Software architecture questions are very difficult to ask without triggering overbroadness. Another category that is off limits are getting started type questions, again they’re considered too vague (but that’s the whole point, the user doesn’t know where to start). And the illogical ban on pointing to research involving statistics also drives me batty. I’ve had arguments with moderators before where my answer was bad because it pointed to capers jones’ research, one of the most authorative sources of good software dev practices.
I always feel like it’s a game of dodge the moderator bot to get questions to not be closed, unless they’re of the boring easy to answer briefly and precisely variety.
https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/3698...
I'm sure the moderator feels entirely justified by closing this question, and going by the rules they are perfectly right, but it still feels wrong to me to turn this user away instead of working with them to figure out a way to make their questions fit the website's format.
But, that takes a lot of work, and moderators are volunteers whose time is entirely on their own dime. I suspect that if the stackexchange network had paid moderators the outcome would be very different, but they probably don't have the funding model to support that. I myself also don't do moderator duties on the SE network, so I really shouldn't be blaming the moderators. I merely want to point out the frustration and the non-optimal outcome, not lay blame at the moderators' feet.
"What document backend to use with Drupal?" is a question whose answers are in constant flux. It is a bad match for and Authoritative Language Compendium. But it's also the kinds of thing people wonder about, it's a relevant tech question, and the dialog around something like that is easily as valuable as the accepted answer since everyone is skinning a different cat.
So instead of "overly broad, no discussion for you" I'd rather see those questions get routed to "conversation-SO" instead of "reference-SO"...
IIRC, they did something like that. It was called programmers.stackexchange.com, and I used it a couple times and it was great.
Then some power-that-be decided it "wasn't working" (probably because it didn't fit the SO only-kind-of-good-question rubric) and changed the focus be a clone of SO with some minor difference in emphasis.
It takes a lot of work to maintain a free for all site by the community. It takes less work by the community to maintain a heavily moderated site.
The culture of a site is a reflection of how much work people are willing to put into keeping it that way.
You'll have to be more specific about what that "crud" is, as SO's culture seems to have a tendency to reclassify the baby as dirt and throw him out with the bathwater.
> the options were either abandon it completely (that was threatened) or clean it up along with the associated rules of what makes a good subjective question.
Seems like there should have been more options on the table than "abandon" or "remake in SO's image." SO has a better population to answer subjective questions than most of the alternatives it tries to push people towards. They really should have been more flexible.
The enforcement notice was with https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions... (which also lists a lot of the water cooler days of PSE links).
The history is described in https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3415 . Also give https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/17/merging-season/ a read. Note the:
> There’s an even longer list of things that really belong on the new Programmers Stack Exchange, which appears to be degrading into fairly stupid water-cooler nonsense, and could benefit from an infusion of more meaty subjects, like these proposals:
A lot of those links 404 for me, but a lot of that stuff could have been taken care of by being better at defining what was on and off topic, e.g. it's a site for subjective questions about programming, rather than programmers answering subjective questions. SO has the moderation resources to handle that.
The community that was there at the time wasn't doing any significant moderation or curation of those questions. Consider https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/4417... and consider is that useful? curated? Should "Quit my last job." (entire answer) be there? or "I tried to apply good programming technique to a language such as TI-83+ BASIC."? Count how many times "read books" or some variation is in that list.
It wasn't moderated or curated. Such pile on "give a pithy answer" was acceptable. And it made the site - trying for the more conceptual and architecture questions that Joel was asking for in his blog post harder to find, and they would get drowned out by the popular fun questions. That lead to https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/01/31/the-trouble-with-popul...
Its not that those aren't interesting questions, its that they are the wrong fit for that format. There are better places to ask for the best programming joke than Stack Overflow and Exchange sites.
And so, with the lack of moderation and curation from the fun days of Programmers.SE a different philosophy of the site was able to establish itself... and the site grew in activity.
The culture of a site is a proof of work. You have to work to maintain it. If there isn't work to do it, it can change. Its probably far to late to change to the less moderated version of the site again. However, if one wants to do that, actively work to curate the site so that those questions are acceptable.
MathOverflow has a fair number of fun and soft questions - but that comes at a lot of work of moderation and curation from the entire community... which they do. The community on other sites that wants those fun and soft questions has not shown as much a desire to curate them, and so others moderate them (not desiring to curate them either).
Yes.
> curated?
It's not a worthless question. If you're talking about subjective questions, obsessive curation is not the answer.
> Should "Quit my last job." (entire answer) be there?
Sure, considering there were better answers that had far more votes. It might have been better if it wasn't, and moderation could have taken care of it.
Answers like that are certainly not an indictment of the format.
> Its not that those aren't interesting questions, its that they are the wrong fit for that format. There are better places to ask for the best programming joke than Stack Overflow and Exchange sites.
That's never the kind of think I asked or liked at programmers.se, but like I said before, they threw the baby out with the bathwater.
You haven't really convinced me that subjective questions are "wrong for the format." All you've really shown it that an unmoderated free for all produces some garbage that doesn't fir in a high quality tech Q&A site.
The real answer for why programmers.se failed is probably that the powers-that-be weren't willing to spend the time and resources to meet a new challenge, so they gave up and did something else.
The format that SE provides is a very direct Q&A that tries to cut out all of the excess and gives a single good answer. There are other sites that are better cut out for polling questions and other sites that do a better job of "what is the best ...?"
