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My pet annoyance is also the prohibition of opinion based answers. I've found many great answers, usually the top result on Google. But sadly the question is l

My pet annoyance is also the prohibition of opinion based answers. I've found many great answers, usually the top result on Google. But sadly the question is locked. Sometime the top answer (before the question was locked) was pretty much the right thing to do 5 years ago, but no one can add another answer. I do understand that opinion based questions are a moderation tar pit. But sometimes there aren't that many options. You get 5 different opinions and you pick the best one for yourself. I've sometimes thought there would be a place for a "Stack overflow overflow" site - banned on SO but allowed on SOO.

shagie 4y ago
The difficulty is that questions that solicit opinion based answers often become unnaturally popular and difficult to moderate. Consider https://stackoverflow.com/questions/84556/whats-your-favorite-programmer-cartoon https://stackoverflow.com/questions/84556/whats-your-favorit... and the "is another answer going to be useful?" Or https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1711/what-is-the-single-most-influential-book-every-programmer-should-read https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1711/what-is-the-single-... The "no opinion based questions" is a clear line that can be drawn (rather than other squiggly lines that are more difficult) that reduces the overall moderation workload. You'll note that https://mathoverflow.net https://mathoverflow.net allows such questions - but they have many fewer questions per day and a much higher percent of the userbase performs moderation actions. This means that you can allow for that additional workload (which is a few questions rather than hundreds or thousands) to be spread across a larger part of the site's users. If you want Stack Overflow to allow such questions, then get 1% of the user base to close questions that should be closed every day so that the moderation tasks on them don't get too heavy on too small a group of people who would eventually say "we're not carefully moderating this anymore and instead not allowing those questions at all."
Izkata 4y ago
That (plus "culture"-style questions as in the sibling reply) was pretty much the original purpose of programmers.stackexchange.com but it got taken over by people who didn't like these open-ended questions. After some years with them banned, it was renamed to softwareengineering.stackexchange.com
- shagie 4y ago
  Those questions were inherently difficult to moderate and that was realized very early on that such a site wouldn't work. For such to work, it needs many people who are actively moderating that content rather than just showing up to add fun quips. https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/350/the-six-subjective-question-guidelines-enforcement-notice https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions... and https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/17/merging-season/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/17/merging-season/ From the SO Blog: > There’s an even longer list of things that really belong on the new Programmers Stack Exchange, which appears to be degrading into fairly stupid water-cooler nonsense, and could benefit from an infusion of more meaty subjects, like these proposals: > Software Engineering which was posted three months before it was out of beta ( https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/12/17/introducing-programmers-stackexchange-com/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/12/17/introducing-programmer... ). I would contend that the 'it got taken over by people' is not representative of the history as it would have gotten shut down by Jeff and Joel if it didn't clean up its act.

shagie 4y ago

The difficulty is that questions that solicit opinion based answers often become unnaturally popular and difficult to moderate. Consider https://stackoverflow.com/questions/84556/whats-your-favorite-programmer-cartoon https://stackoverflow.com/questions/84556/whats-your-favorit... and the "is another answer going to be useful?" Or https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1711/what-is-the-single-most-influential-book-every-programmer-should-read https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1711/what-is-the-single-... The "no opinion based questions" is a clear line that can be drawn (rather than other squiggly lines that are more difficult) that reduces the overall moderation workload. You'll note that https://mathoverflow.net https://mathoverflow.net allows such questions - but they have many fewer questions per day and a much higher percent of the userbase performs moderation actions. This means that you can allow for that additional workload (which is a few questions rather than hundreds or thousands) to be spread across a larger part of the site's users. If you want Stack Overflow to allow such questions, then get 1% of the user base to close questions that should be closed every day so that the moderation tasks on them don't get too heavy on too small a group of people who would eventually say "we're not carefully moderating this anymore and instead not allowing those questions at all."

Izkata 4y ago

That (plus "culture"-style questions as in the sibling reply) was pretty much the original purpose of programmers.stackexchange.com but it got taken over by people who didn't like these open-ended questions. After some years with them banned, it was renamed to softwareengineering.stackexchange.com

shagie 4y ago
Those questions were inherently difficult to moderate and that was realized very early on that such a site wouldn't work. For such to work, it needs many people who are actively moderating that content rather than just showing up to add fun quips. https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/350/the-six-subjective-question-guidelines-enforcement-notice https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions... and https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/17/merging-season/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/17/merging-season/ From the SO Blog: > There’s an even longer list of things that really belong on the new Programmers Stack Exchange, which appears to be degrading into fairly stupid water-cooler nonsense, and could benefit from an infusion of more meaty subjects, like these proposals: > Software Engineering which was posted three months before it was out of beta ( https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/12/17/introducing-programmers-stackexchange-com/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/12/17/introducing-programmer... ). I would contend that the 'it got taken over by people' is not representative of the history as it would have gotten shut down by Jeff and Joel if it didn't clean up its act.