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Dear StackExchange: Thank You

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Re: Dear StackExchange: Thank You

#51

Post by bp_ »

simonsarris wrote: post #27

I participate in the SO community a lot (I'm top answer-er for the Canvas tag and HTML5 tag). It's not quite a "community", though, because while I have a lot of respect for the other answer-ers I don't really get to interact with them very much, aside from complimenting a novel solution and the like. I sort of wish there were more methods for interaction (the chat channels don't help that much for niche tags). And w…

The problem is mainly that chat.SO sucks in a lot of ways and probably should be reduced to a single room where all SO regulars who have time to chat do chat - together. That's the way pretty much all other sites do chat (including MSO) and it's... saner. I just don't know how much it'd scale.

Re: Dear StackExchange: Thank You

#52

Post by jrgifford »

excuse-me wrote: post #39
4ad wrote: post #9

No thanks from me. The no discussions rule means the only questions on the site are the trivial questions that could be answered by reading some documentation. If questions are broad or open ended, the value lies in the discussion, not in any particular answer. I also found that many accepted answers are blatantly wrong, or encourage very poor practice. Sure, the StackExchange network is better than experts-exchange…

stackexchange is to solve problems not answer questions. Can a dog have the Bhudda nature - is a good question but it's not really a problem. How do I connect to a wifi network without an SSID in Ubuntu is a problem - even if it is a less good question

Nope, we're here to answer questions. Can a dog have the Buddha nature is argumentative, and as far as I know would be off-topic since there is no Buddha site. However, "Can a dog be saved and go to heaven" would be closer to being on-topic, since there is a christianity.se. Make sense?

Re: Dear StackExchange: Thank You

#53

Post by benjaminwootton »

haasted wrote: post #15
pilgrim689 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bit off-topic but: what are good discussion/open-ended questions sites (software development specific)?

I believe that http://programmers.stackexchange.com/ was introduced for this. A lot of questions were migrated from SO to programmers when it started.

I prefer programmers.stackexchange.com and really want to contribute more, but the heavy handed closing of questions gors on there and it's really putting me off.

Re: Dear StackExchange: Thank You

#54

Post by ashovlin »

babarock wrote: post #6

I can definitely relate with the feeling described. I too got the "prize" from Unix&Linux.SE. The hand signed letter by Spolsky definitely had a strong effect. I felt proud like a child receiving a gold star in kindergarden. A piece of advice for all the startup/business founders here on HN. When you send personalized communication to your users, be it a personal email, or something as superficial as putting your han…

The same goes for recruiting.

I'm a student at Penn State which is a ranked CS school, but not necessarily Stanford or MIT. I noticed a stack of Fog Creek recruiting pamphlets in the lobby to our CS building. Inside each one was a signed letter from Joel. Students are inundated with literature at career fairs and events, but this was the only one I read entirely and then saved.

Re: Dear StackExchange: Thank You

#55

Post by sopooneo »

reidmain wrote: post #31

StackOverflow is a watershed website. There are very few websites I can go without and StackOverflow is, without a doubt, one of them. It is difficult to remember the dark ages where every question I typed into Google would link to Expert Exchange and it was a coin flip on whether you'd find your answer. Very much like GitHub was the tipping point for social coding, StackOverflow was the tipping point for social prob…

It's funny. I remember when Spolsky first announced the idea for the site and the vast majority of the reactions I read were people poo-pooing it since there were so many seemingly similar things already. I take that as a big lesson: if there is a crowded market, but no one doing it well, that is the best possible opportunity.

Re: Dear StackExchange: Thank You

#56

Post by kmontrose »

dbecker wrote: post #44
bp_ wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SE is not meant to be a replacement for reddit or traditional forums. If you want to have discussion by all means have discussion. Just don't do it on SE because SE wasn't made for discussion. Just because echo doesn't read from files doesn't mean it's useless. If you need to read from files you just use cat instead. Sure, you can coerce both to do the other's job, but it'll be messy and only work half the time and o…

The problem is that the quality of participants/knowledge on the discussion sites simply isn't as good as SE. No knock on SE. Quite the opposite. But I frequently have questions that aren't SE style questions, and I wish I knew where to take them for such intelligent and informed responses.

The theory (a very sound one, based on internal observation) is that the strict "answers, not discussion" format is what attracts and retains high quality participants.

I really strongly believe that it's an either/or proposition, you either get discussion or you get quality answers to questions. Discussion "sucks the air out", so to speak.

And since there are already so many places for discussion on the internet, it's better for us to focus on Q&A.

Re: Dear StackExchange: Thank You

#57

Post by kprobst »

reidmain wrote: post #31

StackOverflow is a watershed website. There are very few websites I can go without and StackOverflow is, without a doubt, one of them. It is difficult to remember the dark ages where every question I typed into Google would link to Expert Exchange and it was a coin flip on whether you'd find your answer. Very much like GitHub was the tipping point for social coding, StackOverflow was the tipping point for social prob…

Actually prior to the dark ages most programming answers (for me at least) were to be found on the Deja USENET archives.

Re: Dear StackExchange: Thank You

#58

Post by crumblan »

4ad wrote: post #9

No thanks from me. The no discussions rule means the only questions on the site are the trivial questions that could be answered by reading some documentation. If questions are broad or open ended, the value lies in the discussion, not in any particular answer. I also found that many accepted answers are blatantly wrong, or encourage very poor practice. Sure, the StackExchange network is better than experts-exchange…

Once you are asking questions beyond a certain level at SO it is impossible to get a correct answer; instead you will get conjectures from people who don't know what they are doing.

Re: Dear StackExchange: Thank You

#59

Post by skeletonjelly »

robbles wrote: post #35
EvilTerran wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Likewise. I usually only end up searching the web-in-general for answers when the product documentation doesn't help. When that's led me to stackexchange, more often than not the threads asking my exact question have been closed as "too general" or similar. The most recent example, in my case, was: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10166086/good-examples-of... "Can anybody recommend some [PHP] programs for me to loo…

In my opinion, that IS an ambiguous question. Not in the sense that it's hard to understand approximately what you're looking for, but that it's not obvious how to choose the right answers. I agree that this kind of moderation can be a bit heavy-handed, but I think one of the goals of SO is to have provably correct solutions to questions, not an "answer wiki" like Quora. You can't really "accept the right answer" to…

> You can't really "accept the right answer" to this question in any fair way.

I see that as the issue - that there has to be one answer. It's a site that promotes the same issue that plagues reddit, the hunger for karma.

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