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It's undeniable that their main developer Q&A site is a really great thing that saved me many hours of work. However, it was somewhat hostile to its more export

It's undeniable that their main developer Q&A site is a really great thing that saved me many hours of work. However, it was somewhat hostile to its more export users from the very beginning: the reputation system favors quickfire replies to grab the first upvotes, and they seem to put a strong emphasis on "cookbook" answers where many of the more nuanced discussions were closed as "opinion based". I think there are some missed opportunities here to make the Q&A site even more useful. However, perhaps that wasn't their focus. My impression is the Q&A site was supposed to be mostly a gateway to their other services, and for that to work, the Q&A part simply had to be "good enough". It's an interesting strategy that perhaps didn't work out quite the way they had hoped it would.

kjxsnht43 9y ago
I couldn't agree less. First off, they're not going out of business, just letting 20% go and one would assume refocusing. I think the site is set up to get good answers and not just the first upvotes as answers stick around and users can vote answers up or down as they see fit. The first answers on older questions tend to be very long and in-depth and give a lot of good information about the pros and cons of the approach they discuss. (If you want something really in-depth, check out https://codereview.stackexchange.com/. https://codereview.stackexchange.com/.) The ones that get closed as opinion based are almost entirely asking for software recommendations or the like. I've rarely seen an objectively answerable question closed as being opinion-based.
- codeflo 9y ago
  For many of the supposedly "opinion-based" questions, reasonable people will at least agree on the relevant trade-offs, even if they come to different conclusions overall. Thus, when a question asks about "pros and cons of technology X", expert insight into the trade-offs involved could be really useful to help evaluate your own specific situation. But that kind of more nuanced question doesn't really fit the simple "one correct answer" model that Stack Overflow seems to be going for and is thus very likely to be closed. IMHO, there should be a distinction between "it depends on the circumstances, and here's why" and "purely opinion based", and Stack Overflow would be more useful for me personally if the former were allowed. Edit: Just to check if moderation policies have changed since I last looked, I did a quick search for questions containing the phrase "pros and cons". As unfortunately expected, practically all of the questions are closed: https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=pros+and+cons https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=pros+and+cons
  - shagie 9y ago
    While "it depends on the circumstances and here's why" is the ideal answer, such questions rarely get those answers. On one of the sister sites to SO, there's a post about pros and cons on their meta - https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6758/ https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions... - such questions are often a moderation headache when you get the inevitable spam and the poor quality answers of "I can't believe anyone didn't mention XYZ". Look at https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15142/what-are-the-pros-and-cons-to-keeping-sql-in-stored-procs-versus-code https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15142/what-are-the-pros-... and start reading through and consider the one that starts out with "@Keith" responding to a different answer or "A SQL stored proc doesn't increase the performance of the query" being the entirety of the answer. Such questions, when left open can get awful answers that are difficult to clean up. Have you considered that there are sites with as laser like of a focus on pros and cons as SO maintains on Q&A? https://www.slant.co https://www.slant.co is one such site. https://www.slant.co/topics/607/~best-java-ides https://www.slant.co/topics/607/~best-java-ides https://www.slant.co/topics/440/~best-nosql-databases-for-web-applications https://www.slant.co/topics/440/~best-nosql-databases-for-we... and so on.
- baldfat 9y ago
  > Opinion based I wish Stackoverflow would buy https://slant.co https://slant.co and just point people to that site for opinions.
ktta 9y ago
>many of the more nuanced discussions were closed as "opinion based" This is also something I don't like, but I wonder if they went on, if the website would become another place for flamewars - something that happens a LOT when you have low moderation.
- shagie 9y ago
  The thing that separates SO from forums is the focus on quality answers. There are more than enough locked examples of the opinion bickering if one wants to see what happens. They may be interesting to read. They may be popular. But most of the time by page 2 and even worse at page 5, it’s crap. And that crap requires an excessive amount of community moderation work to keep clean and try to avoid having more people add answers to the bottom of page 7 that are already stated 6 times on previous pages. If the moderation tools are less powerful than the popularity keeping it there, there isn’t much reason to moderate. And thus the culture by those who shovel crap daily to try to shut down opinion based questions early - so they don’t have to do more work later. Every attempt I’ve seen at an opinion oriented SE alternative has failed to get sufficient expert answering. It’s not fun as a ${Lang} expert to have a newbie argue with you regularly about some feature or design choice.
hehheh 9y ago
Their Q&A site was vastly better than what existed at the time, and that's how they won the market. Now, though, it is full of people looking for quick points (as you suggest) -- people that think that the original poster was asking for someone to search Google for 'em -- and I'm convinced that the truly helpful people have moved just given up. One thing I've noticed, that drives me crazy, is people demanding more information in response to a question, without any intention of using that information to help find an answer. Their whole goal is to score points for asking more details. I don't mean to suggest that more details aren't useful, only that it isn't helpful in any way to ask for more information if you don't intend to follow up. (Perhaps that could be improved by allowing those sorts of requests to be sent privately, and without any chance of generating points?)
- shagie 9y ago
  I suspect there's a mismatch between what you expect Stack Overflow to be and what the other users expect it to be. From the tour ( https://stackoverflow.com/tour https://stackoverflow.com/tour ): > With your help, we're working together to build a library of detailed answers to every question about programming. The "build a library" being the key part. Vague questions aren't that useful in building the library in particular because lacking the necessary information, they can have too many unhelpful answers. Thus the focus on the problem with example demonstrating the problem (so the next person with the problem can verify that it is their problem or not) that gets answers. Furthermore, you appear to be under a misunderstanding of how the stack overflow reputation system works. > Their whole goal is to score points for asking more details. No one gets points for comments. At all. The voting on comments is purely for visibility ranking of helpful and constructive aspects to the post they are on... and nothing else. No points. The reason that people ask those clarifying questions is to make sure that they are answering the right question and aren't wasting their time on trying to answer something that turns out to not be the problem. Say someone asks how to do XYZ in C++... and the person gives an answer for C++17... and then the OP comes back and says "sorry, I'm using turbo C++ and that doesn't work." Instead a comment asking "what version of C++ are you using" up front to make sure that the person asking the question gets the correct answer rather than something that is unhelpful. There is no private messaging on Stack Overflow, probably for the same reason there's none on HN. It increases the moderation workload and possibility of bullying in private. I'd hate to be Jon Skeet if there was private massing. Furthermore, having it be a comment presents the information in public (including the clarification) so that if someone else has the problem they can read the comments and be aware that something may not work in their situation even if parts of the questions match. ("You didn't include a version of C++ in this and it appears to be a very old version, could you update the question with the version you are using?")

