I remember addressing a similar thread last year about the state of discussion, and literally to this day nothing has changed. In fact, it’s actually gotten far worse.
Anyways, I’d like to chime in with my two cents.
I think a lot of people are forgetting that theirs only so much that forum provides before your decisions are yours.
To clarify, there’s no inherent connection between clarifying the rules even further, or showing that you understand how to follow forum etiquette will lead to less garbage flooding in a category. Those that are actively abusing the system and those who aren’t aware they are abusing things are likely to not have read the rules and fail to follow the category expectations in the first place. Clarifying the rules and actively adding these things are just pointless. There’s nothing hard about understanding the concept of making reasonable posts. Users know this, but choose instead to not follow this concept. So it’s an issue with the end user, not the forum.
Frankly, I think that the current rules are not ambiguous. Why would I want to know about someone’s subjective opinion on “what music I prefer” ? that’s not of any use to me and other developers (doesn’t contribute to developers), yet topics like this are created a million times.
What I would want to see instead is a focus on fixing the issue itself: Target audience is not specific enough
To make matters worse, flags that should be rightfully flagged are seen as okay by the moderators. I’d question if this is due to workload of flags increasing, or whether moderators are just starting to be more loose on the moderation here.
So once again, this sort of garbage flooding is an issue that the forum can’t really control, but the users can. More experienced developers will be leaving the forum, and discussion will be no longer a category where you can collaboratively contribute to insightful discussions.