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Comment by sergiotapia | Hacker News Reader

I'm still kind of pissed off that useful questions are closed on Stackoverflow because it doesn't 'fit the Q&A style of the site.'

http://i.imgur.com/VcqqSN9.jpg

You see questions with 400 upvotes closed by some user who has been on the site for 6 months and is autistic about earning internet points.

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If it doesn't fit what the site is structured for, why should it stick around? Aren't there plenty of other sites that can host it? Or is Stack Overflow the only place to host code snips?

Do you have any example 400+ upvoted questions you can point to that aren't of the type "everybody bring out all the snippets you've been saving, this time we're putting on a show"?

It's not about hosting code snips or even nice Markdown css styling. It's about have your question reach the most amount of knowledgable people. Stackoverflow is the best place for that, regardless of their [stupid] closing policies.

But the attention of the community is still finite. It's hard enough to get a moderately difficult question answered already, without opening the floodgates to lower-quality, easier-answered material. Opinion-based questions can be asked in reddit or something, where the time would not otherwise be more usefully spent.

If it doesn't fit what the site is structured for

It's not complicated: questions and answers. This is common in sitebuilding though: "so unique we are." Well, at the end of the day it's just posts and comments, so quit milkin' it. A question that receives answers fits, I don't know how you could say otherwise.

However, this is all just a nice example of NIH Syndrome on SO's part, since these are lessons that have been learned by anybody who's hung out in a large IRC channel with kick/ban bots and arrogant ops, as well as being practiced on a web level for over 10 years by the likes of Metafilter.

It also reads to me like they want to have their cake and eat it too. They want the community part without the humanity, since people's irrelevancies in questions fall into more than the 6 (or however many) preset reasons for closure. This may be an incontrovertible attribute of SO: their "model" (as criticized above) does not allow for the community, "topical identity" if you will, they are seeking to impose themselves,.

> A question that receives answers fits, I don't know how you could say otherwise.

Yeah, if you're trying to re-create Yahoo! Answers.

What do you mean?

What I believe was meant is that the attribute of having an answer is not a sufficient reason to keep a question from being closed.

I think you/they missed my second paragraph, then. I'm not arguing against the concept of moderation, but simply that this is well-trod territory.

Nothing in your second paragraph refutes the fact that the Stack Exchange network of sites was never meant to be a repository for all answerable questions.

Where did I say that it was?

> A question that receives answers fits [in Stack Overflow], I don't know how you could say otherwise.

is autistic about earning internet points

You may not realize it, but language like this is not only grammatically incorrect (you can't be autistic about something), but could be pretty offensive to people who are either autistic or have a friend or family member who is.

Why use a neural development disorder as a derogatory term?

> Why use a neural development disorder as a derogatory term?

Because it's derogatory to accuse someone of disordered neural development.

Then those people can be offended, it's their right, no? I have a cousin who is retarded but I don't wince every time someone says or writes the word.

I didn't say autistic as an insult to those people but as a way to colorfully describe behaviour that is typical of people with autism.

There have been numerous of such stackoverflow posts submitted here, so one might argue: there's a void.

Would be wonderful to see a complementary service to stackexchange's (with the HN community that might be a possible venture? ;)), but in most of the cases I can recall, Quora is just that. Quora has the same "noise" problems as stackoverflow, what with "which ipod is best? lol", but for genuinely interesting questions, meta or opinionbased, Quora is the place I most often see that.

I wish those questions would be moved to the relevant StackExchange site. Often times it's just a case of misplaced question, where it might fit better in superuser or it. It should be moved in those cases.

Stack Overflow has had problems in the past where unclear or otherwise low-quality questions get migrated to sites where they don't really belong. If a question is clear and you know for sure where it belongs, you can flag it for a moderator to migrate.

This is a feature of the closing process on StackOverflow -- don't use the other SE sites as much.

You pick "off-topic" and is asks if it would be "on-topic" somewhere else and offers some suggestions.

For that matter, a question could be connected to multiple SE sites.

I sincerely wish there were better ways of expressing ideas than memegenerated images that seems to be infecting almost every forum I read. Take a look at http://reddit.com/r/gaming All the posts are image macros or comics. One might think that only images were allowed there, but memes seem to be honey to garner upvotes and have killed all other content on that particular subreddit.

That's going to happen on any popular subreddit that allows memes. This comment explains how it happens:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Psychonaut/comments/o1zjo/ban_memes_...

That comment appears to be highly insightful and very relevant to the topic being discussed here. Low effort content eventually displaces high effort content in high traffic websites. I have seen this in every community I have been part of, I have spent the last 10 years on Slashdot, 7 years on Reddit and 4 years on HN and that comment is spot on.

I can only pray that SO doesn't fall victim to it too and I support the admins in restricting content as long as it is subject to oversight and is not overdone.

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