I am specifically referring to the Snowden question follow-up here. People have voiced concern over this type of question in comments, and there have been suggestions of taking this to Meta.
This discussion thread is for the "quantum challenge" follow-up, not about the "Snowden" questions in general. While there are undoubtedly controversial points about both, the original one has been well-received by the community (with a net score of +10) whereas the other one has not.
The question makes a lot of assumptions, in particular that we will have commercially available, general purpose quantum hardware in 2050, clearly against the FAQ:
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.
Which would indeed seem to directly target this question. The question is difficult to answer objectively and as currently formulated, is likely to result in lots of speculation about quantum technologies in the next few decades, and doesn't ask a single, well-defined question that can be reasonably answered.
However, this is also somewhat true of the original question as pointed out by rath, yet that one was not at all discussed (even though it still has no accepted answer), and therefore it can be argued that both should be leave as is for consistency.
But this raises another point: shouldn't we try to make questions self-contained and independent from one another? Is it a good idea to have "part I, part II" questions around on the website?
Finally, should they be edited to have better names? A hypothetical scenario involving Snowden is fun and all but I am not sure it is helpful to have questions titled "How to say something confidentially to Snowden". How many people interested in the cryptographic aspect of the problem are going to find it in an internet search, versus people simply searching for "Snowden"? Perhaps the title should be edited to something more explicit and less sensationalistic.
I'm not trying to be a killjoy, but I think that while the original question is a good one, the second one does not belong on the site as is, and should be merged into the original one or deleted altogether.
What are your opinions on this?