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Comment by Andaith | Hacker News Reader

I recently read on HN about how Stack Overflow is being taken over by the editors and that questions are being closed all too often. Is this an example of that?

"this might cause debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion." is a bad set of reasons to close a question. Surely that's the desired result? If people start behaving like children, close the question, but until then, let the discussion grow...

I think the question is relevant for programmers though. I'd be leery of joining a company with such high turnover.

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It's really the most bizarre thing. They built a site with affordances for discussion (although the mods might call them attractive nuisances). It looks every bit like a discussion site.

The users clearly want to have discussions, and not just factual Q&A.

And yet when you use these affordances to engage with like minded people, you get shut down. It's become a game with myself when I go to an SO page to guess whether it's been shut down, and the result is often a derisive mental "yup."

And for the record, I prefer a rich discussion to an inferior imitation of wikipedia.

The most confusing thing for me, is that this _isn't_ Stack Overflow - it's Programmers. While SO is meant to have objectively correct answers, and that's why they are so quick to close threads, Programmers is meant to be more open and allow more general questions.

Yep. There was a question on Programmers that was something like "What is the good/bad decision you made in your mid-20s about your career". There were a ton of great answers, and I was so proud of my heavily upvoted answer that I linked it on my website. Only to get a note a couple of months later that the link was 404ing.

I looked, and guess what: Not only did the mods close it out of some insane sense of tidiness, and not only did they hide it from normal viewing; they apparently deleted it entirely. All our writing, all the good comments, all the voting: gone forever, without warning or apparent recourse.

So fuck them and their petty, arrogant bureaucracy. I will never write an answer for them again.

There was a discussion on stackexchange about Java books or such that was always linked to in case of duplicate questions. Then it got entirely deleted and so all the links to it from dupes got worthless too - and yet the dupes remained and still point to the 404 page.

Mods are getting too trigger happy? In fairness if you give random "trusted" strangers power to delete anything they deem inappropriate they will start abusing their power, that's in human nature.

But to them they're not abusing it, they're just interpreting the rules very literally and strictly.

The problem is that any gameified system, like a karma or reputation system, attracts people good at interpreting rules strictly and finding efficient ways to exploit them. So you're actually selecting for literalist rules lawyers.

So true.

That's why I consider this the most brilliant bit of Wikipedia's policies: "If a rule prevents you from improving Wikipedia, ignore it." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ignore_all_rules

There's a great discussion of that here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_%22Ignore_all_ru...

Last time this blew up on HN, some of the principals of SO turned up here, as did a bunch of mods. They were mostly unable to discuss the issues in terms of serving the audience; they just kept falling back on The Rules. An attitude, I'm sure, which quickly drove off anybody with common sense. So now they have achieved glorious groupthink: everybody they normally talk to agrees with them about The Rules.

Apart from giving them a feel of a power, what does the fact of closing a thread (whether legitimately or not) give to the mods? Do they have some karma incentive to do so?

There's no incentive in closing a question, other than helping the site reach it's goals, and the primary goal for any Stack Exchange site is useful, not interesting or popular (not that they are mutually exclusive, but also not to be confused).

This specific question was turning into crap fast, with answers like "Sounds like your friend is a bit of a dick. Noone wants to work for him." (since deleted). Closing it only prevents further answers, as it was obvious they were deteriorating. Still, the closure and any closure, is reversible, people always have the choice to vote to re-open if they feel the closure wasn't justified.

Maybe someone has mirror it?

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

That would be great. If somebody has old mirrors, please let me know or mention it here.

It would be pretty simple to mirror selected articles.

For example: If you're worried a page will disappear, go to foo.com and paste the address. If it does disappear, you can go back to foo.com and retrieve the content, link to foo.com instead etc..

Who exactly does closing questions benefit? I can't remember the last time I went to stackoverflow to search for an answer. I always find the pages through a google search. Google does a great job of finding me relevant material on stackoverflow and the voting mechanisms on stackoverflow do a great job of letting me know which content the community value.

In the early days of stackoverflow I seem to recall they had a policy of keeping similar or even duplicate questions. The reasoning was that the extra interpretations of the same question made it easier to find them in a google search. What they have now seems entirely the opposite, content being removed to the point where it doesn't exist in any form. I don't really care if someone thinks a piece of content is on topic or relevant, if it isn't relevant to me I just won't look at it.

Yeah, I cannot recollect getting a useful answer there. Google rarely links to it; the links are often questions without answers (I searched for my question terms after all, not knowing the answer).

And why delete anything? Surely they are not running out of space. I'll volunteer $100 so they can buy another Terabyte to store those deleted discussions.

My pet theory is that it's something I've come to think of as the "WELL effect". Named for the famous online community which I was a member of for approximately one month in the early 2000s, and which is still talking itself up for how vibrant it was 20 years ago but hasn't been vibrant for any time during this century.

