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Ever since StackOverflow started closing strictly off topic questions that were interesting and still related to programming (closed as not constructive, or loc

by jon889 9y ago

Ever since StackOverflow started closing strictly off topic questions that were interesting and still related to programming (closed as not constructive, or locked and marked as having "historical significance" such as https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1995113/strangest-language-feature https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1995113/strangest-langua...) the sense of community there pretty much disappeared. There's not much incentive for knowledgable people to visit a site that is boring, and now StackOverflow seems to contain a lot more questions asked by noobs (I've done this about subjects I don't know) that go unanswered. The same also goes for questions that are almost duplicates. Or are basically but have been inactive so you want to get further information. And when interesting discussions get moved to chat. The whole place is just boring and too heavily controlled. I"m not surprised something that required community failed there.

OzzyB 9y ago
There seems to be an "Overflow" for pratically everything these days, so the question is, why can't they make another board for these more general questions and discussions? ITOverflow? WebArchitecture? There a are people discussing the correct usage of English grammar and how to best raise their kids, why not whether NoSQL is really the right solution? Flame Wars?
- AndrewCHM 9y ago
  They do have overflow for general open ended discussion https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com would probably do best for your sql/nosql thing, e.g. https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/q/54373 https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/q/54373 https://stackexchange.com/sites https://stackexchange.com/sites worth a browse
  - vfaronov 9y ago
    I don’t think they are for “open ended discussion” though? From https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask: > 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. This is sort of the fundamental limit of the format they chose.
    - AndrewCHM 9y ago
      they have that page for all stack exchange sites regardless of content I believe https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask also has it even though it encorages a significant number of answers per question (so, open ended)
    - ceejayoz 9y ago
      Chatty, open-ended stuff can go in the StackExchange chat system, can't it?
      - rspeer 9y ago
        Sounds like banishing it into the abyss. I use StackExchange a lot, and this thread is the first time I've heard it has a "chat system".
        shagie 9y ago
        The chat system had been around for a long time. It was introduced by Jeff with the blog post https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/04/29/do-trilogy-sites-need-a-third-place/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/04/29/do-trilogy-sites-need-... Question tangent comments get sent there to try to keep the focus on Q&A rather than side back and forth. It's not gone permanently. There are also persistent chat rooms for various topics. Their archives are easily searchable.
  - Ajedi32 9y ago
    AFAIK none of the StackExchange sites aside from Meta allow "discussion". It's all about questions and answers, discussion is supposed to be confined to chat rooms. As you said though, there are a few StackExchange sites which deal with more "squishy" topics, like software design or parenting.
- motoboi 9y ago
  There is the softwareengineering.stackexchange.com where this type of question is on-topic: > If you have a question about... > software development methods and practices > requirements, architecture, and design > quality assurance and testing > configuration management, build, release, and deployment
  - felipeccastro 9y ago
    It would be nice if, instead of closing a question as off-topic and asking it again on another site, there was an option for easily transferring the question from one site to another.
43224gg252 9y ago
>Ever since StackOverflow started closing strictly off topic questions that were interesting and still related to programming Seems like they've been doing this since the beginning.
- taneq 9y ago
  There was a definite step-change in strictness a few years ago, though. This is evidenced by the sheer number of questions which are marked "this question exists for historical significance, but [don't ask questions like this]" and locked.
  - yrizos 9y ago
    That's not a useful metric. The questions that today show up as locked for historical significance were simply closed before the historical significance lock was introduced. Conversely, the lock was introduced to stop those highly interesting (but ultimately useless) questions from getting deleted. If anything, it's a step in being less strict.
    - taneq 9y ago
      Oh, so that flag was just applied all questions closed before they introduced the historical significance thing?
beejiu 9y ago
I don't understand why they close questions without noindexing them. The content is either relevant or it isn't.
- tonyedgecombe 9y ago
  Money.
- cannonedhamster 9y ago
  The number of times I've received a quick answer from a closed question (as in marked off topic or something other than solved) is relatively high. Moderators tend to be either too heavy handed and nepotic or completely hands off. It's not an easy job but, seems like entrenched interests have always been more important than anything.
- Ajedi32 9y ago
  A lot of closed questions do get deleted automatically. They have a few metrics to decide which questions to keep: https://stackoverflow.com/help/roomba https://stackoverflow.com/help/roomba
