4 ms·
[2] isn't an example of "subjective editorial decisions"; your question was off-topic because 'recommendation' questions are prohibited. For that tho, there's a
by aeorgnoieang 9y ago
[2] isn't an example of "subjective editorial decisions"; your question was off-topic because 'recommendation' questions are prohibited. For that tho, there's a Stack Exchange sister site:
- [Software Recommendations Stack Exchange](https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/ https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/)
I don't like that 'decision', i.e. to not allow recommendations, but I understand the reasoning behind it, that recommendation questions are basically polls. [But isn't everything on which people can vote basically a poll too? Obviously yes in my opinion.]
- ken 9y agoI never understood it, either. By that reasoning, almost any technical question is an "opinion" question asking for a "recommendation". For example, pretty much any question about C string handling has many possible answers, e.g., [1] admits that comparing two strings is "rather broad" and the various answers there recommend looping over each index and comparing chars with ==, sscanf, strncmp, regexes, and PEGs. Opinions galore! But if you want to know the difference between AWS EC2 and EB [2], even though there's one pretty clear answer, somehow the admins unanimously find the question to be "primarily opinion-based". [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16013031 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16013031 [2]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25956193 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25956193 My hunch is that due to the desire for longevity of content, there's a large unspoken bias in favor of questions about simple programs, and against questions about remote services (which are more likely to disappear or change, even though that's not likely to happen with major AWS services), and that the question closure explanations like "primarily opinion-based" are just a smokescreen.
- fhood 9y agoAlso there seems to be no problem with users who submit opinions instead of answers. Q: How do I do X extremely specific thing that I need because I have an unusual case that needs this specific thing. A (top voted): Why would you want to do X? You shouldn't do that. I clearly know more about your problem than you do because I assume everyone on here is a college student and not a developer working with a large mostly static codebase. You should do Y instead. It is much better.
- kristianc 9y agoThis seems to be a common thing across all online support communities, even ones where the software company has outsourced support to their community. I'd love to see a solution to it, as it makes discussions incredibly frustrating to read.
- fhood 9y agoI have a solution. If a user repeatedly does that without also providing a solution to the original question then ban them.
- shagie 9y agoIn the world of “stack overflow is unfriendly to new users”, banning a person providing an answer that other people have found helpful seems to be a suggestion that would take SO in the direction of yahoo answers. Stack Overflow’s approach appears to be all answers are acceptable. This isn’t just for the person who asked the question but everyone else too. If a person is not providing good answers and people are down voting those poor answers, there is an automatic answer ban in place... but that requires people to down vote poor answers.
- kristianc 9y agoNo. SO absolutely can be opinionated about what constitutes a good and a bad answer. SO's job is to get to the right and most helpful answer fast. You can't always rely on the community to root out bad actors.
- shagie 9y agoThe mechanism that SO uses for sorting answers is community votes. That poor or incorrect answers get up votes is a problem. SO only has its community to do that sorting. The corporate and diamond mods have specifically stepped away from doing this except in the most egregious and disruptive cases.
- 9y ago
- payne92 9y agoI get what you're saying about their 'decision' to prohibit 'recommendation' questions, but my point is that it doesn't make any sense. It's a distinction without a difference, as many, many questions on the site are 'recommendations' or 'how do I': https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1942298/wrapping-a-c-library-in-python-c-cython-or-ctypes https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1942298/wrapping-a-c-lib... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/127803/how-to-parse-an-iso-8601-formatted-date https://stackoverflow.com/questions/127803/how-to-parse-an-i... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1006289/how-to-find-out-the-number-of-cpus-using-python/1006337#1006337 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1006289/how-to-find-out-... ..etc.. I don't understand why "how to generate a USPS label" (my question) is different than any of the above examples.
- shagie 9y agoDo you have any examples of such questions asked in the past... let’s say four years? The problem with recommendation questions is that they are very time consuming to keep curated and useful. You’ll inevitably have 50 answers of which 20 are duplicates and difficult to delete because of up votes on them. The community moderation for “just close them quickly” is much less than the community moderation necessary to curate them. Anyways, https://www.slant.co https://www.slant.co is set up to do recommendations better than stack overflow could conceivably do. Not all questions are best asked on stack overflow.
- payne92 9y agoExamples of questions about the existence of API and library functionality in the past four years? (with recommendation answers) Sure: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46718944/facebook-graph-api-instagram-data-in-python https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46718944/facebook-graph-... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7120806/skype-python-api https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7120806/skype-python-api https://stackoverflow.com/questions/34010978/elasticsearch-http-api-or-python-api https://stackoverflow.com/questions/34010978/elasticsearch-h... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26305704/python-mixed-integer-linear-programming https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26305704/python-mixed-in... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49524937/fast-bipartite-matching https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49524937/fast-bipartite-... ... etc ... I get the idea of avoiding "what's the best programming language?"-type questions, but to the point of my original comment, the application of the policy feels very uneven and therefore "oddly subjective".
- nerdponx 9y agoThe entire Stackexchange network, in my opinion, suffers badly from fragmentation into hyper-specific Q&A sites. Why software recommendations do not fall under the Superuser purview is beyond me.
- shagie 9y agoSuper user has difficulty with recommendations too. The effort upon the community to curate the content on a large site takes a very dedicated team. Past efforts to have such failed and the curation of the question dropped off along with its quality. Moving software recommendations to its own site allowed a community to form there that was engaged with that curation. That said, I believe the SO engine fails spectacularly with recommendations. I find https://slant.co https://slant.co to be a better resource that has its engine dedicated to recommendations (rather than Q&A).
- Noumenon72 9y agoI have never heard of Software Recommendations Stack Exchange, and I've been frustrated for years by how many useful recommendation questions I come across that are closed. They should put a link to Software Recommendations Stack Exchange on questions that are closed for that reason.
- shagie 9y agoSoftware recommendations has a very small community. If even a small fraction of the questions that get closed as recommendation each day re-asked their question there the 9 questions a day they currently get would get lost in noise. Give [this meta post](https://softwarerecs.meta.stackexchange.com/a/762 https://softwarerecs.meta.stackexchange.com/a/762) a read.
- Noumenon72 9y agoThank you for showing me where this had been discussed before!