The changes are a step in the right direction, however I see no mention of the situation where questions with many upvotes are closed. I find it incredibly arrogant that a mod can come close a topic that has many upvotes. It is basically saying to the community that all their opinions count for nothing, which is pretty disrespectful to a community that prides itself (rightly so) on its high number of ___domain experts.
The other truly irritating thing about SO/SE is their propensity for closing opinion based questions. I am sure that I am not the only one that finds ___domain experts arguing about for example, the merits of 1 library over another, or language A over Language B, rather useful (I often use their answers as a basis for further research to see if I agree or can find supporting evidence). Allow the community to vote up the opinion based answers they like and downvote the trolling/flaming answers.
DISCLOSURE: I wrote that blog post, I work for SE, I AM biased.
Thanks for the general support.
You raise two concerns, though:
1. Upvotes - this is tricky. The problem with never allowing questions with lots of upvotes to be closed is twofold:
- Sometimes, what's allowed changes over time. Communities start out allowing almost anything "What's a good snack to help programmers stay awake?", but eventually decide that they need to limit things to a narrower focus. If communities who do that can't close those questions, they'll attract more like them.
- Some popular things are way off base to start with. You might be able to attract a ton of upvotes for an xkcd post, but you really wouldn't wan't the site full of them just because they're broadly loved.
2. opinion based questions - the changes are designed to help a little with what you're worried about: "primarily opinion based" now explicitly acknowledges that many good answers incorporate some expert opinion. But you still want some limit, no? "Which is better, Ruby or PHP?" isn't good for anybody, and the new reasons are designed to make it clearer that some opinion is ok, if it comes from expert experience or can be supported by facts, references, etc. Where that line belongs is for each community to decide.
1. With the examples you gave I can see there are going to be issues, however I have seen many, more focused examples with sometimes a very large number of upvotes, get closed.
Typically a question along these lines will be closed - "What is the best book to learn C++ if I already know Java?" In this case there is no correct answer and the answers will be completely opinion based, but there are still many good answers (and books) that will be relevant.
2. I agree with you that such a broad based question should be closed but even more focused questions are also closed, very similar to the one I used above where there can be quite a few valid - and completely different opinions.
I realise that it is a balancing act and for sure you are moving in the right direction. I am hoping that opinion based questions/answers will be given more leeway going forward.
> never allowing questions with lots of upvotes to be closed
Don't make it never, just raise the threshold?
Make it require X moderators to agree before it can be closed.
Make it so that opinion answers don't get rep.
Make it so the questions are put on hold and go to meta stack overflow.
(I don't acctually use stack overflow; apologies if you already do that.)
The closing of popular questions by a mod on a drunken power-hungry semantics trip is to the exclusion of the community is very off-putting for the regular members of the community who do the majority of the answering.
And who determines which answer is an "opinion answer"? Any attempt at labeling answers as "opinion answers" via machine learning will inevitably have false positives.
I disagree about "not good for anybody". Reading opinions of experts even on topics like" PHP or Ruby" could be very educational. It's a way of sharing experience. If you face decisions about which technology to choose you want to soak that. Asking specific questions is not enough - the thing about experience is that people who have it encountered problems you often can't think of at the beginning of the way.
What's the problem with adding "subjective" tag and allow filtering so people who don't want to see opinion based discussion won't ever encounter it while allowing others to enjoy it and learn from it ?
I agree with top comment (as of now) that SO stance on it is arrogant and display lack of respect for great community.
I also don't like that SO staff attribute their success to stance on this issue. Yes SO is very successful and by far the best place to learn/seek help the reasons are plenty: great interface, very fast, great search, great reputation system, a bit of luck as well. It doesn't mean every decision you took contributed to your success.
Do you really think that closing popular/upvoted questions based on some arbitrary policy thus stopping discussion for the sake of stopping it (it's not as it clutters the site or anything) makes anybody more happy about the site ?
