
Why Github and Stack Overflow are the wrong tools for democracy - reasonwell
http://www.reasonwell.com/about/Reasonwell+vs+Github+and+Stack+Overflow
======
RyanZAG
I can't see this working in practice:

Here is how I see this system playing out in the reality of today. People will
go to the main page, and they will see an argument that does not agree with
their biases. They will then view the claims for that argument, and they will
upvote all claims that agree with their outcome, and downvote all claims that
does not. They will not actually verify each claim, they will vote based on
the their desired outcome for the argument at large. This effect will
completely dwarf the reasoned voting approach for any contentious issue - to
believe otherwise has been to never view an argument on the internet.

The premise of this system is invalid: it relies on people being rational and
logical when debating issues that they are passionate about - people are
neither rational nor logical in these situations.

~~~
richardjordan
Right. I think you're addressing a fundamental problem with all of the pleas
for more reasoned debate in the US and the West as a whole - societies free
enough for debate to take place in theory. As someone who ends up with way too
much NPR on in the background I hear this stuff all the time with all kinds of
worthy never-gonna-happen simplistic answers to what'll make debate better in
society (if only Obama has lunch with Senator X then everything will be find
and dandy).

The core issue - certainly in the United States, perhaps to a lesser degree in
some European countries with better education systems - is that our schools
are turning out people by the million with severely crippled critical thinking
skills. Sure we are in the rarified atmosphere of people who are self
selecting for better than average critical thinking skills, here on Hacker
News. But out there in the real world, folks struggle to comprehend simple
argument structures and logical flows.

It doesn't matter how many smart appealing mechanisms we provide for letting
ordinary folks debate complex issues, most are simply not armed with the tools
for the job.

Sure, that's an elitist argument and we can all mumble platitudes about how
it's unfair to people, and come up with anecdotes about how my great uncle bob
didn't graduate high school and is super smart etc. That doesn't make it
wrong. Just a highly regrettable situation.

~~~
dinkumthinkum
> is that our schools are turning out people by the million with severely
> crippled critical thinking skills.

I sort of agree with your overall point but to this point, I do agree, in some
sense, but is it really the schools, per se, that are turning out those
people. It's not as if there was a point in time that we know where the public
had better critical thinking skills.

~~~
ordinary
When our current education system was first conceived (with the notable
exception of universities), back during the industrial revolution (minor
updates notwithstanding), the goal was not producing capable citizens: The
goal was to produce capable labourers.

To a large extent, our education systems are still stuck in that "teach kids
to behave, then teach them how to earn money" mentality. We keep kids away
from their parents to allow them to earn money, and while we're in control of
what the kids do for 5-8 hours a day, anyway, we should turn them into the
employees we'll need 10 years from now.

And that is where your statement, though technically correct, is (I imagine
unintentionally) little misleading.

Schools have been turning out people like this for the past 2 centuries,
because for people who have no influence on the political process, the more
fundamental skills of critical thinking, creativity and scepticism are simply
not required. If you're a salesman, a nurse or a factory worker without the
right to vote, you don't need to be able to form an opinion on the best way to
recover from an economic depression. So these are incidental skills: usually
not actively discouraged, but by and large not aimed for.

The kicker is, you do need those skills in order to participate effectively in
a democracy that's better than "watch a lot of television and vote for the man
in the best suit once every four years". Over the past 100 years, we've moved
away from excluding people from suffrage (mostly). This means that it's not
just the (relatively) well-educated white male bourgeoisie that needs to have
critical thinking skills. It's everyone.

Our education system has not yet adapted to this 'new' reality. It still aims
for capable workers, not capable citizens. Our education system is vastly
better than it was 150 years ago, but our standards have gone up even further.

~~~
pron
By having a "reasoned debate" about the very purpose of critical thinking, you
are falling into the same trap by discounting the importance of emotions and
irrationality in people's decisions. It's not only that critical thinking is
not required -- it can often be undesirable.

This is a quote from Paul Krugman:

 _Last year the Texas G.O.P. explicitly condemned efforts to teach “critical
thinking skills,” because, it said, such efforts “have the purpose of
challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.”_

[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/11/opinion/krugman-the-
ignora...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/11/opinion/krugman-the-ignorance-
caucus.html)

He is critical of this conservative mode of thought, but these are values that
can have merit. Jonathan Haidt discusses that:

[http://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind.ht...](http://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind.html)

~~~
ordinary
You're confusing two statements: "emotions and irrationality play a big role
in people's poltics" and "emotions and irrationality _should_ play a big role
in people's politics". The former is undoubtedly true. I hope no one would
argue against being rational and objective in matters of, say, world economics
or armed conflict.

If critical thought is at odds with irrationality and emotion, then that is a
conflict that must be resolved in favour of critical thinking, if democracy is
to survive. Carefully considering the arguments for and against political
statements is a good thing. I (again) hope no one would argue against that.

However, I reject the notion that critical thought is necessarily liberal.
There's nothing in theories of critical thought that's inherently opposed to
conservative values. I do not believe critical thinking is a drive towards any
particular school of political thought. It is a drive towards knowledge.

