3 ms·

> It was a the era of "what should I name my cat?" A lot of those links 404 for me, but a lot of that stuff could have been taken care of by being better at de

> It was a the era of "what should I name my cat?" A lot of those links 404 for me, but a lot of that stuff could have been taken care of by being better at defining what was on and off topic, e.g. it's a site for subjective questions about programming, rather than programmers answering subjective questions. SO has the moderation resources to handle that.

shagie 8y ago
SO might have had the moderation resources. The early PSE site didn't (as described in https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/200144 https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/200144 ). The moderation actions trying to deal with that were done mostly by diamond moderator fiat and occasionally Jeff or Joel saying "no." The community that was there at the time wasn't doing any significant moderation or curation of those questions. Consider https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/44177/ https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/4417... and consider is that useful? curated? Should "Quit my last job." (entire answer) be there? or "I tried to apply good programming technique to a language such as TI-83+ BASIC."? Count how many times "read books" or some variation is in that list. It wasn't moderated or curated. Such pile on "give a pithy answer" was acceptable. And it made the site - trying for the more conceptual and architecture questions that Joel was asking for in his blog post harder to find, and they would get drowned out by the popular fun questions. That lead to https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/01/31/the-trouble-with-popularity/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/01/31/the-trouble-with-popul... Its not that those aren't interesting questions, its that they are the wrong fit for that format. There are better places to ask for the best programming joke than Stack Overflow and Exchange sites. And so, with the lack of moderation and curation from the fun days of Programmers.SE a different philosophy of the site was able to establish itself... and the site grew in activity. The culture of a site is a proof of work. You have to work to maintain it. If there isn't work to do it, it can change. Its probably far to late to change to the less moderated version of the site again. However, if one wants to do that, actively work to curate the site so that those questions are acceptable. MathOverflow has a fair number of fun and soft questions - but that comes at a lot of work of moderation and curation from the entire community... which they do. The community on other sites that wants those fun and soft questions has not shown as much a desire to curate them, and so others moderate them (not desiring to curate them either).
- Lionsion 8y ago
  > Consider https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/4417.. https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/4417.... and consider is that useful? Yes. > curated? It's not a worthless question. If you're talking about subjective questions, obsessive curation is not the answer. > Should "Quit my last job." (entire answer) be there? Sure, considering there were better answers that had far more votes. It might have been better if it wasn't, and moderation could have taken care of it. Answers like that are certainly not an indictment of the format. > Its not that those aren't interesting questions, its that they are the wrong fit for that format. There are better places to ask for the best programming joke than Stack Overflow and Exchange sites. That's never the kind of think I asked or liked at programmers.se, but like I said before, they threw the baby out with the bathwater. You haven't really convinced me that subjective questions are "wrong for the format." All you've really shown it that an unmoderated free for all produces some garbage that doesn't fir in a high quality tech Q&A site. The real answer for why programmers.se failed is probably that the powers-that-be weren't willing to spend the time and resources to meet a new challenge, so they gave up and did something else.
  - shagie 8y ago
    Its not a worthless question. However, its worth is drastically diminished by having so many answers, and so many joke answers in there. That people didn't want to curate it so that the joke answers and duplicate answers are removed and set a standard for providing an answer that is more than one line is why that type of question is closed - it takes too much time for the community that wants to maintain the site to curate it and keep it at a quality that matches the rest of the site. The format that SE provides is a very direct Q&A that tries to cut out all of the excess and gives a single good answer. There are other sites that are better cut out for polling questions and other sites that do a better job of "what is the best ...?" Trying to make everything fit in the SE framework puts a burden on the community that moderates and curates the material, and at some point people have said "enough" because they don't want to and others haven't stepped up to do it. The "wrong for the format" is part of the design of the site. Note here that we're talking in a thread. You can follow the discussion. SE was designed to make discussions awkward. When there's a discussion on a site of significant scale, it becomes unmanageable and detracts from the Q&A focus. If that is a good design decision or a bad one is up to debate - but it is the design decision of SE. And there are so many other places where that discussion could be had. Why not ask that question here? or over on a competing discourse site ( https://www.askquestions.tech https://www.askquestions.tech was started by April who wrote the post that sparked much of this)? If Programmers (now Software Engineering) has failed is also up for debate. The name change wasn't so much of a "it failed" but rather "people keep getting the wrong impression of topicality" because yes, it took too much time to keep trying to keep the topic on what the powers that be wanted to moderate and no one else was willing to do the job of curating the content of the larger programmers scope... and after all, they're all volunteers - its really hard to make volunteers volunteer to do something they're not interested in doing. The name change meta post is at https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7935/ https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions... (see also the linked questions).

