Stack Overflow has now was partially a response so that.
If somebody wants to contribute an answer, they should post it on the on-topic UX.SE question. Closing the Stack Overflow post shouldn't affect anyone. (Deleting is another matter, and I'll oppose deleting this question if it's suggested.)
