They could’ve created different categories of questions where some are fact-based and some are opinion-based. Then, focused moderation on the precise questions that need higher quality. Their search engines can also put them ahead of opinion-based questions.
In that way, they keep the questions they prefer at a high, quality level while others are hit and miss. The latter are still there to benefit people. Users will then go where they prefer to go. StackOverflow would have both types of traffic.
Once they realized that it was going poorly, Jeff and Joel created "Not Programming Related" and had all of those questions asked there instead... and it went poorly.
https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions...
The thing is that the site is poorly designed to handle opinion based questions and extra work is required by people who do moderation and curation to avoid problems ( https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/01/31/the-trouble-with-popul... ).
In order to support the opinion based questions, a more active curator group is needed than Stack Overflow users seem to be able to support... and the Q&A format that Stack Overflow is designed around is poorly designed to handle these questions.
While I was active there I saw half a dozen attempts to create that site for "primary opinion" that all failed - No one wanted to spend the time to manage it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6062876 is one such example.
Yes, the other type of questions are useful... it's just that Stack Overflow isn't necessarily the best place to ask those questions. It was designed with a very specific type of format in mind and in doing so makes it difficult to handle other types of questions.
The way to have those other questions be admitted is to reduce the individual burden on the people who are maintaining the site or make it easier for people to moderate the site so that less time is needed in order to help people use the site well (this requires improvements of tooling from corporate).
But Stack Overflow... it doesn't need to be able to handle every type of question. It wasn't designed to be able to handle every type of question.
If you believe that the discussions are useful... create the site. Honestly, when you get done with it, it will look a lot like Reddit or Discourse. They are better able to handle questions of that nature. The Q&A format for SO and the comments were designed to make discussions difficult and impractical - which are the exact things those discussion style questions need.
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(from GP) > You got a bunch of smart people with proven expertise in topics, and yet, I cannot ask about their opinion. This is stupid.
You should go to the place where those people with proven expertise answer those questions instead.
Eric Lippert answers questions on Reddit from time to time - https://www.reddit.com/r/programmerchat/comments/37qwmm/i_am... - and he's there because wants to answer those questions then. But he's on SO because he doesn't always want to answer reddit type questions.
"If you believe that the discussions are useful... create the site."
That's a poor counter right there. It ignores both the rate of success/failures of new sites, network effects of old sites, and switching costs. Almost all projects to do site X with improvement Y fail for these reasons even when people on site X think Y is a good idea. A large number of people almost never move to the new platform. Knowing that, wiser people try to go where the people are already at and make improvements there.
For the network effect, try Reddit and consider why /r/AskProgramming doesn't have the mix of people that you're after. Or consider using AskHN here... but note also that this site (which has similarly smart people) isn't the right spot for such questions on a regular basis... why do we want to make Stack Overflow into something that both the software and the established community resist? ... and consider that it was designed that way to make it difficult and awkward to support those types of questions.
The collection of smart people answering questions on StackOverflow are doing so because it is StackOverflow and they can answer a question and then continue on. Eric Lippert and John Skeet don't want to be getting in discussions or they'd be more active in other places. If you ask "what is the best X" on Stack Overflow you'd still not be getting their answers.
As an aside to the "what is the best" - for a while I was recommending https://slant.co/ as a rather well done site (with even less comments) designed for that style of question. https://web.archive.org/web/20221104202743/https://www.slant...
I keep saying that Stack Overflow was designed a certain way. It was. Jeff was strongly influenced by Clay Shirky who wrote A Group is its Own Worst Enemy ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27706413 ). Clay was on the original board of directors for Stack Overflow. The "poorly designed" comments are in response to:
> 4.) And, finally, you have to find a way to spare the group from scale. Scale alone kills conversations, because conversations require dense two-way conversations. In conversational contexts, Metcalfe's law is a drag. The fact that the amount of two-way connections you have to support goes up with the square of the users means that the density of conversation falls off very fast as the system scales even a little bit. You have to have some way to let users hang onto the less is more pattern, in order to keep associated with one another.
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https://stackoverflow.fogbugz.com/default.asp?W25450
Atwood: Maybe. But the cool thing about this is this is not just me, because that would be boring. It is actually me and Clay Shirky. You know, Clay Shirky is one of my heroes.
Spolsky: Oh...
Atwood: Yeah I know, it's awesome. So we get to talk about like building communities online and I get to talk about StackOverflow, you know, and all the lessons we've learned and, get to present with Clay. Obviously he's an expert so. That's one of the people that I have emailed actually, because I thought that would be good, because he is from New-York city as well. So we could A) show him the site and B) talk about the thing we are going to do together in March, because he needs to see the site to have some context. I mean I did meet him and talk to him about this earlier a few months ago, I think I mentioned it on the podcasts. But that was before we had sort of even going to beta, so there's really not a lot to show him. But I would love to show him in person. So we'll see if I'll hear back from him, I do not know.
Just as Star Wars is a manifestation of Campbell's Hero's Journey (lots of Lucas Campbell links), Stack Overflow is an implementation of "A Group...". There are things that worked well, there are things that worked poorly.
The sites that compete with Stack Overflow for the other questions already exist. That they don't attract the experts or that they don't allow such questions is a statement about what would happen on Stack Overflow if you were try to make it so those questions were allowed.
Remember that https://news.ycombinator.com/ask exists and has those less well formed discussions that clearly doesn't match Stack Overflow's Q&A format.
It is able to handle the wider scope more easily. The fewer questions per day and the more people there to help guide a not-quite-right question to become more useful the more that variation in scope can be handled.
Stack Overflow has the difficulty that as they scaled up in activity, the number of people willing to spend the time to curate and the corresponding tooling didn't scale with it. This resulted in a reduction of time that can be spent on a question to help it be a good question and so people do the least friction fastest action as they can.
If, for every person in https://math.stackexchange.com/review/close/stats you got 10 people to show up in https://stackoverflow.com/review/close/stats it might be feasible to have a more similar level of topic deviation. Note that Math, a small fraction of the size of Stack Overflow has done as many close vote reviews today as Stack Overflow.