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Comment by codinghorror | Hacker News Reader

Stack Overflow is for facts, data, and science. Head over to Quora to see how the other path turned out.

Ironically, a lot of Quora answers still pop up on HN/Reddit to this day as being gems of high quality answers and opinions from experts. Most of the SO answers that pop up in these same forums of the same quality have been archived as being off topic but historically significant.

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.

Only if that's what you want SO to be. But how often do you find a question on how to exclude a particular artifact from a maven configuration on Quora? or finding the cause of a particular compiler issue? Or why sending a particular date through an object mapper works while another one fails? Or trying the sequence of objects to change a class path resource (URL) to a File in Java (URL - URI - Paths - toFile).

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.

I LOLed at that and then I saw who posted this. That made me almost cry.

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.

"Accepted" is marked by the question asker for what helped them, not chosen by an all-knowing overseer or a community vote.

Yes, and that's part of the problem.

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.

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