Like many, I find the answers to these "religious" (in fact, they are not, because done properly the answers are supported by arguments) questions to be the most useful content.
In many ways, I can answer the most objective questions myself from the documentation or source code. But what I cannot do this with is distillation of expert knowledge that requires time, and the more distilled it is, the more subjective it is. Subjective doesn't mean unsupportable by facts (experience).
> Answers that just recommend a 3rd party library optimize for solving the immediate problem an answerer is having asap but they don't work very well at creating a long lasting resource and they also give answerers a hard time.
I see no problem with this. Furthermore, if you can ask a question about using a particular library, you should be able to give that library as an answer.
IMHO, any problems around "3rd party libraries" could be solved from a combination of improved culture (e.g. explain the solution with a library reference) and technical tools (e.g. tagging with library version, result/answer ranking tweaks, etc.)
> Opinion questions can get outdated very quickly and it is hard to tell if you come from a google search if the answers are still applicable.
SO could solve that problem rather than giving up. For better or worse, SO is the watering hole for programming questions. As long as dups are kept under control, competent people can find the old questions and provide new, updated answers that will converge on completeness. Also, "outdated" answers can still have value, since not everyone is using the latest stuff.
What SO needs is features for fixing the practical problems you outlined:
> They also don't work well with the site format because you cant summarize the solution into one accepted answer. Instead, you get hundreds of tiny small disconnected answers, which cant really be edited to consolidate or keep them up to date, and no room for discussions (SO comments don't work well for long discussions)
I would say some form of extra curation, answer clustering, and old answer decay would go a long way towards addressing this, and it would be a great improvement on the existing situation of digging through old forum posts or making new ones (to an audience that may or may not have good opinions).
Same for me. I think it is not wise to expect your users to be that fanatics, that they can't recommend any tool, without starting a flame war all the time. I mean there certainly are fanatics on the internet who fight with religious passion about the weirdest things, but I believe they are not the majority.
So just banning something that might cause trouble, but loosing all the benefits, I think was not a good decision.
But apart from that, I found lots of help on SO. But like others, not so much anymore, but mostly simply because I rarely need to look up things and the problems I do have are too obscure, for the main users, which are the target group, so I solve them by other means.
The utility became less and less over time. It can be done with a small enough and dedicated community behind it (the C++ book list), but without that amount of attention and dedication its not that good anymore.
There's also the number of questions. Stack Overflow back then got maybe a few hundred questions a day. You could glance over all of them in a tag in a page. Now it gets 8000 questions per day. Asking a recommendation question doesn't get your post there for a large community of experts. You're lucky if you've got a few minutes of visibility now.
Look back at one of those https://stackoverflow.com/q/22697 - "only" 14 answers to it... and look how many of them are saying the same thing. That's not useful. https://www.slant.co/topics/259/~best-mock-frameworks-for-ja...
Try https://www.slant.co for the recommendations - its designed for that.
The problem of "same answer repeated" becomes contrary to the "find the answer rather than scrolling through pages" when posts get sufficiently popular. Go through all the pages of https://stackoverflow.com/q/1711 and count how many times the mythical man month is mentioned. Unless you read through all 214 visible answers, do you know how much consensus exists from material on the last page?
They gave it a try - https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/12/17/introducing-programmer... and it veered off into unmanageable and at the end of the day, uninteresting https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/29/good-subjective-bad-su...
It had a really big initial peak, but people didn't stick around. https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/200144
There's a place for such questions, it just isn't Stack Overflow. It isn't the trash either... but its that the structure and the framework of Stack Overflow doesn't work for that sort of question.
The problem is that the endless debates tend to drive away the people who provide the answers. Look at the questions on https://ai.stackexchange.com and consider some of the older ones https://ai.stackexchange.com/questions?page=30&sort=newest to the newest https://ai.stackexchange.com/questions?page=1&sort=newest . They really had a problem with the... science fiction questions https://ai.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1283 and appear to have a done a strong change. Sure, those are interesting, but if one wants to ask questions of the experts, they need to ask questions the experts want to answer. There's a site that handles those questions better... https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/art...
The main thing is that it takes some degree of moderation to keep the people who have the answers that people want. This means matching the site to the vision of the site that the people who have answers want to visit... and that's a lot of clauses. Without that moderation striving for what the site could be, you get https://answers.yahoo.com/dir/index?sid=396545663&link=list and there's a reason that experts tend not to go there and try to answer those questions.
As to the its a human issue, not a technical one - I'd suggest giving http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html a read. The first of the three things to accept.
I've read Jeffs essay. I've used programmers.se and basically vowed never to go back after a few years because the moderation itself is piss poor (there one person gnat who's sole mission is to close every new question unless it's asked by one of their inner circle of buddies). It's really a joke. There's literally no reason for programmers to exist if not for expert opinioned discussions but they started cracking down on that and rendered the site useless. It's not just me either. Other good contributors have posted the same reasons for leaving in meta and in other forums.
