It's a site I sometimes use but dislike intensely.
I kind of want Wirecutter, but for technologies.
But unfortunately it's pretty bad at this other kind of judgment-based compare-and-contrast question. It's especially bad at the "what other solutions am I not aware of?" part, because it isn't kept up to date.
Frankly, I think that's asking a bit much. If you want a high-quality peer review of design proposals to bounce ideas off of others and discuss tradeoffs, you need a team. Maybe something like a meetup group or mailing list for a specific technology, programming language, or industry sector. But it goes beyond one-off Q&A, and I can also understand why Stack Overflow, with a goal of becoming a repository of perpetually useful knowledge that is general enough to be useful for anyone into the indefinite future, does not want to host such project-specific discussions.
Why not just develop in the open and collaborate explicitly with other parties also working on the same project? What you're asking for sounds close to something like the various special interest groups and public discussion of improvement proposals you see in things like the Python programming language or Kubernetes, or discussion on LWN about specific challenges the Linux kernel team faces.
If it were, then there'd be no reason to prohibit such questions... people wouldn't ask them, because they would never be answered. The only reason to prohibit them is because they would get attention/answers where none was desired.
The trouble with StackOverflow, is that what the users want and need does not match what the owners want. The owners want something monetizable, something that can look elegant and beautiful (hence the PR release a couple of years ago where they were positioning it as some "encyclopedia of computer science" or whatever). They figured out that the users could be denied what they want, while still (slowly) creating what the owners themselves wanted.
> and I can also understand why Stack Overflow, with a goal of becoming a repository of perpetually useful knowledge that is general enough to be useful for anyone into the indefinite future, does not want to host such project-specific discussions.
I'm not sure I'd characterize them as wanting that, but if they did... how would that be at all useful to anyone except CS undergrads trying to get someone to do their homework for them? Literally nothing of what people ask there day to day will be generally useful into the indefinite future. What do you want to ask, that will be useful 40 years from now? Neither anything language specific, nor anything domain specific will be relevant to anyone not a historian. Even the cutting edge stuff today will have long since been wrapped up into some blackbox library that everyone will use without unerstanding it.
If you were correct, SO could never be anything more than some useless little dumpster where the same 5 people whine n about the quickest sort algorithm.
It's like giving a big sales force a financial incentive: you have to be careful because they'll just game it, relentlessly, all day long. They won't care about your corporate priorities -- just getting that incentive money.
On SO, people get "reputation points." Those "same 5 people" game that system like salespeople winning that prize. You answered a question? They don't want you as a competitor, so they downvote you. You don't like their answer? Too bad, you don't have enough reputation points to downvote them.
To pick another analogy: they're like high school cheerleaders voting on who can become one of them.
Yes that's a correct interpretation! In fact, I almost wrote something like "even though this is forbidden on SO, it's one of the most common kinds of conversations within and across teams in the workplace in my experience".
I also agree with pretty much everything else you said about how these discussions do happen in project-specific ways on mailing lists and such.
But I disagree that a generic version of this couldn't exist. (Maybe it can't anymore though, because everyone will try to do it solely with AI now because that's what's hot.) I think before the existence of Stack Overflow, you could have said all these same things about the kind of questions that appeared there. Prior to having a good place for getting factual answers from "poorly-known, pseudonymous strangers", it was necessary to get those answers from professors or or teammates or consultants or independent research, just like it still is for these more subjective questions.
I definitely agree that this is a more difficult genre than factual Q&A, and I don't begrudge SO their choice in what content to focus on, but I think it was a choice to go that route, not an inevitability.
I think this is normally an unreasonable ask (when we’re complaining about, like, cars, clearly that’s not in this site’s aggregate wheelhouse). But I mean this is a website about start-ups, full of techie web-devs complaining about a website that they all use.
ChatGPT Has entered the chat.
But nobody wants to duplicate the 80% just to solve the warts.