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Comment by dionidium | Hacker News Reader

These bits are too silly for the internet, so we're going to move them over here to this other part of the internet.

Sigh. This deletionism accomplishes nothing.

There's a reason the frat house isn't in the middle of the classroom on most college campuses. Because it'd interfere with learning.

Frat row is, y'know, over there. Slightly off campus.

Not sure your analogy holds up as "frat row" is often right on the main green of many notable campuses.

Yes, but is it in the middle of the classroom?

Anyway, frat row was pretty far off main campus (sorry, "the lawn") where I went to college, at UVa.

If Stack Overflow is the classroom, frat row would be more like My Little Pony discussions. Questions like "What programming terms have you coined?" would be more for the breakroom or the cafeteria...you don't want them to get mixed in with the proper instructional material, but at the same time you don't put them all the way across a major thoroughfare.

I don't have a particularly strong opinion on this one way or another, but I lean towards the side of less strict moderation, and I think that very metaphor fits my reason why:

For me, one of the biggest advantages of the college classroom over the high school one was that digressions, side topics, and open-ended discussion occured far more frequently in my college classrooms than in my high school classrooms. Think of it as the difference between being taught to a test and just learning things. There still needs to be some moderation so that things stay focused overall, but often those side trails spark some really interesting, useful discussions. Education doesn't have to be narrow.

I think your analogy perfectly fits why I like strict moderation in SO. I hate hearing my CS classmates demonstrate their "intelligence" in the form of questions they already know the answer to, and I hate when the class gets sidetracked by hypothetical situations that will never pertain to me. I want to learn things and move on to the next class. Same with SO: I want my answer so I can get back to the project at hand.

Part of the beauty of SO compared to an actual classroom is that the more open-ended discussion going on in a different question wouldn't keep your question from getting its straightforward answer. It would be read just by the people who found it interesting, instead of taking up shared class time.

I don't think the jargon question example from the article here is well suited for even a looser SO, as it's more entertainment than education, but there are lots of productive questions that don't have black and white answers that I've still enjoyed seeing SO discuss.

"Same with SO: I want my answer so I can get back to the project at hand."

The problem there is, where does the motivation for people to provide you with "your answer" come from?

Do you really think there's pool of people out there who think "Maybe RegEx has a problem at work today, I'll just go check StackOverflow to see if I can answer todays question for him."?

Or do you think it's more likely there are a bunch of people interested in various coding topics, who enjoy discussing problems and solutions? How long do you supposed that second group of people will hang around if "strict moderation" starts deleting any "interesting discussion", because questioners are complaining "I just want my damned answer!"?

Sure, StackOverflow reputation points are one source of motivation, but if I had the choice between getting my questions answered by people wishing to maximise their StackOverflow reputation, and getting my questions discussed by people who're interested and engaged experts in the field - I'd join the second discussion every time.

You're far exaggerating the scope of my comment, and you somehow boiled it down to a false dichotomy of "Do you want people motivated by points, or people who are experts?"

Discussions over the best solutions happen frequently on SO. Poor solutions are criticized, good solutions are expanded upon.

> The problem there is, where does the motivation for people to provide you with "your answer" come from?

Easy. Some people just love to educate. I love to educate - I write tutorials frequently. Some people use SO to educate, while others use forums.

Discussion is the operative word. We only tolerate the minimum amount of discussion necessary to generate a better question and better answers (ideally in the form of edits, not an endless stream of back and forth bickering that nobody will ever read), and no more.

If you're looking for a system that is designed to solicit discussion, Stack Exchange is not that. Not by a long shot. It's kind of the ... opposite of that.

Hi Jeff! I really don't understand your posts regarding stack exchange here. Now and in many previous threads, you defend stack exchange by explaining the model, as if we didn't understand it. Everyone here complaining about the stack exchange network understands the model perfectly. We don't buy it! We don't like it! We don't believe in it. We complain about it because we believe stack exchange would be a better place if things were done differently. Reiterating the same old story over and over again accomplishes nothing.

Speak for yourself.

hmm then wouldn't it make sense to create a new stack-exchange site just for programming discussion and these type of questions that don't qualify for stack-overflow and move them there? stack-discussions or something?

That way there would be a place for people to have these discussions while keeping it separate from stack-overflow?

Oh boy Jeff, I love your work, but you are so way off beam with this one. The over zealous moderation of StackOverflow is insane and it's killing the site. Seriously. If the community votes up questions and/or the answers to those questions, then that is all the indication you need that the material has real value and should not be shut down. You've just proved it yourself. There's a ton of educational value in the material you've reposted. The fact that there's comedic and entertainment value also is just a lovely bonus. And you think deleting this is the right thing to do ? Really ? Please rethink this before it's too late.