~~~
pron
> You're confusing two statements: "emotions and irrationality play a big role
> in people's poltics" and "emotions and irrationality should play a big role
> in people's politics". The former is undoubtedly true. I hope no one would
> argue against being rational and objective in matters of, say, world
> economics or armed conflict.

Actually, there's another question that should be asked: Is conducting
ourselves rationally even possible? If not -- the question whether we should
be rational might become moot. There is no doubt that some of our decisions
can be, and are, rational. But could all of them be rational? Are humans
capable of being 100% rational? I think the answer is a resounding no. In that
case the problem shifts from being binary to a question of degree. To what
degree are we, or should we be rational?

> If critical thought is at odds with irrationality and emotion, then that is
> a conflict that must be resolved in favour of critical thinking

I'm not so sure about that either. If every question could have a rational
answer, would you like our affairs to be handled by a rational artificial
intelligence? Issac Asimov discussed this, and he, too, points in the negative
direction.

The question of rationality becomes irrevocably complex when you start asking
what is our goal. If our goal is to maximize human happiness and minimize
human suffering, then, clearly, we wouldn't even be able to agree on concrete
missions as happiness and suffering are both subjective. Some people would
place honor ahead of survival. If we can't even place a value on the most
basic of ideals -- life -- what hope do we have of assigning value to lesser
ones? For example, the protagonist of Dostoyevsky's _Notes from Underground_
derives joy from being spitefully irrational and from taking actions that
cause him harm. Spite is what gives him happiness. How could you reconcile
this very human need for spite with rationality?

> I reject the notion that critical thought is necessarily liberal.

You are right, but I think conservative thinking clashes with rationality more
often. By its very nature, conservatism places importance on held beliefs and
is less open to changing values based on new findings. Liberals tend to think
that human existence is a solvable problem given enough information and enough
analysis.

------
zalzane
This is way too long for a pitch. Not only that, it also consists of great
swaths of text that are ridiculously easy to skim over that are content-light
and have no attention-grabbing openers.

You _need_ some diagrams on here. I could barely make it through the 3rd
paragraph before skipping to the bottom to see if there's any kind of tldr or
visual aid so that I wouldn't have to read all that crap.

~~~
richardjordan
Yeah. Couldn't agree more. I am interested in this topic. Since learning about
the European government testing Github for policy revisions I was thinking
about what it'd take to build something very similar to this. So I am
sympathetic here. As someone who studied philosophy and still has a more than
passing interest I could get behind something like this. But it was painful to
wade through a long poorly structured rambling introduction.

For a site that wants to boil ideas down to small chunks we can fork and
follow this was a really poor introduction.

And the text was borderline unreadable.

------
neya
Agreed.

The reason why democracy works is because of the illusion of power - The
people at the top give you the illusion of freedom - The freedom of speech, to
do what you want, etc. while you have nothing of those in reality.

Ideally, you had all those right from the early man days, then someone at the
top curbed you of these and gave it back to you so you would feel 'powerful'.
While we all are slaves in one way or the other - We all pay taxes most of
which is pocketed by the politicians (in most corrupt countries) and we read
the media everyday without knowing that they sell us like a bag of chips to
their advertisers and we all think we can say whatever we want on
Facebook/Twitter/etc. while all of it is being actually monitored by unknown
agencies, etc.

Likewise, Stackoverflow has these so called 'moderators' who somehow magically
are considered superior to the average users who go on a rampage to close as
many threads as possible as not constructive based on their will. If you
noticed carefully, Stackoverflow doesn't have an option for the average user
to report moderator abuse. Atleast not easily anyway. If some dude marks a
question as not constructive, you have to deal with it. That's a poor example
of democracy and unfortunately, it exactly depicts the current model of
democracy lives in. If you have some politician who isn't doing his job
properly, you are left _powerless_ \- You can't throw him out of power easily.
The laws are modulated to sustain his power as much as possible - You need
many people to support your opinion, get together as a group, pass bills, etc.
which needs to be approved by another set of corrupt committees which will
most likely rule in favor of the politician himself..etc.

What we need is a more open world - Yes, more open than what we're living in
right now. If someone does something wrong, then they must be served justice
without any delay. The current scenario involves so much paperwork and hassles
that it makes it worthless getting someone to be delivered justice in time. I
wish we had a system like Hackernews, but for the real world, except without
the mods (who are harmless here anyway) so we can have constructive decisions
directly with one another without much effort to set right what's right and to
pull off/flag something that's wrong ourselves without having to have someone
at the top of us like a 'moderator' so you don't live at the mercy of his
bias.