kjxsnht43 9y ago

I couldn't agree less. First off, they're not going out of business, just letting 20% go and one would assume refocusing. I think the site is set up to get good answers and not just the first upvotes as answers stick around and users can vote answers up or down as they see fit. The first answers on older questions tend to be very long and in-depth and give a lot of good information about the pros and cons of the approach they discuss. (If you want something really in-depth, check out https://codereview.stackexchange.com/. https://codereview.stackexchange.com/.) The ones that get closed as opinion based are almost entirely asking for software recommendations or the like. I've rarely seen an objectively answerable question closed as being opinion-based.

codeflo 9y ago
For many of the supposedly "opinion-based" questions, reasonable people will at least agree on the relevant trade-offs, even if they come to different conclusions overall. Thus, when a question asks about "pros and cons of technology X", expert insight into the trade-offs involved could be really useful to help evaluate your own specific situation. But that kind of more nuanced question doesn't really fit the simple "one correct answer" model that Stack Overflow seems to be going for and is thus very likely to be closed. IMHO, there should be a distinction between "it depends on the circumstances, and here's why" and "purely opinion based", and Stack Overflow would be more useful for me personally if the former were allowed. Edit: Just to check if moderation policies have changed since I last looked, I did a quick search for questions containing the phrase "pros and cons". As unfortunately expected, practically all of the questions are closed: https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=pros+and+cons https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=pros+and+cons
- shagie 9y ago
  While "it depends on the circumstances and here's why" is the ideal answer, such questions rarely get those answers. On one of the sister sites to SO, there's a post about pros and cons on their meta - https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6758/ https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions... - such questions are often a moderation headache when you get the inevitable spam and the poor quality answers of "I can't believe anyone didn't mention XYZ". Look at https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15142/what-are-the-pros-and-cons-to-keeping-sql-in-stored-procs-versus-code https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15142/what-are-the-pros-... and start reading through and consider the one that starts out with "@Keith" responding to a different answer or "A SQL stored proc doesn't increase the performance of the query" being the entirety of the answer. Such questions, when left open can get awful answers that are difficult to clean up. Have you considered that there are sites with as laser like of a focus on pros and cons as SO maintains on Q&A? https://www.slant.co https://www.slant.co is one such site. https://www.slant.co/topics/607/~best-java-ides https://www.slant.co/topics/607/~best-java-ides https://www.slant.co/topics/440/~best-nosql-databases-for-web-applications https://www.slant.co/topics/440/~best-nosql-databases-for-we... and so on.
baldfat 9y ago
> Opinion based I wish Stackoverflow would buy https://slant.co https://slant.co and just point people to that site for opinions.

