7 ms·

Meh, I'm an experienced dev and no questions that I might consider posing would get past the filters, either for being too vague, too specific, asking for off-s

by Joeri 10y ago

Meh, I'm an experienced dev and no questions that I might consider posing would get past the filters, either for being too vague, too specific, asking for off-site resources or asking for opinions. To be honest I don't even know what a good SO question is anymore, and i have 8000+ rep. You may believe the current rules and moderator brute squads work to keep the site clean, but from where i'm standing they work to make the site useless.

michaelbuckbee 10y ago
Do you think that maybe it is that all of the questions that can be succinctly summed up in a tidy Q+A fashion have been asked within the languages you work in? I was messing around with Elixir (which is newish in the scheme of thing) and it's very different than asking about Rails/Ruby.
Veedrac 10y ago
Note that asking for opinions is frequently handled through Programmers.SE. Also, "too specific" hasn't been a close reason for quite a while now (and probably never applied to you anyway).
jrumbut 10y ago
Right on, I think the goal of having this pristine collection of content is not really feasible given how fast things change. Most good answers become bad after at most 4 years, on new tech it might not last a month. It's good that there are rules, but what really matters is the community. People are on there are trying to get help following their passion or making their living. The stakes are often very high for the asker, making a rude response particularly painful.
Steeeve 10y ago
I'm a moderator of a small stackexchange site. When we got started, there were all kinds of "this isn't an appropriate question for our site" arguments. I warned people that if you were too strict about what questions could be asked, nobody would want to stay. The counter-argument was you had to push for high quality questions early on to have a high quality community. Nobody seemed able to know what a high quality question was, nor could come to an agreement on what topics specifically would be allowed. I left the community and became a mod a year later because stackexchange asked me to - given that I had a high reputation on the site and the site itself was in danger of dying out. The site still exists today IMO, in spite of the users who are quick to criticize other peoples questions instead of answer them - and really because the topic itself is something a lot of people are interested in without a lot of other communities to go to for support. Stackexchange's system encourages people to be bitchy and put down other people's questions. They are in the position they are because of SEO - and because google and yahoo's alternative solutions were short sighted. If the monetization model was really all that strong they would lose their market position very quickly.

by Joeri 10y ago

michaelbuckbee 10y ago

Do you think that maybe it is that all of the questions that can be succinctly summed up in a tidy Q+A fashion have been asked within the languages you work in? I was messing around with Elixir (which is newish in the scheme of thing) and it's very different than asking about Rails/Ruby.

Veedrac 10y ago

Note that asking for opinions is frequently handled through Programmers.SE. Also, "too specific" hasn't been a close reason for quite a while now (and probably never applied to you anyway).

jrumbut 10y ago

Right on, I think the goal of having this pristine collection of content is not really feasible given how fast things change. Most good answers become bad after at most 4 years, on new tech it might not last a month. It's good that there are rules, but what really matters is the community. People are on there are trying to get help following their passion or making their living. The stakes are often very high for the asker, making a rude response particularly painful.

Steeeve 10y ago

I'm a moderator of a small stackexchange site. When we got started, there were all kinds of "this isn't an appropriate question for our site" arguments. I warned people that if you were too strict about what questions could be asked, nobody would want to stay. The counter-argument was you had to push for high quality questions early on to have a high quality community. Nobody seemed able to know what a high quality question was, nor could come to an agreement on what topics specifically would be allowed. I left the community and became a mod a year later because stackexchange asked me to - given that I had a high reputation on the site and the site itself was in danger of dying out. The site still exists today IMO, in spite of the users who are quick to criticize other peoples questions instead of answer them - and really because the topic itself is something a lot of people are interested in without a lot of other communities to go to for support. Stackexchange's system encourages people to be bitchy and put down other people's questions. They are in the position they are because of SEO - and because google and yahoo's alternative solutions were short sighted. If the monetization model was really all that strong they would lose their market position very quickly.