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The most confusing thing for me, is that this _isn't_ Stack Overflow - it's Programmers. While SO is meant to have objectively correct answers, and that's why t

The most confusing thing for me, is that this _isn't_ Stack Overflow - it's Programmers. While SO is meant to have objectively correct answers, and that's why they are so quick to close threads, Programmers is meant to be more open and allow more general questions.

jlarocco 14y ago
Honestly, I have no idea what programmers.stackexchange.com is for. When I found out about it, I thought it could be interesting, so I made a habit of visiting a few times a week to see what it was all about. I stopped visiting after a few weeks because nobody knows what the point is. 90% of the interesting questions are closed as off-topic, closed because they "belong on Stack Overflow", or are closed because the answers are debatable. It's kind of silly, really.
wpietri 14y ago
Yep. There was a question on Programmers that was something like "What is the good/bad decision you made in your mid-20s about your career". There were a ton of great answers, and I was so proud of my heavily upvoted answer that I linked it on my website. Only to get a note a couple of months later that the link was 404ing. I looked, and guess what: Not only did the mods close it out of some insane sense of tidiness, and not only did they hide it from normal viewing; they apparently deleted it entirely. All our writing, all the good comments, all the voting: gone forever, without warning or apparent recourse. So fuck them and their petty, arrogant bureaucracy. I will never write an answer for them again.
- bragh 14y ago
  There was a discussion on stackexchange about Java books or such that was always linked to in case of duplicate questions. Then it got entirely deleted and so all the links to it from dupes got worthless too - and yet the dupes remained and still point to the 404 page.
  - notimetorelax 14y ago
    Mods are getting too trigger happy? In fairness if you give random "trusted" strangers power to delete anything they deem inappropriate they will start abusing their power, that's in human nature.
    - simonh 14y ago
      But to them they're not abusing it, they're just interpreting the rules very literally and strictly. The problem is that any gameified system, like a karma or reputation system, attracts people good at interpreting rules strictly and finding efficient ways to exploit them. So you're actually selecting for literalist rules lawyers.
      - S4M 14y ago
        Apart from giving them a feel of a power, what does the fact of closing a thread (whether legitimately or not) give to the mods? Do they have some karma incentive to do so?
        yrizos 14y ago
        There's no incentive in closing a question, other than helping the site reach it's goals, and the primary goal for any Stack Exchange site is useful, not interesting or popular (not that they are mutually exclusive, but also not to be confused). This specific question was turning into crap fast, with answers like "Sounds like your friend is a bit of a dick. Noone wants to work for him." (since deleted). Closing it only prevents further answers, as it was obvious they were deteriorating. Still, the closure and any closure, is reversible, people always have the choice to vote to re-open if they feel the closure wasn't justified.
      - wpietri 14y ago
        So true. That's why I consider this the most brilliant bit of Wikipedia's policies: "If a rule prevents you from improving Wikipedia, ignore it." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ignore_all_rules http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ignore_all_rules There's a great discussion of that here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_%22Ignore_all_rules%22_means http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_%22Ignore_all_ru... Last time this blew up on HN, some of the principals of SO turned up here, as did a bunch of mods. They were mostly unable to discuss the issues in terms of serving the audience; they just kept falling back on The Rules. An attitude, I'm sure, which quickly drove off anybody with common sense. So now they have achieved glorious groupthink: everybody they normally talk to agrees with them about The Rules.
- gizzlon 14y ago
  Maybe someone has mirror it? http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
  - wpietri 14y ago
    That would be great. If somebody has old mirrors, please let me know or mention it here.
    - gizzlon 14y ago
