The changes are a step in the right direction, however I see no mention of the situation where questions with many upvotes are closed. I find it incredibly arrogant that a mod can come close a topic that has many upvotes. It is basically saying to the community that all their opinions count for nothing, which is pretty disrespectful to a community that prides itself (rightly so) on its high number of domain experts.
The other truly irritating thing about SO/SE is their propensity for closing opinion based questions. I am sure that I am not the only one that finds domain experts arguing about for example, the merits of 1 library over another, or language A over Language B, rather useful (I often use their answers as a basis for further research to see if I agree or can find supporting evidence). Allow the community to vote up the opinion based answers they like and downvote the trolling/flaming answers.
One of the changes they describe is about reformulating questions to better fit their "model." I didn't see any indication that people would be getting any indication or explanation of what their "model" is, but it's pretty much just another "closed...FU."
DISCLOSURE: I wrote that blog post, I work for SE, I AM biased.
Thanks for the general support.
You raise two concerns, though:
1. Upvotes - this is tricky. The problem with never allowing questions with lots of upvotes to be closed is twofold:
- Sometimes, what's allowed changes over time. Communities start out allowing almost anything "What's a good snack to help programmers stay awake?", but eventually decide that they need to limit things to a narrower focus. If communities who do that can't close those questions, they'll attract more like them.
- Some popular things are way off base to start with. You might be able to attract a ton of upvotes for an xkcd post, but you really wouldn't wan't the site full of them just because they're broadly loved.
2. opinion based questions - the changes are designed to help a little with what you're worried about: "primarily opinion based" now explicitly acknowledges that many good answers incorporate some expert opinion. But you still want some limit, no? "Which is better, Ruby or PHP?" isn't good for anybody, and the new reasons are designed to make it clearer that some opinion is ok, if it comes from expert experience or can be supported by facts, references, etc. Where that line belongs is for each community to decide.
1. With the examples you gave I can see there are going to be issues, however I have seen many, more focused examples with sometimes a very large number of upvotes, get closed.
Typically a question along these lines will be closed - "What is the best book to learn C++ if I already know Java?" In this case there is no correct answer and the answers will be completely opinion based, but there are still many good answers (and books) that will be relevant.
2. I agree with you that such a broad based question should be closed but even more focused questions are also closed, very similar to the one I used above where there can be quite a few valid - and completely different opinions.
I realise that it is a balancing act and for sure you are moving in the right direction. I am hoping that opinion based questions/answers will be given more leeway going forward.
I'll flat-out disagree with you about the opinion-based questions.
We're in a young-enough industry and practice that opinions are really the coin of the realm--there is not the same standard accept methodology you'd see in, say, mechanical engineering.
To pretend that opinions aren't somehow a useful component of learning here is absurd--all the more so because beginners need opinions to start. Once they learn more, once they get exposed to other ideas, then they can form their own opinions. But to pretend that this happens in a vacuum is quite wrong.
Your example "Which is better, Ruby or PHP?" is exactly where opinions, properly backed-up, are useful: a good answer will say "Well, Ruby has these great metaprogramming features, but PHP has a much larger developer pool, and so on". Bad answers will of course just be "ruby is teh 1337 n00b". If only there was some kind of way that Stack Overflow let users filter good answers from bad answers...
At the end of the day, opinions and their debate are what are most useful to a beginner, especially when they don't know what questions to ask or issues to consider. The big failing right now is that you aren't trusting your community enough to filter out the garbage.
No one is saying that opinions aren't important. What they're saying is that their place isn't StackOverflow. Why do people find this so hard to understand? Just because SO/SE is big doesn't obligate them to become big enough to encompass all the useful questions in their domain. Let them do their thing.
Well, when your site is titled "Stack Overflow is a question and answer site for professional and enthusiast programmers.", people, professional and hobbyists alike, tend to think they can questions. (The nerve of those people...)
In our field, again, there are a great many questions which seem to only be matters of opinion--and that's okay! That's fine! That's how people work, and to pretend otherwise is foolish.
Many architectural decisions in computing are heuristic, right? Many solutions are the result of opinion, because nearly everybody outside of hard-core mathematicians and computer scientists lacks the language to even describe their problems in such a way as to avoid opinion. Even the folks that do have that ability are likely working on a problem where the assumptions are incomplete and ill-defined anyway.
This is a faulty binning of questions into "is question about opinion" and "is question that is not matter of opinion". I posit that the former bin is quite useful and shouldn't be worked against.
You're still fighting a strawman. No one is pretending anything. Let me say it one more time: SO/SE is not obligated to accommodate all useful questions in their domain. They made their choice. Let them do their thing. But stop whining. Just stop.
In the "but, questions and answers!" vein, it's the "answer" part that's important. I believe they've come out and said they only want to handle questions that have one single answer, in full knowledge there are many questions that don't fit in that mold.
Architectural decisions are a red herring: they don't want to answer heuristic-driven architecture questions. That's not in their scope.
No one's saying those questions aren't useful. They're only saying that SO is not the place for them. This is not complicated. As a programmer, avoiding feature creep is something you almost certainly already understand. It's basically the same.