I still often search for most popular SO questions in history, many of them closed and containing a lot of great information. It's sad to think that a lot more was lost due to overeager closing. Forunately it was better at the beginning so some of those discussions developed a bit before being shut down.
I'll flat-out disagree with you about the opinion-based questions.
We're in a young-enough industry and practice that opinions are really the coin of the realm--there is not the same standard accept methodology you'd see in, say, mechanical engineering.
To pretend that opinions aren't somehow a useful component of learning here is absurd--all the more so because beginners need opinions to start. Once they learn more, once they get exposed to other ideas, then they can form their own opinions. But to pretend that this happens in a vacuum is quite wrong.
Your example "Which is better, Ruby or PHP?" is exactly where opinions, properly backed-up, are useful: a good answer will say "Well, Ruby has these great metaprogramming features, but PHP has a much larger developer pool, and so on". Bad answers will of course just be "ruby is teh 1337 n00b". If only there was some kind of way that Stack Overflow let users filter good answers from bad answers...
At the end of the day, opinions and their debate are what are most useful to a beginner, especially when they don't know what questions to ask or issues to consider. The big failing right now is that you aren't trusting your community enough to filter out the garbage.
No one is saying that opinions aren't important. What they're saying is that their place isn't StackOverflow. Why do people find this so hard to understand? Just because SO/SE is big doesn't obligate them to become big enough to encompass all the useful questions in their ___domain. Let them do their thing.
Well, when your site is titled "Stack Overflow is a question and answer site for professional and enthusiast programmers.", people, professional and hobbyists alike, tend to think they can questions. (The nerve of those people...)
If it's such a stupid viewpoint, then why aren't they being ousted by Q&A sites that don't hold that viewpoint? It's not like this is something they haven't heard before - people have been making the same complaint since day 1.
I say the following in all seriousness and with no sarcasm: Feel free to create your own Q&A site that invites discussion. If it becomes more useful than Quora or Yahoo! Answers, please let me know.
In our field, again, there are a great many questions which seem to only be matters of opinion--and that's okay! That's fine! That's how people work, and to pretend otherwise is foolish.
Many architectural decisions in computing are heuristic, right? Many solutions are the result of opinion, because nearly everybody outside of hard-core mathematicians and computer scientists lacks the language to even describe their problems in such a way as to avoid opinion. Even the folks that do have that ability are likely working on a problem where the assumptions are incomplete and ill-defined anyway.
This is a faulty binning of questions into "is question about opinion" and "is question that is not matter of opinion". I posit that the former bin is quite useful and shouldn't be worked against.
You're still fighting a strawman. No one is pretending anything. Let me say it one more time: SO/SE is not obligated to accommodate all useful questions in their ___domain. They made their choice. Let them do their thing. But stop whining. Just stop.
In the "but, questions and answers!" vein, it's the "answer" part that's important. I believe they've come out and said they only want to handle questions that have one single answer, in full knowledge there are many questions that don't fit in that mold.
Architectural decisions are a red herring: they don't want to answer heuristic-driven architecture questions. That's not in their scope.
No one's saying those questions aren't useful. They're only saying that SO is not the place for them. This is not complicated. As a programmer, avoiding feature creep is something you almost certainly already understand. It's basically the same.
I hate this answer, and it crops up in many places in this discussion and on SO/SE. What you are basically saying is "it's their game and you can follow these rules or go away". Sure, it's their game... and it's a shame many of the best players hang around their playground, otherwise I would depart in a split second. And the moment another alternative shows up, I will. Until then I will just take what I can and give back... well, less than I would if the rules were more sensible. And I will whine. :)
Disclosure: they have closed a few of my answers that I actually went to some length to make good - but apparently "which library" type of questions are not appropriate for a programming Q&A site?!? Go figure.
Stack Exchange is not going to provide you with what you want. You can ask 'til you're blue in the face, but they're pretty clear about what they do and don't want.
