6 ms·

Rather than close these sorts of "not constructive" but clearly useful questions, it would be a lot better if they created a place for them. Something like know

by dboat 14y ago

Rather than close these sorts of "not constructive" but clearly useful questions, it would be a lot better if they created a place for them. Something like knowledge.stackexchange.com, where the utility of public questions and upvoted answers could be applied to more subjective, as well as more advanced topics. They really limit their own usefulness by throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

jiggy2011 14y ago
Well looks like the market is wide open for anybody wanting to create a computer programming opinions website.
- andrewflnr 14y ago
  It's called Quora.
  - jiggy2011 14y ago
    Well, then there is an opening for a site that allows you to see the discussion index without creating an account.
    - markokocic 14y ago
      Nothing stops you from playing a few seconds with Chrome inspector or Firebug if you really need to see the answer. If I weren't too lazy I would probably make a Greazemonkey script to remove the login overlay, but since I visit that site once our tribe a month I just don't bother.
      - _delirium 14y ago
        They've removed the blurred-text overlay and now are returning pseudo-blurred-text images, so afaict there's no way to get the remaining answers without logging in. I can't seem to find actual confirmation of it, but a lot of people were skeptical of whether Quora's previous approach (returning text but rendering it non-user-readable) was consistent with Google's rules against search-engine cloaking, so maybe they changed it to avoid angering Google.
  - orthecreedence 14y ago
    1. Quora is trash. 2. http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/ http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/ is a terrific discussion forum for for all programming-related topics.
    - pnathan 14y ago
      I have been extremely positively impressed by r/programming (as opposed to SO). I would agree that there's a niche for a high-quality discussion forum that is currently not filled. Reddit has, well, "redditors", and has entirely too much NSFW style content. A more buttoned-down site would be nice.
- finnw 14y ago
  This is pointed out every time a link to a closed SO/SE question appears on HN (for about three years now.) So why is there still no programming opinions website? Maybe because it's a bad idea.
  - jlgreco 14y ago
    I imagine a "programming opinions" website could, in some ways, be done similarly to Rosetta Code. http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Rosetta_Code http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Rosetta_Code I imagine it providing a way for people to pose potential problems/questions, and either letting users post their suggestion/opinion of how the problem should be solved. Rosetta Code limits itself to programming problems, but this hypothetical site could allow more general questions/challenges as well.
  - nsmartt 14y ago
    I disagree. Building a community around open-ended questions like this is next to difficult. SE was able to counter this because of the nature of the allowed questions. A website with the premise of "ask programming questions that do not have a specific answer" lacks the specificity to cultivate a community that is connected enough to be lively (based on my small amount of experience with forum management). SE is in a good position to attempt such a thing because the community already exists. However, it may still face issues with liveliness. It may be a better idea to just allow these sorts of questions with a specific tag (and visual indicator on question links).
tikhonj 14y ago
I think the main problem is that the site format is very focused on a single sort of interaction: questions with at most a few specific answers. This is what makes them great Q&A sites, but also makes them relatively ill-suited as discussion sites. Creating a good site for discussion would be quite a bit of work, paramount to creating a different platform. I could perhaps see them expanding to that style of site and reusing the StackExchange brand in the future, but it would essentially be a separate sort of product. For now, it makes the most sense to focus on what they're already great at: Q&A sites. These sort of questions are much better suited to places like HN and Reddit, although those also have their own problems. (Mostly, discussion tends to be short-lived: almost nobody looks at HN comments a day after they've left the front page, and Reddit isn't all that much better in that regard.)
- jlgreco 14y ago
  > This is what makes them great Q&A sites, but also makes them relatively ill-suited as discussion sites. Are they actually ill-suited to this sort of discussion though? Most of the closed discussions like this that I have seen have actually been very good. It seems like they are closing these discussions because the site wasn't designed for it, but not because the site is bad for it.
  - nsmartt 14y ago
    Minus the ability to select an answer, voting on best answers doesn't seem ill-suited for these types of questions at all. It seems to me that removing answer selection would be all that's necessary to create a place for discussion.
    - bunderbunder 14y ago
      Or perhaps better yet, they could just scale back a bit on the gamification. I suspect the real root of the issue here is that there's a lot of karma points attached to the green checkmark, so that the gamification system effectively punishes people for not checking one regardless of whether it's really appropriate to do so. And someone noticed that, and got as far as realizing that the problem came down to the gamification system was slightly out of phase with where users were actually finding value in the site. But then they had a brain fart and decided the best way to fix this wasn't to tweak the gamification system to fit humanity, but instead to try and tweak humanity to fit the gamification system.
bonch 14y ago
Nearly every interesting and popular question on StackExchange gets closed for not following rules. When I see a posted link to a question, I assume it will be closed, and it is.
wh-uws 14y ago
So I just had an interesting idea I may even pose to meta.stackexchange Why not have a discussions.#{sub_domain}.stackexchange.com ? Questions like this one would be moved there and you would need a certain level of karma to participate. Somewhat like HN Edit: Did it http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/161305/why-not-have-a-discussions-sub-domain-stackexchange-com http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/161305/why-not-have-...

