What thing of substance can result from threads like
Do you ask people their age? Do you not like to answer that question yourself?
or
What is the time between you getting out of bed and the first firm commitment of the day?
or any of the numerous other threads that are currently in IMHO but aren’t discussing anything of substance?
Why are you letting those remain open? Why don’t you close them if they fail the “substance” test?
It’s influenced by, among other things, mods that stop people from calling each other names, try to prevent hijackings, etc. I don’t think the debate style on the SDMB is helped by mods who close subjects they don’t like.
OK, but at least be fair: it was not that it was a subject the mod didn’t like. It was the fact that the subject itself was judged to be incoherent and effectively directionless.
I disagree with the decision to close the thread for reasons already stated here. I don’t care too much one way or the other because I personally wouldn’t have participated in that thread and I find the threads Curtis starts annoying, but in principle I think the thread should have remained open.
The OP did seem to lack focus, but we don’t know if the thread would have become a directionless mess because the mod didn’t give it a chance. Why not just let the thread live long enough for, say, one page of responses, and then, if it did indeed become an incoherent mess, close it down. Instead of a mess, the thread could have resulted in some interesting discussion. Given the way these sorts of threads go, there was no way for the mod to know for sure that it would 100% have become a mess.
Perhaps because no one had yet started to dig into any kind of discussion at all, so it seemed like it would be no one’s loss to just cancel the thread and invite the OP to give it some more focus: a retry. I can see an argument either way, but personally this strategy makes sense to me. The mod is basically just asking the OP to break the thread up into two or three threads. I don’t see any reason to get upset about this.
That’s pretty much the way I see it, too. I knew who the OP had to be before I scanned halfway through the first screen of poll choices. Not really possible to have any meaningful discussion of 75 different topics.
I’m so upset, I think I’m going to start a Pit thread 
I wonder how it would go over if we were totally civil. I’m sure there must have been some satirical pit threads before, but I’m not sure how to search for them.
So says you.
I guess you weren’t here when the rules were rescinded, and you could actually talk about things you love in the pit.
And, yes, there have been a lot of satirical pit threads. For a while, all joke threads had to be in the pit, since they were making fun of the poster who made the original thread.
The kid obviously put a lot of time and effort into that poll. Misguided? Perhaps, but the question was interesting, even if no conclusion was going to come out of the thread. If posts start getting closed just for ridiculousness there are some posters here we’ll never read again…
An aside but what’s the point in having polls that allow 75 options, especially if you don’t want people using them?
My thoughts, exactly.
Also, I’ve never agreed with shutting down thread because you think it’s pointless. I see no reason why the mods are the best people to decide what is pointless, and not the members of the board, who can get rid of a thread by making it drop off the page.
In other words, what horrible thing are you preventing that you need to shut down such threads? What would happen if you just let the thread go? What problem is this solution solving?
I hold out hope that it’s possible to create a meaningful thread with 75 options. This one clearly wasn’t it. I don’t have a strong feeling either way on the closing of this thread, but I do want moderators who close unworkable threads and who point the OP to what they need to do to create a workable thread.
Qin Shi Huangdi has a track record of starting ill focused and pointlessly hypothetical threads and then never returning to them. He has some interesting ideas and can be a really good contributor to the board but not with his current posting style, IMO. I think it is part of the mods jobs to help steer posters like him towards a style that is better suited for this board. We may disagree on that point, but it has been part of the mods jurisdiction for my entire time here.
Which board rule was broken?
The question that **PlainJane **and **BigT **have asked about the harm leaving threads like these open has never, as far as I’m aware, been answered by the mods.
I don’t usually criticize mod decisions, but this one went too far. I do not need a mod preventing the possibility of a useless thread.
It wasn’t hateful, volatile, overly political or antagonistic.
Bad call. If people found the topic meaningless they could have avoided it or made fun of it. It didn’t need to be closed. Also, I don’t see what was so meaningless about the topic though the poll was a bit much.
We’re now 40 posts deep, and an extremely small percentage of posts are defending the decision. This is the point in the program where the moderator in question slinks away so that all of them can huddle up in the moderator forum, pat each other on the backs, and start discussing this particular iteration of circling the wagons around a shitty moderator decision. Will they go clockwise? Counterclockwise?!? The world waits…