So why keep asking?
You'll get better results creating it yourself, or persuading someone else to create it.
> I find it incredibly arrogant that a mod can come close a topic that has many upvotes.
Is this actually true? My understanding was that no one could directly close a question, but rather that you can cast close votes (and 5 of them closes a question).
With regards to opinions, I think SO's stance is that they want the site to be a medium to exchange mostly facts, and as little opinion as possible.
The problem with opinions is that, to someone who is not knowledgeable, it may not be immediately clear which opinion holds more weight. In turn, this may end up confusing the reader even more, or worse yet, it may mislead them. This is especially true because even when an opinion is correct, its correctness may be context-sensitive, and this may cause the reader to make the wrong decision based on the correct opinion.
More often than not the voting is based on opinion in addition to fact. Often the top answer is not only correct but cleaner, more elegant or adheres to some aesthetic quality that's valued by those people voting up the answer.
In software there's many ways to achieve a goal, not a single unique factual answer, thus many answers are context-sensitive and not absolute truths. Sure we can determine to some extent the correctness of the answers, but many of them are contextual and based on factors that are based on opinion/experience.
The voting system in and of itself encourages users to infuse answers with opinion.
The problem with opinions is that, to someone who is not knowledgeable, it may not be immediately clear which opinion holds more weight
If only there was some facility in Stack Overflow to let users add weight to an opinion, either by signaling agreement or explicitly rounding it out with comments--man, that'd be really useful, wouldn't it?
Opinions aren't something that are bad. Facts, especially to somebody that doesn't know what they don't know, are often less useful. If you punish opinions, you also discourage people from answering with extra background on a topic and creating useful discussion.
> I find it incredibly arrogant that a mod can come close a topic that has many upvotes. It is basically saying to the community that all their opinions count for nothing
What is the distribution of those upvotes against reputation, though? Anybody can upvote. Only users with significant reputations can issue votes to close a question.
If ___domain experts think that a question should be closed, but an overwhelming number of beginners, non-participants (eg. people viewing the HN front page) or ill-informed think otherwise, then what should happen?
One of the changes they describe is about reformulating questions to better fit their "model." I didn't see any indication that people would be getting any indication or explanation of what their "model" is, but it's pretty much just another "closed...FU."
> All dupes now must point to an answered question, and the new language focuses on getting you answers
This one is the most useful, I think. I've stumbled across closed-for-duplication answers before via google searches and found myself wondering what the question duplicated.
Answers are never closed as duplicates. Only questions are closed as duplicates of other questions that ask the same thing. The change is that now the original question should have an answer.
Nearly all of the cases where I've found myself annoyed at someone closing a question are the "off-topic" variety. Most commonly, they are questions asked, answered, upvoted, and google-indexed on StackOverflow and then closed because some mod decided it wasn't programmy enough and should have been asked at ServerFault. Due to the large overlap between programming and system administration, the same question asked at both SO and SF may generate different but equally useful responses tailored to their own communities. It's far too easy for an over-zealous moderator to fail to consider this and close out a question for no good reason.
I'll be interested to see if the new "close reasons" will actually improve this problem. My guess is that it won't and there will still be overly draconian closures of edge-case topics that are relevant to multiple communities.
Can you share some links to those questions that were wrongly closed? As a general policy, questions that are on topic on Stack Overflow shouldn't be closed just because they might also be on topic on another site. We're aware of the overlap, and we're supposed to allow for it.
But looking through my history, I was slightly incorrect-- at least one was closed as "not constructive" rather than "off-topic." (I remembered incorrectly because it's true the question is not about programming specifically)
The question resulted in answers based on facts and expertise that I found extremely helpful. It was almost exactly what I was looking for when I put the search into google. The question got 161 upvotes and the best answer got 150. The most upvoted answer included 6 factual statements, 1 assertive opinion, and 1 testimonial.
