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Note that high-reputation users can see deleted questions and answers on SO, and petition for them to be undeleted. So there is at least a check on the ability

by lambda 12y ago

Note that high-reputation users can see deleted questions and answers on SO, and petition for them to be undeleted. So there is at least a check on the ability of the moderators to delete things for personal reasons. Most of the complaints about deletion or closing on SO are not about it for petty personal reasons, but instead a general community mindset that is a bit too quick to jump to closing imperfect questions, questions that are close to duplicates but not quite, questions that are somewhat subjective but still have a lot of users interested in them, and so on.

slantyyz 12y ago
>> Note that high-reputation users can see deleted questions and answers on SO, and petition for them to be undeleted. While overall, SO's a great place to get questions answered, the problem, in my mind, is that there might be a disconnect between the high-reputation users and newbies who asked and the newbies come to SO to find answers to the questions that do flagged down or deleted. While I don't think that any of the high rep users are newbie haters, I do think it can be challenging for them to see things from a newbie's point of view.
- sosborn 12y ago
  In my experience, the standard newbie questions have all been answered. A quick search is all it takes to find the answer. The problem, of course, is that newbies rarely know the right questions to ask (read: search), which is to be expected because they don't posses the right amount of domain knowledge.
  - slantyyz 12y ago
    >> The problem, of course, is that newbies rarely know the right questions to ask (read: search) When I'm "learning a new tech" -- let's use switching from Rails to Node as an example, I usually go to Google first. Ask a question like "why would I choose Framework X over Y" in Google's searchbox, and your top results will have the same question on SO, except that it has been closed because the answer is opinion-based. The few answers to the closed question are usually fairly objective and insightful and leave me wishing that more people were able to add their 2 cents. Sometimes newbies ask a broad question to get a big picture perspective (from multiple people answering) that can't be provided by a couple of blog entries found in Google results. And yes, those questions might elicit opinionated responses, but I would argue that the responses add more value to SO than they take away.
    - crdoconnor 12y ago
      >Ask a question like "why would I choose Framework X over Y" in Google's searchbox, and your top results will have the same question on SO, except that it has been closed because the answer is opinion-based. The few answers to the closed question are usually fairly objective and insightful and leave me wishing that more people were able to add their 2 cents. They are often very outdated too - some were closed 3, 4, 5 years ago and never updated.
      - slantyyz 12y ago
        >> They are often very outdated too - some were closed 3, 4, 5 years ago and never updated. This is true, but closing a question pretty much guarantees that it won't ever be updated.
    - lambda 12y ago
      Ah, if your problem is about opinion questions like that, I recommend you not try to get StackOverflow to support that. StackOverflow is specifically geared towards objectively answerable questions; solving an actual problem that can be solved by code. "What's the best framework" or "why is framework X better than Y" will never fit well into its model. I recommend starting another site, tailored for that kind of question, if that's something you're interested in. I imagine it would look pretty different than SO; instead of simply sorting by votes, you'd want to group answers by "reasons to prefer X" and "reasons to prefer Y", each of which could be voted on, and with optional discussion threads to clarify each one of them, or something of the sort.
- lambda 12y ago
  I don't really think that you're right that high-rep users can't see things from a newbie's point of view. Most high-rep users got there by being good at seeing things from a newbie's point of view, and thus being able to explain things well to newbies. The answers that get the most upvotes, and give you the most reputation, are the basic problems that everyone has, since then everyone finds that question, and upvotes the answer that solves the problem for them. I'll note that as a high-rep user (top 0.1% overall), I more often see the moderate-rep users as the ones closing a lot of questions. The high-rep users are busy getting more reputation by actually answering questions, it's the moderate rep users that have just enough to be able to vote to close that wind up spending all of their time policing the site. The biggest problem that I have with SO is the review queue, which queues up questions that have close votes or flags, in order to get a quicker resolution, and rewards people with badges for spending a lot of time reviewing questions that they don't really know much about. I've seen so many slightly vague questions closed because of that, when if you had actually just spent a few minutes getting the user to clarify via comments, you could have figured out what their actual problem was and answered it. But because there's a review queue, and badges for reviewing lots of questions, answers, edits, etc, some people just spend all their time in there rather than actually trying to answer or clarify. Anyhow, I very frequently hear vague complaints about SO, but it's much more informative to look at particular examples. Do you have examples of questions that have been closed that you don't think should have been? As a high-rep user, I can vote for them to be re-opened, and as an experienced user I can help reword them and make them more clear so that they will be more likely to be reopened and less likely to be closed. By the way, one thing that can be challenging is figuring out, from a question that doesn't provide enough information, what the user is asking. This is hard for anyone to figure out, newbie or experienced user. The best way to avoid this is to ask questions clearly. State the exact problem you're trying to solve, show a small code example that demonstrates the problem, state what you've tried in order to solve it. And state a question that can be solved objectively; there's no way to provide a good, unambiguously correct answer to an opinion question, and the whole reason for StackOverflow to exist is to provide good, unambiguously correct answers, not to prompt endless discussion threads in which everyone discusses their favorite X. If you follow these guidelines, you should generally be able to get a good answer on SO, and not have your question closed (unless as a duplicate, which is another way of solving your problem by redirecting you to existing answers).