- coryfklein 9y ago
  The same "question" can be asked many different ways, so it is useful to close all but one duplicate and have them all link to the authoritative Question. This allows for Googlers to use several different wordings for a question and still find the single page with the answer.
shagie 9y ago
A core problem for Stack Overflow is the lack of people willing to curate material. Its not an easy job and is quite thankless. Its possible to have a site that is a mashup of /r/programming, /r/programmerhumor and /r/learnprogramming (and a few others) all on one site. Though when all of those things are together on one site it makes the job of the people trying to curate it impossible. Sure, Strangest language feature is interesting... and it has 320 visible answers when it was locked. Is it useful? It might be interesting, but it is impossible to remove the crap content from it (go to page 11 and start reading backwards and saying "is that useful or not?"). Jeff Atwood wrote about this - https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/01/31/the-trouble-with-popularity/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/01/31/the-trouble-with-popul... . Too much interesting but ultimately not useful stuff gets in the way of finding useful stuff. This really runs up against the Atwoodian vision of Stack Overflow ( https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/ ) > It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home. Better programming is our goal. Interesting stuff and fun stuff may be interesting and fun - but when it gets in the way of making a site that is a library of good programming knowledge... something needs to be done about it. Everything doesn't have to be on Stack Overflow. There are many other sites that are better suited to discussions and fun things than the format for that Stack Overflow took as a Q&A site. It may be boring and heavily controlled... but that unity of vision is necessary for trying to make it a site that provides material that I need when I search for how to deal with some programming problem of configuring Spring Statemachine or whatnot... and then interesting and fun gets in the way of me doing my job.
- PaulHoule 9y ago
  Lately I have been writing a lot of Python and I am seeing a lot of bit rot in Stack Overflow lately. For one thing, it seems almost all the code snippets use "print-without-parenthesis" from Python 2, so you cannot just cut and paste them into Python 3. It isn't hard to fix this, but it's a clear sign the lights are on and nobody is home. The lack of curation is a problem too. Often the first answer is wrong, or less than optimal. From the viewpoint of somebody looking for answers you don't really want 10 people's opinion, you want one really good answer.
pawelk 9y ago
My top 3 answers are one-liners that solve "problems" any semi-competent developer shouldn't even need stackoverflow to solve. The answers that required some effort, more code and explanations are not that "valuable" because they answer more specific problem that is not shared by many developers. I don't have a problem with that, I don't answer on SO only to accumulate points, but in my opinion it skews the incentives towards going after the low-hanging fruit. The closer it gets into "RTFM" territory the bigger the possible payoff. EDIT: And the karma DOES matter if you want to get new opportunities via stackoverflow careers. I have landed a job recently via SO and chatted with the recruiter a bit about their experience with the platform. He told me some companies specify they want to hire from the pool of Top X% in given technology. Another thing is the response rate on SO is dramatically better than Linkedin, which doesnt surprise me: I do my best to answer every SO Careers message while I mostly ignore Linkedin recruiters.
- dionidium 9y ago
  I've answered a bunch of narrow questions like the ones you described, only to see them closed later because the community decided it doesn't want to include those questions. My attitude has always been, "Speak for yourself. I'm fine answering them." But, of course, they still get closed, so now I don't even bother. There are people (like me) willing to kill some time solving useful problems that people in the real world are actually having, but SO's theory of broken windows is so extreme that they want to make me feel bad for doing that.
  - mark-r 9y ago
    You can blame Jeff Atwood. He outlined his theory of the descent of sites into irrelevance in some blog posts, then put it into action. There's code on SO to prevent two questions having an identical title for example. Even though he's long gone from SO management, the legacy of his philosophy is still abundant.
- gwbas1c 9y ago
  The thing with the RTFM moments, is that, when I'm experimenting with a new technology, I often ask Google a question and it points me to a stack overflow page. Yes, the question is obvious. And yes, it can be answered via 10-20 minutes of RTFM. But, the value of Stack Overflow is that it replaced 10-20 minutes of RTFM with a simple answer. So, don't knock the RTFM questions on Stack Overflow. That's part of its value to the greater community. (I must admit that I've answered very few Stack Overflow questions because every time I find an answer. I did take the time to write out a well-written answer for an obscure problem, and it got me plenty of points. It's nice that the community has a 1000x ROI, too.)
protomyth 9y ago
I often wish they had implemented a ‘tangent’ mechanism that would have allowed folks to have an interesting conversation in a bit of an off topic manner about the question. It could be represented by an a link and not interfer with the main answer.
- Ajedi32 9y ago
  Well, you could always create a chat room for that and link to it in the comments...