Here's an example of a question closed as off-topic from serverfault. I honestly have no idea why, or where such a question should be asked:
Once again, I found it on a google search and the first answer had exactly what I was looking for. Minutes later I had downloaded iperf and had used it to run the tests I wanted to run. Yet the question is locked with a disclaimer about how it's only preserved for legacy reasons and it's not on-topic for the site.
To be clear, I don't have a strong preference for where these questions get asked and answered so long as the answers are high-quality and an itinerant surfer like me can find them and active+fruitful discussions don't get permanently squashed because the question caused a red-flag in some moderators pruning algorithm.
The first one is off-topic, but it could have been closed as "not constructive" as well. Shopping recommendations aren't encouraged, which is the same issue with the Server Fault question.
That's great but the fact is, these communities are better than anyone else at answering those questions. Why close a good question with good, relevant answers when a better forum doesn't exist?
Give us some time :) We are working as hard as we can and the amount of content is growing at a really good rate each month. That said, we are missing the vast majority of the content we need so probabilistically you're not going to find a specific query on Slant right now. Could you let me know what question you had? I'd love to research it for you.
If I could make one suggestion-- allow question details. The serverfault question I linked had two components:
Subject: How to test real network throughput between two points?
Body: What are some of the better tools/utilities for testing real bandwidth across a link? In my case I am testing the real throughput across a wifi bridge.
The question body is what turns it into a conversation, personalized with subtle details and information less likely to emerge from a highly-organized, more-generic and less organic "shopping list" presentation.
Off-topic closes were definitely unfriendly before. It would show all five or six users who had voted to close, which felt excessive and like being ganged up on, and just had a generic message "Questions on Stack Overflow are expected to relate to programming or software development within the scope defined in the FAQ." Where that FAQ link is to the whole FAQ, which had dozens of questions.
I hope the new approach helps, but strict arbitrary off-topic lines are still going to come across as hostile, IMHO. Especially when there is no StackExchange site that the question is on-topic for.
> Questions on Stack Overflow are expected to relate to programming or software development within the scope defined in the FAQ. Consider editing the question or leaving comments for improvement if you believe the question can be reworded to fit within the scope. Read more about closed questions here.
The second part links to a section of the FAQ (now the Help Center) that explains why questions are closed.
It's tough because I think those bullets in the last link are way too fuzzy to actually be useful guidelines to someone who isn't already very familiar with the all the sites.
I'm a moderator on Stack Overflow ( http://stackoverflow.com/users/16587 ). If you can post on Meta ( http://meta.stackoverflow.com ), we can take a look and let you know why you're question banned. However, I can tell you from experience that no one is post banned after one question (also, you can't see your deleted questions on your profile, which may lead you to believe you've only had one post).
I never claimed the OP lied; nor would I even try to imply it. I've long had issues with the policy that users can't see their own deleted questions ( http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/2645/show-all-of-my-... ), and I brought that up to say that I can understand if there's confusion there. No one is ever post banned for one post (it's a system imposed ban that takes into account a number of things: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/86997/what-can-i-do-... ). It's our fault (moderators and members of the Stack Overflow community) if there isn't clear enough feedback regarding that cycle. That was my intention. I'm sorry. I'll try to communicate more clearly on this topic in the future.
Yeah, I think it's just a natural response to being in a very strictly ruled culture like Stack Overflow. The focus falls on the details ("banned after asking 1 question") rather than the general premise ("banned unfairly"). When you point out the details don't sound right, that is absolutely correct, but that doesn't help the person, since the rules are just arbitrary from their viewpoint anyways. It's a hard problem.
(And I apologize if my response came off overly harsh. I tried to soften it.)
Eh, I didn't feel like I was being accused of anything. I was actually incorrect since I've looked at my profile and apparently I asked two questions (and have answered none).
I would fully admit to not engaging the community in the same way most devs have on SO and I understand that in order for the SO community to be successful it needs just as many people helping others as it does people asking questions.
