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Comment by jordanpg | Hacker News Reader

There is an ongoing religious war among avid SO users (don't know about the rest of SE) about what kinds of questions should be allowed.

Roughly, there are two camps. Those who say that any well-formed, non-dup question of interest should be let in and those who think it's a stop of last-resort after checking all conceivable documentation and scouring the internet.

I believe the latter viewpoint is pretty run-of-the-mill developer machismo, and it makes me chuckle every time the first google hit directs me to a SO post with 1000 upvotes that has been closed as "off-topic".

It seems self-evident to me that in the year 2015, the internet has allowed me to make more valuable use of my time quickly searching for answers rather than scouring documentation. Docs have a time and a place, but are not needed for quick dips into the myriad techs you need to use to write a typical app these days.

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We simply touch too many different code platforms to RTFM/RTFD on everything.

Just today I have probably worked with at least 20 code libraries with their own documentation, and most of those libraries will be replaced within 3 years from now.

I think reading the documentation for everything that a webdev works with now could be a full time job in itself.

Agreed. In fact, there was a HN thread a while back about this very topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4494016

It's unbelievably annoying when this happens. I have a number of bookmarks to incredibly insightful posts, whose usefulness has been corroborated by literally hundreds of people...all closed because they are deemed "off-topic" or some such by an admin.

My theory is that SO was essentially "done" years ago. But people are still on staff and needed something to do. Thus, unrelenting navel gazing ensued.

I think the thing missing in this is all the low-quality questions that end up getting closed due to lack of solvability. One of the objectives of SO's rules is to avoid flame wars and ambiguous answers.

Imagine the question : "What is the best templating engine to use for Django?" This question doesn't have an answer, because it's so dependent on use case (even that statement is controversial). So if it's on SO and not closed, you'll get a bunch of answers that are contradictory, and people flaming in the comments.

I think the main objective for the SO team is to have people land on the site and _have their answer right there_. By removing possibilities of these off-topic questions, you're less likely to land on answers that help your specific thing.

End result is "when I land on SO I get an answer every time" instead of "when I land on SO sometimes I get a flame war". For branding, at least, I think it works in their favor to close those questions

What actually happens is there's a bunch of decent answers, and then it gets closed, which somehow kind of leads to the best of both worlds, but leaves a bitter taste in a bunch of people's mouths -"that was really useful why close it" answers.

e.g. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/257712/best-web-applicati...

or less seriously:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/184618/what-is-the-best-c...

One of the problems is however carefully you craft your question somebody who should never been admin will find a way to flag it. Ask about a list of common ways/libraries/etc and boom - ban! Don't need to ask which is best (which could plausibly start a flamewar), just asking a smart question is enough. (And yes, I agree that people karma-farming is annoying, but could they please use community wiki or something instead of closing good questions with interesting questions?)

Also, smart, general questions are not the only questions to be closed: I got one closed on networking because the problem was between two company networks, not inside. There is an obvious reason for a rule about company networks and that is to keep hone networking out, not because we need another subsection for WANs, no?

Most SO moderators are unpaid volunteers. Not that this stops the effect, though, much the same is visible on the English Wikipedia as well.

"Those who say that any well-formed, non-dup question of interest should be let in and those who think it's a stop of last-resort after checking all conceivable documentation and scouring the internet."

This is wrong in multiple dimensions and [edit: the next sentence which i didn't quote is] flamebait.

One camp believes in following these guidelines to a fault. The other camp thinks some of the rules are counterproductive to SO's principles.

Source: http://stackoverflow.com/help, the guidelines are clearly outlined.

This reminds me of the unhelpful SO answers where they state the answer to a question is already stated as part of a spec and won't be answered with a link to the spec. My preferred answer to these questions will quote applicable parts of the spec along with reference numbers and a link.

I don't understand why I have to click another link to go to another site that doesn't have the same context and awareness of where I just came from.

And may no longer even EXIST ... seriously love when working with old libraries and all i have is some dump copy on github of a long dead source code littered with comments about see the web page for the docs... the docs dont come from the comments, and lo and behold, the stack overflow post ... slaps you in the face with yet another link.

I agree that it's not the most nuanced picture, but it correctly captures the ongoing debate on meta about this very question -- a debate whose very existence suggests that these guidelines aren't cut and dry at all.

For example, where is the guideline that answers this without ambiguity?

http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/261592/how-much-rese...

The latter group sounds like people who are sick of seeing SO being a place where people are rewarded for regurgitating documentation.

I've some sympathy for that.

This viewpoint only makes sense if you subscribe to the (very silly) ideas that there are a limited number of internet points available and that they matter. Why does it matter to you which people are being rewarded for what?

It matters because people respond to incentives. If what you want to see encouraged is good answers to novel questions, you need a system that rewards that over copy-pasting from documentation.

What do you think happens when the two are rewarded equally, but the latter can be done much more frequently per unit of time?

I don't think what the site developers (or most users, for that matter) want to see is good answers to novel questions. I think they want to is good answers to all questions.