Trying to make everything fit in the SE framework puts a burden on the community that moderates and curates the material, and at some point people have said "enough" because they don't want to and others haven't stepped up to do it.
The "wrong for the format" is part of the design of the site. Note here that we're talking in a thread. You can follow the discussion. SE was designed to make discussions awkward. When there's a discussion on a site of significant scale, it becomes unmanageable and detracts from the Q&A focus. If that is a good design decision or a bad one is up to debate - but it is the design decision of SE. And there are so many other places where that discussion could be had. Why not ask that question here? or over on a competing discourse site ( https://www.askquestions.tech was started by April who wrote the post that sparked much of this)?
If Programmers (now Software Engineering) has failed is also up for debate. The name change wasn't so much of a "it failed" but rather "people keep getting the wrong impression of topicality" because yes, it took too much time to keep trying to keep the topic on what the powers that be wanted to moderate and no one else was willing to do the job of curating the content of the larger programmers scope... and after all, they're all volunteers - its really hard to make volunteers volunteer to do something they're not interested in doing.
The name change meta post is at https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions... (see also the linked questions).
Are you trying to use SO or the Software Engineering site?
https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/
They also have a site for software recommendations now, so they created alternative sites for some categories of questions forbidden on SO.
I'm not sure if it hadn't been better to try to integrate it into SO though, using tags for example.
It's right there in the parent's text.
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/365720/feature-requ...
Turned out somebody posted the almost exact same idea here almost 3 years earlier:
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/254205/opt-in-mento...
And StackOverflow even did an experiment with a different implementation last year:
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/365720/feature-requ...
But while there definitely seems to be a movement afoot to tackle the issue, I can see why you're ready to give up. Look at the comments to my question and you'll find this (with a couple upvotes):
@klenwell 'users who downvote without comment or explanation other new users who have given some obvious attention to the composition of their question' I hear these things often. I don't see them when using SO, nor have I seen any evidence that such a set of users exists, and I have asked for such evidence, many, many times. None has ever been forthcoming. I have concluded that such users do not actually exist.
This after I provided a detailed personal account of this dynamic in action. I mean I guess I could start collecting timestamped screenshots or request the server logs from the Stack Overflow sysadmins. For now, I guess I'll just join the chorus of the disaffected here.
No one wants the rules to change in a game that they perceive that they are winning (or have won). Moreso if they worked hard to win.
I'm one of those people who wants the rules to change in a game that I'm already winning. I worked hard to win; I fully engaged in the gamifiction, spending days at a time making sure I hit the max daily rep level, optimizing how I answered questions to get the highest score.
Even then, I tried to focus my optimization on ways that would help people more. For instance, one way to optimize is to post a very short quick answer, so you are able to get early upvotes before there's been a flood of answers for a question; but I would then edit and flesh out my answer. This has both advantages for reputation, since I could get early upvotes, and then later provide a more detailed comprehensive answer that would be likely to get further upvotes. It's also helpful for the person asking; it's possible that the very quick reply will be helpful, so they get an answer soon, but it's also possible that the more detailed reply with references to docs is what they need, so it's a way of making the gamification actually work to help people out more.
I think one of the big problems is when they added gamification of moderation. They added the review queues, which prompt you to review questions and answers that had been downvoted, voted to close, edited by other people, etc, and gave out badges based on numbers of reviews done. This means you'd go through a queue of questions and answers on topics you might know nothing about, and be prompted as for whether or not you agree with someone else's close vote or edit or the like.
When a question is not great, you could just vote to close it, or you could try to engage with the person asking the question and help edit it into a better form. I generally try to talk to the person asking and edit the question to be better; but getting internet points for getting through a lot of reviews quickly incentivizes people to make quick judgements, sometimes on topic they don't know much about. After they added the review queues, I found a lot more questions were being closed before you had a chance to answer or to engage with the person in comments to get them to clarify their question.
And while lots of people these days argue that closing a question is just a way to indicate that it's not up to standards but it can be fixed and re-opened, for people new to SO who aren't familiar with the culture it feels like a slap in the face and a rejection of their question. After a question is closed, it's a lot more likely that they'll just delete it, delete their account, or just stop participating.
Anyhow, yeah, there is an aspect of people not wanting to change the rules of a game that they are playing and winning; I just wish either the incentives were changed, or more people would take the view that the point of the scoring is as a rough measure of how much they are helping people out, and helping people out is the ultimate goal, rather than being an end in itself.
And I should also say that I'm not against closing truly bad or unsalvageable questions; I've had cases where I've tried to engage with someone to make their question better, and they just haven't made any effort, or cases in which people are obviously asking homework questions. But I really think that there should be some effort to help people out with asking their questions before just blindly deciding to close them out.
No one seems to want to change. No one seems to want to even engage with criticism about the culture; they just push back and pile on when criticism is brought up.
After a couple times of seeing this kind of behavior, and pushing back, and then getting piled on by people rejecting the criticism, I started to get tired of it and withdrawing somewhat. Later on, I some blatant sexism in a chatroom that was laughed off when I pointed it out to the moderators.
I've pretty much given up. I'll occasionally reply to questions people ask on my existing answers or if I see something that needs an answer or edit I'll make it, but I don't really feel like fighting the overwhelmingly elitist, sexist, and uncaring attitude on the site.
I think that this post is a nice gesture, and good that it's coming from the company and not just another user, but I worry that's it's much too late. The community has been attracting people who like it the way it is, and repelling people like me who don't, for a long time.