by dboat 14y ago

jiggy2011 14y ago

Well looks like the market is wide open for anybody wanting to create a computer programming opinions website.

andrewflnr 14y ago
It's called Quora.
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  Well, then there is an opening for a site that allows you to see the discussion index without creating an account.
  - markokocic 14y ago
    Nothing stops you from playing a few seconds with Chrome inspector or Firebug if you really need to see the answer. If I weren't too lazy I would probably make a Greazemonkey script to remove the login overlay, but since I visit that site once our tribe a month I just don't bother.
    - _delirium 14y ago
      They've removed the blurred-text overlay and now are returning pseudo-blurred-text images, so afaict there's no way to get the remaining answers without logging in. I can't seem to find actual confirmation of it, but a lot of people were skeptical of whether Quora's previous approach (returning text but rendering it non-user-readable) was consistent with Google's rules against search-engine cloaking, so maybe they changed it to avoid angering Google.
- orthecreedence 14y ago
  1. Quora is trash. 2. http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/ http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/ is a terrific discussion forum for for all programming-related topics.
  - pnathan 14y ago
    I have been extremely positively impressed by r/programming (as opposed to SO). I would agree that there's a niche for a high-quality discussion forum that is currently not filled. Reddit has, well, "redditors", and has entirely too much NSFW style content. A more buttoned-down site would be nice.
finnw 14y ago
This is pointed out every time a link to a closed SO/SE question appears on HN (for about three years now.) So why is there still no programming opinions website? Maybe because it's a bad idea.
- jlgreco 14y ago
  I imagine a "programming opinions" website could, in some ways, be done similarly to Rosetta Code. http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Rosetta_Code http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Rosetta_Code I imagine it providing a way for people to pose potential problems/questions, and either letting users post their suggestion/opinion of how the problem should be solved. Rosetta Code limits itself to programming problems, but this hypothetical site could allow more general questions/challenges as well.
- nsmartt 14y ago
  I disagree. Building a community around open-ended questions like this is next to difficult. SE was able to counter this because of the nature of the allowed questions. A website with the premise of "ask programming questions that do not have a specific answer" lacks the specificity to cultivate a community that is connected enough to be lively (based on my small amount of experience with forum management). SE is in a good position to attempt such a thing because the community already exists. However, it may still face issues with liveliness. It may be a better idea to just allow these sorts of questions with a specific tag (and visual indicator on question links).

tikhonj 14y ago

I think the main problem is that the site format is very focused on a single sort of interaction: questions with at most a few specific answers. This is what makes them great Q&A sites, but also makes them relatively ill-suited as discussion sites. Creating a good site for discussion would be quite a bit of work, paramount to creating a different platform. I could perhaps see them expanding to that style of site and reusing the StackExchange brand in the future, but it would essentially be a separate sort of product. For now, it makes the most sense to focus on what they're already great at: Q&A sites. These sort of questions are much better suited to places like HN and Reddit, although those also have their own problems. (Mostly, discussion tends to be short-lived: almost nobody looks at HN comments a day after they've left the front page, and Reddit isn't all that much better in that regard.)

jlgreco 14y ago
> This is what makes them great Q&A sites, but also makes them relatively ill-suited as discussion sites. Are they actually ill-suited to this sort of discussion though? Most of the closed discussions like this that I have seen have actually been very good. It seems like they are closing these discussions because the site wasn't designed for it, but not because the site is bad for it.
- nsmartt 14y ago
  Minus the ability to select an answer, voting on best answers doesn't seem ill-suited for these types of questions at all. It seems to me that removing answer selection would be all that's necessary to create a place for discussion.
  - bunderbunder 14y ago
    Or perhaps better yet, they could just scale back a bit on the gamification. I suspect the real root of the issue here is that there's a lot of karma points attached to the green checkmark, so that the gamification system effectively punishes people for not checking one regardless of whether it's really appropriate to do so. And someone noticed that, and got as far as realizing that the problem came down to the gamification system was slightly out of phase with where users were actually finding value in the site. But then they had a brain fart and decided the best way to fix this wasn't to tweak the gamification system to fit humanity, but instead to try and tweak humanity to fit the gamification system.

bonch 14y ago

Nearly every interesting and popular question on StackExchange gets closed for not following rules. When I see a posted link to a question, I assume it will be closed, and it is.

wh-uws 14y ago

So I just had an interesting idea I may even pose to meta.stackexchange Why not have a discussions.#{sub_domain}.stackexchange.com ? Questions like this one would be moved there and you would need a certain level of karma to participate. Somewhat like HN Edit: Did it http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/161305/why-not-have-a-discussions-sub-domain-stackexchange-com http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/161305/why-not-have-...