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I find it fascinating that so many of the responses in that thread were along the lines of "Not allowing the community to do what it likes is destroying the com

I find it fascinating that so many of the responses in that thread were along the lines of "Not allowing the community to do what it likes is destroying the community of StackOverflow." I say fascinating because it's a perspective I genuinely would not have suspected be prevalent. I've always felt that SA was a place to ask technical questions, and that there never really was meant to be a "community" or discussion, only a service. It's a bit like SA wanted to address one thing (ask technical questions, get technical answers), meanwhile ton of people discovered that SA's format was more useful for some discussions than a forum, and now the community wants something that was never the goal. I'm curious if there's something like SA, but dedicated to the discussion that SA avoids.

lnanek2 13y ago
I see it as more a bunch of aspies fighting over technicalities. Unfortunately, the aspies in charge in this case and squashed a valuable use case. There are countless questions where the number of answers is unlimited. StackOverflow tends to be very useless for me since the questions they allow I can lookup quicker in the docs and the questions they don't are the ones that are super useful for me. A typical allowed question is how to read the gyro on Android. Well that's well documented and useless to talk about further anyway. A typical question not allowed is the best way to make money in your app. This is very valuable to me since I've tried dozens of different ad networks. It took me a long time to figure out Google and AdMob pay terribly vs. all the others, etc.. Hell, even the question they cite as being frat house and not college is really useful to me since I could pickup new jargon, something not straight out of the docs. Anyway, the site they made for this is here: programmers.stackexchange.com Although I still think it is a stupid distinction not to just allow it on the main site. The best content they have for experienced programmers who have passed the point where the main site is useful is shoved off into some ghetto. It is kind of like how you see lots of dead people on Hacker News who actually post interesting and useful stuff. HN bans people who are not outright spammers and trolls just for disagreeing, and it hurts the site.
hibbelig 13y ago
> I'm curious if there's something like SA, but dedicated to the discussion that SA avoids. It's called HN.
Silhouette 13y ago
I'm curious if there's something like SA, but dedicated to the discussion that SA avoids. Assuming SA means Stack Overflow, some of the other Stack Exchange sites are probably better venues for some kinds of question. For example, programmers.stackexchange.com is for more conceptual questions. It's still explicitly not intended to be a discussion forum, though, if that's what you're looking for.
theoh 13y ago
That's the idea behind Not Constructive, which was discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6062876 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6062876 I'm not sure what the status of the project is currently.

lnanek2 13y ago

I see it as more a bunch of aspies fighting over technicalities. Unfortunately, the aspies in charge in this case and squashed a valuable use case. There are countless questions where the number of answers is unlimited. StackOverflow tends to be very useless for me since the questions they allow I can lookup quicker in the docs and the questions they don't are the ones that are super useful for me. A typical allowed question is how to read the gyro on Android. Well that's well documented and useless to talk about further anyway. A typical question not allowed is the best way to make money in your app. This is very valuable to me since I've tried dozens of different ad networks. It took me a long time to figure out Google and AdMob pay terribly vs. all the others, etc.. Hell, even the question they cite as being frat house and not college is really useful to me since I could pickup new jargon, something not straight out of the docs. Anyway, the site they made for this is here: programmers.stackexchange.com Although I still think it is a stupid distinction not to just allow it on the main site. The best content they have for experienced programmers who have passed the point where the main site is useful is shoved off into some ghetto. It is kind of like how you see lots of dead people on Hacker News who actually post interesting and useful stuff. HN bans people who are not outright spammers and trolls just for disagreeing, and it hurts the site.

hibbelig 13y ago

> I'm curious if there's something like SA, but dedicated to the discussion that SA avoids. It's called HN.

Silhouette 13y ago

I'm curious if there's something like SA, but dedicated to the discussion that SA avoids. Assuming SA means Stack Overflow, some of the other Stack Exchange sites are probably better venues for some kinds of question. For example, programmers.stackexchange.com is for more conceptual questions. It's still explicitly not intended to be a discussion forum, though, if that's what you're looking for.

theoh 13y ago

That's the idea behind Not Constructive, which was discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6062876 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6062876 I'm not sure what the status of the project is currently.