If I can find the answer I am after more quickly by searching and finding a hit on SO than I would by grepping documentation, how is that not providing value?

Now balance it against the more important questions that are unanswered or even unasked because SO becomes a place where there's no point to that. It's not as simple as that.

I get your argument, but it sounds like a weak version of the claim that there is a strict ordering of priorities in the world and that only the top priority should ever be worked on.

Heck, even if the site was only for "novel" questions, according to your logic, only the most important unanswered question should be visible, until it is answered. Otherwise people might be incentivized to answer the second most important question instead.

The attention of users is a limited resource. Demands on it must be balanced against one another.

Then do you agree that only the single most important unanswered question should be visible at any given time?

I'm not sure I follow you. How does erring on the side of leaving a question open leave more questions unanswered or unasked?

When the reward system is such that novel questions do not receive answers, users will eventually stop asking those questions.

I still don't see what one has to do with the other(s). Besides, go browse through SO's unanswered questions; this is the state of things today! Simple questions, the most common variety, get answers in minutes. The complex and/or specialized questions which cannot easily be answered by a large portion of the userbase tend to languish.

Indeed. The result is that SO is a lot less useful than it used to be. I have repeatedly found myself chasing an obscure error message only to dead-end on SO and be forced to backtrack.

While I've experienced something similar too, I think it may have more to do with the fact that tech has diversified in the absolute sense. An obsecure question about your processor was easily answered in the past because everyone had tinkered with it. Today a question about a bolted-on feature in <insert tool of the year> might not receive an answer because so little experts on SO use it.(?) I've got no clue if this explains it, but it makes more sense to me than the idea that SO's attention/incentive span is so short that users are only spending time on 5-minutes-typing questions.

I've had that happen repeatedly as well, both now and "back in the day". I have no idea if a higher or lower proportion of the tougher questions are being answered now than they "used to be", but my sense is that it is about the same. The tougher questions are just tougher to answer; that hasn't changed through time. What I do know for sure is that a much higher proportion of easy questions can be answered by searching google and following one of the first few SO links, which is valuable.

Some people find difficult problems more rewarding to solve. Given that internet points are meaningless, someone interested in learning a language better could spend their time regurgitating documentation (and hopefully learning along the way). Eventually, one of those regurgitated responses gets picked up by Google and becomes the top answer, and nobody even needs to go to the SE forums to ask.

I don't think they're mutually exclusive - there are multiple reward structures for multiple types of players. Both should be encouraged.

Right now, there's one reward structure. People who value and respond to that reward structure act rationally within it. This means that regurgitation gets rewarded over good answers to novel questions.

Fair point on the question of why it matters. On the question of what should be encouraged, I think "good answers to novel questions" is only one of many possibilities. In my opinion, what should be encouraged is simply "people quickly and easily finding good answers to their questions", and I think copy-pasting (or linking to) the relevant section from documentation serves that goal just fine, and that voting is a good system for indicating what answers are useful, regardless of the form they take.

My key point is that not all questions are created equal.

Further, there's the question of how much effort the questioner should be expected to put in. In a great many technical question fora, the experience is that many noobs make no attempt to search out answers.

Isn't the incentive to answer those kinds of questions mostly intrinsic? I mean, the interesting questions and answers are more likely to be given exactly because they are so. The extrinsic reward is then complementarily useful for the opposite questions: the ones that are not very interesting but important nonetheless, such as the case of a reference to a cryptic documentation.

Extrinsic motivations displace intrinsic ones. Once you have the magical internet points, the intrinsic motivations fade.

Maybe the difference of opinion largely comes down to whether you think the second sentence of your comment "sounds right". It seems false to me, but it must seem true to you, since you wrote it. I would be very interested in seeing an analysis of data relating a measure of how many "non-novel" answers are being given to how many difficult questions are being answered.

It seems like the solution is to instead of close non-novel questions, just make them not award points.

I think this would be an excellent solution. Combine it with some semantic similarity analysis, and the vast majority of newbie questions could be replaced with "Here's a link to a pre-written answer that almost certainly addresses what you want".

They already do that analysis and show similar questions while you're asking a question. You can say "well they should do it better" (and I'm sure they try), but the whole beauty of the Q&A model is combining the strengths of computers and humans. Computers are better at organizing and storing tons of information, but humans are much better at figuring out what other humans are really asking.

I could see an argument that the people more equipped to answer more technical questions may leave if they have to wade through a bunch of questions that could be answered in the docs. If those sorts of answers "take over" then you'll have to wade through them to find more novel questions to post answers to.

Rewarded with what; internet points? How about rewarding the far larger portion of its userbase, i.e., the sector that doesn't care about upvotes, with information? Yes, I am in the former camp if I have to chose one. SO has become far too heavy handed an "noob hostile". I have been around since the beginning and am in the top 0.16% of users and I can't stand how stringently some adhere to the formal and informal guidelines.

