3 ms·

Except, it does work. I've found many closed opinion questions to be just the info I was looking for. Until they effectively stamped that behavior out, it was o

Except, it does work. I've found many closed opinion questions to be just the info I was looking for. Until they effectively stamped that behavior out, it was one of the best ways to get a request-for-recs in front of a massive audience of informed professionals. It was messy, but very useful.

shagie 9y ago
It also took a significant amount of community curation to maintain the utility of that. As the communities that tried to maintain the posts have found that it didn't work well, those posts became worse and worse content that wasn't up to date and would have people adding a post for no other reason than to add a post (not even checking for if the answer was there before). The utility became less and less over time. It can be done with a small enough and dedicated community behind it (the C++ book list), but without that amount of attention and dedication its not that good anymore. There's also the number of questions. Stack Overflow back then got maybe a few hundred questions a day. You could glance over all of them in a tag in a page. Now it gets 8000 questions per day. Asking a recommendation question doesn't get your post there for a large community of experts. You're lucky if you've got a few minutes of visibility now. Look back at one of those https://stackoverflow.com/q/22697 https://stackoverflow.com/q/22697 - "only" 14 answers to it... and look how many of them are saying the same thing. That's not useful. https://www.slant.co/topics/259/~best-mock-frameworks-for-java https://www.slant.co/topics/259/~best-mock-frameworks-for-ja... Try https://www.slant.co https://www.slant.co for the recommendations - its designed for that.
- dcow 9y ago
  It's easy for you to say they're not useful. But it's harder to ignore the myriad up votes. Even objective technical questions suffer from the "same answer multiple times" problem you explain. IMO repeat answers act to provided consensus in a more finessed way beyond just added votes. I don't think it's inherently "not useful".
  - shagie 9y ago
    In many cases, up votes on Stack Overflow have no more significance than a like on facebook. The problem of "same answer repeated" becomes contrary to the "find the answer rather than scrolling through pages" when posts get sufficiently popular. Go through all the pages of https://stackoverflow.com/q/1711 https://stackoverflow.com/q/1711 and count how many times the mythical man month is mentioned. Unless you read through all 214 visible answers, do you know how much consensus exists from material on the last page?
    - dcow 9y ago
      Is that really so bad of a problem it requires sacrificing the utility of similar questions? It really feels like a few bad apples poisoned the lot. Maybe opinion based questions could have a TTJ (time to judgement) on them. If they result in useful info, keep them, if not, punt. IDK I'm just spit-balling now. I really don't see why SO has to take such strong ideological stances toward community moderation--which is a human issue not a mechanical one.
      - shagie 9y ago
        Stack Overflow had a bad experience with excessively popular questions as described in https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/01/31/the-trouble-with-popularity/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/01/31/the-trouble-with-popul... They gave it a try - https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/12/17/introducing-programmers-stackexchange-com/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/12/17/introducing-programmer... and it veered off into unmanageable and at the end of the day, uninteresting https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/29/good-subjective-bad-subjective/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/29/good-subjective-bad-su... It had a really big initial peak, but people didn't stick around. https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/200144 https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/200144 There's a place for such questions, it just isn't Stack Overflow. It isn't the trash either... but its that the structure and the framework of Stack Overflow doesn't work for that sort of question. The problem is that the endless debates tend to drive away the people who provide the answers. Look at the questions on https://ai.stackexchange.com https://ai.stackexchange.com and consider some of the older ones https://ai.stackexchange.com/questions?page=30&sort=newest https://ai.stackexchange.com/questions?page=30&sort=newest to the newest https://ai.stackexchange.com/questions?page=1&sort=newest https://ai.stackexchange.com/questions?page=1&sort=newest . They really had a problem with the... science fiction questions https://ai.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1283 https://ai.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1283 and appear to have a done a strong change. Sure, those are interesting, but if one wants to ask questions of the experts, they need to ask questions the experts want to answer. There's a site that handles those questions better... https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/artificial-intelligence https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/art... The main thing is that it takes some degree of moderation to keep the people who have the answers that people want. This means matching the site to the vision of the site that the people who have answers want to visit... and that's a lot of clauses. Without that moderation striving for what the site could be, you get https://answers.yahoo.com/dir/index?sid=396545663&link=list https://answers.yahoo.com/dir/index?sid=396545663&link=list and there's a reason that experts tend not to go there and try to answer those questions. As to the its a human issue, not a technical one - I'd suggest giving http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html a read. The first of the three things to accept.
hutzlibu 9y ago
"Except, it does work. I've found many closed opinion questions to be just the info I was looking for." Same for me. I think it is not wise to expect your users to be that fanatics, that they can't recommend any tool, without starting a flame war all the time. I mean there certainly are fanatics on the internet who fight with religious passion about the weirdest things, but I believe they are not the majority. So just banning something that might cause trouble, but loosing all the benefits, I think was not a good decision. But apart from that, I found lots of help on SO. But like others, not so much anymore, but mostly simply because I rarely need to look up things and the problems I do have are too obscure, for the main users, which are the target group, so I solve them by other means.

