Hacker News Reader

OT: Love your style of writing - I am a fan.

Back On Topic:

1. With the examples you gave I can see there are going to be issues, however I have seen many, more focused examples with sometimes a very large number of upvotes, get closed. Typically a question along these lines will be closed - "What is the best book to learn C++ if I already know Java?" In this case there is no correct answer and the answers will be completely opinion based, but there are still many good answers (and books) that will be relevant.

2. I agree with you that such a broad based question should be closed but even more focused questions are also closed, very similar to the one I used above where there can be quite a few valid - and completely different opinions.

I realise that it is a balancing act and for sure you are moving in the right direction. I am hoping that opinion based questions/answers will be given more leeway going forward.

I disagree about "not good for anybody". Reading opinions of experts even on topics like" PHP or Ruby" could be very educational. It's a way of sharing experience. If you face decisions about which technology to choose you want to soak that. Asking specific questions is not enough - the thing about experience is that people who have it encountered problems you often can't think of at the beginning of the way. What's the problem with adding "subjective" tag and allow filtering so people who don't want to see opinion based discussion won't ever encounter it while allowing others to enjoy it and learn from it ?

I agree with top comment (as of now) that SO stance on it is arrogant and display lack of respect for great community. I also don't like that SO staff attribute their success to stance on this issue. Yes SO is very successful and by far the best place to learn/seek help the reasons are plenty: great interface, very fast, great search, great reputation system, a bit of luck as well. It doesn't mean every decision you took contributed to your success. Do you really think that closing popular/upvoted questions based on some arbitrary policy thus stopping discussion for the sake of stopping it (it's not as it clutters the site or anything) makes anybody more happy about the site ?

I still often search for most popular SO questions in history, many of them closed and containing a lot of great information. It's sad to think that a lot more was lost due to overeager closing. Forunately it was better at the beginning so some of those discussions developed a bit before being shut down.

For example: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1218390/what-is-your-most... Is great read for someone starting with VIM,it got people excited, many upvoted and many participated. Do you really think closing it contribute to quality of the site ? Another example: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9033/hidden-features-of-c So many posts like the most upvoted answer in first and OP in 2nd (after edits) weren't written because of your policy. It's just sad :(

> never allowing questions with lots of upvotes to be closed

Don't make it never, just raise the threshold?

Make it require X moderators to agree before it can be closed.

Make it so that opinion answers don't get rep.

Make it so the questions are put on hold and go to meta stack overflow.

(I don't acctually use stack overflow; apologies if you already do that.)

The closing of popular questions by a mod on a drunken power-hungry semantics trip is to the exclusion of the community is very off-putting for the regular members of the community who do the majority of the answering.

And who determines which answer is an "opinion answer"? Any attempt at labeling answers as "opinion answers" via machine learning will inevitably have false positives.

> The problem with never allowing questions with lots of upvotes to be closed is twofold:

You could always make the number of moderators required to close a topic increase as the topic rises in popularity.

A +4 question might need 2 moderators to close but a +2000 question might need 12 moderators to close.

I'll flat-out disagree with you about the opinion-based questions.

We're in a young-enough industry and practice that opinions are really the coin of the realm--there is not the same standard accept methodology you'd see in, say, mechanical engineering.

To pretend that opinions aren't somehow a useful component of learning here is absurd--all the more so because beginners need opinions to start. Once they learn more, once they get exposed to other ideas, then they can form their own opinions. But to pretend that this happens in a vacuum is quite wrong.

Your example "Which is better, Ruby or PHP?" is exactly where opinions, properly backed-up, are useful: a good answer will say "Well, Ruby has these great metaprogramming features, but PHP has a much larger developer pool, and so on". Bad answers will of course just be "ruby is teh 1337 n00b". If only there was some kind of way that Stack Overflow let users filter good answers from bad answers...

At the end of the day, opinions and their debate are what are most useful to a beginner, especially when they don't know what questions to ask or issues to consider. The big failing right now is that you aren't trusting your community enough to filter out the garbage.