It works like this: The oldsters perceive that they enjoy a certain elite status by virtue of how long they've been there, and begin to think of themselves as the "keepers" of the community. They also develop a measure of contempt for newbies, perhaps because they (being new) want to talk about things that the oldsters have had a chance to discuss many times before. And perhaps because they (being new) represent a slightly different culture, which triggers stereotypical "kids these days" instincts.

So they begin taking measures to protect the site from junior members. A positive spin is put on it by calling it "upholding community standards", but it would be just as fair to negatively characterize it as "telling those damn kids to get off my lawn." I suppose which one you think it is depends on whether you're the one yelling or being yelled at.

Either way, the terminal point is that everyone has gone to have fun somewhere else, essentially because that's precisely what they had been told to do, and all that's left is a hoary old collection of ossified cucumbers fondly remembering how much fun they used to have and wondering where the magic went.

This is a brilliant explanation of the effect. Does anybody know of a forum that has some structure that will keep that from happening?

When I joined WELL they had introduced forums that were only intended for people who joined during a specific calendar year. Presumably it was an attempt to try and counteract the effect somewhat. Personally, it just made me feel ghettoized.

At an old-fashioned web forum I used to run we toyed with the idea of closing down and archiving old threads after they reached a certain age. The idea was to try and codify our opinion that old conversations might be worth preserving for posterity, but they aren't a substitute for new conversations and shouldn't be used as an excuse to stifle them. Never actually got around to implementing it, though.

Honestly, I have no idea what programmers.stackexchange.com is for.

When I found out about it, I thought it could be interesting, so I made a habit of visiting a few times a week to see what it was all about.

I stopped visiting after a few weeks because nobody knows what the point is. 90% of the interesting questions are closed as off-topic, closed because they "belong on Stack Overflow", or are closed because the answers are debatable.

It's kind of silly, really.

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/faq

It's not 'anything goes', however.

This is a close call, but I agree with the closing in that the post conflicted with the rules. It's possible it could have been worded better to avoid being closed, but even general employee retention strategies don't belong on that site.

The problem isn't that they don't allow discussion, it's that the range of topics allowed is so narrow. There are many (I've lost count) StackExchange sites, and each one has a very narrow, well-defined (but, importantly, poorly-communicated) breadth of allowable topics. And, if you get the wrong bucket it's closed and that's that.

It was closed at "not constructive", which is obviously thought untrue by the hundreds of people who engaged with it. So I can't agree with the specific closing.

It is a mystery to me why a question that yields some answers that are directly about engineers and some that could apply more widely could be considered off topic. One answer explicitly cites the Joel Test. Another specifically discussed the economics of software development, and why the management behavior is pathological specifically for engineering organizations. How much more on topic does one need to be?

Hundreds of people engaging in a question is actually a very good hint that it's Not Constructive (just a hint though). Remember, Programmers and every other Stack Exchange site are about questions and answers, not discussions.

We have deeply different ideas of what constructive means.

"There are many (I've lost count) StackExchange sites"

To me there's only one, and the answer pages sometimes look different when I get sent in from DDG or Google.

My bad, I guess.

/ users clearly want to have discussions, and not just factual Q&A.

Equally, Quora users clearly crave questions and discussion, but Quora moderation/admins police grammar, content and direction so close people can't type free.

It feels hard to think. It feels hard to question.

Remember kids fight to feel free and talk free, in grown-up good-rooms of adults saying we need talk more appropriate and legal?

Little mind is given to little minds, and big minds in hiding.

What do you do, if someone else networked high tells you to change your mind, online?

Feels really hard typing free thoughts, stacked with questionable questions questioning questions.

I remember asking once what should I do with my career, provided that I somehow feel that I reached the end of it.

Guess what happened to that topic. Likely quora was more open-minded in that regard (although not necessarily heaps more helpful, but I digress).

> I'd be leery of joining a company with such high turnover.

But how do you find out if turnover is high? Just ask, I suppose, but a manager is going to try to downplay it, since he's selling the company to you. Hit or miss whether workers will be truthful about it, between wanting to be team players and not telling tales out of school.

I'm leaving a place with high turnover now. I had no idea. Although I could have entertained some suspicion when my agency told me how much they love this place; churn is lucrative for some people.

> "Just ask, I suppose, but a manager is going to try to downplay it"

And it will be fairly evident when he does. A place with low turnover would be one where the manager can confidently look you in the eye and declare he has low turnover.

It is rare for hiring managers to be effective bald-faced liars (HR on the other hand suffers from no such weakness), so they will try to dodge the question instead. Dodgy hiring managers is pretty much the signal for "run for the hills".

But how do you find out if turnover is high?

It would be interesting if you could measure this with LinkedIn - as in looking at the profiles of all developers who worked for company X and determine how long they stayed on average. Of course it would rely on people actively updating their profiles. But if you could it would be interesting to see how much high turnover at a company correlated with bad reviews for said company on sites like Glassdoor.

Don't ask directly about turnover. Ask about average time people stay there. (Depending on your formulation of the question, you give them an opportunity to brag about how much they are growing and thus having new-ish people.)

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