I mostly hit this locked question thing with recommendations like 'what graph database should I use'. I've found that for simpler straight up programming questions, there is much less locked questions.
The problem is that I often land on a locked SO question, and it's actually incredibly helpful, leading me to wonder why it was locked in the first place.
Most annoying to me is when I find someone asking a question that's exactly what I'm looking for, but it's locked and says "This question is too specific and is unlikely to be useful to anyone else." Last time that happened was with gdb, and looking through the code wasn't helpful because all it said was "unless you're a gdb developer, these header files are unlikely to be useful".
Thanks. To me it's simply a matter of whether the question is on-topic for programming. If so, don't lock it for being off-topic. It seems so simple, especially when the question gets 400+ net votes and 50+ responses. They should let their users decide, with their votes, whether a question is off-topic.
SO is good, but it could be much better without so many locked on-topic questions. I don't want to ask a question there, even if it's clearly not a duplicate, with lock-happy mods there. I don't like having my time wasted.
Shouldn't they be able to do something better with popular content that is beneficial to the community and appropriate to the forum than "lock" it on a technicality?
Like this one I found useful the other day - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/81584/what-ide-to-use-for..., favorited by 1600 people, 1000 points, 5 answers with over 100 points ... locked because it's a bad question that doesn't suit the site. Just that it suits a lot of people using the site. Its score puts it at about 180 in their rank of 8.2 million questions and makes it the 8th most popular python question out of 350k.
I haven’t noticed much degradation, and I ask it fairly technical questions related to code and physics topics. What I have noticed though is needing to qualify my statements more, to avoid having it go down the wrong chain of conversation and getting stuck in a suboptimal context. By this I mean having to say things like “I have installed <package XYZ> per the documentation and am familiar with the API” or “assume the reader is already familiar with <foundational topic>, do not simply your explanations.” Otherwise I get stuck in a situation where it talks to me like a kindergartener or spends 3-4 additional rounds of querying just getting through the basic boilerplate. Maybe this was always the case, and posts like these are just subconsciously influencing me.
Plugins like AskYourPDF and Wolfram have been a huge boost though. I can feed it whole textbook chapters and have it summarize sections, solve problems, generate new exercises, and generally help with learning in ways previously unavailable.
Funny, I see a lot of closed questions on SO, but most of them are from HN links. When I google for a solution for a programming problem, I usually find a high-scoring (not closed) SO question with useful answers.
1. They locked it when it got attention. So most people thought it was fine until some pedantic, overzealous admin noticed it.
2. Where else am I supposed to ask a question like this? These are actually really important question in understanding the history and context of why people make decisions.
3. There are plenty of problems which programmers face every day that have no definitive answer. Should I start a new namespace or not in scenario a? Should I use framework x or framework y? What are the long-term downsides to approach z?
These fit the SO model fine, it's just that there are a bunch of pedants out there locking these extremely valuable questions.
Also fracturing the community with all these different exchange sites is actually getting really irritating. programmers.stackexchange.com, for example, is filled with very poor advice to lots of programming questions that get upvoted as it seems to attract architect astronauts.
If you're looking for high quality discussion, SO probably isn't your best bet. Although I have learned a _ton_ about a new topic by doing a search on a topic, and then ordering the questions by votes or favorites. For example, this is the most voted question for haskell, which has some decent discussion:
Most of the time I use StackOverflow as kind of a warm up to writing my own code. It's a good intermediary step between reading HN and actually getting something done.
I'm genuinely curious why there are consistently at least 3-4 new questions about how to start programming or what language to start with, etc. etc.
Do you think the askers are following through, and actually learning based off of the recommendations? Is it a band-wagon sort of thing? Is there any way to compile the information in one place and point askers towards that?
I'm not GP, but I often still go there via Google searches that turn up questions, and then discover that a useful question with a great answer has been closed as off-topic to the programming forum. 90% of the time it seems like a legitimate programming question.
To go off topic a bit here - all these SO articles that are not pinpointed programming questions are always closed or locked. You can no longer ask these kind of open ended, leading to a debate kind of questions on SO anymore. The questions have to be very focused and narrow so that someone can answer it to get points. Its really disappointing but that is just the way the community took it in - pedantic.
Same for me. I only ask questions now if there is no documentation for something or it is a bleeding edge technology.
I haven't asked a python or C++ question in probably 5 years because the existing answers are all excellent and I can glean what I need from one or more of them.
SO really shines once you've cleared the minimum bar in terms of computing knowledge. From what I hear it's not super great for people that haven't cleared the minimum bar yet (students, absolute beginners, etc.), but it's truly a gem of the internet (I didn't use it as a student because I didn't learn about its existence until I already graduated college - plus, it launched when I was a sophomore in college so it really hadn't built up a good answer base until later).
You might want to look at Stack Overflow's younger sibling(? child? cousin?) - http://programmers.stackexchange.com/ which is intended for the design type questions rather than the code type questions.
Realizing that these softer questions are very likely to stray into the discussion and debate realm the caretaker community of programmers.se can be very active in closing the questions (also with only ~50 questions/day, one can look at every question each day).
The exact phrasing of the "Should I use NoSQL or an ACID based approach..." question would likely run into this and cite the Gorilla vs Shark blog post ( http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/08/gorilla-vs-shark/ ) and close the question as a recommendation question.
However, if you went through and wrote it "Here is my problem, here is my design, here are the potential issues that I see with that design, would switching the database from A to B solve these issues without creating worse new ones?" it would likely be a question that remains open.
Programmers.SE really does try for a higher threshold of quality than stack overflow in that with higher quality questions it is possible to attract people who will give high quality answers.
One bit to note is that with a small amount of reputation on any stack exchange site, someone can get into the chat part of the site (the minimum rep is to keep the spammers out) where discussions are completely appropriate.
All of the Stack Exchange sites are designed around the "problem and solution" model. Furthermore, the model was designed to avoid some issues of the scale of community by making discussion difficult and not appropriate. To that end, I'd suggest reading A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html
Much of the problems that Stack Overflow in particular is facing (compared to the smaller stack exchange sites) is a clash between the core group (read that group article) and the endless september.
It saddens me, but I do believe the endless september is winning in that the core group lacks the numbers or the tool to properly defend itself within the system.
Yeah, unfortunately, these days SO is relatively good for shallow questions but mostly terrible for niche questions when you're already at an advanced level on the topic. Often enough you get several inquiries about your use case from people at or maybe even below your level who can't really answer the niche question, you waste time explaining irrelevant details and fending off skepticism, and end up leaving without an answer.
Is it just me or has the quality and quantity of answers dropped in the past year or so?
I find SO perfect for the simple problems you have when you're new to a language/framework/whatever but when you get into the real nitty gritty problems its like nobodys home.
SO saves time, but drives away the expertise: If I need a help in a bigger, complex and not so trivial questions such as what framework to choose (e.g. angular vs backbone), chances are that question will be closed as not relevant. That leave very technical specific questions which are easily answered by references book.
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