For example, pretty much any question about C string handling has many possible answers, e.g., [1] admits that comparing two strings is "rather broad" and the various answers there recommend looping over each index and comparing chars with ==, sscanf, strncmp, regexes, and PEGs. Opinions galore!
But if you want to know the difference between AWS EC2 and EB [2], even though there's one pretty clear answer, somehow the admins unanimously find the question to be "primarily opinion-based".
[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16013031 [2]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25956193
My hunch is that due to the desire for longevity of content, there's a large unspoken bias in favor of questions about simple programs, and against questions about remote services (which are more likely to disappear or change, even though that's not likely to happen with major AWS services), and that the question closure explanations like "primarily opinion-based" are just a smokescreen.
Q: How do I do X extremely specific thing that I need because I have an unusual case that needs this specific thing.
A (top voted): Why would you want to do X? You shouldn't do that. I clearly know more about your problem than you do because I assume everyone on here is a college student and not a developer working with a large mostly static codebase. You should do Y instead. It is much better.
> "A client has asked me to build and install a custom shelving system. I'm at the point where I need to nail it, but I'm not sure what to use to pound the nails in. Should I use an old shoe or a glass bottle?" >...[potential answers] >b) There is something fundamentally wrong with the way you are building; you need to use real tools.
The answerer is often telling the person, what you are trying to do sounds like a really bad/inefficient/ineffective/whatever solution. The common way to solve this is Y because of reasons A, B, and C. Are you doing something where those reasons are not a concern?
[1] https://weblogs.asp.net/alex_papadimoulis/408925 [2] http://thedailywtf.com
Stack Overflow’s approach appears to be all answers are acceptable. This isn’t just for the person who asked the question but everyone else too.
If a person is not providing good answers and people are down voting those poor answers, there is an automatic answer ban in place... but that requires people to down vote poor answers.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1942298/wrapping-a-c-lib...
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/127803/how-to-parse-an-i...
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1006289/how-to-find-out-...
..etc..
I don't understand why "how to generate a USPS label" (my question) is different than any of the above examples.
The problem with recommendation questions is that they are very time consuming to keep curated and useful. You’ll inevitably have 50 answers of which 20 are duplicates and difficult to delete because of up votes on them.
The community moderation for “just close them quickly” is much less than the community moderation necessary to curate them.
Anyways, https://www.slant.co is set up to do recommendations better than stack overflow could conceivably do. Not all questions are best asked on stack overflow.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46718944/facebook-graph-...
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7120806/skype-python-api
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/34010978/elasticsearch-h...
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26305704/python-mixed-in...
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49524937/fast-bipartite-...
... etc ...
I get the idea of avoiding "what's the best programming language?"-type questions, but to the point of my original comment, the application of the policy feels very uneven and therefore "oddly subjective".
The Skype question is a bit older Its actually 6 years older and has only been seen on average 100 times a month. The answer is "yes, look at [broken link], and [obsolete python library at source forge]". It needs some curation. Are you up to doing it? The other answer says that the answer was action in 2011... and compares it to using IE5.
The fourth link (python mixed integer linear programming) is interesting in that its three and a half years old, has only one answer and has been updated in the past 5 days. The author of that answer has done almost 20 revisions keeping it up to date since then. This is the work that needs to be done on posts to keep it useful and relevant.
Compare with the second answer to Elasticsearch HTTP API or python API:
> You may also try elasticsearch_dsl it is a high level wraper of elasticsearch.
Thats it. A lot more work is going to need to be done to that post to make it useful. That said, this isn't a "does this exist" question its a "Which technique is better for my occasion? The elasticsearch RESTful API or the python API for elastic search (elasticsearch-py)?"
The Fast bipartite matching actually matches that criteria.
The point I'm trying to make is that it takes a lot of work to keep the good questions of this sort good and useful. Otherwise, they end up like the Skype question and become worse than useless in that they make it harder to find the answer on other sources.
Moving software recommendations to its own site allowed a community to form there that was engaged with that curation.
That said, I believe the SO engine fails spectacularly with recommendations. I find https://slant.co to be a better resource that has its engine dedicated to recommendations (rather than Q&A).
- [Software Recommendations Stack Exchange](https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/)
I don't like that 'decision', i.e. to not allow recommendations, but I understand the reasoning behind it, that recommendation questions are basically polls. [But isn't everything on which people can vote basically a poll too? Obviously yes in my opinion.]