      It would be pretty simple to mirror selected articles. For example: If you're worried a page will disappear, go to foo.com and paste the address. If it does disappear, you can go back to foo.com and retrieve the content, link to foo.com instead etc..
ollysb 14y ago
Who exactly does closing questions benefit? I can't remember the last time I went to stackoverflow to search for an answer. I always find the pages through a google search. Google does a great job of finding me relevant material on stackoverflow and the voting mechanisms on stackoverflow do a great job of letting me know which content the community value. In the early days of stackoverflow I seem to recall they had a policy of keeping similar or even duplicate questions. The reasoning was that the extra interpretations of the same question made it easier to find them in a google search. What they have now seems entirely the opposite, content being removed to the point where it doesn't exist in any form. I don't really care if someone thinks a piece of content is on topic or relevant, if it isn't relevant to me I just won't look at it.
- JoeAltmaier 14y ago
  Yeah, I cannot recollect getting a useful answer there. Google rarely links to it; the links are often questions without answers (I searched for my question terms after all, not knowing the answer). And why delete anything? Surely they are not running out of space. I'll volunteer $100 so they can buy another Terabyte to store those deleted discussions.
  - bunderbunder 14y ago
    My pet theory is that it's something I've come to think of as the "WELL effect". Named for the famous online community which I was a member of for approximately one month in the early 2000s, and which is still talking itself up for how vibrant it was 20 years ago but hasn't been vibrant for any time during this century. It works like this: The oldsters perceive that they enjoy a certain elite status by virtue of how long they've been there, and begin to think of themselves as the "keepers" of the community. They also develop a measure of contempt for newbies, perhaps because they (being new) want to talk about things that the oldsters have had a chance to discuss many times before. And perhaps because they (being new) represent a slightly different culture, which triggers stereotypical "kids these days" instincts. So they begin taking measures to protect the site from junior members. A positive spin is put on it by calling it "upholding community standards", but it would be just as fair to negatively characterize it as "telling those damn kids to get off my lawn." I suppose which one you think it is depends on whether you're the one yelling or being yelled at. Either way, the terminal point is that everyone has gone to have fun somewhere else, essentially because that's precisely what they had been told to do, and all that's left is a hoary old collection of ossified cucumbers fondly remembering how much fun they used to have and wondering where the magic went.
bluedanieru 14y ago
http://programmers.stackexchange.com/faq http://programmers.stackexchange.com/faq It's not 'anything goes', however. This is a close call, but I agree with the closing in that the post conflicted with the rules. It's possible it could have been worded better to avoid being closed, but even general employee retention strategies don't belong on that site. The problem isn't that they don't allow discussion, it's that the range of topics allowed is so narrow. There are many (I've lost count) StackExchange sites, and each one has a very narrow, well-defined (but, importantly, poorly-communicated) breadth of allowable topics. And, if you get the wrong bucket it's closed and that's that.
- antidoh 14y ago
  "There are many (I've lost count) StackExchange sites" To me there's only one, and the answer pages sometimes look different when I get sent in from DDG or Google. My bad, I guess.
- wpietri 14y ago
  It was closed at "not constructive", which is obviously thought untrue by the hundreds of people who engaged with it. So I can't agree with the specific closing. It is a mystery to me why a question that yields some answers that are directly about engineers and some that could apply more widely could be considered off topic. One answer explicitly cites the Joel Test. Another specifically discussed the economics of software development, and why the management behavior is pathological specifically for engineering organizations. How much more on topic does one need to be?
  - yrizos 14y ago
    Hundreds of people engaging in a question is actually a very good hint that it's Not Constructive (just a hint though). Remember, Programmers and every other Stack Exchange site are about questions and answers, not discussions.
    - wpietri 14y ago
      We have deeply different ideas of what constructive means.