ktta 9y ago

>many of the more nuanced discussions were closed as "opinion based" This is also something I don't like, but I wonder if they went on, if the website would become another place for flamewars - something that happens a LOT when you have low moderation.

shagie 9y ago
The thing that separates SO from forums is the focus on quality answers. There are more than enough locked examples of the opinion bickering if one wants to see what happens. They may be interesting to read. They may be popular. But most of the time by page 2 and even worse at page 5, it’s crap. And that crap requires an excessive amount of community moderation work to keep clean and try to avoid having more people add answers to the bottom of page 7 that are already stated 6 times on previous pages. If the moderation tools are less powerful than the popularity keeping it there, there isn’t much reason to moderate. And thus the culture by those who shovel crap daily to try to shut down opinion based questions early - so they don’t have to do more work later. Every attempt I’ve seen at an opinion oriented SE alternative has failed to get sufficient expert answering. It’s not fun as a ${Lang} expert to have a newbie argue with you regularly about some feature or design choice.

hehheh 9y ago

Their Q&A site was vastly better than what existed at the time, and that's how they won the market. Now, though, it is full of people looking for quick points (as you suggest) -- people that think that the original poster was asking for someone to search Google for 'em -- and I'm convinced that the truly helpful people have moved just given up. One thing I've noticed, that drives me crazy, is people demanding more information in response to a question, without any intention of using that information to help find an answer. Their whole goal is to score points for asking more details. I don't mean to suggest that more details aren't useful, only that it isn't helpful in any way to ask for more information if you don't intend to follow up. (Perhaps that could be improved by allowing those sorts of requests to be sent privately, and without any chance of generating points?)

shagie 9y ago
I suspect there's a mismatch between what you expect Stack Overflow to be and what the other users expect it to be. From the tour ( https://stackoverflow.com/tour https://stackoverflow.com/tour ): > With your help, we're working together to build a library of detailed answers to every question about programming. The "build a library" being the key part. Vague questions aren't that useful in building the library in particular because lacking the necessary information, they can have too many unhelpful answers. Thus the focus on the problem with example demonstrating the problem (so the next person with the problem can verify that it is their problem or not) that gets answers. Furthermore, you appear to be under a misunderstanding of how the stack overflow reputation system works. > Their whole goal is to score points for asking more details. No one gets points for comments. At all. The voting on comments is purely for visibility ranking of helpful and constructive aspects to the post they are on... and nothing else. No points. The reason that people ask those clarifying questions is to make sure that they are answering the right question and aren't wasting their time on trying to answer something that turns out to not be the problem. Say someone asks how to do XYZ in C++... and the person gives an answer for C++17... and then the OP comes back and says "sorry, I'm using turbo C++ and that doesn't work." Instead a comment asking "what version of C++ are you using" up front to make sure that the person asking the question gets the correct answer rather than something that is unhelpful. There is no private messaging on Stack Overflow, probably for the same reason there's none on HN. It increases the moderation workload and possibility of bullying in private. I'd hate to be Jon Skeet if there was private massing. Furthermore, having it be a comment presents the information in public (including the clarification) so that if someone else has the problem they can read the comments and be aware that something may not work in their situation even if parts of the questions match. ("You didn't include a version of C++ in this and it appears to be a very old version, could you update the question with the version you are using?")