shagie 8y ago

SO might have had the moderation resources. The early PSE site didn't (as described in https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/200144 https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/200144 ). The moderation actions trying to deal with that were done mostly by diamond moderator fiat and occasionally Jeff or Joel saying "no." The community that was there at the time wasn't doing any significant moderation or curation of those questions. Consider https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/44177/ https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/4417... and consider is that useful? curated? Should "Quit my last job." (entire answer) be there? or "I tried to apply good programming technique to a language such as TI-83+ BASIC."? Count how many times "read books" or some variation is in that list. It wasn't moderated or curated. Such pile on "give a pithy answer" was acceptable. And it made the site - trying for the more conceptual and architecture questions that Joel was asking for in his blog post harder to find, and they would get drowned out by the popular fun questions. That lead to https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/01/31/the-trouble-with-popularity/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/01/31/the-trouble-with-popul... Its not that those aren't interesting questions, its that they are the wrong fit for that format. There are better places to ask for the best programming joke than Stack Overflow and Exchange sites. And so, with the lack of moderation and curation from the fun days of Programmers.SE a different philosophy of the site was able to establish itself... and the site grew in activity. The culture of a site is a proof of work. You have to work to maintain it. If there isn't work to do it, it can change. Its probably far to late to change to the less moderated version of the site again. However, if one wants to do that, actively work to curate the site so that those questions are acceptable. MathOverflow has a fair number of fun and soft questions - but that comes at a lot of work of moderation and curation from the entire community... which they do. The community on other sites that wants those fun and soft questions has not shown as much a desire to curate them, and so others moderate them (not desiring to curate them either).

Lionsion 8y ago
> Consider https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/4417.. https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/4417.... and consider is that useful? Yes. > curated? It's not a worthless question. If you're talking about subjective questions, obsessive curation is not the answer. > Should "Quit my last job." (entire answer) be there? Sure, considering there were better answers that had far more votes. It might have been better if it wasn't, and moderation could have taken care of it. Answers like that are certainly not an indictment of the format. > Its not that those aren't interesting questions, its that they are the wrong fit for that format. There are better places to ask for the best programming joke than Stack Overflow and Exchange sites. That's never the kind of think I asked or liked at programmers.se, but like I said before, they threw the baby out with the bathwater. You haven't really convinced me that subjective questions are "wrong for the format." All you've really shown it that an unmoderated free for all produces some garbage that doesn't fir in a high quality tech Q&A site. The real answer for why programmers.se failed is probably that the powers-that-be weren't willing to spend the time and resources to meet a new challenge, so they gave up and did something else.
- shagie 8y ago
  Its not a worthless question. However, its worth is drastically diminished by having so many answers, and so many joke answers in there. That people didn't want to curate it so that the joke answers and duplicate answers are removed and set a standard for providing an answer that is more than one line is why that type of question is closed - it takes too much time for the community that wants to maintain the site to curate it and keep it at a quality that matches the rest of the site. The format that SE provides is a very direct Q&A that tries to cut out all of the excess and gives a single good answer. There are other sites that are better cut out for polling questions and other sites that do a better job of "what is the best ...?" Trying to make everything fit in the SE framework puts a burden on the community that moderates and curates the material, and at some point people have said "enough" because they don't want to and others haven't stepped up to do it. The "wrong for the format" is part of the design of the site. Note here that we're talking in a thread. You can follow the discussion. SE was designed to make discussions awkward. When there's a discussion on a site of significant scale, it becomes unmanageable and detracts from the Q&A focus. If that is a good design decision or a bad one is up to debate - but it is the design decision of SE. And there are so many other places where that discussion could be had. Why not ask that question here? or over on a competing discourse site ( https://www.askquestions.tech https://www.askquestions.tech was started by April who wrote the post that sparked much of this)? If Programmers (now Software Engineering) has failed is also up for debate. The name change wasn't so much of a "it failed" but rather "people keep getting the wrong impression of topicality" because yes, it took too much time to keep trying to keep the topic on what the powers that be wanted to moderate and no one else was willing to do the job of curating the content of the larger programmers scope... and after all, they're all volunteers - its really hard to make volunteers volunteer to do something they're not interested in doing. The name change meta post is at https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7935/ https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions... (see also the linked questions).