jlarocco 14y ago

Honestly, I have no idea what programmers.stackexchange.com is for. When I found out about it, I thought it could be interesting, so I made a habit of visiting a few times a week to see what it was all about. I stopped visiting after a few weeks because nobody knows what the point is. 90% of the interesting questions are closed as off-topic, closed because they "belong on Stack Overflow", or are closed because the answers are debatable. It's kind of silly, really.

wpietri 14y ago

Yep. There was a question on Programmers that was something like "What is the good/bad decision you made in your mid-20s about your career". There were a ton of great answers, and I was so proud of my heavily upvoted answer that I linked it on my website. Only to get a note a couple of months later that the link was 404ing. I looked, and guess what: Not only did the mods close it out of some insane sense of tidiness, and not only did they hide it from normal viewing; they apparently deleted it entirely. All our writing, all the good comments, all the voting: gone forever, without warning or apparent recourse. So fuck them and their petty, arrogant bureaucracy. I will never write an answer for them again.

bragh 14y ago
There was a discussion on stackexchange about Java books or such that was always linked to in case of duplicate questions. Then it got entirely deleted and so all the links to it from dupes got worthless too - and yet the dupes remained and still point to the 404 page.
- notimetorelax 14y ago
  Mods are getting too trigger happy? In fairness if you give random "trusted" strangers power to delete anything they deem inappropriate they will start abusing their power, that's in human nature.
  - simonh 14y ago
    But to them they're not abusing it, they're just interpreting the rules very literally and strictly. The problem is that any gameified system, like a karma or reputation system, attracts people good at interpreting rules strictly and finding efficient ways to exploit them. So you're actually selecting for literalist rules lawyers.
    - S4M 14y ago
      Apart from giving them a feel of a power, what does the fact of closing a thread (whether legitimately or not) give to the mods? Do they have some karma incentive to do so?
      - yrizos 14y ago
        There's no incentive in closing a question, other than helping the site reach it's goals, and the primary goal for any Stack Exchange site is useful, not interesting or popular (not that they are mutually exclusive, but also not to be confused). This specific question was turning into crap fast, with answers like "Sounds like your friend is a bit of a dick. Noone wants to work for him." (since deleted). Closing it only prevents further answers, as it was obvious they were deteriorating. Still, the closure and any closure, is reversible, people always have the choice to vote to re-open if they feel the closure wasn't justified.
    - wpietri 14y ago
      So true. That's why I consider this the most brilliant bit of Wikipedia's policies: "If a rule prevents you from improving Wikipedia, ignore it." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ignore_all_rules http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ignore_all_rules There's a great discussion of that here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_%22Ignore_all_rules%22_means http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_%22Ignore_all_ru... Last time this blew up on HN, some of the principals of SO turned up here, as did a bunch of mods. They were mostly unable to discuss the issues in terms of serving the audience; they just kept falling back on The Rules. An attitude, I'm sure, which quickly drove off anybody with common sense. So now they have achieved glorious groupthink: everybody they normally talk to agrees with them about The Rules.
gizzlon 14y ago
Maybe someone has mirror it? http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
- wpietri 14y ago
  That would be great. If somebody has old mirrors, please let me know or mention it here.
  - gizzlon 14y ago
    It would be pretty simple to mirror selected articles. For example: If you're worried a page will disappear, go to foo.com and paste the address. If it does disappear, you can go back to foo.com and retrieve the content, link to foo.com instead etc..

ollysb 14y ago

Who exactly does closing questions benefit? I can't remember the last time I went to stackoverflow to search for an answer. I always find the pages through a google search. Google does a great job of finding me relevant material on stackoverflow and the voting mechanisms on stackoverflow do a great job of letting me know which content the community value. In the early days of stackoverflow I seem to recall they had a policy of keeping similar or even duplicate questions. The reasoning was that the extra interpretations of the same question made it easier to find them in a google search. What they have now seems entirely the opposite, content being removed to the point where it doesn't exist in any form. I don't really care if someone thinks a piece of content is on topic or relevant, if it isn't relevant to me I just won't look at it.

JoeAltmaier 14y ago
Yeah, I cannot recollect getting a useful answer there. Google rarely links to it; the links are often questions without answers (I searched for my question terms after all, not knowing the answer). And why delete anything? Surely they are not running out of space. I'll volunteer $100 so they can buy another Terabyte to store those deleted discussions.
- bunderbunder 14y ago
  My pet theory is that it's something I've come to think of as the "WELL effect". Named for the famous online community which I was a member of for approximately one month in the early 2000s, and which is still talking itself up for how vibrant it was 20 years ago but hasn't been vibrant for any time during this century. It works like this: The oldsters perceive that they enjoy a certain elite status by virtue of how long they've been there, and begin to think of themselves as the "keepers" of the community. They also develop a measure of contempt for newbies, perhaps because they (being new) want to talk about things that the oldsters have had a chance to discuss many times before. And perhaps because they (being new) represent a slightly different culture, which triggers stereotypical "kids these days" instincts. So they begin taking measures to protect the site from junior members. A positive spin is put on it by calling it "upholding community standards", but it would be just as fair to negatively characterize it as "telling those damn kids to get off my lawn." I suppose which one you think it is depends on whether you're the one yelling or being yelled at. Either way, the terminal point is that everyone has gone to have fun somewhere else, essentially because that's precisely what they had been told to do, and all that's left is a hoary old collection of ossified cucumbers fondly remembering how much fun they used to have and wondering where the magic went.

bluedanieru 14y ago

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/faq http://programmers.stackexchange.com/faq It's not 'anything goes', however. This is a close call, but I agree with the closing in that the post conflicted with the rules. It's possible it could have been worded better to avoid being closed, but even general employee retention strategies don't belong on that site. The problem isn't that they don't allow discussion, it's that the range of topics allowed is so narrow. There are many (I've lost count) StackExchange sites, and each one has a very narrow, well-defined (but, importantly, poorly-communicated) breadth of allowable topics. And, if you get the wrong bucket it's closed and that's that.

antidoh 14y ago
"There are many (I've lost count) StackExchange sites" To me there's only one, and the answer pages sometimes look different when I get sent in from DDG or Google. My bad, I guess.
wpietri 14y ago
It was closed at "not constructive", which is obviously thought untrue by the hundreds of people who engaged with it. So I can't agree with the specific closing. It is a mystery to me why a question that yields some answers that are directly about engineers and some that could apply more widely could be considered off topic. One answer explicitly cites the Joel Test. Another specifically discussed the economics of software development, and why the management behavior is pathological specifically for engineering organizations. How much more on topic does one need to be?
- yrizos 14y ago
  Hundreds of people engaging in a question is actually a very good hint that it's Not Constructive (just a hint though). Remember, Programmers and every other Stack Exchange site are about questions and answers, not discussions.
  - wpietri 14y ago
    We have deeply different ideas of what constructive means.