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We hadn’t quite figured out that opinions and discussion questions were not a good fit in the early days.

joelthelion 9y ago
You mean decided.
dcow 9y ago
The sibling comment is good enough and gets the point across. But I want to elaborate because I've ended up in basically the same place as the GP. I know you've written about SO not being a good place for opinion-based questions before, and perhaps in theory you are correct, but I (at least) am not satisfied with the implementation, and tend to link that at some level to a flaw in the theory. What I mean: some of SO's most [in]famous questions are opinion questions where the askers are requesting advice from "expert" answerers to help them navigate a new topic. They're not just infamous because they may be controversial and "hard to moderate". They're famous primarily because the way in which the question was asked drove many users (hundreds even thousands of upvotes with millions of views) to the site and helped a lot of people through their journey working on a new technology or in a new problem domain. SO said "nahwp, we don't want questions without clear cut answers". Not necessarily SO's fault, but nonetheless their problem: the community took that as, "err on the side of annoying pedantic asshole and close, downvote, and otherwise ostracize any user asking any question that might not be a good fit for the site under the new regime". In my experience, it feels like people are trying to find a way justify being annoying instead of find a way to provide meaningful advice. I've asked questions that, if you took 30 seconds to think about instead of a quick search for a marginally related title (which I already did in the 4 hours prior to asking my question) and immediate vote to close as duplicate, or an almost bot-like flag as "too broad" based on word choice heuristics, are not bad questions, and often after hours of flagging and arguing with the original users who are stubborn because they don't want to be wrong (especially publicly) I can make my case. But by that point it's too late and too many times I've had to do that to fend off users trying to do good for the site over helping me with a problem. And I'm not even asking opinion questions... By making one small decision, you created two problems. 1. You actively choose to diminish the value to practical real users of the site by setting a long term vision of becoming some bastion of objective knowledge. We have those; they're encyclopedias. 2. You unintentionally validated the pedantic/authoritarian desire for and abuse of power that has deterred many of your original users. Honestly most people can handle snarky comments and opinionated edged answers. Everyone (users of SO) has a tiny (and sometimes large) "programmer ego" inside of them. On SO you could responsibly exercise it. Not anymore. What I can't handle is nonsensical authoritarian and meaningless abuse of questions because they don't immediately and explicitly adhere to some SO agenda. The former can be mildly annoying at times but tolerable and hell even fun on occasion, the latter is frustrating and infuriating and something I cannot tolerate. Sorry that really turned into a rant, didn't it?
mickronome 9y ago
I don't really have an opinion on the fit. But people still ask those questions and the questions apparently get indexed. In my experience the result is that when coming from a search engine, even for non-fit topics, it is quite common that closed Stackoverflow posts occurr several times on the first result page. It could be that I search for strange things, but at least for me the combination of closed but still indexed posts are not helpful, especially when the question didn't get any useful answers at all before being closed. I don't mind closing topics, but I would prefer that closed questions with no even remotely useful answers wasn't indexed at all. Now, that might not be entirely under your control, but the issue remains, or so it seems to me.
weinzierl 9y ago
Thank you for the letter and the stickers, I have one of them on my bicycle to this day. > We hadn’t quite figured out that opinions and discussion questions were not a good fit in the early days. This is something I had to learn as well, I guess one of my most upvoted questions falls well in that territory [1]. I just think that Stack Overflow was best when you were its primary moderator and it's arch enemy was Experts Exchange [2]. That battle is won, but the war goes on. Nowadays when the first search result is Quora I have very much the same feeling I had regarding ExpertsExchange back in the day and I can't help thinking that there is lost opportunity for Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange. [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/961942/what-is-the-worst-programming-language-you-ever-worked-with#962146 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/961942/what-is-the-worst... [2] https://blog.codinghorror.com/whos-your-arch-enemy/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/whos-your-arch-enemy/

You mean decided.

dcow 9y ago

The sibling comment is good enough and gets the point across. But I want to elaborate because I've ended up in basically the same place as the GP. I know you've written about SO not being a good place for opinion-based questions before, and perhaps in theory you are correct, but I (at least) am not satisfied with the implementation, and tend to link that at some level to a flaw in the theory. What I mean: some of SO's most [in]famous questions are opinion questions where the askers are requesting advice from "expert" answerers to help them navigate a new topic. They're not just infamous because they may be controversial and "hard to moderate". They're famous primarily because the way in which the question was asked drove many users (hundreds even thousands of upvotes with millions of views) to the site and helped a lot of people through their journey working on a new technology or in a new problem domain. SO said "nahwp, we don't want questions without clear cut answers". Not necessarily SO's fault, but nonetheless their problem: the community took that as, "err on the side of annoying pedantic asshole and close, downvote, and otherwise ostracize any user asking any question that might not be a good fit for the site under the new regime". In my experience, it feels like people are trying to find a way justify being annoying instead of find a way to provide meaningful advice. I've asked questions that, if you took 30 seconds to think about instead of a quick search for a marginally related title (which I already did in the 4 hours prior to asking my question) and immediate vote to close as duplicate, or an almost bot-like flag as "too broad" based on word choice heuristics, are not bad questions, and often after hours of flagging and arguing with the original users who are stubborn because they don't want to be wrong (especially publicly) I can make my case. But by that point it's too late and too many times I've had to do that to fend off users trying to do good for the site over helping me with a problem. And I'm not even asking opinion questions... By making one small decision, you created two problems. 1. You actively choose to diminish the value to practical real users of the site by setting a long term vision of becoming some bastion of objective knowledge. We have those; they're encyclopedias. 2. You unintentionally validated the pedantic/authoritarian desire for and abuse of power that has deterred many of your original users. Honestly most people can handle snarky comments and opinionated edged answers. Everyone (users of SO) has a tiny (and sometimes large) "programmer ego" inside of them. On SO you could responsibly exercise it. Not anymore. What I can't handle is nonsensical authoritarian and meaningless abuse of questions because they don't immediately and explicitly adhere to some SO agenda. The former can be mildly annoying at times but tolerable and hell even fun on occasion, the latter is frustrating and infuriating and something I cannot tolerate. Sorry that really turned into a rant, didn't it?

mickronome 9y ago

I don't really have an opinion on the fit. But people still ask those questions and the questions apparently get indexed. In my experience the result is that when coming from a search engine, even for non-fit topics, it is quite common that closed Stackoverflow posts occurr several times on the first result page. It could be that I search for strange things, but at least for me the combination of closed but still indexed posts are not helpful, especially when the question didn't get any useful answers at all before being closed. I don't mind closing topics, but I would prefer that closed questions with no even remotely useful answers wasn't indexed at all. Now, that might not be entirely under your control, but the issue remains, or so it seems to me.

weinzierl 9y ago

Thank you for the letter and the stickers, I have one of them on my bicycle to this day. > We hadn’t quite figured out that opinions and discussion questions were not a good fit in the early days. This is something I had to learn as well, I guess one of my most upvoted questions falls well in that territory [1]. I just think that Stack Overflow was best when you were its primary moderator and it's arch enemy was Experts Exchange [2]. That battle is won, but the war goes on. Nowadays when the first search result is Quora I have very much the same feeling I had regarding ExpertsExchange back in the day and I can't help thinking that there is lost opportunity for Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange. [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/961942/what-is-the-worst-programming-language-you-ever-worked-with#962146 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/961942/what-is-the-worst... [2] https://blog.codinghorror.com/whos-your-arch-enemy/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/whos-your-arch-enemy/