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Comment by enraged_camel | Hacker News Reader

With regards to opinions, I think SO's stance is that they want the site to be a medium to exchange mostly facts, and as little opinion as possible.

The problem with opinions is that, to someone who is not knowledgeable, it may not be immediately clear which opinion holds more weight. In turn, this may end up confusing the reader even more, or worse yet, it may mislead them. This is especially true because even when an opinion is correct, its correctness may be context-sensitive, and this may cause the reader to make the wrong decision based on the correct opinion.

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More often than not the voting is based on opinion in addition to fact. Often the top answer is not only correct but cleaner, more elegant or adheres to some aesthetic quality that's valued by those people voting up the answer.

In software there's many ways to achieve a goal, not a single unique factual answer, thus many answers are context-sensitive and not absolute truths. Sure we can determine to some extent the correctness of the answers, but many of them are contextual and based on factors that are based on opinion/experience.

The voting system in and of itself encourages users to infuse answers with opinion.

Have a read of

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-su...

and

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/01/the-trouble-with-popul...

If you only click one link here, click the second link.

The problem with opinions is that, to someone who is not knowledgeable, it may not be immediately clear which opinion holds more weight

If only there was some facility in Stack Overflow to let users add weight to an opinion, either by signaling agreement or explicitly rounding it out with comments--man, that'd be really useful, wouldn't it?

Opinions aren't something that are bad. Facts, especially to somebody that doesn't know what they don't know, are often less useful. If you punish opinions, you also discourage people from answering with extra background on a topic and creating useful discussion.

>>creating useful discussion

They have said several times that the site is not for discussions. I don't know what is so difficult to understand about that.

Nothing difficult about it--they are plainly wrong in throwing out discussions if they want to encourage answers.

Alright everyone, angersock has spoken. All hail angersock!

In what ways do you consider discussion as not helping with answers? Where does it fall short as an educational mechanism?

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