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Comment by VexXtreme | Hacker News Reader

I love how the question was locked because "it is not considered a good, on-topic question for this site". It's crazy. Unless an extremely specific concrete answer can be given, a question immediately gets killed. SO has turned into such a turd of a website.

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> Unless an extremely specific concrete answer can be given, a question immediately gets killed

Isn't that pretty much SO's explicit goal from day one? Complaining about SO not being a site for open discussion is like complaining that HN doesn't cover celebrity gossip.

Well it's not like that. If you tried submitting celebrity gossip here you wouldn't get much traction to put it mildly. On the other hand a lot of blocked questions on SO were very popular, people produced very valuable and detailed answers to them and they (and the questions) got a lot of upvotes. It's clearly a policy of blocking content the community is very interested in. Better analogy would be blocking politics at HN.

Not only that but SO in general is a rather bad source for programming advice - at least for beginners.

What you generally see on SO happening:

- Statements are being marked as "correct" even though they did not answer the question. It happens all the time that people as a Cocoa/OS X related question and get a iOS/UIKit answer which is then marked as correct. - Wrong answers are marked as correct all the time. - There are a couple of people who reformat my answers on SO all the time. They add emphasis, reformat my code/paragraphs etc. I don't know why they are doing it - probably to get a couple of points easily. This is so annoying. - It seems to me that collective intelligence sometimes does not produce the best answers... My friend and myself often begin our days by telling us about funny "answers" on SO, how we tried to argue but then got "overruled" by the majority even though the majority is wrong.

This is probably not the right place to rant about SO...

> They add emphasis, reformat my code/paragraphs etc.

That's the reason I left SO while still in my noob phase - they'd make really strange changes, such as adding typos or removing paragraph breaks. And it's obvious why, too: yes, they get points for it and their name is now right next to the answer. I also found they had generally insane amounts of karma. Yeah, I really don't get SO, for lots of reasons.

No, you don't get any points for making edits unless you're under 2000, and even then it has to be robo-approved blindly by three other users.

No matter why some users do this: It sucks. I mean I am the one giving the answer - I am the expert. It should be the expert who decides which term/sentence should be emphasised and which don't. I have nothing against correcting my bad english but when it comes to the content or formatting I don't want to be messed with it unless you want me to leave.

You forget your <oblig> tag. Its pretty obvious that the success of SO as a Q/A site is thanks to all the mechanisms in place to make it not another shitty forum. And its actual function as a Q/A site has far more value than a handful of cute lists.

> SO has turned into such a turd of a website.

Yeah, not imposing any kind of quality on questions definitely gave Quora a distinct unturdlike quality.

"What are some things that make you really sad?" - real world example from this week's Quora Weekly Digest.

http://www.quora.com/Sadness/What-are-some-things-that-make-...

Being required to register an account with Quora to view that makes me sad :(

Add ?share=1 to the end of the URL:

http://www.quora.com/Sadness/What-are-some-things-that-make-...

Just a note: Quora tailors the digests on a per-user basis. I'm not certain what the algorithms involved are, but I'd be willing to bet that they use information about what you and your friends spend time reading about in constructing it.

For example, my most recent weekly digest does not have "What are some things that make you really sad?", but does have "What are your favourite quotes from Harry Potter?" -- it often seems to include Harry Potter. Maybe not a very great question, but it does fit my social network's reading interests pretty snugly.

Speaking of which, is there a good alternative site for questions that are forbidden on SO?

There are other sites in the StackExchange network like Programmers and Code Review and some others for math and other things. But I'm not sure which site (SE or otherwise) would be the best for this particular topic.

Probably the CS stackexchange (http://cs.stackexchange.com/), or CStheory (http://cs.stackexchange.com/). Unfortunately, neither are anywhere near as popular as StackOverflow, so the chances of getting a good discussion are lower.

Yahoo answers.

I was shooting for 'brevity is the soul of wit' but fear I might have hit 'sarcasm is the lowest form of humour' and completely failed to get my point across, to wit, stackoverflow is designed for productive, informative, objective q&a, and alternatives that are less prescriptive, such as Yahoo answers, often end up as a source of unending crap.

Perhaps Quora?

Most times this comes up on HN, the SE team points to http://www.slant.co/

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