Hacker News Reader

Comment by esafak | Hacker News Reader

I think it's a fundamentally flawed premise of the site: that answers ought to be self-contained and all else is noise. No debate, no commentary. That's why they reject opinion-based questions. But not all things in life are cut and dried. I get it, though; subjectivity makes it difficult to promote quality answers.

View on HN

I get the theory, but I've seen the effects of that decision.

The pre-objectivity police StackOverflow was sooo much more useful (2010ish). 85% of the top 1000 questions had incredibly well written and insightful answers to subjective questions. Things like "How do I become a better software engineer?" which is far more useful than "How can I rename a local Git branch?"

For a time these bled out into other smaller stack exchange communities, but many eventually fell to the objectivity police.

I learned so much as a young dev in 2009 when I first used Stackoverflow. Experts poured their hearts out and shared so much. Now the busybodies are there to police everything and what are you left with... a dead site with nothing but hall monitors! What a shame for the next generation of developers.

Yeah, they pretty much explicitly disclaim those questions that don't have cut and dried answers. But I think that means they never should have dipped into topics like "workplace", which has vanishingly few cut and dried topics.

On these sites the idea is that answers belong in the top-level answer posts where they can be voted up and down for the purpose of sorting the competing ideas and forms of responses to the primary question post. Criticisms should remain in the comments until they are integrated and addressed in the answers, at which point they are obsolete and can be removed. Therefore chats belong elsewhere, and are helpfully moved into chat rooms, which you can click through to and read if you're interested.

That's, uh, not quite what I was talking about.

Yup, that might work for stackoverflow, or the math stackexchange, but not for 99% of the other sites under the umbrella.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com