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There is an ongoing religious war among avid SO users (don't know about the rest of SE) about what kinds of questions should be allowed. Roughly, there are two
by jordanpg 12y ago
There is an ongoing religious war among avid SO users (don't know about the rest of SE) about what kinds of questions should be allowed.
Roughly, there are two camps. Those who say that any well-formed, non-dup question of interest should be let in and those who think it's a stop of last-resort after checking all conceivable documentation and scouring the internet.
I believe the latter viewpoint is pretty run-of-the-mill developer machismo, and it makes me chuckle every time the first google hit directs me to a SO post with 1000 upvotes that has been closed as "off-topic".
It seems self-evident to me that in the year 2015, the internet has allowed me to make more valuable use of my time quickly searching for answers rather than scouring documentation. Docs have a time and a place, but are not needed for quick dips into the myriad techs you need to use to write a typical app these days.
- JonnieCache 12y agoCan they not give the macho developers some kind of button that spends some of their points to put a badge on the questions they like, elevating them to "true SO" status? Thats how these things are supposed to work I believe.
- nsajko 12y agoMaybe they won't be able to find the true SO questions if they're buried amongst the lesser quality ones.
- slantyyz 12y agoI always upvote on closed questions that I find useful. This happens more often than it should, imo. What I would think would be better is for questions that receive a lot of upvotes after they are closed, that the people who flagged the question have reduced capability to flag down questions in the future.
- Kalium 12y agoThe latter group sounds like people who are sick of seeing SO being a place where people are rewarded for regurgitating documentation. I've some sympathy for that.
- sanderjd 12y agoThis viewpoint only makes sense if you subscribe to the (very silly) ideas that there are a limited number of internet points available and that they matter. Why does it matter to you which people are being rewarded for what?
- Kalium 12y agoIt matters because people respond to incentives. If what you want to see encouraged is good answers to novel questions, you need a system that rewards that over copy-pasting from documentation. What do you think happens when the two are rewarded equally, but the latter can be done much more frequently per unit of time?
- exelius 12y agoSome people find difficult problems more rewarding to solve. Given that internet points are meaningless, someone interested in learning a language better could spend their time regurgitating documentation (and hopefully learning along the way). Eventually, one of those regurgitated responses gets picked up by Google and becomes the top answer, and nobody even needs to go to the SE forums to ask. I don't think they're mutually exclusive - there are multiple reward structures for multiple types of players. Both should be encouraged.
- Kalium 12y agoRight now, there's one reward structure. People who value and respond to that reward structure act rationally within it. This means that regurgitation gets rewarded over good answers to novel questions.
- seizethecheese 12y agoIt seems like the solution is to instead of close non-novel questions, just make them not award points.
- 12y ago
- mason240 12y agoWe simply touch too many different code platforms to RTFM/RTFD on everything. Just today I have probably worked with at least 20 code libraries with their own documentation, and most of those libraries will be replaced within 3 years from now. I think reading the documentation for everything that a webdev works with now could be a full time job in itself.
- dustingetz 12y ago"Those who say that any well-formed, non-dup question of interest should be let in and those who think it's a stop of last-resort after checking all conceivable documentation and scouring the internet." This is wrong in multiple dimensions and [edit: the next sentence which i didn't quote is] flamebait. One camp believes in following these guidelines to a fault. The other camp thinks some of the rules are counterproductive to SO's principles. Source: http://stackoverflow.com/help http://stackoverflow.com/help, the guidelines are clearly outlined.
- jordanpg 12y agoI agree that it's not the most nuanced picture, but it correctly captures the ongoing debate on meta about this very question -- a debate whose very existence suggests that these guidelines aren't cut and dry at all. For example, where is the guideline that answers this without ambiguity? http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/261592/how-much-research-effort-is-expected-of-stack-overflow-users http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/261592/how-much-rese...
- blocktuw 12y agoThis reminds me of the unhelpful SO answers where they state the answer to a question is already stated as part of a spec and won't be answered with a link to the spec. My preferred answer to these questions will quote applicable parts of the spec along with reference numbers and a link. I don't understand why I have to click another link to go to another site that doesn't have the same context and awareness of where I just came from.
- techdragon 12y agoAnd may no longer even EXIST ... seriously love when working with old libraries and all i have is some dump copy on github of a long dead source code littered with comments about see the web page for the docs... the docs dont come from the comments, and lo and behold, the stack overflow post ... slaps you in the face with yet another link.
- mavelikara 12y agoI hope that at some point Google starts pruning away closed SO questions from its index. That will give the user a better search experience.