I disagree. Seeing that someone uses "banana banana banana" as a comment placeholder, or that they refer to clueless programmers as "Jimmy"... is not illuminating my day to day work at all.

Entertaining? Sure.

I guess it depends on the use case. I never "hang out" on StackOverflow (though maybe I should). I find it through Google, so I never see the non-sequitur posts. I had no idea that content like that even existed there. Knowing that you guys have posts like that is so great for the brand.

No, but seeing that they take the time to say, 'what would someone not fammilar with this do?' is very useful. The question of new jargon could be viewed as what novel things do you do that are so common for you, but uncommon for most people, that you had to create your own word.

I'm with you on this one, please keep at it. How many times have you seen a (for want of a better phrase) Reddit-esque comment on HN that contributed nothing, had plenty of upvotes, and was then followed up with "This isn't how we do things on HN" comments? There is nothing wrong at all with wanting to keep your site on-topic and /focused/.

Over where? Seriously, I can't find the frat house.

Is there a sanctioned place for people to post this sort of meta-programmer stuff? You find little scraps of it from time to time, is there a stack exchange site that can be used for fun stuff?

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/?

Who hate being labelled a dumping ground for offtopic or moderated SO questions.

yeikes.. i was not sure.

But these kinds of posts don't interfere with learning.

I actually learnt a bunch from those jargon examples - I'll certainly start using some of them at work. Jargon exists to make communication more efficient - I just learned a bunch of new ways to communicate about my craft.

What we are complaining about is the killing of discussion that promotes learning.

You have to ignore your users sometimes, and maybe this is one of those times. But if you are getting a consistent message from your users that they're unhappy, I hope you're at least listening.

Characterizing the people who want more reasonable^H^H^H^H^H lenient moderation on SO as wanting a frat house atmosphere makes me think you're not really listening.

I think the real question is why hide things to people unless they have a certain reputation. I understand locking a question, but I don't understand making a question with answers inaccessible. Does this serve some purpose I'm unaware of?

10k+ users have the possibility to undelete questions. In order to do that they would have to be able to see them first.

True, but that still doesn't answer the question of why it's not visible in the first place.

Not if a moderator locked and deleted it - a 10k user can then only view the question and vote to re-open it. Sometimes the moderators act extra viciously by editing each answer before deleting the answers as well. That way the user can't recover their own answers in order.

Sample: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/14827/typical...

The highest upvoted user got 122 points for that question.

Suppose you we're in charge of a q&a site whose quality was going downhill. How would you go about fixing it if not for locking and deleting questions?

I don't think there's any evidence that these extremely popular, "fun" questions have any effect on the day-to-day programming queries submitted to StackOverflow. I haven't seen any presented.

Some people have an intuition that the presence of these historical bits contributes to a reduction in quality. I think that intuition is mistaken. Who knows who is right or even if that's a meaningful thing to ask. We're just discussing preferences.

/r/programming should be enough of a cautionary note.

The mob is always happy to stoop to lower levels of discourse. It cannot be trusted to govern itself as a site grows. And most of the Internet is more than willing to cater to this out of fear of losing visitors. I say bravo. Let the 'gregarious' go elsewhere and live in the land of forum signatures, endless bike shedding, and editor wars once again.

FYI, I heartily agree, and accidentally fat-fingered the down arrow on my phone. Sorry about that.

Yeah, because edit wars are surely better than editor wars, and what we're doing now (with Jeff here!) is not bikeshedding.

The only questions on SO are the trivial questions that could be answered by reading some documentation. If questions are broad or open ended, the value lies in the discussion, not in any particular answer. I also found that many accepted answers are blatantly wrong. For me, SO has no value. /r/programming doesn't have any value either, but that doesn't make SO better.

SO wishes to remain a Q&A site, rather than a discussion site. They're intentionally limiting its scope. This is a very good thing.

There is a huge opportunity for a quality, ruthlessly moderated programming-centric discussion site. I'd argue that an aggregator is suboptimal over the long term due to the economic structure of the Internet favoring eyeballs over quality content.

I do agree that SO quality sucks at times, though.

So what would you do instead? Ignoring stack overflow (which I think is doing fine). How do you improve a community who's quality is declining? Do you just let it run its course for better or worse?

I really think moderation is the best choice.

Personally, I think that unless you foster a community that'll self-police the quality, nothing else those "in charge" can do will help much in the long term.

I deny the charge that it was "going downhill" before all the deletions started. If the "quality" is declining, then it is due to the vast quantities of new questions being asked, and the inability of regular users to find questions that they can answer.

Yogi Berra described the situation as "Nobody goes there anymore. Its too crowded".

It pretty much wrote a blogpost

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