I hate this answer, and it crops up in many places in this discussion and on SO/SE. What you are basically saying is "it's their game and you can follow these rules or go away". Sure, it's their game... and it's a shame many of the best players hang around their playground, otherwise I would depart in a split second. And the moment another alternative shows up, I will. Until then I will just take what I can and give back... well, less than I would if the rules were more sensible. And I will whine. :)
Disclosure: they have closed a few of my answers that I actually went to some length to make good - but apparently "which library" type of questions are not appropriate for a programming Q&A site?!? Go figure.
I say the following in all seriousness and with no sarcasm: Feel free to create your own Q&A site that invites discussion. If it becomes more useful than Quora or Yahoo! Answers, please let me know.
If it's such a stupid viewpoint, then why aren't they being ousted by Q&A sites that don't hold that viewpoint? It's not like this is something they haven't heard before - people have been making the same complaint since day 1.
Stack Exchange is not going to provide you with what you want. You can ask 'til you're blue in the face, but they're pretty clear about what they do and don't want.
So why keep asking?
You'll get better results creating it yourself, or persuading someone else to create it.
> never allowing questions with lots of upvotes to be closed
Don't make it never, just raise the threshold?
Make it require X moderators to agree before it can be closed.
Make it so that opinion answers don't get rep.
Make it so the questions are put on hold and go to meta stack overflow.
(I don't acctually use stack overflow; apologies if you already do that.)
The closing of popular questions by a mod on a drunken power-hungry semantics trip is to the exclusion of the community is very off-putting for the regular members of the community who do the majority of the answering.
And who determines which answer is an "opinion answer"? Any attempt at labeling answers as "opinion answers" via machine learning will inevitably have false positives.
I disagree about "not good for anybody". Reading opinions of experts even on topics like" PHP or Ruby" could be very educational. It's a way of sharing experience. If you face decisions about which technology to choose you want to soak that. Asking specific questions is not enough - the thing about experience is that people who have it encountered problems you often can't think of at the beginning of the way.
What's the problem with adding "subjective" tag and allow filtering so people who don't want to see opinion based discussion won't ever encounter it while allowing others to enjoy it and learn from it ?
I agree with top comment (as of now) that SO stance on it is arrogant and display lack of respect for great community.
I also don't like that SO staff attribute their success to stance on this issue. Yes SO is very successful and by far the best place to learn/seek help the reasons are plenty: great interface, very fast, great search, great reputation system, a bit of luck as well. It doesn't mean every decision you took contributed to your success.
Do you really think that closing popular/upvoted questions based on some arbitrary policy thus stopping discussion for the sake of stopping it (it's not as it clutters the site or anything) makes anybody more happy about the site ?
I still often search for most popular SO questions in history, many of them closed and containing a lot of great information. It's sad to think that a lot more was lost due to overeager closing. Forunately it was better at the beginning so some of those discussions developed a bit before being shut down.
With regards to opinions, I think SO's stance is that they want the site to be a medium to exchange mostly facts, and as little opinion as possible.
The problem with opinions is that, to someone who is not knowledgeable, it may not be immediately clear which opinion holds more weight. In turn, this may end up confusing the reader even more, or worse yet, it may mislead them. This is especially true because even when an opinion is correct, its correctness may be context-sensitive, and this may cause the reader to make the wrong decision based on the correct opinion.
More often than not the voting is based on opinion in addition to fact. Often the top answer is not only correct but cleaner, more elegant or adheres to some aesthetic quality that's valued by those people voting up the answer.
In software there's many ways to achieve a goal, not a single unique factual answer, thus many answers are context-sensitive and not absolute truths. Sure we can determine to some extent the correctness of the answers, but many of them are contextual and based on factors that are based on opinion/experience.
The voting system in and of itself encourages users to infuse answers with opinion.
The problem with opinions is that, to someone who is not knowledgeable, it may not be immediately clear which opinion holds more weight
If only there was some facility in Stack Overflow to let users add weight to an opinion, either by signaling agreement or explicitly rounding it out with comments--man, that'd be really useful, wouldn't it?
Opinions aren't something that are bad. Facts, especially to somebody that doesn't know what they don't know, are often less useful. If you punish opinions, you also discourage people from answering with extra background on a topic and creating useful discussion.
> I find it incredibly arrogant that a mod can come close a topic that has many upvotes.
Is this actually true? My understanding was that no one could directly close a question, but rather that you can cast close votes (and 5 of them closes a question).
> I find it incredibly arrogant that a mod can come close a topic that has many upvotes. It is basically saying to the community that all their opinions count for nothing
What is the distribution of those upvotes against reputation, though? Anybody can upvote. Only users with significant reputations can issue votes to close a question.
If domain experts think that a question should be closed, but an overwhelming number of beginners, non-participants (eg. people viewing the HN front page) or ill-informed think otherwise, then what should happen?
The other truly irritating thing about SO/SE is their propensity for closing opinion based questions. I am sure that I am not the only one that finds domain experts arguing about for example, the merits of 1 library over another, or language A over Language B, rather useful (I often use their answers as a basis for further research to see if I agree or can find supporting evidence). Allow the community to vote up the opinion based answers they like and downvote the trolling/flaming answers.
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