No one is saying that opinions aren't important. What they're saying is that their place isn't StackOverflow. Why do people find this so hard to understand? Just because SO/SE is big doesn't obligate them to become big enough to encompass all the useful questions in their domain. Let them do their thing.

Well, when your site is titled "Stack Overflow is a question and answer site for professional and enthusiast programmers.", people, professional and hobbyists alike, tend to think they can questions. (The nerve of those people...)

Q&A and discussions are not the same.

> No one is saying that opinions aren't important. What they're saying is that their place isn't StackOverflow

And that's where you wrong, they would fit perfectly if you made an effort to accommodate them instead of being dogmatic about them.

If SO decides that SO isn't the place for opinions, then they're right. It's their site. I don't see why this is such a difficult concept.

It's not a difficult concept, it's just a stupid viewpoint.

Just because they can legally ignore user feedback doesn't mean that they should.

If it's such a stupid viewpoint, then why aren't they being ousted by Q&A sites that don't hold that viewpoint? It's not like this is something they haven't heard before - people have been making the same complaint since day 1.

Again: if you want to start your own Q&A site that invites discussions, then feel free. No one will stop you.

I say the following in all seriousness and with no sarcasm: Feel free to create your own Q&A site that invites discussion. If it becomes more useful than Quora or Yahoo! Answers, please let me know.

It's a site with questions and answers.

In our field, again, there are a great many questions which seem to only be matters of opinion--and that's okay! That's fine! That's how people work, and to pretend otherwise is foolish.

Many architectural decisions in computing are heuristic, right? Many solutions are the result of opinion, because nearly everybody outside of hard-core mathematicians and computer scientists lacks the language to even describe their problems in such a way as to avoid opinion. Even the folks that do have that ability are likely working on a problem where the assumptions are incomplete and ill-defined anyway.

This is a faulty binning of questions into "is question about opinion" and "is question that is not matter of opinion". I posit that the former bin is quite useful and shouldn't be worked against.

You're still fighting a strawman. No one is pretending anything. Let me say it one more time: SO/SE is not obligated to accommodate all useful questions in their domain. They made their choice. Let them do their thing. But stop whining. Just stop.

In the "but, questions and answers!" vein, it's the "answer" part that's important. I believe they've come out and said they only want to handle questions that have one single answer, in full knowledge there are many questions that don't fit in that mold.

Architectural decisions are a red herring: they don't want to answer heuristic-driven architecture questions. That's not in their scope.

No one's saying those questions aren't useful. They're only saying that SO is not the place for them. This is not complicated. As a programmer, avoiding feature creep is something you almost certainly already understand. It's basically the same.

I hate this answer, and it crops up in many places in this discussion and on SO/SE. What you are basically saying is "it's their game and you can follow these rules or go away". Sure, it's their game... and it's a shame many of the best players hang around their playground, otherwise I would depart in a split second. And the moment another alternative shows up, I will. Until then I will just take what I can and give back... well, less than I would if the rules were more sensible. And I will whine. :)

Disclosure: they have closed a few of my answers that I actually went to some length to make good - but apparently "which library" type of questions are not appropriate for a programming Q&A site?!? Go figure.

> "it's their game and you can follow these rules or go away"

Exactly.

Also, answers (by themselves) cannot be closed, only questions can be closed.

> I'll flat-out disagree with you about the opinion-based questions.

There's nothing stopping you from setting up your own opinion-only SE clone.

C'mon. I'm launching a product soon and am very hard-pressed for spare cycles for project development.

Your observation is a perfect example of a fact which is not an answer.

Stack Exchange is not going to provide you with what you want. You can ask 'til you're blue in the face, but they're pretty clear about what they do and don't want.

So why keep asking?

You'll get better results creating it yourself, or persuading someone else to create it.

>"Which is better, Ruby or PHP?"

Note that this would fit perfectly in the "too broad" reason for closing.

Nuclear key the option. If X votes then X number of moderators have to agree before its closed.