5 ms·

Prompted a fascinating answer. 'closed as too broad' -- modern Stack overflow in a nutshell.

TeMPOraL 8y ago
I wish there was a guide for "proper" SO questions; my impression is, the only ones are super-detailed questions about some super-particular APIs. Also interesting how this disconnect is still going on after so many years, mostly unaddressed - despite the many essays Jeff Atwood writes about true purpose of SO, people still want to use it differently.
- AndrewDucker 8y ago
  There is a guide here : https://stackoverflow.com/help/asking https://stackoverflow.com/help/asking
- CathyWest 8y ago
  > I wish there was a guide for "proper" SO questions; my impression is, the only ones are super-detailed questions about some super-particular APIs. And those questions can in most cases be answered by the docs anyway. The times I've used SO is when the problem can't be answered by the docs, my own experience or that of the team, but then I've received either no answer or a series of non-answers (that should have been comments instead, but a lot of people can't comment). I also see quite a bit of overt reputation farming there. Like vague questions that receive an improbably precise answer that immediately gets selected. Like "how do u process payments?" (the orthography is usually bad) immediately followed by very specific instructions from a very specific payment processor not mentioned in the question, probably taken straight from its documentation. And I rarely see "closed as too broad" on those, probably because of the quick turn-around.
yesenadam 8y ago
Yeah, I hate that. I've asked a few questions on those sites and came back later, excited to read what answers I got and...it had been closed immediately, before anyone could answer it. GRRRR! Maybe there could/should be a 'broad' SE site alongside every 'normal' one? The 'too broad' questions include most of the interesting ones to read. The ones that are 'intellectually interesting'.[0] It's a shame. I love how you can ask anything on HN without being shut down like that. It's so unfriendly, hurtful even. (At worst on here, no-one answers - no harm done.) Why they can't just let 'too broad' questions go for a day or two to see what responses come in, and delete the page if it sux, I don't know. The mods get points for closing things, I guess. Often they don't understand the question, it seems. [0] e.g. https://mathoverflow.net/questions/43690/whats-a-mathematician-to-do https://mathoverflow.net/questions/43690/whats-a-mathematici... Well, bizarrely the close notice on that says "This question is unlikely to help any future visitors; it is only relevant to a small geographic area, a specific moment in time, or an extraordinarily narrow situation that is not generally applicable to the worldwide audience of the internet." Which seems absurd. (Although sure, the question doesn't help people, the answers do though.)
- torstenvl 8y ago
  One quasi-workaround for broader questions is to use the Software Engineering SE site. It's not a panacea (and in my opinion shouldn't be necessary), but questions like the OP should theoretically be better-received there. https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/c https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/tagg...
  - yesenadam 8y ago
    Thanks, will try that.
- Arnt 8y ago
  Some neat questions are too broad. But the too-broad questions aren't usually very interesting. Most of them are just pure crap. If you have enough SO karma, try https://stackoverflow.com/review/close/?filter-closereason=toobroad https://stackoverflow.com/review/close/?filter-closereason=t... — what I see just now is someone who wants help with his java/spring thing and isn't very detailed about it, someone who's "been trying to learn how delegation" works, someone who "would like to know how can i mock diffrent user request behavior pattern" and those aren't unusual. The intellectually interesting questions are unusual in the "too broad" morass. If people are to moderate SO, the rules have to be simple and quick to apply. Of course people don't have to do that, but I fear that without moderation, the interesting questions would get no answers because they would be completely flooded by questions like those three. So the open-ended, intellectially interesting questions lose either way.
  - yesenadam 8y ago
    Well, yeah, I assume most non-broad questions are pure crap too. But they don't close all of the non-broad questions. (Or even a lot of the awful ones - I have tried to answer a few horrifyingly badly written Qs on math SE, that no-one else dared to go near, which weren't closed for months, for some reason) So I can't see how that was so relevant to talk about that. So the answer is, There Is No Alternative? There's no possible way things could be different in that respect?
cirosantilli 8y ago
One day, I will create a website with decent ranking algorithms to destroy stack overflow: https://github.com/cirosantilli/write-free-science-books-to-get-famous-website https://github.com/cirosantilli/write-free-science-books-to-...
- kkarakk 8y ago
  >One day so never then?
  - cirosantilli 8y ago
    * maybe never :-) But I said the same thing about creating a bare metal example one day hehe
- sureaboutthis 8y ago
  SO doesn't use a ranking algorithm.
pteraspidomorph 8y ago
It always reminds me of that really weird period of wikipedia in which four out of five articles you looked up had been shut down as not notable enough (fortunately they have moved past it). It's probably not wrong of the stackoverflow users to have closed the question according to established rules, I just don't think this is necessarily the right way to run the site.
sureaboutthis 8y ago
Because Stack Overflow is for asking a specific question that can generate a specific solution or answer. This is spelled out in "The tour" and the Help Center which no one ever reads. Then they complain when their question gets closed as if they were never told--even those who are told, don't read the link they're given to the above topics, and continue to complain anyway.
CannisterFlux 8y ago
I think Stack Overflow has reached a point where most of its regular power users would be happier if there were no more new questions. Then they could dedicate their time to putting the correct tags on things, closing and deleting the remaining backlog until there's nothing left. :-) I have over 10k points there, so this is said (mostly) in jest. There is a lot of crap being pumped into SO all the time. This kind of defensive closing of an interesting but off-topicy question is the only real tool people have over there. If they had let this question go unclosed, it could encourage other less-interesting open-ended questions and before you know it we'd be seeing "best kind of Pizza topping for programmers?" questions.