I've been on there for two years and some change and maybe I'm at fault for not scrutinizing the rules when I first joined (I belong to many forum communities so that I can seek similar assistance and help others and they tend to be very hands off moderation wise), but I think that myself, like others, seek out the community on StackOverflow to answer a one off question from time to time and maybe there should be very clear policies about this kind of interaction (or some considerations given to users who use the system in this way but find it hard to contribute because of lack of expertise or because easier questions have already been answered by others).
Also if my rep could carry over from some of the other networks (ie: I might not be able to answer your Redis questions but I can sure contribute to the Wordpress network) that might help my grievance a bit. That solution does open up other problems, but you get my drift.
I think it does carry over in a way. Once I hit a particular amount of rep on stackoverflow, I would start out at 101 rep on any other site, with lets me comment and vote and stuff.
"All dupes now must point to an answered question" is a good new rule.
But you know what would be a better rule? Questions with over 50 upvotes cannot be closed as "irrelevant" unless they are moved to a different StackExchange site.
Stack Overflow moderator here. I love Slant for so many reasons! I'm glad there's a place where people can ask subjective questions. It sucked when people used to ask where they could ask their question and we basically had to respond "not here, try reddit." I also think the design of Slant reinforces the argument that Stack Overflow just isn't built for that kind of question. Well done!
I had a question about about alternatives to Amazon's Product Advertising API that was there for a long time. I felt like it was fairly useful to people. It had 20+ upvotes and a dozen favorites. Then one day it disappeared without warning and leaving no trace it ever existed.
Also, completely impossible to follow. If I ask a question and there's only one answer: then its not opinion based. If there's two possible answers: then the question is opinion based.
Of course, I don't know if it has one answer or two answers. That's why I asked the question!
Straw man. Some "primarily opinion based" questions are bad, that doesn't mean that they all are. As long as they are precise, they can be useful.
Of course, they should be handled properly. They should be tagged as such, and managed differently from the other questions. For example, they could expire after a while, at least if they are not renewed.
Primarily opinion-based questions aren't necessarily bad. They just aren't a fit in Stack Overflow. If you wish to create your own Q&A site based upon primarily opinion-based questions, please feel free.
If it doesn't fit what the site is structured for, why should it stick around? Aren't there plenty of other sites that can host it? Or is Stack Overflow the only place to host code snips?
Do you have any example 400+ upvoted questions you can point to that aren't of the type "everybody bring out all the snippets you've been saving, this time we're putting on a show"?
It's not about hosting code snips or even nice Markdown css styling. It's about have your question reach the most amount of knowledgable people. Stackoverflow is the best place for that, regardless of their [stupid] closing policies.
But the attention of the community is still finite. It's hard enough to get a moderately difficult question answered already, without opening the floodgates to lower-quality, easier-answered material. Opinion-based questions can be asked in reddit or something, where the time would not otherwise be more usefully spent.
It's not complicated: questions and answers. This is common in sitebuilding though: "so unique we are." Well, at the end of the day it's just posts and comments, so quit milkin' it. A question that receives answers fits, I don't know how you could say otherwise.
However, this is all just a nice example of NIH Syndrome on SO's part, since these are lessons that have been learned by anybody who's hung out in a large IRC channel with kick/ban bots and arrogant ops, as well as being practiced on a web level for over 10 years by the likes of Metafilter.
It also reads to me like they want to have their cake and eat it too. They want the community part without the humanity, since people's irrelevancies in questions fall into more than the 6 (or however many) preset reasons for closure. This may be an incontrovertible attribute of SO: their "model" (as criticized above) does not allow for the community, "topical identity" if you will, they are seeking to impose themselves,.
Nothing in your second paragraph refutes the fact that the Stack Exchange network of sites was never meant to be a repository for all answerable questions.
You may not realize it, but language like this is not only grammatically incorrect (you can't be autistic about something), but could be pretty offensive to people who are either autistic or have a friend or family member who is.
