2 ms·

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. That gets said

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. That gets said a lot, but the truth of the matter is that it works just fine for this kind of thing, too. Stellar case in point: The linked article. It even has (or at least had) features which are specifically designed to support this kind of scenario. Remember the Community Wiki feature? The site is absolutely littered with great resources on topics which a small number of the site's moderators have deemed too subjective to be of value but which the site's users have upvoted into the stratosphere or provided extremely useful, thoughtful answers which other users proceeded to upvote into the stratosphere. Oftentimes they were around since near the site's beginning, enough time to become top Google results which are often linked by blogs, and generally done quite well for themselves - all a testament to how excellent a job Stack Overflow's format does at producing extremely high-quality content on these topics. Only to get closed anyway within the past year or two, in the service of trying to force this bizarre reality-deaf Pronouncement from Above that, regardless of what anyone's actual experience may be, you are mistaken and Stack Overflow can't actually do that. In summary: If the people who run Stack Overflow were in charge of Apple, there would be a ban on music/podcast player apps on the iPad justified by nothing firmer than condescending lectures about how Steve Jobs prefers audio players that fit in his pocket and has therefore pronounced that the iPad is fundamentally unsuited to the consumption of audio content.

Sandman 14y ago
Mind you, this question wasn't even posted on SO. It was posted on programmers.stackexchange.com which begs the question, on which stackexchange site, if any, would this be a valid question?
- bunderbunder 14y ago
  Heh. I'm old school; I think it all belongs on SO and P.SE should be merged back into the mother site. As far as I can tell, the only practical consequences of having them as two separate sites are that you have to set up different user accounts to use them, and the SE.com is less discoverable because search results depend on what subsite you search on. Not exactly a great win for usability. Having separate sites for completely separate topics (like most the others on SE) makes all the sense in the world. But sticking a Berlin wall between the categories of "programming questions" and "other programming questions" is just goofy. To my mind, the original once-sentence statement of how P.SE is different from SO (Paraphrased, "SO is for when you're sitting at the keyboard, P.SE is for when you're standing at the whiteboard.") makes it clear that the idea was fuzzily-conceived from the get-go. And it only got more muddled when the maintainers of the site, which had originally been specifically envisioned as a place for subjective discussion as per the very first sentence of the (original) site FAQ,* came out with a decision that it was absolutely not a place for subjective discussion, no how no way. *Those with long memories will catch me out by pointing out that the very next paragraph of the original FAQ started by making a sudden one hundred eighty degree turn and specifically admonishing people to not ask subjective questions. I must concede that this is absolutely true. But I would counter by saying this fact doesn't make P.SE look any more well-conceived.
rtpg 14y ago
There is a logic to this madness, at least in my experience with SO. One of the big rules seems to be "don't start flame wars", and this question could definitely start bickering. The value brought by these sorts of questions seem to be overshadowed by the risk of everyone just getting bad vibes from each other due to endless arguing

Sandman 14y ago

Mind you, this question wasn't even posted on SO. It was posted on programmers.stackexchange.com which begs the question, on which stackexchange site, if any, would this be a valid question?

bunderbunder 14y ago
Heh. I'm old school; I think it all belongs on SO and P.SE should be merged back into the mother site. As far as I can tell, the only practical consequences of having them as two separate sites are that you have to set up different user accounts to use them, and the SE.com is less discoverable because search results depend on what subsite you search on. Not exactly a great win for usability. Having separate sites for completely separate topics (like most the others on SE) makes all the sense in the world. But sticking a Berlin wall between the categories of "programming questions" and "other programming questions" is just goofy. To my mind, the original once-sentence statement of how P.SE is different from SO (Paraphrased, "SO is for when you're sitting at the keyboard, P.SE is for when you're standing at the whiteboard.") makes it clear that the idea was fuzzily-conceived from the get-go. And it only got more muddled when the maintainers of the site, which had originally been specifically envisioned as a place for subjective discussion as per the very first sentence of the (original) site FAQ,* came out with a decision that it was absolutely not a place for subjective discussion, no how no way. *Those with long memories will catch me out by pointing out that the very next paragraph of the original FAQ started by making a sudden one hundred eighty degree turn and specifically admonishing people to not ask subjective questions. I must concede that this is absolutely true. But I would counter by saying this fact doesn't make P.SE look any more well-conceived.

rtpg 14y ago

There is a logic to this madness, at least in my experience with SO. One of the big rules seems to be "don't start flame wars", and this question could definitely start bickering. The value brought by these sorts of questions seem to be overshadowed by the risk of everyone just getting bad vibes from each other due to endless arguing