Ultimately, the site depends utterly on the internet points people. Without them there is only noobs asking questions, and they leave without people answering.

So, yes. Internet points.

That's a fair point. It's not my motivation for being active, but I assume it is for most, and it is an effective carrot. I would just like the balance to be tipped a little back in the direction of the consumers of the site.

I'm not suggesting we leave obviously terrible questions open, it's the borderline posts that get me. Interesting questions which may not have a black and white answer, but would still encourage discussion/opinions which would be useful to people down the road. I know "it's not a discussion site", but sometimes there are gray areas and it's useful to have the opinions of experts on the pros and cons of certain approaches/technologies/whatever.

That gets into sticky moderation issues. My experience moderating support fora is that no matter how or where you draw the line, there's always a grey area. The line has to be drawn somewhere, and there's always going to be something that seems like a reasonable except that gets cut.

I suspect that SOs answer to your need is "Go use a different site". At some point, that becomes a reasonable answer.

It is a reasonable answer, but the reason many people don't find the "go use a different site" answer satisfying is that sites on the internet have network effects that make switching untenable, so it makes more sense to stay and debate the point. Which is also reasonable.

True, but the guidelines could be changed. Every close-happy user loves to link back to the guidelines. If they were a bit more lenient these users would have less leverage. It is a people issue though, I can't think of a technical solution which will solve it 100% of the time.

Changing the guidelines doesn't so much fix things as change where the lines are. You'll still see just as much "close-happy" behavior, just in different subjects.

Some people derive personal enjoyment from answering questions.

I'm tired of seeing stack overflow used as a place people go in lieu of actually reading documentation. However, I sympathize with the other point of view… Sometimes people just need something clearly explained to them and they can take it from there.

I feel the same way, but whenever I vocalize this viewpoint on meta I get downvoted into oblivion and wind up deleting my post.

SO never quite the original vision right. (A strange thing to say about an incredibly successful site, but...)

The problem is that you can't boil down development to very focussed questions with very focussed answers.

A lot of answers are experience and opinion - and if someone experienced is giving an opinion that's usually useful in itself, dammit, even if someone else with experience disagrees.

'Is React better than Angular?' may seem pointlessly open, but if you get answers from two camps who both know what they're talking about, it's possible to learn a lot from both.

I hope that at some point Google starts pruning away closed SO questions from its index. That will give the user a better search experience.

As a side note, the closed questions are not deleted from the web site because Stack Exchange takes a conservative approach when it comes to deletion. Nevertheless some questions do get deleted. The Help Center[1] and Meta[2] have more details on this.

[1]: http://stackoverflow.com/help/deleted-questions

[2]: http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/5221/135744

> Questions that are extremely off topic, or of very low quality, may be removed at the discretion of the community and moderators.

In my experience, this is completely false, it should be reworded as "Questions that moderators like to remove on a whim".

The fact that a moderator (or group of moderators) don't find a question valuable doesn't mean that it is not valuable for the rest of the world, and this applies specifically with questions about recommendations.

I hope that they don't. In fact, that's the worst thing they could do.

I have gotten a _lot_ of value from closed SO questions that were high ranked in my Google search results.

I don't know what that says about SO's flagging system, but it is what it is, I guess.

> I have gotten a _lot_ of value from closed SO questions that were high ranked in my Google search results.

Too bad for you, it just takes an overzealous moderator to remove a closed question that many people find valuable.

Your best bet is to bookmark the question and trigger archive.org's crawler via the "Save Page Now" form: https://archive.org/web/

I hope not. I don't know how many times a question I search for is closed as off topic, but was answered before it was closed

You've also got people closing questions who don't know the language. Am I the best person to vote on say Clojure questions? I'd say not, but on SO that frequently happens. When the languages go to people, the conference speakers and book authors are ignored by someone who has never written a line of code in that language something is wrong.

Also in the rapidly changing JS world they don't reference the version consistently. Code that worked fine on version 1 doesn't work six months later on version 1.1, if I knew the version it would save a lot of time.

Can they not give the macho developers some kind of button that spends some of their points to put a badge on the questions they like, elevating them to "true SO" status? Thats how these things are supposed to work I believe.

I always upvote on closed questions that I find useful. This happens more often than it should, imo.

What I would think would be better is for questions that receive a lot of upvotes after they are closed, that the people who flagged the question have reduced capability to flag down questions in the future.

Maybe they won't be able to find the true SO questions if they're buried amongst the lesser quality ones.

One of my top question created earliest (before the over zealous moderators appeared) was

how to push an item into an array in Java?

The obvious response is "lol don't you know how to read the doc"?

Yet the view count is over 100,000 and counting, with people commenting how much they appreciate finding the answer immediately.

SO had always allowed and encouraged beginner questions, actually. These days the same question would likely be closed as a duplicate, because the question, presumably along with a good answer already exists.

So that's an example of a good question, actually. And an answer "read the docs" would be down-voted as unhelpful and quickly disappear.

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