by lambda 12y ago

slantyyz 12y ago

>> Note that high-reputation users can see deleted questions and answers on SO, and petition for them to be undeleted. While overall, SO's a great place to get questions answered, the problem, in my mind, is that there might be a disconnect between the high-reputation users and newbies who asked and the newbies come to SO to find answers to the questions that do flagged down or deleted. While I don't think that any of the high rep users are newbie haters, I do think it can be challenging for them to see things from a newbie's point of view.

sosborn 12y ago
In my experience, the standard newbie questions have all been answered. A quick search is all it takes to find the answer. The problem, of course, is that newbies rarely know the right questions to ask (read: search), which is to be expected because they don't posses the right amount of domain knowledge.
- slantyyz 12y ago
  >> The problem, of course, is that newbies rarely know the right questions to ask (read: search) When I'm "learning a new tech" -- let's use switching from Rails to Node as an example, I usually go to Google first. Ask a question like "why would I choose Framework X over Y" in Google's searchbox, and your top results will have the same question on SO, except that it has been closed because the answer is opinion-based. The few answers to the closed question are usually fairly objective and insightful and leave me wishing that more people were able to add their 2 cents. Sometimes newbies ask a broad question to get a big picture perspective (from multiple people answering) that can't be provided by a couple of blog entries found in Google results. And yes, those questions might elicit opinionated responses, but I would argue that the responses add more value to SO than they take away.
  - crdoconnor 12y ago
    >Ask a question like "why would I choose Framework X over Y" in Google's searchbox, and your top results will have the same question on SO, except that it has been closed because the answer is opinion-based. The few answers to the closed question are usually fairly objective and insightful and leave me wishing that more people were able to add their 2 cents. They are often very outdated too - some were closed 3, 4, 5 years ago and never updated.
    - slantyyz 12y ago
      >> They are often very outdated too - some were closed 3, 4, 5 years ago and never updated. This is true, but closing a question pretty much guarantees that it won't ever be updated.
  - lambda 12y ago
    Ah, if your problem is about opinion questions like that, I recommend you not try to get StackOverflow to support that. StackOverflow is specifically geared towards objectively answerable questions; solving an actual problem that can be solved by code. "What's the best framework" or "why is framework X better than Y" will never fit well into its model. I recommend starting another site, tailored for that kind of question, if that's something you're interested in. I imagine it would look pretty different than SO; instead of simply sorting by votes, you'd want to group answers by "reasons to prefer X" and "reasons to prefer Y", each of which could be voted on, and with optional discussion threads to clarify each one of them, or something of the sort.
lambda 12y ago
I don't really think that you're right that high-rep users can't see things from a newbie's point of view. Most high-rep users got there by being good at seeing things from a newbie's point of view, and thus being able to explain things well to newbies. The answers that get the most upvotes, and give you the most reputation, are the basic problems that everyone has, since then everyone finds that question, and upvotes the answer that solves the problem for them. I'll note that as a high-rep user (top 0.1% overall), I more often see the moderate-rep users as the ones closing a lot of questions. The high-rep users are busy getting more reputation by actually answering questions, it's the moderate rep users that have just enough to be able to vote to close that wind up spending all of their time policing the site. The biggest problem that I have with SO is the review queue, which queues up questions that have close votes or flags, in order to get a quicker resolution, and rewards people with badges for spending a lot of time reviewing questions that they don't really know much about. I've seen so many slightly vague questions closed because of that, when if you had actually just spent a few minutes getting the user to clarify via comments, you could have figured out what their actual problem was and answered it. But because there's a review queue, and badges for reviewing lots of questions, answers, edits, etc, some people just spend all their time in there rather than actually trying to answer or clarify. Anyhow, I very frequently hear vague complaints about SO, but it's much more informative to look at particular examples. Do you have examples of questions that have been closed that you don't think should have been? As a high-rep user, I can vote for them to be re-opened, and as an experienced user I can help reword them and make them more clear so that they will be more likely to be reopened and less likely to be closed. By the way, one thing that can be challenging is figuring out, from a question that doesn't provide enough information, what the user is asking. This is hard for anyone to figure out, newbie or experienced user. The best way to avoid this is to ask questions clearly. State the exact problem you're trying to solve, show a small code example that demonstrates the problem, state what you've tried in order to solve it. And state a question that can be solved objectively; there's no way to provide a good, unambiguously correct answer to an opinion question, and the whole reason for StackOverflow to exist is to provide good, unambiguously correct answers, not to prompt endless discussion threads in which everyone discusses their favorite X. If you follow these guidelines, you should generally be able to get a good answer on SO, and not have your question closed (unless as a duplicate, which is another way of solving your problem by redirecting you to existing answers).