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Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

I think it's a bit like Wikipedia: the more you hang around, the less you like it. It's understandable though; after the 12324th question that basically boils down to "please do my homework", even a saint would lose his shit. It's the inevitable fate of every "beginners' resource", from IRC to forums, in the long run.

Personally, I had decent experiences in most cases. I never got over the fact that it refuses to become the de-facto point of reference for stacks, i.e. questions like "what are the best web libraries for $language", "what is the best practice for deploying $framework" are brutally rejected. And it's a shame, because those would have helped immensely -- it's very easy to learn a language, but it's really hard to figure out what you should use from the surrounding ecosystem.

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Where are we supposed to get opinions from? Would we have a success if we started "OpinionStack.com"? I believe if we did so, we should outdate the votes, so the top answer would be the most fashionable nowadays.

Code Review [1] is a thing. But that comes with the same problems - nobody wants to review reading from a text file in language X over and over again.

[1] http://codereview.stackexchange.com

This seems like a good use case of their community wiki feature. List the major ones, and suggest the rationale and tradeoffs for the different major choices.

You can actually find a few of these questions floating around marked as "wiki answer" and locked to prevent the otherwise inevitable flood of duplicate answers.

Problem is that most people don't want to maintain these lists. The handful of exceptions stand out precisely because they have a few dedicated maintainers who've dutifully kept them relevant for years... Most of them, though, died from neglect and were eventually deleted out of mercy.

If people really wanted or needed those lists, someone would create a site for that purpose. The reality is that such a site would fail terribly, because those kinds of lists are opinions people won't agree on, and go out of date incredibly quickly. If you search for such a thing, you'll find blog posts from people giving such lists, and most of them will be useless because they are out of date.

StackOverflow is a good resource precisely because it's curated and maintained, including rejecting content that doesn't work on the site. Just like Wikipedia doesn't allow you to have your own page listing your opinions.

> those kinds of lists are opinions people won't agree on

That's why you need voting, same as traditional SO.

> and go out of date incredibly quickly

I can see that being a problem -- but it's a problem even for regular SO questions, since languages evolve (the best way to do X in python 2.3 is not the same as in python 2.4, let alone 3.x).

You could simply timestamp votes and progressively devalue old ones, like tajen suggested.

> If you search for such a thing, you'll find blog posts [...] useless because they are out of date

Absolutely. Blog posts and wikis are terrible at keeping up, they are fundamentally static and require a lot of work. For example Fullstack Python [1] is nice but it's probably an immense effort. It would be nice to have some semiautomated way to highlight stacks that can self-maintain and stay relevant.

[1] http://www.fullstackpython.com

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