shagie 9y ago

It also took a significant amount of community curation to maintain the utility of that. As the communities that tried to maintain the posts have found that it didn't work well, those posts became worse and worse content that wasn't up to date and would have people adding a post for no other reason than to add a post (not even checking for if the answer was there before). The utility became less and less over time. It can be done with a small enough and dedicated community behind it (the C++ book list), but without that amount of attention and dedication its not that good anymore. There's also the number of questions. Stack Overflow back then got maybe a few hundred questions a day. You could glance over all of them in a tag in a page. Now it gets 8000 questions per day. Asking a recommendation question doesn't get your post there for a large community of experts. You're lucky if you've got a few minutes of visibility now. Look back at one of those https://stackoverflow.com/q/22697 https://stackoverflow.com/q/22697 - "only" 14 answers to it... and look how many of them are saying the same thing. That's not useful. https://www.slant.co/topics/259/~best-mock-frameworks-for-java https://www.slant.co/topics/259/~best-mock-frameworks-for-ja... Try https://www.slant.co https://www.slant.co for the recommendations - its designed for that.

dcow 9y ago
It's easy for you to say they're not useful. But it's harder to ignore the myriad up votes. Even objective technical questions suffer from the "same answer multiple times" problem you explain. IMO repeat answers act to provided consensus in a more finessed way beyond just added votes. I don't think it's inherently "not useful".
- shagie 9y ago
  In many cases, up votes on Stack Overflow have no more significance than a like on facebook. The problem of "same answer repeated" becomes contrary to the "find the answer rather than scrolling through pages" when posts get sufficiently popular. Go through all the pages of https://stackoverflow.com/q/1711 https://stackoverflow.com/q/1711 and count how many times the mythical man month is mentioned. Unless you read through all 214 visible answers, do you know how much consensus exists from material on the last page?
  - dcow 9y ago
    Is that really so bad of a problem it requires sacrificing the utility of similar questions? It really feels like a few bad apples poisoned the lot. Maybe opinion based questions could have a TTJ (time to judgement) on them. If they result in useful info, keep them, if not, punt. IDK I'm just spit-balling now. I really don't see why SO has to take such strong ideological stances toward community moderation--which is a human issue not a mechanical one.
    - shagie 9y ago
      Stack Overflow had a bad experience with excessively popular questions as described in https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/01/31/the-trouble-with-popularity/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/01/31/the-trouble-with-popul... They gave it a try - https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/12/17/introducing-programmers-stackexchange-com/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/12/17/introducing-programmer... and it veered off into unmanageable and at the end of the day, uninteresting https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/29/good-subjective-bad-subjective/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/29/good-subjective-bad-su... It had a really big initial peak, but people didn't stick around. https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/200144 https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/200144 There's a place for such questions, it just isn't Stack Overflow. It isn't the trash either... but its that the structure and the framework of Stack Overflow doesn't work for that sort of question. The problem is that the endless debates tend to drive away the people who provide the answers. Look at the questions on https://ai.stackexchange.com https://ai.stackexchange.com and consider some of the older ones https://ai.stackexchange.com/questions?page=30&sort=newest https://ai.stackexchange.com/questions?page=30&sort=newest to the newest https://ai.stackexchange.com/questions?page=1&sort=newest https://ai.stackexchange.com/questions?page=1&sort=newest . They really had a problem with the... science fiction questions https://ai.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1283 https://ai.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1283 and appear to have a done a strong change. Sure, those are interesting, but if one wants to ask questions of the experts, they need to ask questions the experts want to answer. There's a site that handles those questions better... https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/artificial-intelligence https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/art... The main thing is that it takes some degree of moderation to keep the people who have the answers that people want. This means matching the site to the vision of the site that the people who have answers want to visit... and that's a lot of clauses. Without that moderation striving for what the site could be, you get https://answers.yahoo.com/dir/index?sid=396545663&link=list https://answers.yahoo.com/dir/index?sid=396545663&link=list and there's a reason that experts tend not to go there and try to answer those questions. As to the its a human issue, not a technical one - I'd suggest giving http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html a read. The first of the three things to accept.

hutzlibu 9y ago

"Except, it does work. I've found many closed opinion questions to be just the info I was looking for." Same for me. I think it is not wise to expect your users to be that fanatics, that they can't recommend any tool, without starting a flame war all the time. I mean there certainly are fanatics on the internet who fight with religious passion about the weirdest things, but I believe they are not the majority. So just banning something that might cause trouble, but loosing all the benefits, I think was not a good decision. But apart from that, I found lots of help on SO. But like others, not so much anymore, but mostly simply because I rarely need to look up things and the problems I do have are too obscure, for the main users, which are the target group, so I solve them by other means.