  - chris_7 9y ago
    Stack Exchange moderators needing to constantly delete comment threads with "use chat" has to be one of the biggest case of desire lines online I've seen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - fapjacks 9y ago
      Absolutely this. And also whenever I see a mod axe a whole conversation and replace it with the form response of "this conversation has been moved to chat", I know that is Stack Exchange's way of tossing conversation into /dev/null (and oftentimes when I'm involved in one of those conversations, it gets the axe because the mod doesn't want opposition to their opinion). It's deleting content without actually deleting content. I've seen way too many useful, on-topic, mind-expanding conversations tossed out using this mechanism, never to be seen again.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
adamc 9y ago
Yep. I stopped going there (except for incidental visits when it shows up in google searches) a long time ago because of that. The kinds of questions that most interest me -- for example, design questions -- don't have cut and dried answers. Most of what StackOverflow excels at I can find in the documentation anyway.
- Ajedi32 9y ago
  What kind of design questions? IMO that sounds like the sort of thing you'd see on https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/ https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/
BearGoesChirp 9y ago
The last few times I've asked questions, they were closed as duplicates to questions that weren't related but for a few key words. And often it was done by some of the same set of power users. I've tried adding explanation as to why its different, and some have been reopened, but mostly it isn't worth the time anymore.
- tyrw 9y ago
  I had this happen to me 2-3 times as well. Incorrectly flagged and closed by point seekers in a hurry. It made me respect the platform less and honestly I find myself barely participating anymore after years of activity.
  - minitech 9y ago
    If they were “point seekers”, they would have answered the questions (an action that gives points) instead of closing them (an action that gives no points). I somehow doubt the votes were incorrect, though.
    - tyrw 9y ago
      Sorry, "badge seekers" then if you must insist on precision for the same idea. It's all fake internet points.
Mahn 9y ago
Most people would tell you that if you seek the community aspect of it, you should go to Reddit, but honestly, I still feel like there's a hole for something in between. A site with the conciseness and technicality of SO but with the community and open-endedness of Reddit is something I'd definitely like to see and contribute to.
- zanny 9y ago
  Isn't that down to just subreddit curation? Go look at askscience or askhistory, the top level responses are always relevant or they get deleted by the moderators. Nothing stops someone from making askprogramming that has that level of curation. The problem just becomes incentives, in that getting experts to write informative responses for free is hard, and once SO rating stopped mattering (like how reddit karma never mattered) people stopped trying to participate.
jonahx 9y ago
> closing strictly off topic questions that were interesting ... closed as not constructive, or locked and marked as having "historical significance" SO is a great resource, but not providing a mechanism for this is its greatest failing. I understand "subjective" questions are problematic, but banning them outright without qualification is not the correct solution. I've always thought restricting them to users with 2K reputation or something like that, and having a different set of closing standards if you tag your question "opinion" or "tool-recommendation", could work well. The most highly upvoted (ie, useful) questions are more often than not marked "closed" -- and that has always seemed like an undeniable signal that the current system doesn't capture all potential value.
- aeorgnoieang 9y ago
  There's a separate Stack Exchange site for software recommendations: - https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/ https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/ But I'm with you – if anything, even more extreme – the SO model handles 'subjective' questions just fine.
  - mixmastamyk 9y ago
    Wow, didn't know that existed.
  - jonahx 9y ago
    Thanks, I'd forgotten about that. Although it's pretty clear (imo) from the activity that it would have worked better as a special SO tag.
    - shagie 9y ago
      One of the principles of version control and branching is "branch on incompatible policy" ( http://www.bradapp.com/acme/branching/branch-creation.html#PolicyBranch http://www.bradapp.com/acme/branching/branch-creation.html#P... ). The same applies to Stack Exchange sites. Instead of trying to say "these rules apply to only this tag and always when this tag is included", that entire set of topicality was taken to a different site. Consider trying to ask the question "what is the best C complier given XYZ requirements" on SO. Its tagged with "C", "recommendations" and "compiler". Well... that would mean that it shows up in the C feed - and those people don't think its a good question, so they close it. And then the recommendation followers say "but its tagged with recommendation - that means it should be open and its ok if it gets 100 answers." Two different policies on the site. So branch the community - ask the questions about recommendations where a different policy for what makes a good question and answer on a different site. CodeGolf was that way. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/code-golf https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/code-golf - but two things happened. First, it got lost in the noise of all of the other questions on the site. Secondly, people who wanted to have fun questions with many answers that constantly get bumped to the top of activity were getting their questions closed and down voted because of that fun. So the community branched to a new stack exchange site https://codegolf.stackexchange.com https://codegolf.stackexchange.com where they have flourished even more than they were when it was a tag within stack overflow. That Software Recommendations doesn't have the activity and isn't flourishing the same way suggests that first off people aren't interested in moderating or curating the site in a way that attracts more than drive by questions. With a Q&A site it is the Answers that drive if it flourishes or not. The quality of the answers draw other people who want to provide at least as good content. Also, the format for Q&A doesn't work as well for recommendations. Why does it have to be on Stack Overflow or another exchange site? Why not go over to https://www.slant.co https://www.slant.co where the entire focus of the site is the "what is the best XYZ" - https://www.slant.co/topics/4265/~open-source-c-c-compilers https://www.slant.co/topics/4265/~open-source-c-c-compilers https://www.slant.co/topics/1376/~resources-to-learn-about-compiler-construction https://www.slant.co/topics/1376/~resources-to-learn-about-c... or https://www.slant.co/improve/topics/7940/~which-open-source-c-compiler-s-source-code-is-easiest-to-understand https://www.slant.co/improve/topics/7940/~which-open-source-... for example. Different format focused on that question doing it better than Stack Overflow ever could (but that's also because it doesn't try to do a more general Q&A format).
GordonS 9y ago
It honestly feels like some of the mods are on a power trip. Some claims questions are dupes of unrelated question (presumably they didn't bother reading them), vote to close within seconds of posting etc. It used to be great to be part of SO. No, any time I ask a question I wonder if it's going to survive...
- urda 9y ago
  > It honestly feels like some of the mods are on a power trip. Feels? There is no feels there's a clear desire for mods to push their personal agenda on Stack Overflow. Closing, Merging of questions is slowly killing the site.
  - shagie 9y ago
    Consider the site where nothing is closed. Its not hard to imagine... https://answers.yahoo.com/dir/index?sid=396545663 https://answers.yahoo.com/dir/index?sid=396545663 Consider that without people who care about the quality (and that means trying to maintain a standard for content by removing material that doesn't meet that standard), you'll get Yahoo Answers. Go ahead... try it... read some programming and design questions there, consider answering them. https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20170802102541AArArp4 https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20170802102541A... https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20170726200637AAqCwFw https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20170726200637A... https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20170724205902AA21mXn https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20170724205902A... https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20170723132853AAnaAGe https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20170723132853A... Without moderation, you've got a steaming pile of crap that no one wants to look at or touch.
    - GordonS 9y ago
      Surely there is a middle ground though? SO wasn't always such a negative place to be, yet users with enough points have always been able to perform 'mod' type actions.
balls187 9y ago
They are closed, but not deleted. And as a community, the community decided that they want to keep Stackoverflow for specific programming problems, not those that are opinion based. It is unfortunate that your POV differs from what the general consensus of the community.
lisa_henderson 9y ago
Or questions that are original but get marked as duplicate. This has happened to me several times. It's become my biggest frustration with StackOverflow. I might run into a problem that is a new variation on an old problem. I try to document it carefully, and I often link to old questions on StackOverflow so that people will realize that I've done my research, and my current problem is not the same as the older problem. But still, the moderators on StackOverflow don't always take the time to read all the way through a post. They seem to just read the first sentence or two and decide that the question is a repeat of an older question. I've been shocked at how aggressive they can be about marking a question as a duplicate.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  Another frustration is stuff like PowerShell where it's entirely luck of the draw whether they answer your question or redirect it to SuperUser (where nobody is likely to be able to answer certain classes of question anyway).
dlandis 9y ago
Yep, totally agree. It is total insanity to me that they allow many of their most interesting and popular questions to be locked by mods just because they involve a little subjectivity. Allowing the questions to remain open wouldn't harm the site in the slightest way and would increase engagement and user enjoyment significantly. The way the policy is implemented is incredibly user hostile and unfortunately is reminiscent of wikipedia and other places where you have power-tripping mods. Once the sense of community there reduces passed a certain level there, people will stop caring, and the quality of answers will continue to decrease.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
emodendroket 9y ago
I find that the questions that are least likely to be answered are ones that require some expertise to answer. "Please write a regex for me" questions invariably get multiple answers.

