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Comment by cft | Hacker News Reader

"closed as no longer relevant ", I find that is a growing problem with StackOverflow. My colleagues and I personally asked several relevant questions (like this one, that has many upvotes on HN), that were shut down or deleted by StackOverflow heavy-handed mods as "off topic" , "not relevant" etc. This made me give up on contributing and treat it as a read-only resource.

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Most of the SEs, in my experience, dislike questions, like this one, that boil down to subjective opinion. This makes them hard to answer, as answers no longer depend on fact or statistics, but someone's opinion of something. Frankly — while I feel for the questioner, and agree w/ him — this one seems very close to that edge.

It isn't immediately clear to me that this question is relevant like you claim; the FAQ isn't really clear on it either:

> The site works best for well-defined questions: math questions that actually have a specific answer. You'll notice that there is the occasional question making a list of something, asking about the workings of the mathematical community, or something else which isn't really a math question. Such questions can be helpful to the community, but it is extremely tricky to ask them in a way that produces a useful response.

I asked very well defined programming questions, that resulted in the same actions by SE moderators.

What was the question?

I've never seen anyone claiming these kind of things actually providing a link, heh.

I asked a question on an electronics stack, but it was shut down by mods because they apparently couldn't answer the question, and decided it wasn't clear/valid. Clear case of mod ego.

Having participated frequently in SO and others, I understand why it is necessary. But, I feel that so much is wasted with such a qualified audience. There is so much potential to be explored there.

I don't have a solution either. I just wish I had.

I'm very curious about this: is there a reason the reductionists seem to win in communities like this? Wikipedia has a similar culture. Are there systemic forces that point this direction, or is it just an accident of the history of the specific people involved?

There may be so much spam that they practice a shotgun banning approach without comprehension or real content evaluation. Somehow the best "spam banners" get elevated perhaps?

in all these things the pedants win, because every one else says whatever...and goes outside in the sun

One thing HN does well is having reasonable mods.

It's worth noting that SE and Wikipedia are two of the most valuable reference resources human civilization has produced, ever in history. Maybe the reductionism contributes to their high level of signal.

My problem is that it feels like they could have been much more useful.

Annoyingly often it is also the most useful questions that are closed while things I consider trivia style/karma-farming operations like: "what is the reason for x" seems to be totally OK.

I too find those trivia questions and their answers interesting but IMO they are a distraction.

SE aims to answer every relevant question, even basic questions. Karma is a reward for the users which do activities to generate the relevant Q&A entries.

I used to think like you, then I saw Quora become an useless "stupid questions answered by smart people" site...

More valuable than Charms of Defence and Deterrence by Catullus Spangle?

As a member of both, no, they're really not. The information on SE is very useful but highly transient (and redundant, but at least we constantly try to rectify that). It'd be extremely more valuable if it could be condensed into a guide or textbook or what have you to teach idioms to beginners.

As for Wikipedia, I'm almost convinced most information on it is erroneous, unverifiable, or useless in the forms it is presented. I've stopped making contributions and try not to ever reference it at all.

Can you point me to a few erroneous articles?

My favourite is the one that pretends pseudo-random binary sequences are only generated by LFSRs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRBS

Huh? That clearly reads to me like it is just using an LFSR as an example implementation.

This gives no indication one way or the other of which direction causality points.

ie. I could just as accurately say: maybe their value as a reference has led to reductionism. We can't go back and do an experiment, so we'll never really know.

probably because both have the goals of being encyclopedic sources of knowledge, and successfully complete this goal following reductionist policies, and its a hell of a lot easier to follow a strict philosophy than a lenient one (because the latter invites heavy legal discussion by armchair lawyers, while the former minimizes it).

In short, likely because its efficient and apparently sufficient

I don't really agree with this, but I upvoted it because it's the best charitable explanation I've seen, even if I'm frustrated by what I perceive to be a missed opportunity.

Which part do you disagree with? That its easier to enforce, or that its sufficiently effective?

The former is intuitively true; finding good rules to enforce strictly is difficult, but enforcing is simple (is the act explicitly allowed/banned or not?). Find broad rules is trivial, but then you spend all the enforcement time arguing edge cases (see: US gov)

The latter is defended by the assumption that wikipedia/overflow do indeed follow such a policy, and its difficult to argue that they are not successful. There might be something better out there, but at least currently the market seems to have converged on this policy; ala "democracy is the worst form of government, except for the all other forms we've tried.

I disagree with the part about it achieving the goal of being an encyclopedic source of knowledge. Except it largely comes down to how you define "encyclopedic". I would like it to mean "broad and inclusive", but it often means "highly curated", which tends to translates to "conservative".

I don't think the convergence of the market on this sort of policy provides any indication one way or the other, because of network effects. Both of those sites won their space before the culture we're discussing here became entrenched, and because of network effects, it is not realistic to unseat them.

Im not sure you can easily argue either is "highly curated"; they both cover an extremely large domain and cover at least a substantial subset of it. It's hardly the case that any one/group handpicked particular subjects of interest, rather they denied anything not of interest (and accepted the rest)

I imagine rather than "broad and inclusive", it should be "broad and authoritative", which then tends towards conservative when contraversial (which makes sense: how can you be authoritative when a general agreement can't be reached?)

And ofc, wikipedia was preceded by c2wiki, and stackoverflow by innumerable Q&A sites, both predecessors being substantially more liberal in what they accepted. And both beat out their predecessors, presumably largely because quality control was made much more difficult, and often absent, in the face of liberal acceptance.

> And both beat out their predecessors, presumably largely because quality control was made much more difficult, and often absent, in the face of liberal acceptance.

That doesn't mesh with my experience of what made the sites popular at the time of their growth. Wikipedia was the only wiki that anyone had ever heard of, and SO was the only software focused Q&A site besides expertsexchange which had a freemium model that made it unusable (not to mention a funny domain name!).

"Are there systemic forces that point this direction,"

When you can "contribute" to the community simply by clicking a delete button, rather than actually adding new and useful information, you're bound to get this sort of situation.

StackOverflow mods are appointed to police content. The more content they remove, the more it looks like they're doing their jobs.

It's the same with Wikipedia. Deleting someone else's hard work counts as a "contribution". It shows up in your profile just like writing a new multi-page article would.

When the same credit is awarded for for destroying as for creating, the destroyers are always going to win.

I recognized a few of the names who deleted the post to be fine mathematicians who have contributed quite a bit to mathoverflow, so I don't think that applies. Mathoverflow is a Q&A site for professional mathematicians, you may have it confused with math.se.

> StackOverflow mods are appointed to police content. The more content they remove, the more it looks like they're doing their jobs.

I can safely say you're wrong in this regard. Content removal is a big fraction of what the mods do because the contributors filter editing, closing, pointing out duplicates, migrating, etc. so that mods have to deal with only important stuff.

Agree this is a problem; there are a huge number of worthwhile questions that get closed on stack exchange. This is because they prioritize the reputation of the community over answering all worthwhile questions (and to be fair maybe they wouldn't still be with us if they hadn't). Still most of the mods would do well to remind themselves of the official advice

https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/29/good-subjective-bad-su...

and be a bit more lenient.

I don't have a problem with it being closed if it's subjective but I do wish they would remove closed articles from the search.

Mathoverflow is the Q&A site for professional mathematicians, not math.se where it may have been more appropriate.

In fairness, it was closed after being open for more than two and a half years. Although the point remains that the "no longer relevant" message is needlessly grating.

Similar to the deletionists on Wikipedia [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_i...

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