>, the one that really annoys me is the prohibition on question that will elicit answeres which are opinion based. It appears to me that experts often love to a

>, the one that really annoys me is the prohibition on question that will elicit answeres which are opinion based. It appears to me that experts often love to answer such questions. I don’t see how this fits into your framework of making things better for the answeres. I agree that questions seeking opinions are valuable. I'll attempt to explain why opinions are discouraged and then I'll offer up my idea of how they can be added. The "Q&A" aspect of Stackoverflow is widely misunderstood. From what I've read from SO's creators (Joel Spolsky & Jeff Atwood), they intended a "wikipedia" style authoritative site that was seeded with questions. But not just with any kind of question; only questions with objective answers. Yes, opinions are also valuable but they discourage it because they invite endless discussion and they thought the best place for that was Slashdot/Reddit/HN. Therefore, the ideal question had an objective authoritative answer instead of triggering debate, controversy, and meta-commentary. To add to the issue, the question's "discussion" eventually degrades into arguments with low signal-to-noise ratio. (Fyi if you didn't know: some mods tried to move "opinion questions" to "programmers.stackexchange.com" but that triggered a meta discussion discouraging that[0].) All that said, I agree that many experts would enjoy providing their opinions on SO and question askers would also benefit from reading them. For opinion-based questions to avoid the problems mentioned in the previous paragraph, SO would have to put restrictions such as... only users with a certain karma threshold (e.g. 10k+) could answer them, and only if the question got a high amount of votes (e.g. 200+) which broadcasts to the community that members are desperately seeking quality opinions. Another rule might be the an answerer must also provide the opposing view to try and minimize bias. Whatever the mechanism, the game theory and secondary effects must be considered so trolls don't degrade the site. If that was pursued, StackOverflow would be surrendering the original ideal of "no opinion questions"... but on the other hand, they could also embrace it with a new slogan: "Yes, opinion-based questions are subjective but with our tough rules, StackOverflow has the best collection of high-quality opinions anywhere on the web." I'd like to see some good ideas on how to handle opinion-based questions. [0] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/73382/please-stop-using-softwareengineering-se-as-your-toilet-bowl https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/73382/please-stop-u...