by jon889 9y ago

OzzyB 9y ago

There seems to be an "Overflow" for pratically everything these days, so the question is, why can't they make another board for these more general questions and discussions? ITOverflow? WebArchitecture? There a are people discussing the correct usage of English grammar and how to best raise their kids, why not whether NoSQL is really the right solution? Flame Wars?

AndrewCHM 9y ago
They do have overflow for general open ended discussion https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com would probably do best for your sql/nosql thing, e.g. https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/q/54373 https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/q/54373 https://stackexchange.com/sites https://stackexchange.com/sites worth a browse
- vfaronov 9y ago
  I don’t think they are for “open ended discussion” though? From https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask: > 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. This is sort of the fundamental limit of the format they chose.
  - AndrewCHM 9y ago
    they have that page for all stack exchange sites regardless of content I believe https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask also has it even though it encorages a significant number of answers per question (so, open ended)
  - ceejayoz 9y ago
    Chatty, open-ended stuff can go in the StackExchange chat system, can't it?
    - rspeer 9y ago
      Sounds like banishing it into the abyss. I use StackExchange a lot, and this thread is the first time I've heard it has a "chat system".
      - shagie 9y ago
        The chat system had been around for a long time. It was introduced by Jeff with the blog post https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/04/29/do-trilogy-sites-need-a-third-place/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/04/29/do-trilogy-sites-need-... Question tangent comments get sent there to try to keep the focus on Q&A rather than side back and forth. It's not gone permanently. There are also persistent chat rooms for various topics. Their archives are easily searchable.
- Ajedi32 9y ago
  AFAIK none of the StackExchange sites aside from Meta allow "discussion". It's all about questions and answers, discussion is supposed to be confined to chat rooms. As you said though, there are a few StackExchange sites which deal with more "squishy" topics, like software design or parenting.
motoboi 9y ago
There is the softwareengineering.stackexchange.com where this type of question is on-topic: > If you have a question about... > software development methods and practices > requirements, architecture, and design > quality assurance and testing > configuration management, build, release, and deployment
- felipeccastro 9y ago
  It would be nice if, instead of closing a question as off-topic and asking it again on another site, there was an option for easily transferring the question from one site to another.

43224gg252 9y ago

>Ever since StackOverflow started closing strictly off topic questions that were interesting and still related to programming Seems like they've been doing this since the beginning.

taneq 9y ago
There was a definite step-change in strictness a few years ago, though. This is evidenced by the sheer number of questions which are marked "this question exists for historical significance, but [don't ask questions like this]" and locked.
- yrizos 9y ago
  That's not a useful metric. The questions that today show up as locked for historical significance were simply closed before the historical significance lock was introduced. Conversely, the lock was introduced to stop those highly interesting (but ultimately useless) questions from getting deleted. If anything, it's a step in being less strict.
  - taneq 9y ago
    Oh, so that flag was just applied all questions closed before they introduced the historical significance thing?

beejiu 9y ago

I don't understand why they close questions without noindexing them. The content is either relevant or it isn't.

tonyedgecombe 9y ago
Money.
cannonedhamster 9y ago
The number of times I've received a quick answer from a closed question (as in marked off topic or something other than solved) is relatively high. Moderators tend to be either too heavy handed and nepotic or completely hands off. It's not an easy job but, seems like entrenched interests have always been more important than anything.
Ajedi32 9y ago
A lot of closed questions do get deleted automatically. They have a few metrics to decide which questions to keep: https://stackoverflow.com/help/roomba https://stackoverflow.com/help/roomba
coryfklein 9y ago
The same "question" can be asked many different ways, so it is useful to close all but one duplicate and have them all link to the authoritative Question. This allows for Googlers to use several different wordings for a question and still find the single page with the answer.

