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SO has critical mass which would be difficult to replicate in a new site; remember that it was started by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky, who were already establi

SO has critical mass which would be difficult to replicate in a new site; remember that it was started by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky, who were already established bloggers. "Make your own SO for subjective discussions" would be a good suggestion for someone who already has a large online following, but not for a general programmer. I have yet to see a good argument why these types of questions detract from the main site and asked on a separate site (http://programmers.stackexchange.com/ http://programmers.stackexchange.com/). If the problem is cluttering up search results with opinions, then they could be marked as "subjective" and people could be given the option to avoid these results.

YZF 13y ago
Maybe you could get Joel to refer people from SO to your site? I guess my problem is that Joel and the others running the site don't want it to be a forum for those discussions. This topic has been beaten to death already and the outcome isn't going to change. So "we" need to let go of it. It's like Go and generics... (just kidding) I can think of a few reasonable arguments. A lot of subjective discussions tend to degenerate into holy wars or popularity contests. It's hard to tell what's a good answer and what's not and it can get annoying both for people participating and people reading. Even if you mark those as subjective they would clutter the front page. Whenever you give people the option you need to consider defaults, if the default is not to see subjective questions then no one will ever see them, if the default is to see them we're back to square 1. What about search engines? EDIT: It also so happens that some of the "good" subjective questions do seem to hang around, get attention, and get cool answers, so the system does seem to be working.
- kintamanimatt 13y ago
  > Even if you mark those as subjective they would clutter the front page. Really simple solution: put a checkbox on the right: "[ ] Hide posts marked as subjective" Make it bold and obvious, and far above the fold.
  - Shog9 13y ago
    We tried a variation on that fairly early on. It led to endless arguments over how subjective something had to be to be branded subjective. See: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/51627/should-we-permanently-remove-the-subjective-tag http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/51627/should-we-perm... In the end, it was a huge distraction from what we should've been talking about instead: which questions are actually resulting in the creation of something useful?

YZF 13y ago

Maybe you could get Joel to refer people from SO to your site? I guess my problem is that Joel and the others running the site don't want it to be a forum for those discussions. This topic has been beaten to death already and the outcome isn't going to change. So "we" need to let go of it. It's like Go and generics... (just kidding) I can think of a few reasonable arguments. A lot of subjective discussions tend to degenerate into holy wars or popularity contests. It's hard to tell what's a good answer and what's not and it can get annoying both for people participating and people reading. Even if you mark those as subjective they would clutter the front page. Whenever you give people the option you need to consider defaults, if the default is not to see subjective questions then no one will ever see them, if the default is to see them we're back to square 1. What about search engines? EDIT: It also so happens that some of the "good" subjective questions do seem to hang around, get attention, and get cool answers, so the system does seem to be working.

kintamanimatt 13y ago
> Even if you mark those as subjective they would clutter the front page. Really simple solution: put a checkbox on the right: "[ ] Hide posts marked as subjective" Make it bold and obvious, and far above the fold.
- Shog9 13y ago
  We tried a variation on that fairly early on. It led to endless arguments over how subjective something had to be to be branded subjective. See: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/51627/should-we-permanently-remove-the-subjective-tag http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/51627/should-we-perm... In the end, it was a huge distraction from what we should've been talking about instead: which questions are actually resulting in the creation of something useful?