I think Stack Overflow has been getting worse and worse in recent years. Their community is outright hostile to active discussion. Only directly answerable questions are tolerated. Microsoft is (as always) a few years late to the party.
That's not to say Stack Overflow isn't without its problems, but it's more the hostility (something which we're trying to address[1]) that's the problem than the stance against active discussion.
[1]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/240839/the-new-new-...
However, I wish there was a place as fantastically focused on good discussion.
It does this:
http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/43179/how-can-i-r...
And it's officially supported:
https://blog.quora.com/Making-Sharing-Better
But you still need to sign up/in in to casually browse.
>And is this a bad practice?
It's pretty user hostile which is why I personally never used the site.
It's certainly staying on track, but it's worth noting that many track-related analogies are pejoratives that focus on the way that you can't steer vehicles that go on tracks. I suspect an inordinate amount of incoming traffic to Stack Exchange is for information that only Stack Exchange apparently thinks (not just by the closing, but by the choice of words in explaining the reason for the closing) is not particularly valuable. Methinks that's evidence that the community governance has become an echo chamber - otherwise one should think that the people running this company would have identified a gap in the market that they could be exploiting by now.
Closed question: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/2254/what-are...
Open Question: http://www.slant.co/topics/1150/~what-are-the-best-keyboards...
I removed that option, thanks for pointing that out. We have a long way to go on the moderation side of things.
Anything else you don't like/wish we had?
- it's a tad confusing that in a list with questions every question has 3 links. Two of them are the same (queston title itself 'See All Options') so I'd remove the latter as it doesn't really add anything useful imo.
- it's not clear to me what the 'Best' sorting option means
- a built-in way to link questions wouldn't be bad. For example there's a 'What are the best over-ear headphones under $200?' but also a 'What are the best over/on ear headphones around $300?' and in the latter the Sennheiser HD598 wins while it doesn't in the former. Something like a 'This is Related To' button which then pops up something similar to SO's duplicate question window.
- which reminds me: not sure if it can be done but eventually you'll probably need a way to remove or rather merge duplicates
- just figured that after adding a pro, I still have to vote for it. It would make sense to do this automatically?
>Only some minor points, for the rest I really like the interface and functionality:
Thanks :) Do you like what we did with the sources? (example: http://bit.ly/1va9Aj6. The favicons act like tabs if you didn't notice)
- it's a tad confusing that in a list with questions every question has 3 links. Two of them are the same (queston title itself 'See All Options') so I'd remove the latter as it doesn't really add anything useful imo.
Good point. I'll double check with the analytics in the morning and see if we can simplify.
- it's not clear to me what the 'Best' sorting option means
It's very opaque at the moment as I'm experimenting with various sorting algorithms almost weekly. Once I nail something down I'll work on the UI transparency.
- a built-in way to link questions wouldn't be bad. For example there's a 'What are the best over-ear headphones under $200?' but also a 'What are the best over/on ear headphones around $300?' and in the latter the Sennheiser HD598 wins while it doesn't in the former. Something like a 'This is Related To' button which then pops up something similar to SO's duplicate question window.
We're building this! Not only "this is related to" but the ability to easily sync/add pro's from one occurrence of an option to another. (Yep, I'm aware of the potential issues with changing context, it's not going to be an auto sync, more like "suggested pros/cons/sources")
- which reminds me: not sure if it can be done but eventually you'll probably need a way to remove or rather merge duplicates
This is part of the same flagging project I'm in the middle of.
- just figured that after adding a pro, I still have to vote for it. It would make sense to do this automatically?
I keep going back and forth on this. A lot of people add pros/cons to be good community members, not necessarily due to them personally agreeing with them. I think it will end up being a checkbox that's enabled by default.
Thanks so much for taking the time to help us out! I'll keep working away until you describe Slant as "amazing" instead of "ok" :)
(btw if you want to help us shape the product even further we have a meta.slant.co)
oh yes, that's nice. Bug (on FF) though: the favicon disappears after having clicked on a tabs.
Your effort/enthusiasm sounds good for the rest :]. I'll check meta.
But why are we talking about shoulds that will never get done when a really good answer is already here? You've got users actively providing good content and your response is to reprimand them and tell them that content should be over here instead? You know, we have these things called links on the world wide web. The internet isn't running out of them.
Sometimes it feels like the mods are building a really tidy card catalog at the expense of the books in the collection.
Reasons:
- Gets rid of the "This was closed because of trigger-happy
moderators failing to distinguish between 'similar' and
'identical'" problem by making that situation impossible.
- Improves answer discovery for users: If Google gets you
to almost, but not quite, the right question,
cross-referencing gets you the rest of the way.
- Improves answer discovery for users: Maybe the best answer
today isn't the same as the best answer 5 years ago.
- Improves gamification: Rewards are the lifeblood of
a site like Stack Overflow. A way of dealing with
duplicate questions that rewards users for
cross-referencing them is infinitely more in line with
SE's basic idea than one that punishes them with
public shaming.
- Reduces opportunity for petty bureaucrats to take root.