shagie 9y ago

A core problem for Stack Overflow is the lack of people willing to curate material. Its not an easy job and is quite thankless. Its possible to have a site that is a mashup of /r/programming, /r/programmerhumor and /r/learnprogramming (and a few others) all on one site. Though when all of those things are together on one site it makes the job of the people trying to curate it impossible. Sure, Strangest language feature is interesting... and it has 320 visible answers when it was locked. Is it useful? It might be interesting, but it is impossible to remove the crap content from it (go to page 11 and start reading backwards and saying "is that useful or not?"). Jeff Atwood wrote about this - https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/01/31/the-trouble-with-popularity/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/01/31/the-trouble-with-popul... . Too much interesting but ultimately not useful stuff gets in the way of finding useful stuff. This really runs up against the Atwoodian vision of Stack Overflow ( https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/ ) > It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home. Better programming is our goal. Interesting stuff and fun stuff may be interesting and fun - but when it gets in the way of making a site that is a library of good programming knowledge... something needs to be done about it. Everything doesn't have to be on Stack Overflow. There are many other sites that are better suited to discussions and fun things than the format for that Stack Overflow took as a Q&A site. It may be boring and heavily controlled... but that unity of vision is necessary for trying to make it a site that provides material that I need when I search for how to deal with some programming problem of configuring Spring Statemachine or whatnot... and then interesting and fun gets in the way of me doing my job.

PaulHoule 9y ago
Lately I have been writing a lot of Python and I am seeing a lot of bit rot in Stack Overflow lately. For one thing, it seems almost all the code snippets use "print-without-parenthesis" from Python 2, so you cannot just cut and paste them into Python 3. It isn't hard to fix this, but it's a clear sign the lights are on and nobody is home. The lack of curation is a problem too. Often the first answer is wrong, or less than optimal. From the viewpoint of somebody looking for answers you don't really want 10 people's opinion, you want one really good answer.

pawelk 9y ago

My top 3 answers are one-liners that solve "problems" any semi-competent developer shouldn't even need stackoverflow to solve. The answers that required some effort, more code and explanations are not that "valuable" because they answer more specific problem that is not shared by many developers. I don't have a problem with that, I don't answer on SO only to accumulate points, but in my opinion it skews the incentives towards going after the low-hanging fruit. The closer it gets into "RTFM" territory the bigger the possible payoff. EDIT: And the karma DOES matter if you want to get new opportunities via stackoverflow careers. I have landed a job recently via SO and chatted with the recruiter a bit about their experience with the platform. He told me some companies specify they want to hire from the pool of Top X% in given technology. Another thing is the response rate on SO is dramatically better than Linkedin, which doesnt surprise me: I do my best to answer every SO Careers message while I mostly ignore Linkedin recruiters.

dionidium 9y ago
I've answered a bunch of narrow questions like the ones you described, only to see them closed later because the community decided it doesn't want to include those questions. My attitude has always been, "Speak for yourself. I'm fine answering them." But, of course, they still get closed, so now I don't even bother. There are people (like me) willing to kill some time solving useful problems that people in the real world are actually having, but SO's theory of broken windows is so extreme that they want to make me feel bad for doing that.
- mark-r 9y ago
  You can blame Jeff Atwood. He outlined his theory of the descent of sites into irrelevance in some blog posts, then put it into action. There's code on SO to prevent two questions having an identical title for example. Even though he's long gone from SO management, the legacy of his philosophy is still abundant.
gwbas1c 9y ago
The thing with the RTFM moments, is that, when I'm experimenting with a new technology, I often ask Google a question and it points me to a stack overflow page. Yes, the question is obvious. And yes, it can be answered via 10-20 minutes of RTFM. But, the value of Stack Overflow is that it replaced 10-20 minutes of RTFM with a simple answer. So, don't knock the RTFM questions on Stack Overflow. That's part of its value to the greater community. (I must admit that I've answered very few Stack Overflow questions because every time I find an answer. I did take the time to write out a well-written answer for an obscure problem, and it got me plenty of points. It's nice that the community has a 1000x ROI, too.)

protomyth 9y ago

I often wish they had implemented a ‘tangent’ mechanism that would have allowed folks to have an interesting conversation in a bit of an off topic manner about the question. It could be represented by an a link and not interfer with the main answer.