I think you're conflating useful questions and good moderation with opinionated Q/A. I don't think anyone wants SE to be yahoo answers. But a question like what is the correct way to implement IO multiplexing is really useful. I think in SOs crusade to rid the site of opinion-based questions that are hard to handle, they threw the baby out with the bath water and got rid of some of the most useful discussions as a byproduct. Is SO dead? No. But I certainly get less utility out of it these days because I'm less willing to contribute when 90% of the time questions are met with instant downvotes and flags because someone didn't understand the finesse in a question and/or didn't assume positive intent so they could justify being pedantic assholes. I'm pedantic too. I draw the line at using it as a reason to be an asshole though.
I'm not saying SO didn't do its homework. But I am giving one data point that feels SO's usefulness has been marginalized because of the way the community has interpreted "no opinion based questions". I feel that zealotry has spilled out into the general air at stack overflow and it's no longer engaging or fun for many people to contribute these days. Take that for what it is, I guess.
I call them an idiot because they were nitpicking on a question that was asking for help well within the already Procrustean bed of regulations. I stand by my assessment: it's hardly a reason to refuse help citing bureaucratic regulations if you're a public servant, but that's somewhat expected. If, however, it's a fellow forum contributor, this is both unexpected and serves no purpose.
Not sure who's right, of course, but as you see, the number of people complaining is greater by day. Note that many of them are familiar with the Internet since 1990s and are netizens of good standing; still, they manage to somehow "violate" these rules.
As soon as there is a real competition to the "soup Nazi's shop", many people will jump ship without hesitation.
It's also interesting that other Stack Exchange communities are not that strict.
Its a matter of scale and the ratio of the amount of time people are willing to help to the incoming question rate.
Lets say there are 500 people who are willing to spend the time to help a user craft a better question. They are willing to spend 60 minutes per day helping. Thats 30,000 minutes per day. There are 8,000 question/day. If we generously apply Sturgeon's law to this, thats 7,2000 questions in need of help.
And now we're at 4.2 minutes per question for those 500 people. If you believe this is a smaller number based on https://stackoverflow.com/review/helper/stats and https://stackoverflow.com/review/close/stats then apply the appropriate scaling.
You might want to work off of the values in https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357198/mentorship-r...
> 63 mentors from the community volunteered to be our partners.
Lets think about a smaller site now. Electrical Engineering gets 80 questions per day. DBA gets 40. Now you've got a point where each question with potential to it can have someone spend a significant amount of time making it into a good question for the site.
The other half to that is the curation of the answers. Questions with discussions and polling are a nightmare to keep curated. Consider https://stackoverflow.com/q/1711 or https://stackoverflow.com/q/406760 or https://stackoverflow.com/q/184618 and how many duplicate answers there are in there. Consider that if that was open, how often would a new user go to that post and create another poor answer to add their own opinion.
Yes, each time a new answer is posted, there's activity on that the question that bumps it to the front page... but the front page scrolls too fast to do meaningful curation for all but the worst (and this also takes time out of the 1h for those 500 people).
A smaller site can spend a lot more time per user to guide them to ask a good question and a lot more time per answer to make it something that is a good answer.
why ? why do you do this ? a lot of time there is an exact piece of code that does what OP asks for, what does it change if the piece of code is in a SO answer or in a github project ?
Library recommendations however - everyone has their favorite. Someone recommends Spring. Someone else recommends Play. Someone else recommends Stripes (and then has a dozen comments explaining the different between Stripes and Stripe). Someone else has Struts (and then gets a dozen comments about the version they're recommending being out of date and lead to the equifax breech). JSF, Jspx, JHipster, Grails, GWT, ... it goes on and on.
And now that there are a score of answers, some new user sees the post, doesn't read everything and recommends a new version of Spring. Or points to a different site for Struts.
The curation of such a question takes far more work than the question is worth. Look at how much effort the C++ community puts into maintaining the C++ book list. Spending that much effort on each recommendation question is far too much moderation time across the community.
On the other hand... go to a site that is designed with exactly that goal in mind. https://www.slant.co/topics/40/~best-java-web-frameworks does it much better than Stack Overflow can.
But you admit to trying to suppress his ability to express that opinion and see no problem in doing so?
The point being, SO is not for opinions, and not because I say so. The rules of the site say so. And I (and others) already explained why there are such rules. So why shouldn't I vote to close a question that is patently off-topic when the site rules say I should vote to close it?
> But you admit to trying to suppress his ability to express that opinion and see no problem in doing so?
Is this a trial? I find this phrase is a bit accusatory, but maybe I'm just reading too much into it.
I usually don't downvote answer that ask for 3rd party libraries, just vote to close. Your example is a bit borderline and it's something I wouldn't close, but I can see how someone might think it warrants to be closed. Consider that the rule about external tools is meant to avoid a deluge of answers about libraries. They may be useful, but none of them is objectively right and can cause religious wars with people downvoting answers about libraries they don't like and massively upvoting their favorite library.
If we can avoid this by being strict, I think it's a good thing. But hey, I'm just one of hundreds of thousands users, so it's not like my opinion is somehow more valuable than yours.