Why use a neural development disorder as a derogatory term?
There have been numerous of such stackoverflow posts submitted here, so one might argue: there's a void.
Would be wonderful to see a complementary service to stackexchange's (with the HN community that might be a possible venture? ;)), but in most of the cases I can recall, Quora is just that. Quora has the same "noise" problems as stackoverflow, what with "which ipod is best? lol", but for genuinely interesting questions, meta or opinionbased, Quora is the place I most often see that.
I wish those questions would be moved to the relevant StackExchange site. Often times it's just a case of misplaced question, where it might fit better in superuser or it. It should be moved in those cases.
Stack Overflow has had problems in the past where unclear or otherwise low-quality questions get migrated to sites where they don't really belong. If a question is clear and you know for sure where it belongs, you can flag it for a moderator to migrate.
I sincerely wish there were better ways of expressing ideas than memegenerated images that seems to be infecting almost every forum I read. Take a look at http://reddit.com/r/gaming All the posts are image macros or comics. One might think that only images were allowed there, but memes seem to be honey to garner upvotes and have killed all other content on that particular subreddit.
That comment appears to be highly insightful and very relevant to the topic being discussed here. Low effort content eventually displaces high effort content in high traffic websites. I have seen this in every community I have been part of, I have spent the last 10 years on Slashdot, 7 years on Reddit and 4 years on HN and that comment is spot on.
I can only pray that SO doesn't fall victim to it too and I support the admins in restricting content as long as it is subject to oversight and is not overdone.
We do try to remove unanswered questions after a while, though in the meantime it's important that they're able to be found - after all, someone out there might have an answer.
We're stepping up efforts to remove closed unanswered questions more promptly though, since those won't be answered and just end up being noise in the search results.
If you need that much detail to explain some of the new answers to current users, why such a focus on brevity when the actual ( responses || closes ) are generated? Also in the news today is the NSA FOIA response in which they took one bureaucratic statement "DENIED - CLASSIFIED" and softened it considerably by including a bunch of explanation in the response itself.
These are good changes, but if they insist on closing perfectly valid opinion-based questions, then the text should emphasize that that's their problem, not mine. I didn't do anything wrong. They're the ones making a mistake.
This comes up now and again on HN. Essentially, StackOverflow is a great site. It's premise was a free, frictionless, focused Q&A site and it was made possible by the wide audiences of Atwood and Spolsky. Atwood focused more on something that went between obscene OCD and just dogma. I think what wasn't realized after the beginning of SO was that SO became a success despite Atwood's ideology, not because of it. I think Joel realized it, just based on the podcasts, but since Atwood was doing most of the work, "whatever." The big problem came in with the ideology becoming enmeshed with the culture and the high council of Meta being sort of a sycophantic keeper of the faith. Basically, any question or answer or anything that might, some day, remotely look like a "discussion" (gasp) on SO is rigidly stamped out by the religious police. You could say this is hyperbole, but just use it for awhile. Heck, google any technical question and probably SO will be the first hit but that question will be marked "Closed, not conforming to the ideology of Atwood" or something like that to the point of being comical.
It's even more farcical when you consider the abject snobbery SO has toward the "other Q&A sites." That has been there from the beginning, and to be sure many of the criticism of those sites are well deserved. But, SO has deeper problems, in some ways, particularly with the zealotry, but it is masked by the fact that there are so many technical people still on SO or, even if many have left, they have gathered such a large corpus that they will remain the big kid on the block.
But at least they are trying to address it, if only at a surface level.
The other truly irritating thing about SO/SE is their propensity for closing opinion based questions. I am sure that I am not the only one that finds ___domain experts arguing about for example, the merits of 1 library over another, or language A over Language B, rather useful (I often use their answers as a basis for further research to see if I agree or can find supporting evidence). Allow the community to vote up the opinion based answers they like and downvote the trolling/flaming answers.