Why is this community not allowed to decide its scope?

Question

The general rule I've seen around Stack Exchange is that a community is sovereign in deciding its scope¹, as long as it makes a modicum of sense. Stack Exchange employees may enforce quality requirements, for example by closing questions that are “bad subjective”. But scope — deciding what questions are on-topic or off-topic — is decided by the community, through meta discussions.

As a moderator on several Stack Exchange sites, I've always felt that it was within my mandate to crack down on low-quality questions whether the community acted or not, but that deciding the scope was solely the purview of the community. I do of course participate in debates about the scope, but I'll enforce whatever the community decides. This is what I've seen practiced on other Stack Exchange sites except sometimes on the Trilogy (SO/SU/SF).

Yet, one week into the private beta, with no prior warning that I am aware of, a Stack Exchange employee closed at least 15 questions (about 1/8 of the questions to date) with the following comment:

"Hardware Recommendations" was created for questions seeking a specific hardware products given a set of definitive requirements. If your question involved general computing or hardware issues, it can likely be asked on Super User; but nevertheless, it is outside the scope of this site.

This statement about the scope directly contradicts the meta consensus around

Are “What should I consider when buying” questions allowed?

(…) I think, they should be allowed and in fact be encouraged.

After prompting, the employee expanded on this statement in a meta answer on the aforementioned question, rejecting any debate around the scope:

But what we absolutely cannot allow to happen is to turn this site into an "alternative Super User"… a site where you can ask your hardware questions which also happens to allow product recommendations too. That just cannot happen.

Some of the questions that the employee closed were reopened by the community, but the employee closed them again (despite the meta opinion not having changed in the meantime).

Why are we not allowed to decide our scope? To use Stack Exchange's own language, why are we not respected? As far as I'm aware, it's a unique departure from the general rule.

And why does the crackdown happen without any prior discussion?

¹ _{Excluding content that's inappropriate, e.g. NSFW.}

Answer 1

I agree, that the community should be the ones casting close/reopen votes themselves: it's a community-driven site after all. However, I want to throw a couple arguments that I think are important, and missing. Here are some examples:

• Should I find a processor with "hyper-threading?"
• What should I look for besides pixel density/count when choosing a smartphone with a good camera?

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Hardware Recommendations is for... Recommendations.

I think the main reasons why these questions have been closed is because they don't explicitly ask for a recommendation. Instead, they really seem to be asking whether a certain feature or component of hardware is worth having. This is arguably not a recommendation: the community can't recommend a product.

But isn't this implicit?

I would like to believe that it is. My question, which is the first mentioned above in the examples, isn't explicit asking the community to recommend a processor. However, I think that it more asks the community to recommend why I should have a processor. I stand on the argument that although the community doesn't recommend a hardware product, it recommends for/against the use of a specific feature that is specific to a hardware product.

Should these "implicit questions" be allowed if they don't ask for a product?

Quite personally, I'm not sure where I stand on this issue in particular. I feel like questions can assist askers to determine the nit-bits of a product that they want. For example:

Should I find a fridge to keep things cold? Of course you should!
What's a good fridge to keep things cold? There's this and that fridge!

I can see these "smaller" questions becoming excellent questions in the end, when the author has full information on what they want.

Aren't we making Software Recs a model here?

I think this is another important issue to consider here, that is potentially extremely relevant to this situation. I'm not active on Software Recs, so I don't want to make a definitive argument here, but I feel that we made be trying to hard to make a near exact replica of the SR model. This is good and all, but it's like this site should be closed as an "exact duplicate", if you catch my drift. If the reason why the "implicit recommendation" questions are closed, then is it a result of the SR scope? Like I said, I'm not trying to discourage any efforts, but I think this is a valid point to consider when looking for barriers in the community-determined scope.