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Ask HN: Is StackOverflow being ruined by its mods?

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Re: Ask HN: Is StackOverflow being ruined by its mods?

#51

Post by genwin »

icebraining wrote: post #48
genwin wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please elaborate. If I want to know the pros/cons of storing images in a database, vs. (say) storing only the links to images in the database, what more specific question should I look for? How is that question too general or vague? Apparently at least 400 people thought it was reasonable, than thought it was unreasonable. 50+ people thought it was reasonable enough to respond to.

Here: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/105191/what-a...

Thanks. There seems to be plenty of overlap between that site's purpose and SO's purpose as described here: http://stackoverflow.com/faq

Re: Ask HN: Is StackOverflow being ruined by its mods?

#52

Post by waiwai933 »

genwin wrote: post #50
Shog9 wrote: post #44

You might like some data. See: http://stackoverflow.com/annotated-posts?tab=locked&filt... 1900 locked questions, out of which just over 1700 are locked because they were merged into duplicates, or migrated to other Stack Exchange sites. < 200 locked questions out of 3.3 million doesn't seem so bad.

That's great info. If accurate I must be unlucky to hit so many locked questions. I just scrolled through all 38 pages but didn't see the question I referred to in the OP.

It's on page 17, or if you hit the "noticed" tab, it's there on the very first page.

Re: Ask HN: Is StackOverflow being ruined by its mods?

#53

Post by genwin »

icebraining wrote: post #47
genwin wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that's SO's goal then I would say they've left a big hole in their strategy for a competitor. That goal sounds good in principle. In practice, very specific programming questions often (if not usually ) have multiple correct answers, with the best choice for a particular scenario being made by evaluating pros/cons just like the question I referred to. Some languages embrace multiple ways of doing things. For examp…

The "competitor" is Programmers.SE: the other site of the same network for more subjective, high level QA. http://programmers.stackexchange.com/

Thanks. SO should change their FAQ if they want questions like the one in the OP to go to this other site instead. Looking at http://stackoverflow.com/faq, the question is (to me) on-topic for SO. It's not good enough to just have a "competitor" that's a better fit for the question.

Re: Ask HN: Is StackOverflow being ruined by its mods?

#54

Post by genwin »

facorreia wrote: post #37

For conceptual questions like these, StackExchange has http://programmers.stackexchange.com

Thanks. Looking at both their FAQs, I see clear overlap in what's on-topic. The question in the OP seems on-topic for either site, but better for programmers.stackexchange.com.

Re: Ask HN: Is StackOverflow being ruined by its mods?

#55

Post by genwin »

waiwai933 wrote: post #52
genwin wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's great info. If accurate I must be unlucky to hit so many locked questions. I just scrolled through all 38 pages but didn't see the question I referred to in the OP.

It's on page 17, or if you hit the "noticed" tab, it's there on the very first page.

Okay, I see it. Maybe the extent of this issue is my imagination then.

Re: Ask HN: Is StackOverflow being ruined by its mods?

#56

Post by genwin »

sedev wrote: post #46

I call Betteridge's Law on this. [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_Law_of_Headlines ] Stack Overflow has a fairly specific rubric for judging questions, and a central part of it is the requirement that they have a single verifiably correct answer. The example question does not, and it runs afoul of the guidelines in multiple other ways. The example question is something for a conventional discussion board…

In my experience there's rarely a single verifiable correct answer for a programming question that one can't easily find the answer to without asking (outside of SO).

Also, whereas you're like the fourth person here to say the questions must have a single answer, that requirement is not called out in the SO guidelines at http://stackoverflow.com/faq. The closest I see there is "You should only ask practical, answerable questions". A question asking for pros/cons of storing images in a database (vs. links to files) meets that criterion in my book.

Re: Ask HN: Is StackOverflow being ruined by its mods?

#57

Post by foxhop »

viraptor wrote: post #41
foxhop wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

russellballestrini or foxhop You cannot delete your account on stackoverflow without writing to the administrators via email. It is a manual process for them,and they don't delete your account they just rename it and prevent you from logging in. The questions do persist. I'm pretty sure they also deleted my "spam" questions when they banned me. edit: the stack overflow account is the only one they deleted/renamed. He…

Not trying to offend, but from the answers I see, a number of them are just not right for SO. They're either very opinionated, or not answering the question itself. The first couple of questions from new users go to the moderators' queue automatically, so they will get more attention than stuff from others... then again, that's done exactly so that new users get the feel for what's acceptable and what isn't. If you w…

I have not logged in since they banned me. I am not going to provide free user generated content to a website that bans active and real users for spamming.

Re: Ask HN: Is StackOverflow being ruined by its mods?

#58

Post by codeka »

icebraining wrote: post #47
genwin wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that's SO's goal then I would say they've left a big hole in their strategy for a competitor. That goal sounds good in principle. In practice, very specific programming questions often (if not usually ) have multiple correct answers, with the best choice for a particular scenario being made by evaluating pros/cons just like the question I referred to. Some languages embrace multiple ways of doing things. For examp…

The "competitor" is Programmers.SE: the other site of the same network for more subjective, high level QA. http://programmers.stackexchange.com/

It kind of annoys me that we've got all these "kind-of, sort-of" related stack exchange sites for programming and whether one question belongs on Stack Overflow, or Programmers.SE or cstheory.SE or whatever is often quite hit-and-miss.

But then, on the other hand, you have tags on Stack Overflow that are almost separate sites in and of themselves. Usually this happens when companies start using Stack Overflow as the defacto support forum for their product (a lot of Google stuff uses this, e.g. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/google-apps-script or http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/android etc)

Re: Ask HN: Is StackOverflow being ruined by its mods?

#59

Post by Shog9 »

genwin wrote: post #50
Shog9 wrote: post #44

You might like some data. See: http://stackoverflow.com/annotated-posts?tab=locked&filt... 1900 locked questions, out of which just over 1700 are locked because they were merged into duplicates, or migrated to other Stack Exchange sites. < 200 locked questions out of 3.3 million doesn't seem so bad.

That's great info. If accurate I must be unlucky to hit so many locked questions. I just scrolled through all 38 pages but didn't see the question I referred to in the OP.

> If accurate I must be unlucky to hit so many locked questions.

Well, there's another possibility... A lot of those 200 locked posts were created when Stack Overflow was still very young, and are quite popular - they're locked because they turned into discussions or polls and are pretty much played out when it comes to getting anything answered, but keeping them around preserves whatever value made them popular. It's hardly surprising that you might stumble onto a few of the more popular posts regularly - there are a lot of links out there to some of them.

It's pretty safe to say that something like this - http://stackoverflow.com/q/686216/ - doesn't need more answers, and doesn't need to be repeated. But it's there, locked, in the archive for those who want to refer back to it.

Re: Ask HN: Is StackOverflow being ruined by its mods?

#60

Post by recursive »

foxhop wrote: post #29
recursive wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The internet running out of space is a red herring. The concern is a dilution of focus of Stack Overflow.

The answers and questions were both on topic and related to the sites purpose connecting common programming problems with great programming answers.

From the faq:

Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page.

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