- sre_ops 12y agoMost importantly, it would delivery such a hit to SO's bottom line that SO would have to figure out how to reign in the "topic closers"
- ciupicri 12y agoAs a side note, the closed questions are not deleted from the web site because Stack Exchange takes a conservative approach when it comes to deletion. Nevertheless some questions do get deleted. The Help Center[1] and Meta[2] have more details on this. [1]: http://stackoverflow.com/help/deleted-questions http://stackoverflow.com/help/deleted-questions [2]: http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/5221/135744 http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/5221/135744
- Aldo_MX 12y ago> Questions that are extremely off topic, or of very low quality, may be removed at the discretion of the community and moderators. In my experience, this is completely false, it should be reworded as "Questions that moderators like to remove on a whim". The fact that a moderator (or group of moderators) don't find a question valuable doesn't mean that it is not valuable for the rest of the world, and this applies specifically with questions about recommendations.
- slantyyz 12y agoI hope that they don't. In fact, that's the worst thing they could do. I have gotten a _lot_ of value from closed SO questions that were high ranked in my Google search results. I don't know what that says about SO's flagging system, but it is what it is, I guess.
- Aldo_MX 12y ago> I have gotten a _lot_ of value from closed SO questions that were high ranked in my Google search results. Too bad for you, it just takes an overzealous moderator to remove a closed question that many people find valuable. Your best bet is to bookmark the question and trigger archive.org's crawler via the "Save Page Now" form: https://archive.org/web/ https://archive.org/web/
- rmason 12y agoYou've also got people closing questions who don't know the language. Am I the best person to vote on say Clojure questions? I'd say not, but on SO that frequently happens. When the languages go to people, the conference speakers and book authors are ignored by someone who has never written a line of code in that language something is wrong. Also in the rapidly changing JS world they don't reference the version consistently. Code that worked fine on version 1 doesn't work six months later on version 1.1, if I knew the version it would save a lot of time.
- stevebot 12y agoI feel the same way, but whenever I vocalize this viewpoint on meta I get downvoted into oblivion and wind up deleting my post.
- TheOtherHobbes 12y agoSO never quite the original vision right. (A strange thing to say about an incredibly successful site, but...) The problem is that you can't boil down development to very focussed questions with very focussed answers. A lot of answers are experience and opinion - and if someone experienced is giving an opinion that's usually useful in itself, dammit, even if someone else with experience disagrees. 'Is React better than Angular?' may seem pointlessly open, but if you get answers from two camps who both know what they're talking about, it's possible to learn a lot from both.
- Bamafan 12y agoAgreed. In fact, there was a HN thread a while back about this very topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4494016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4494016 It's unbelievably annoying when this happens. I have a number of bookmarks to incredibly insightful posts, whose usefulness has been corroborated by literally hundreds of people...all closed because they are deemed "off-topic" or some such by an admin. My theory is that SO was essentially "done" years ago. But people are still on staff and needed something to do. Thus, unrelenting navel gazing ensued.
- jpatokal 12y agoMost SO moderators are unpaid volunteers. Not that this stops the effect, though, much the same is visible on the English Wikipedia as well.
- rtpg 12y agoI think the thing missing in this is all the low-quality questions that end up getting closed due to lack of solvability. One of the objectives of SO's rules is to avoid flame wars and ambiguous answers. Imagine the question : "What is the best templating engine to use for Django?" This question doesn't have an answer, because it's so dependent on use case (even that statement is controversial). So if it's on SO and not closed, you'll get a bunch of answers that are contradictory, and people flaming in the comments. I think the main objective for the SO team is to have people land on the site and _have their answer right there_. By removing possibilities of these off-topic questions, you're less likely to land on answers that help your specific thing. End result is "when I land on SO I get an answer every time" instead of "when I land on SO sometimes I get a flame war". For branding, at least, I think it works in their favor to close those questions
- richardwhiuk 12y agoWhat actually happens is there's a bunch of decent answers, and then it gets closed, which somehow kind of leads to the best of both worlds, but leaves a bitter taste in a bunch of people's mouths -"that was really useful why close it" answers. e.g. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/257712/best-web-applications-framework-for-java http://stackoverflow.com/questions/257712/best-web-applicati... or less seriously: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/184618/what-is-the-best-comment-in-source-code-you-have-ever-encountered http://stackoverflow.com/questions/184618/what-is-the-best-c...
- curiously 12y agoOne of my top question created earliest (before the over zealous moderators appeared) was how to push an item into an array in Java? The obvious response is "lol don't you know how to read the doc"? Yet the view count is over 100,000 and counting, with people commenting how much they appreciate finding the answer immediately.
- ygra 12y agoSO had always allowed and encouraged beginner questions, actually. These days the same question would likely be closed as a duplicate, because the question, presumably along with a good answer already exists. So that's an example of a good question, actually. And an answer "read the docs" would be down-voted as unhelpful and quickly disappear.