- Represents a more thoughtful, measured way of thinking
about software engineering. Many questions really can
have more than one correct answer, or the correct answer
can depend on subtle details. Which answer gets the
green check mark may have as much to do with the situation
of the asker than the quality of the answer.(Yes, I think SO looks like a bug tracker used as a discussion forum. They're certainly very close, including hostile project owners, WONTFIX's, etc.)
An alternative to shaming is that you could just accept this great new content that a volunteer is giving you.
Whenever a question gets a new post it gets bumped up to the top of the activity again - the same amount of possible attention as when an hour old question gets a new answer too.
What it really comes down to, though, is that when somebody asks a new question, I want to answer their new question, with all of its subtleties, in response to its particular phrasing, in its context.
Edit: In fact, I should admit that I usually only put the effort into answering old questions when it's something that has a lot of views. It's an indication that the question is linked somewhere prominent or is ranking well for some search terms. Those questions are worth putting the time in for. Most aren't.
Closing with a link to the original is cross-referencing in a way that does just the opposite: It decreases the vitality of the community by taking away opportunities for newcomers to take part in the gamification feature.
Let's frame the issue another way: What's Stack Overflow really for? Is it for people to ask questions and get answers? Or is it just a gamified Wikipedia?
SO has hurt the industry more than helped, I believe.
If a question gets asked more, maybe having more indexed landing pages for it for search engines will make it easier to find. It seems to be a popular question after all! Why limit yourself to just one answer?
Theoretically it's better to have all the answers in one place instead of scattered about, so that you can compare and contrast them. In practice it's far from ideal. Often a new question will generate a fresh take on an answer, and the diversity would be welcome.
If there's a subtle difference between the "duplicate" question and the older one, you can edit it to highlight the difference. Unfortunately that's hard to do, and you're unlikely to get the reopen votes even if you do a good job.
It's not the discussion Stack Overflow seeks to squelch; it's the noise. Unfortunately, discussion is one of the things that attracts noisy posts, so it's not exactly something that's actively encouraged.
I find voting systems tend to squelch most of the idiots on technically focused forums.
Stack Overflow was designed so that the next person with the same question could find the answer more easily. The next person could avoid having to go through Sun's Java forums, and CodeRanch, and /r/Java, and /r/JavaHelp and the comments of someone's blog post, and ... Too many places with too much tangental knowledge that wasn't well indexed. Despite the idiots and trolls having posts removed,
With Stack Overflow, one knows that if they ask a question there (admittedly, that fits within the focus and quality guidelines) they will get an answer - not someone commenting on another comment that is indistinguishable from an answer (comments vs answers). And if they search Stack Overflow, and find the question that has an answer - it is an answer. That is the key value proposition of Stack Overflow in that the next person who has the same question as you do can find it easily.
The people who tend to rise in a site that's organized that way are people who devote the most time to volunteering for the site. And volunteering for the site means spending a lot of time reeeeaallllyy focused on a glowing screen. Meaning people who naturally rise to the top in such a community are people who've chosen to devote large portions of their free time to content, not people.
And I can understand that. There exist a lot of places on the web to discuss technology (e.g., the one we’re commenting on now). Forums, IRC, blogs, and social media site have been around for a long time. They all sucked as a place to get answers. SO/SE built a better solution, and part of that was a strong anti-discussion bias. It worked, and there is now a great place on the internet to get answers instead of the endless morass of vBulletin sites. I can understand them not wanting to mess with a successful formula.
Eventually I gave up and to this day yet I am still unclear what is considered on/off-topic on P.SE.
Although I do agree I've noticed a change in community tone and tolerance that i don't like either; I think that's just the nature of it though, of any community. I don't know that it HAS to be that way, but that seems to be the default behavior.
SO is a great site for the first five years of a developer's career. After that, it's value wanes as the questions become less "how do I do this?" and more "how should I do this?"
The problem is, being a good site for both things would be difficult. There are plenty of places out there that cater to extended discussion within expert groups. Forums have been around in one form or other almost since the dawn of the web. The problem with these is that they're bad at one-shot Q&A (as the answer to a question might be pages after it was asked, or not there at all, or out of date, and it might take you a long time to work this out). This failing is exactly what Stack Overflow is about, and exactly why it's not good for deeper engineering questions.
I'm unfamiliar with the state of IE Web Dev support at the moment, is it currently a good forum for extended discussion?
That said, anyone wants to start a site oriented specifically towards discussion and discovering new solutions? Just need a workable idea on how to keep discussions from deteriorating into holy flame wars or getting philosophical.
If the sites were merged, this sense of community and ownership would be lost. This is why each site is separate, with a style somewhat picked/influenced by the site's community, with ads chosen by the community, and rules drawn up by the community. Stack Exchange is the sum of many small (and a few big) communities, not one big one.
The bottom line is that it's still a really important archive of software coding. I'd say 80+ percent of the issues I face in coding, someone has seen before - and therefore, a place like SO could have solved my issue with almost zero time wasted.
It's terrible.
I consider myself a power user and I already have one account that was "suspended" due to too many downvoted questions of mine.
Perhaps this is why the article mentions using SO for Web Developer support and not end-user support?