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Many, many things are wrong with stackoverflow. Insisting that every discussion be factual and opinion-free pushes you deep into the McNamara fallacy of believi
by adamc 3y ago
Many, many things are wrong with stackoverflow. Insisting that every discussion be factual and opinion-free pushes you deep into the McNamara fallacy of believing that things that cannot easily be quantified don't matter.
It's a site I sometimes use but dislike intensely.
- sanderjd 3y agoI think the absolute hardest thing to get information on is "I have XYZ problem, I am aware of solutions A, B, and C. What is the best solution among these, what are the trade-offs between them, and what solutions am I not aware of?". Now, this is just a truly difficult question, but Stack Overflow solves that problem by forbidding such questions, which is understandable, but I think also a shame. At one point in time, I thought maybe Quora would try to fill this gap, but they went off in some other direction that I never understood. Most other "social" things (reddit, etc.) are discussion rather than Q&A. Or they are blog posts, where the focus is usually on solution A, with solutions B and C presented only for contrast, because solution A is what motivated the author to write the post. I kind of want Wirecutter, but for technologies.
- adamc 3y agoYes, that would actually be much more useful to me than what stackoverflow is. A vast number of the questions found that can be easily answered by RTFM and/or doing some direct experimentation. The harder ones would be more useful.
- sanderjd 3y agoYeah. I think it's also why chatgpt (and copilot, etc.) actually did turn out to be a strong SO competitor, because it actually can do a pretty good job on these factual questions. But unfortunately it's pretty bad at this other kind of judgment-based compare-and-contrast question. It's especially bad at the "what other solutions am I not aware of?" part, because it isn't kept up to date.
- nonameiguess 3y agoYou seem to be trying to replace a basic peer-review of an engineering design that typically involves a paid team with advice from poorly-known, pseudonymous strangers with reputation crowd-sourced from a web site's user-rating system. Frankly, I think that's asking a bit much. If you want a high-quality peer review of design proposals to bounce ideas off of others and discuss tradeoffs, you need a team. Maybe something like a meetup group or mailing list for a specific technology, programming language, or industry sector. But it goes beyond one-off Q&A, and I can also understand why Stack Overflow, with a goal of becoming a repository of perpetually useful knowledge that is general enough to be useful for anyone into the indefinite future, does not want to host such project-specific discussions. Why not just develop in the open and collaborate explicitly with other parties also working on the same project? What you're asking for sounds close to something like the various special interest groups and public discussion of improvement proposals you see in things like the Python programming language or Kubernetes, or discussion on LWN about specific challenges the Linux kernel team faces.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y agoI don't think that's asking a bit much. If it were, then there'd be no reason to prohibit such questions... people wouldn't ask them, because they would never be answered. The only reason to prohibit them is because they would get attention/answers where none was desired. The trouble with StackOverflow, is that what the users want and need does not match what the owners want. The owners want something monetizable, something that can look elegant and beautiful (hence the PR release a couple of years ago where they were positioning it as some "encyclopedia of computer science" or whatever). They figured out that the users could be denied what they want, while still (slowly) creating what the owners themselves wanted. > and I can also understand why Stack Overflow, with a goal of becoming a repository of perpetually useful knowledge that is general enough to be useful for anyone into the indefinite future, does not want to host such project-specific discussions. I'm not sure I'd characterize them as wanting that, but if they did... how would that be at all useful to anyone except CS undergrads trying to get someone to do their homework for them? Literally nothing of what people ask there day to day will be generally useful into the indefinite future. What do you want to ask, that will be useful 40 years from now? Neither anything language specific, nor anything domain specific will be relevant to anyone not a historian. Even the cutting edge stuff today will have long since been wrapped up into some blackbox library that everyone will use without unerstanding it. If you were correct, SO could never be anything more than some useless little dumpster where the same 5 people whine n about the quickest sort algorithm.
- spencerchubb 3y agoI don't see that as a bad thing. Stack Overflow only wants to focus on questions that have a verifiable answer. Other types of questions still matter, they just don't matter on Stack Overflow.
- bee_rider 3y agoThis is the most techie social media site I use, and I see constant complaints about the other techie social media site, StackOverflow. Why doesn’t someone test the theory and come up with some competition? I think this is normally an unreasonable ask (when we’re complaining about, like, cars, clearly that’s not in this site’s aggregate wheelhouse). But I mean this is a website about start-ups, full of techie web-devs complaining about a website that they all use.