I wish there was a guide for "proper" SO questions; my impression is, the only ones are super-detailed questions about some super-particular APIs. Also interesting how this disconnect is still going on after so many years, mostly unaddressed - despite the many essays Jeff Atwood writes about true purpose of SO, people still want to use it differently.

AndrewDucker 8y ago
There is a guide here : https://stackoverflow.com/help/asking https://stackoverflow.com/help/asking
CathyWest 8y ago
> I wish there was a guide for "proper" SO questions; my impression is, the only ones are super-detailed questions about some super-particular APIs. And those questions can in most cases be answered by the docs anyway. The times I've used SO is when the problem can't be answered by the docs, my own experience or that of the team, but then I've received either no answer or a series of non-answers (that should have been comments instead, but a lot of people can't comment). I also see quite a bit of overt reputation farming there. Like vague questions that receive an improbably precise answer that immediately gets selected. Like "how do u process payments?" (the orthography is usually bad) immediately followed by very specific instructions from a very specific payment processor not mentioned in the question, probably taken straight from its documentation. And I rarely see "closed as too broad" on those, probably because of the quick turn-around.

yesenadam 8y ago

Yeah, I hate that. I've asked a few questions on those sites and came back later, excited to read what answers I got and...it had been closed immediately, before anyone could answer it. GRRRR! Maybe there could/should be a 'broad' SE site alongside every 'normal' one? The 'too broad' questions include most of the interesting ones to read. The ones that are 'intellectually interesting'.[0] It's a shame. I love how you can ask anything on HN without being shut down like that. It's so unfriendly, hurtful even. (At worst on here, no-one answers - no harm done.) Why they can't just let 'too broad' questions go for a day or two to see what responses come in, and delete the page if it sux, I don't know. The mods get points for closing things, I guess. Often they don't understand the question, it seems. [0] e.g. https://mathoverflow.net/questions/43690/whats-a-mathematician-to-do https://mathoverflow.net/questions/43690/whats-a-mathematici... Well, bizarrely the close notice on that says "This question is unlikely to help any future visitors; it is only relevant to a small geographic area, a specific moment in time, or an extraordinarily narrow situation that is not generally applicable to the worldwide audience of the internet." Which seems absurd. (Although sure, the question doesn't help people, the answers do though.)

torstenvl 8y ago
One quasi-workaround for broader questions is to use the Software Engineering SE site. It's not a panacea (and in my opinion shouldn't be necessary), but questions like the OP should theoretically be better-received there. https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/c https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/tagg...
- yesenadam 8y ago
  Thanks, will try that.
Arnt 8y ago
Some neat questions are too broad. But the too-broad questions aren't usually very interesting. Most of them are just pure crap. If you have enough SO karma, try https://stackoverflow.com/review/close/?filter-closereason=toobroad https://stackoverflow.com/review/close/?filter-closereason=t... — what I see just now is someone who wants help with his java/spring thing and isn't very detailed about it, someone who's "been trying to learn how delegation" works, someone who "would like to know how can i mock diffrent user request behavior pattern" and those aren't unusual. The intellectually interesting questions are unusual in the "too broad" morass. If people are to moderate SO, the rules have to be simple and quick to apply. Of course people don't have to do that, but I fear that without moderation, the interesting questions would get no answers because they would be completely flooded by questions like those three. So the open-ended, intellectially interesting questions lose either way.
- yesenadam 8y ago
  Well, yeah, I assume most non-broad questions are pure crap too. But they don't close all of the non-broad questions. (Or even a lot of the awful ones - I have tried to answer a few horrifyingly badly written Qs on math SE, that no-one else dared to go near, which weren't closed for months, for some reason) So I can't see how that was so relevant to talk about that. So the answer is, There Is No Alternative? There's no possible way things could be different in that respect?

cirosantilli 8y ago

One day, I will create a website with decent ranking algorithms to destroy stack overflow: https://github.com/cirosantilli/write-free-science-books-to-get-famous-website https://github.com/cirosantilli/write-free-science-books-to-...

kkarakk 8y ago
>One day so never then?
- cirosantilli 8y ago
  * maybe never :-) But I said the same thing about creating a bare metal example one day hehe
sureaboutthis 8y ago
SO doesn't use a ranking algorithm.

pteraspidomorph 8y ago

It always reminds me of that really weird period of wikipedia in which four out of five articles you looked up had been shut down as not notable enough (fortunately they have moved past it). It's probably not wrong of the stackoverflow users to have closed the question according to established rules, I just don't think this is necessarily the right way to run the site.

sureaboutthis 8y ago

Because Stack Overflow is for asking a specific question that can generate a specific solution or answer. This is spelled out in "The tour" and the Help Center which no one ever reads. Then they complain when their question gets closed as if they were never told--even those who are told, don't read the link they're given to the above topics, and continue to complain anyway.

CannisterFlux 8y ago

I think Stack Overflow has reached a point where most of its regular power users would be happier if there were no more new questions. Then they could dedicate their time to putting the correct tags on things, closing and deleting the remaining backlog until there's nothing left. :-) I have over 10k points there, so this is said (mostly) in jest. There is a lot of crap being pumped into SO all the time. This kind of defensive closing of an interesting but off-topicy question is the only real tool people have over there. If they had let this question go unclosed, it could encourage other less-interesting open-ended questions and before you know it we'd be seeing "best kind of Pizza topping for programmers?" questions.