Ajedi32 9y ago
Well, you could always create a chat room for that and link to it in the comments...
- chris_7 9y ago
  Stack Exchange moderators needing to constantly delete comment threads with "use chat" has to be one of the biggest case of desire lines online I've seen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path
  - deleted 9y ago
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  - fapjacks 9y ago
    Absolutely this. And also whenever I see a mod axe a whole conversation and replace it with the form response of "this conversation has been moved to chat", I know that is Stack Exchange's way of tossing conversation into /dev/null (and oftentimes when I'm involved in one of those conversations, it gets the axe because the mod doesn't want opposition to their opinion). It's deleting content without actually deleting content. I've seen way too many useful, on-topic, mind-expanding conversations tossed out using this mechanism, never to be seen again.

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adamc 9y ago

Yep. I stopped going there (except for incidental visits when it shows up in google searches) a long time ago because of that. The kinds of questions that most interest me -- for example, design questions -- don't have cut and dried answers. Most of what StackOverflow excels at I can find in the documentation anyway.

Ajedi32 9y ago
What kind of design questions? IMO that sounds like the sort of thing you'd see on https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/ https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/

BearGoesChirp 9y ago

The last few times I've asked questions, they were closed as duplicates to questions that weren't related but for a few key words. And often it was done by some of the same set of power users. I've tried adding explanation as to why its different, and some have been reopened, but mostly it isn't worth the time anymore.

tyrw 9y ago
I had this happen to me 2-3 times as well. Incorrectly flagged and closed by point seekers in a hurry. It made me respect the platform less and honestly I find myself barely participating anymore after years of activity.
- minitech 9y ago
  If they were “point seekers”, they would have answered the questions (an action that gives points) instead of closing them (an action that gives no points). I somehow doubt the votes were incorrect, though.
  - tyrw 9y ago
    Sorry, "badge seekers" then if you must insist on precision for the same idea. It's all fake internet points.

Mahn 9y ago

Most people would tell you that if you seek the community aspect of it, you should go to Reddit, but honestly, I still feel like there's a hole for something in between. A site with the conciseness and technicality of SO but with the community and open-endedness of Reddit is something I'd definitely like to see and contribute to.

zanny 9y ago
Isn't that down to just subreddit curation? Go look at askscience or askhistory, the top level responses are always relevant or they get deleted by the moderators. Nothing stops someone from making askprogramming that has that level of curation. The problem just becomes incentives, in that getting experts to write informative responses for free is hard, and once SO rating stopped mattering (like how reddit karma never mattered) people stopped trying to participate.

jonahx 9y ago

> closing strictly off topic questions that were interesting ... closed as not constructive, or locked and marked as having "historical significance" SO is a great resource, but not providing a mechanism for this is its greatest failing. I understand "subjective" questions are problematic, but banning them outright without qualification is not the correct solution. I've always thought restricting them to users with 2K reputation or something like that, and having a different set of closing standards if you tag your question "opinion" or "tool-recommendation", could work well. The most highly upvoted (ie, useful) questions are more often than not marked "closed" -- and that has always seemed like an undeniable signal that the current system doesn't capture all potential value.

aeorgnoieang 9y ago
There's a separate Stack Exchange site for software recommendations: - https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/ https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/ But I'm with you – if anything, even more extreme – the SO model handles 'subjective' questions just fine.
- mixmastamyk 9y ago
  Wow, didn't know that existed.
- jonahx 9y ago
  Thanks, I'd forgotten about that. Although it's pretty clear (imo) from the activity that it would have worked better as a special SO tag.
  - shagie 9y ago
    One of the principles of version control and branching is "branch on incompatible policy" ( http://www.bradapp.com/acme/branching/branch-creation.html#PolicyBranch http://www.bradapp.com/acme/branching/branch-creation.html#P... ). The same applies to Stack Exchange sites. Instead of trying to say "these rules apply to only this tag and always when this tag is included", that entire set of topicality was taken to a different site. Consider trying to ask the question "what is the best C complier given XYZ requirements" on SO. Its tagged with "C", "recommendations" and "compiler". Well... that would mean that it shows up in the C feed - and those people don't think its a good question, so they close it. And then the recommendation followers say "but its tagged with recommendation - that means it should be open and its ok if it gets 100 answers." Two different policies on the site. So branch the community - ask the questions about recommendations where a different policy for what makes a good question and answer on a different site. CodeGolf was that way. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/code-golf https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/code-golf - but two things happened. First, it got lost in the noise of all of the other questions on the site. Secondly, people who wanted to have fun questions with many answers that constantly get bumped to the top of activity were getting their questions closed and down voted because of that fun. So the community branched to a new stack exchange site https://codegolf.stackexchange.com https://codegolf.stackexchange.com where they have flourished even more than they were when it was a tag within stack overflow. That Software Recommendations doesn't have the activity and isn't flourishing the same way suggests that first off people aren't interested in moderating or curating the site in a way that attracts more than drive by questions. With a Q&A site it is the Answers that drive if it flourishes or not. The quality of the answers draw other people who want to provide at least as good content. Also, the format for Q&A doesn't work as well for recommendations. Why does it have to be on Stack Overflow or another exchange site? Why not go over to https://www.slant.co https://www.slant.co where the entire focus of the site is the "what is the best XYZ" - https://www.slant.co/topics/4265/~open-source-c-c-compilers https://www.slant.co/topics/4265/~open-source-c-c-compilers https://www.slant.co/topics/1376/~resources-to-learn-about-compiler-construction https://www.slant.co/topics/1376/~resources-to-learn-about-c... or https://www.slant.co/improve/topics/7940/~which-open-source-c-compiler-s-source-code-is-easiest-to-understand https://www.slant.co/improve/topics/7940/~which-open-source-... for example. Different format focused on that question doing it better than Stack Overflow ever could (but that's also because it doesn't try to do a more general Q&A format).

