81–90 of 210 posts
Microsoft making a lot of moves that are starting surprise the tech community. it will take some time to convert the generation that grew up with the old closed microsoft, but slowly I believe they will have converts.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am a mod on a similarly hostile StackExchange site. The community has always been outright hostile to active discussion (outside of chat, the area of the site for specifically this) for all but a brief period when it was still working out what it was. The fact it's hostile to active discussion is part of what enables it to continue to be a useful resource. That's not to say Stack Overflow isn't without its problems…
It's not just about discussion. It's a general stance positioning the perfect against the pretty good. Here's just one example: questions often get closed as duplicate after good answers start rolling in. Sometimes, the new answers are better than the old ones. The mods argue that the users should move their answers over to the old question. Or that they should improve the old answers. It's a lot of should, should, s…
Microsoft making a lot of moves that are starting surprise the tech community. it will take some time to convert the generation that grew up with the old closed microsoft, but slowly I believe they will have converts.
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 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.
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I'm guessing StackExchange is partnering with them in this move.
Already partnered - that the "Internet-Explorer" tag already has an image indicates an existing partnership [1]. This may be a deeper partnership though. 1: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/30187/what-do-icons-...
If you want to go further than that, there are various levels of sponsorship possible for a tag, and [internet-explorer] has been sponsored at some level for at least a year. These grant you various advertising and branding privileges, but do not otherwise affect how questions are asked/answered within that tag.
Disclaimer: I work for Stack Exchange but am not involved in the sales or marketing side of things.
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Yeah, I agree. I think it's actually fantastic that they focus so narrowly on answerable questions. It's still a super useful resource, and a tight focus means it will probably be able to stay on track for a long long time. However, I wish there was a place as fantastically focused on good discussion.
On the other hand, in the past few years I've found that all of the most useful Stack Overflow or P.SE pages I've found when Googling for information have turned out to be questions with 25+ upvotes, with answers having 50ish upvotes. And all closed as "not constructive." 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…
Closed question: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/2254/what-are...
Open Question: http://www.slant.co/topics/1150/~what-are-the-best-keyboards...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not just about discussion. It's a general stance positioning the perfect against the pretty good. Here's just one example: questions often get closed as duplicate after good answers start rolling in. Sometimes, the new answers are better than the old ones. The mods argue that the users should move their answers over to the old question. Or that they should improve the old answers. It's a lot of should, should, s…
It's almost like there should be a mechanism when marking a question as a duplicate to automatically move the answers from the new question to the old question... along with a 301 redirect on the removed-as-duplicate URL.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am a mod on a similarly hostile StackExchange site. The community has always been outright hostile to active discussion (outside of chat, the area of the site for specifically this) for all but a brief period when it was still working out what it was. The fact it's hostile to active discussion is part of what enables it to continue to be a useful resource. That's not to say Stack Overflow isn't without its problems…
It's not just about discussion. It's a general stance positioning the perfect against the pretty good. Here's just one example: questions often get closed as duplicate after good answers start rolling in. Sometimes, the new answers are better than the old ones. The mods argue that the users should move their answers over to the old question. Or that they should improve the old answers. It's a lot of should, should, s…
Such a bad idea. The format of StackOverflow is very tightly defined. I bet all support questions don't fit that format. Then what? StackOverflow should speak up against companies doing this.
It's not as though SO hasn't been the de-facto support site for C# for years; what's one more platform? If Microsoft wants to go where folks are already asking questions on its products and answer them then more power to 'em. We do have fairly strict guidelines for companies that want to do this however: http://stackoverflow.com/help/product-support
I wasn't happy with the lack of response from their support team so I posted a message saying "What the heck do I have to do to get an answer from you guys on your product?". What do you think the response from SO was? People yelled "it's volunteers here choosing to answer questions on their own time! You aren't allowed to demand a response on SO, who do yo think you are?". Or something to that effect anyway.
Corporate support channels do not belong on a site that is rigorously and outspokenly community driven.
If such a thing is to be allowed then there must be formal escalation procedures to be able to push questions up the line the the company that has offloaded its support to SO.
The whole thing just doesn't fit.
Launch announcement: http://fourlightyears.blogspot.com.au/2014/11/notconstructiv...