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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 newbi

by 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 They are often very outdated too - some were closed 3, 4, 5 years ago and never updated.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 They are often very outdated too - some were closed 3, 4, 5 years ago and never updated.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.

by sosborn 12y ago

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.