GordonS 9y ago

It honestly feels like some of the mods are on a power trip. Some claims questions are dupes of unrelated question (presumably they didn't bother reading them), vote to close within seconds of posting etc. It used to be great to be part of SO. No, any time I ask a question I wonder if it's going to survive...

urda 9y ago
> It honestly feels like some of the mods are on a power trip. Feels? There is no feels there's a clear desire for mods to push their personal agenda on Stack Overflow. Closing, Merging of questions is slowly killing the site.
- shagie 9y ago
  Consider the site where nothing is closed. Its not hard to imagine... https://answers.yahoo.com/dir/index?sid=396545663 https://answers.yahoo.com/dir/index?sid=396545663 Consider that without people who care about the quality (and that means trying to maintain a standard for content by removing material that doesn't meet that standard), you'll get Yahoo Answers. Go ahead... try it... read some programming and design questions there, consider answering them. https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20170802102541AArArp4 https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20170802102541A... https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20170726200637AAqCwFw https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20170726200637A... https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20170724205902AA21mXn https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20170724205902A... https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20170723132853AAnaAGe https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20170723132853A... Without moderation, you've got a steaming pile of crap that no one wants to look at or touch.
  - GordonS 9y ago
    Surely there is a middle ground though? SO wasn't always such a negative place to be, yet users with enough points have always been able to perform 'mod' type actions.

balls187 9y ago

They are closed, but not deleted. And as a community, the community decided that they want to keep Stackoverflow for specific programming problems, not those that are opinion based. It is unfortunate that your POV differs from what the general consensus of the community.

lisa_henderson 9y ago

Or questions that are original but get marked as duplicate. This has happened to me several times. It's become my biggest frustration with StackOverflow. I might run into a problem that is a new variation on an old problem. I try to document it carefully, and I often link to old questions on StackOverflow so that people will realize that I've done my research, and my current problem is not the same as the older problem. But still, the moderators on StackOverflow don't always take the time to read all the way through a post. They seem to just read the first sentence or two and decide that the question is a repeat of an older question. I've been shocked at how aggressive they can be about marking a question as a duplicate.

emodendroket 9y ago
Another frustration is stuff like PowerShell where it's entirely luck of the draw whether they answer your question or redirect it to SuperUser (where nobody is likely to be able to answer certain classes of question anyway).

dlandis 9y ago

Yep, totally agree. It is total insanity to me that they allow many of their most interesting and popular questions to be locked by mods just because they involve a little subjectivity. Allowing the questions to remain open wouldn't harm the site in the slightest way and would increase engagement and user enjoyment significantly. The way the policy is implemented is incredibly user hostile and unfortunately is reminiscent of wikipedia and other places where you have power-tripping mods. Once the sense of community there reduces passed a certain level there, people will stop caring, and the quality of answers will continue to decrease.

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emodendroket 9y ago

I find that the questions that are least likely to be answered are ones that require some expertise to answer. "Please write a regex for me" questions invariably get multiple answers.