Comment by captainmuon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by captainmuon | Hacker News Reader

Expanded from a comment I left:

I think he is missing a camp, to which I'd count myself: 5. Those users who visit the site to solve their problems, and who like to help others.

Like 1 they want to have nice content on the site, but their number one criterion is "is it helpful (and civil)"? They don't care much about "is objective/it a good match for SE/constructive" and are frustrated by the wikipedia-like deletionism of 1. They would enjoy and benefit from even the "worst cardinal sin" kind of questions, like "What is the best node.js framework as of early 2014?". (The question would have many answers and would be a bit messy, but a novice could quickly gauge what frameworks there are, which ones are popular, and around which ones there is controversy.)

They dont't care much about 2 ("help vampires"), answer the questions if it is not much effort, otherwise ignore them. They don't like the term, and absolutely hate it when 1 accuses them of being one. It is incredibly rude when one closes your question for supposedly being "homework".

They don't care about 3 ("rep whores") either, and find the grudge of 1 against 3 silly. Let them have the rep they can get, if they're having fun and contributing useful content! Like 3, they enjoy getting rep (or XP), and try to unlock new features on the site, but isn't that the point of gamification?

Basically, these are the people who also care about the site and the community, but are less obsessive and deletionist (I'm looking for a less offensive word for anal-retentive...) than the vocal majority on SO and Wikipedia.

Agreed. There is a real problem that Stack Overflow comes out on top if you Google for most of the "best X framework/library/... for Y" questions.

Thus, many if not most of my encounters with SO are with closed, marked-as-offtopic questions that are still often the best resource to get an overview of the available alternatives.

I would love for someone to sift through the SO dataset for such questions and create a new, separate community catering to this specific need.

As is usually mentioned on the "Take my SO, please" discussions on HN, there is a site for that[1], which I usually forget about when I have that type of question.

[1] http://www.slant.co

Ah, thanks!

my default searches include -stackoverflow

> their number one criterion is "is it helpful (and civil)"? They don't care much about "is objective/it a good match for SE/constructive"

Then why don't they go to one of the million Q&A sites that don't have those restrictions? Oh, wait, is it perhaps because they don't have anywhere near as good content?

The very fact that out of SO's restrictions has emerged what is generally regarded as the best Q&A site that exists, might suggest it would be a bad idea to change it, simply because some people get upset that their questions suck.

There are other Q&A sites?! Quora and Yahoo answers has a different audience. Quora has an annoying sign-up policy and uses real names, and Yahoo made absolutely no effort in getting quality content. ExpertSexchange is dead and/or costs money, I don't know. I haven't found any others.

What I'm asking for is a site with the SE engine, where the most important criteria for posts are helpfulness and civility. Everything that is not helpful or not civil gets removed. People who are snarky and/or deletionist are not welcome there. If you apply these criteria, all the other "Q&A" sites fail.

It's not that yahoo and expertsexchange were full of "helpful and civil but not constructive answers", and failed because of that. They suffered from poorly-written, nonsensical posts.

Yes, there are a huge number of Q&A sites. You just listed three yourself. Others include things like coderanch, SDMB general questions, linuxquestions, etc etc

But all of them have flaws: of course they do. If you think your alternative SO will work so well, then set it up. I've no doubt you'll end up with massive pedantic arguments about what "helpfulness" means before you get beyond 10 users, but perhaps I'm wrong and you'll do to SO what it did to expertsexchange.

I just prefer that the existing SO doesn't get broken to the point of uselessness for the sake of experimentation with different posting criteria.

I'd have to agree with this, my most often route to stack overflow is from googling to solving my own problems, then occasionally I'll checkout my favourite tags to see if there's anything I can give back in return. On the rare occasion I ask a question on Stack Overflow, they're normally too specific and don't receive any comments/answers/upvotes/downvotes.

I'd count myself in that group, which is why I rarely use the site anymore. I'm in 4 because 1 forces me to be - every time I'm answering a nice question that doesn't follow "THE RULES", it's closed before I have chance.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com