Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums • Hacker News Board

Re: Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums

#221

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Wed, Jan 21, 2015, 12:24 PM UTC

stevebot wrote: post #160

jordanpg wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-…

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.

Re: Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums

#222

Post by reitanqild » Wed, Jan 21, 2015, 3:46 PM UTC

rtpg wrote: post #204

Bamafan wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" yea…

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…

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?

Re: Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums

#223

Post by Max_Horstmann » Wed, Jan 21, 2015, 3:53 PM UTC

Max_Horstmann wrote: post #122

christop wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To any of the people who have had some success with SO Careers — are you in Europe / Germany? I get remarkably few contacts on Careers compared to other sources, and then often from people who completely ignored my location (back when I was marked as "no relocation"). Friends who I gave invites to didn't seem to get anywhere with SO. Also, it's still the case that searching for a postal code on the German version of…

We're looking into the zip code issue, stay tuned.

The zip code issue should now be fixed.

E.g. try "76131" on the German site and you'll see jobs/companies in Karlsruhe, Germany.

Do the same search on the U.S. and you'll see results from Fort Worth, TX.

Re: Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums

#224

Post by Kalium » Wed, Jan 21, 2015, 6:53 PM UTC

EpicEng wrote: post #175

Kalium wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums

#225

Post by grkvlt » Thu, Jan 22, 2015, 1:46 AM UTC

troymc wrote: post #28

I often ask a question on Google, get taken to a Stack Exchange site, and find that yes, they have my question, but some moderator closed it before it got answered. SE got my traffic, but I didn't get my answer. Isn't that broken?

> I often [find] a question on [...] Stack Exchange [but] some moderator [has] closed it before it got answered.

How often is often in practice, though? This is a common objection, and I see it mentioned a lot by disgruntled commenters here. This is just another form of observational bias, and in reality the situaion described is pretty rare...

There are many times that SO and SE sites have been useful to me, both is finding answers to existing questions, asking questions that are then answered, and also providing answers myself. I agree that it can be infuriating to see a question that you want answered on the site, but it has been closed as 'off topic' or 'irrelevant' or the classic 'not suitable for a question-and-answer format site.' However, this has not happened to me much in the several years I have used the site(s) so I have to assume one of the following is true:

a. I only ask/search for the 'right' kinds of questions?

b. Closed questions are not that common?

Due to the annoyance factor, I think that b. is what is happening, and people just weight those occurrences much higher in their subconcious. That means they will recall them more readily, thus giving the false impression that it happens a lot.

This is actually a very common observational bias, which people should be more aware of.

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic

The availability heuristic is the idea that if something can be readily recalled, it must be important, or at least more important than alternatives which are not as readily recalled. The easier it is to recall the consequences of something the greater those consequences are often perceived to be, and similarly the greater the consequences the easier somehing is to recall. This means strong negative associations with closed answers make those easy to remember, and people incorrectly estimate the frequency of this situation to be much greater than it actually is.

Re: Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums

#226

Post by code_duck » Sun, Jan 25, 2015, 2:12 AM UTC

troymc wrote: post #28

I often ask a question on Google, get taken to a Stack Exchange site, and find that yes, they have my question, but some moderator closed it before it got answered. SE got my traffic, but I didn't get my answer. Isn't that broken?

It's hard to even research certain topics these days without google leading to a useless stackoverflow page. Yes, most questions have been 'answered'... But years ago and those aren't the ones Google leads to.

The overall quality of stack overflow has decreased dramatically over the past few years. These days, when I go there mostly I have the chance to help someone from India do his or her job and tell people to stop using obsolete database interfaces and leaving their code wide-open to SQL injection. It's not very rewarding, educational, useful or entertaining.

Re: Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums

#227

Post by code_duck » Sun, Jan 25, 2015, 2:14 AM UTC

Kalium wrote: post #99

jordanpg wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-…

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.

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.