
Stackoverflow is "some random website" - type0
https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=151960881910649
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sebringj
Having 10K+ rep as well on StackOverflow, I thought this way for a time but
more earlier on in my use of it. In looking back at the things that were
deleted from my account or times I was down voted or things that were edited
that I felt were just wrong, those were the ones where I was in a bad mood or
not exactly nice or being silly or aloof in my comments etc. This is a similar
experience in Hacker News except they don't delete your stuff, they just let
it be clobbered unless you get banned. I can't say what is better overall but
I would have to say they are both appropriate for their use case as I honestly
love them both. IMO, the internet is a better place because of StackOverflow
(and Hacker News).

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tptacek
This seems like out-of-context message board drama, with an editorialized
title. Why is an openbsd-misc opinion about Stack Overflow at the top of the
front page? Are people voting this up because they think it's important that
Martin Schroeder called SO "some random website"? Who cares?

~~~
tedunangst
Kids these days don't know how to stir trouble by cross posting, so we get
this instead.

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jcastro
I've been using the Ask Ubuntu stackexchange since it came out (Top .3% of
users there) and have spent countless hours reviewing. In my experience the
deletion is one of the best features.

The mail is making an assumption that every thing that is being deleted is
valuable, and the fact is that there's a ton of noise, and there's a lot of
time being saved _for everyone else_ by deleting crap.

\- Most comments don't add anything useful, if a comment is actually useful
then it's better to edit and add it to the answer or question, or to remind
the poster to do so.

\- By the time SE is automatically deleting something it's clearly been
abandoned by the community long before.

\- I don't need 50 answers explaining what `/etc/hostname` is for or 15
comments with your opinion on systemd.

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pjc50
The problem with SO is simple:

\- many of the questions would actually work better on a forum that was
explicitly somewhat transient, rather than somewhere that tries to keep the
best answers ""forever""

\- there is no such forum

\- Jeff Atwood wrote Discourse more-or-less as an attempt to build the right
kind of forum software for that purpose. But there is still no such forum, or
at least _not one that SO questions can be moved to_.

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vbezhenar
Why do you think that forum is better than SO? I think that SO does its job
pretty well: good questions (or answers) are visible, especially via Google
while bad or non-interesting questions are vanished forever. Forum is about
discussions. Most of programming questions are not about discussions, but
rather simple question-answer style. And discussions are not welcome in SO
anyway.

~~~
pjc50
> discussions are not welcome in SO anyway

Yes, so rather than deleting the question unanswered on a few people's
subjective opinion that the question is a "discussion", move it to the forum?

(e.g. I ran into this problem
[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49302369/gdpr-
encrypted-...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49302369/gdpr-encrypted-
logging-in-c-sharp) ; would you say that's a discussion? It got closed until I
cheated by mentioning it on HN, resulting in helpful HN readers re-opening it)

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pvg
It's not really SO's goal to be a perfect and immutable repository and
publisher of your personal content. If 90% of your content is finding a
permanent home on SO, the optimistic, generous interpretation is that you're
producing excellent, useful stuff. The converse one is that they're not
deleting enough.

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azhenley
This just sounds like some random people ranting. Most people seem to like SO
(it certainly helps me).

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JdeBP
Have some random juxtaposition to go with the random WWW site.

* [https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=151958046704287](https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=151958046704287)

* [https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/413978](https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/413978)

* [https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/327361](https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/327361)

* [https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/430344](https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/430344)

* [https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/299580](https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/299580)

* [https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/434844](https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/434844)

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matte_black
I never knew about deleted content. Is there any place you could buy a stack
overflow account with 10k+ reputation?

~~~
pjc50
Why would you want to buy such a thing?

~~~
matte_black
You never know when these accounts come in handy. I'll just buy it up.

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nmeofthestate
I've had my jimmies rustled by what felt like over-zealous deletion of my
content on SO. A strict moderator culture seems to have developed there. It
may well make sense, to prevent the site bloating up with low-quality content,
but it was pretty annoying at the time.

~~~
IshKebab
I don't think it's about low quality content. That is the intent of the rules,
but the overzealous application is because a) the people that spend most of
the time enforcing rules obviously _love_ enforcing rules, and are probably
the kind of people you don't want doing it, and b) they tend to zip through
the review queue and don't really consider questions fully. Especially with
the "too broad" or "not clear what you're asking", often it is just that the
reviewer doesn't understand the question because it isn't something they are
knowledgeable about.

Despite its flaws it's still the best option.

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pwaivers
Wow SO Documentation was, in fact, shut down:
[https://stackoverflow.com/documentation](https://stackoverflow.com/documentation).
I remember reading about it Hacker News not so long ago.

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jdlyga
Is there any good alternative though?

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Klasiaster
Depending on the project there are bugtrackers, archived IRCs/mailinglists,
wiki (discussion) pages, forums or blogs and blog comments. And there you even
have the chance to get information from contributors to the project in
question. Other ideas?

