IMO it doesn't scale indefinitely. There's a site culture to be maintained, and as the site gets larger the core moderator culture becomes a smaller and more isolated part of the site.
That's very much considered offtopic on SO. Maybe other sites on the SE network such as Information Security or Software Engineering might have taken it. But I don't use either of those, so I don't know if that would actually fit into their policies.
That's exactly what I want to discuss on SO.
Most SO questions/answers are things that could easily be googled/RTFM with 5 minutes worth of effort. Seasoned developers/architects don't need that, and to be frank, it's pretty low-hanging fruit and not super valuable.
What is valuable are opinions, experiences, perspectives on trade-offs and engineering considerations. These are, of course, highly personal and subjective. But that's why it's so important - it's this kind of experience that people pay high salaries for, not answer to specific code one-liners.
If SO isn't willing to provide that kind of discussion, they're going to very susceptible to someone who starts up a competing platform to do so.
The whole philosophy of StackOverflow was that it wasn’t about sharing opinions, discussions, etc. - it was about questions that have an answer.
Jon’s post points out this difference: that some askers want to ask a question, but haven’t taken the time to understand what makes StackOverflow different to the discussion forums of old.
The people answering questions have time boxed their involvement. Here's 15 minutes, here's an answer and move on.
I've had discussions on slack that span days. But that's ok... because its people I know and trust to be mindful of my time and theirs. They ask interesting questions that make me think.
To open up the spigot to everyone asking those questions (and while they are the ones I'd be most interested in having a discussion with), would make it impossible for me to ask or find anything in the future.
And as an expert in my domain, I'd be rather annoyed at getting dozens (or I suspect hundreds Jon's case) questions asking my opinion each day. I don't have time for them. I've chosen to spend time to answer this question and have a reasonable work / life / social-site balance.
Those sites all work exactly the same as StackOverflow and you can login with a single account. Just the rules regarding content are different. See for example https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/
There is also the Area 51 site for proposals for new sites: https://area51.stackexchange.com/
They're still around. They're smaller... and by being smaller they are more useful.
What Stack Overflow killed off was Experts Exchange and a smattering of forums. Some are still around, but they're not trying to be searchable. Reddit's /r/javahelp or Code Ranch - every time there's a question its posted as a new question. Few people go back to find old posts there, but then that's the way the community works... and it works because it is so much smaller than Stack Overflow.
IRC channels and Slacks have taken some of it, with all the downsides that comes with that.
Is discuss the keyword here? Because a back-and-forth is not exactly what the Q&A format enables.
And I think that Q&A format of SO is actually quite appropriate for that sort of thing; unlike the usual discussion forums, which may get into real discussion of nuances of expert consensus. (Maybe that's where the cultural misunderstanding about SO comes from, that people actually want a site which will give an expert opinion, more or less, without having to read experts arguing too much?)
i.e. these high quality but subjective answers are still being created on Quora, but not SO. That strikes me as being a problem for SO.
They are different sites for different purposes and different audiences. Trying to make one site to be everything for all people doesn't work well for any of them.
If SO is for facts, data, and science why do I so often see accepted answers that are wrong. And I'm not even talking about accepted answers that got wrong because the environment changed.
The person who asked the question can only tell if it did supposedly solve their problem. They can't tell if the answer is actually sound advice or if it has subtle problems that another answer solves better.
The accepted answer also gains the top spot, even if other answers have gained more upvotes.
> That's exactly what I want to discuss on SO.
Broad-ish architecturing questions belong on https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/ (formerly known as programmers.SE). A good rule of thumb for which of those two sites to go to is, does your question have code?
(Also, "discuss" is a forbidden word on StackExchange - it's Q&A, not discussion)
What does this division help to achieve? The two communities are in exactly the same format.
The division is there so that questions about design and architecture have a place to get asked that don't get closed as off topic (lacking code) on Stack Overflow. Consider a question like In an agile process, how much work should be done by the PO on a project or feature before presenting it to the team? - https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/3676...
The format doesn't dictate topicality... there are many sites that use the same format. https://cooking.stackexchange.com for example.
Isn't that kinda what hackernews is? The breadth of discussion here is far more varied than hackernews. I'd also think a place like lobste.rs or maybe an architecture specific slack would be a good spot for this.
I personally think it is fine for SO to set boundaries of what is acceptable discussion, and at the same time it is ok for you to be frustrated with that and think of other places to ask your (very valid) question.
With that introduction, I strongly recommend reading A Group... in particular the fourth item of the Fourth Things to Design For.
> 4.) And, finally, you have to find a way to spare the group from scale. Scale alone kills conversations, because conversations require dense two-way conversations. In conversational contexts, Metcalfe's law is a drag. The fact that the amount of two-way connections you have to support goes up with the square of the users means that the density of conversation falls off very fast as the system scales even a little bit. You have to have some way to let users hang onto the less is more pattern, in order to keep associated with one another.
The design of Stack Overflow is one that tries to hinder the ability to discuss. This is intentional. Consider how hard it is to search discussions. Try finding a comment here or a particular post on Reddit, or something someone said on Usenet or a mailing list archive. They work ok in small sizes, but they fail miserably when the scale goes up.
If polling / opinion gathering / discussions were allowed, Stack Overflow would be no more useful than forums of old. It would be impossible to find anything of value later because there would be too much noise. All of the chatter makes finding the questions and answers that people are searching for harder. Having questions that don't follow the "One question, one complete answer" make it more acceptable to ask more of those questions making it even harder to find the question with the answer.
There are other sites that are better designed for polling and discussions. Stack Overflow because of that. Hacker News, Reddit, Quora, Slant.co. Stack Overflow doesn't need to be all things to all people.
Stack overflow doesn't need to be all things for all people. Its trying to do one thing and do it right. Fighting against that design brings friction in usability. Fighting against the intent behind that design brings friction in the community.
Stack overflow is susceptible to someone providing a better Q&A site. But building a better Q&A site that provides for discussions? I haven't seen that design scale much beyond the department Confluence install.
Continuing to the next paragraph from A Group...
> This is an inverse value to scale question. Think about your Rolodex. A thousand contacts, maybe 150 people you can call friends, 30 people you can call close friends, two or three people you'd donate a kidney to. The value is inverse to the size of the group. And you have to find some way to protect the group within the context of those effects.
I do not know whether it applies in this case, but I know from my experience in other areas that it is not uncommon for objections of this type to demand a specificity that is not actually necessary for a good answer to be given - and undue specificity means that fewer related questions can be redirected to its answer.
Broad questions like that don't have a single good answer that fits every scenario, they have lots of different answers, each of which is the best fit for a different scenario.
The problem with a site like SO allowing questions like that is that you _would_ get an answer, that answer would be accepted, and that question would appear really high in search results. When the next person comes along needing an answer to the same question, but in a different scenario... they're gonna take the one that was given there, even though it isn't the best fit.
Scale this up to SO's scale across a few years and all of a sudden SO isn't a trusted resource any more; it's more like experts exchange used to be, where it was full of answers which _can_ be valid, but are basically useless to everyone, and taking that advice can actually be actively damaging.
I get why your question is on hold. But I find it unfair. Some of the best questions and answers have been highly opinionated. And I have often been led to on hold questions by google.
An opinionated SO site might be nice. In the old days we had newsgroups for this. But that audience has disappeared when everything moved to the web.