~~~
saraid216
Could someone actually _cite_ these people who are holding up Stack Overflow
and Github as bastions of democratic process? Because I'm more concerned by
some random schmuck building a site supposedly about argumentation getting
himself twisted up over a straw man. If you're going to play this game, you
need to do marketing for your competitors by citing them, too. You've got no
ethos here.

~~~
maxerickson
<http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/03/pycon-github/>

(I explicitly do not mean to raise a discussion of the context. It's just that
the article does exactly what you are asking about, saying "It’s yet another
way that GitHub is moving beyond software, helping to democratize the
development of other stuff, including everything from laws and other legal
documents to cartoons and even Wired articles.")

------
cyberp
I'm in a similar space some of the time, so I thought I'd look for good ideas.
Review:

* Poor idea -- misses out on issues of motivation, and the soft sides of how people influence each other.

* Isn't great for hard side either. Most good arguments are too nuanced for soundbites.

* Indeed, it would be interesting to see the argument for Reasonwell (over github and similar) presented in Reasonwell's format, and then used as a discussion for how such a system should be designed. This would be a good first use case, and of similar complexity to most political debates. My claim is it would be difficult or impossible to do this in their format.

* The implementation doesn't work (dialog pops up when you try to post a comment, and "okay" doesn't work).

* UX is unclear (I couldn't figure out how to start a debate after minutes of trying, or how to search in useful ways, etc.).

* System isn't open source/free software. This is important for a tool for democracy.

Overall, good ideas were scarce.

------
lowerkey
Why reasonwell's is a strawman argument <https://coderwall.com/p/f43tyq>

~~~
richardjordan
Yeah. Great points both - don't go taking the two wrong features not the two
right ones.

------
rurounijones
Wrong tools for democracy? Damn that is a very broad stroke.

Git is perfect for storing and versioning written legislation.

Unfortunately it needs:

* A beginner friendly, focused (leglisation only), interface

* (lets face it) users who are not luddites (Yes, there are some people who cannot understand even simple branchless versioning no matter how many times you explain and demonstra it).

* Legislation to be written differently (Since most leglisation in countries I am familiar with are basically very wordy plain language diff files already).

The last one is probably the biggest hitch legally and because it is probably
written by people who fall into the second point.

------
eah13
Guys, I think you're spot on with critiques of the product and the
presentation. But the interesting thing about what reasonwell is trying to do
here is its scope. He's trying to map human thought. I for one want to try to
help the guy instead of saying why it won't work.

Models of natural argument are a really fascinating area of AI. Check out the
Argumentation lab at University of Dundee for some of this work:
<http://www.arg.dundee.ac.uk/?page_id=96>

The tradeoff in knowledge representation is specificity vs usability. How do
you structure a machine-readable argument that represents what you think in an
acceptable way but that isn't onerous to create? What is the schema of an
argument? Are they all the same?

There's some basic research to be done here that's empirical, not theoretical.
I hope that Reasonwell narrows down to facilitating a credible use case rather
than presenting yet another grand platform. Here's my line of thought for the
guy: Who s currently making structured arguments on the web? The Dundee guys
have found plenty of natural language argument (it's everywhere, just like in
this post) but haven't been able to get many to actually mark up their
thoughts. How could you get people to do this? Perhaps an Intrade like
platform for predictions, where people could get extra points for being right
for the right reasons. It's a big problem and you'll have to tack into the
wind I think.

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
I think reasonwell does not understand why Github and Stack Overflow work so
well. The reasons do not apply to politics. 1) They are relatively value
neutral. 2) You can usually get immediate objective feedback about either the
repository or the answer. You can try it out yourself, without affecting
anybody else and see what happens. If you try a github repository and it
always crashes, you know that this is something that is not good.

The reason they work so well is for the above reasons, not because "nerds" are
so logic bound. If you don't believe me, imagine what a StackOverflow question
of "Is vi or emacs better?" look like". If "nerds" can't decide that question,
when either answer will have not affect on them personally - both programs are
free and the person is free to use whatever software they want, how will
people decide about issues that are at least as complicated but will also
affect them personally. They use the example of a carbon tax. If you are for
it, then you believe that opposing it will destroy the world. If you are
against it, you believe it is government forcibly taking money away from you.

I think that the best way for people to really consider the issue is to have
broad friendships in the real world. When debating something over the
internet, it frequently devolves into one-upmanship or worse rather than
people really learning. If however, you and your buddy and talking about
something over a beer while hanging out, even if you have different views, you
will likely learn something. More importantly, you will not have fallen into
the trap of viewing everyone with a different view as your enemy.

------
richardjordan
Okay so this is a repeat of a point others are making but this is just not a
good intro. The passage is way too long and unstructured. There's no
visualization. The design makes it hard to read. When I sign up you want to
debate with me what password I use - look you're new, you're getting my
throwaway email address, you're getting what password I give you or you've
lost my attention.

But mostly - you are a site that wants to tell people - quite boldly - that
you're the right way to get ideas across and facilitate debate. However this
introduction is a terrible way to get an idea across - the idea being: "We
have a solution for debating points in a simple fashion. That solution follows
XYZ format. Why not try it and let us explain it to you as you go?"

So to the actual approach insofar as I can glean it for as much of your post
as I digested - I am not convinced trying to boil everything down to
true/false is that useful an approach to debating complex issues. The level of
granularity you have to get to in order to break things down to a series of
binary choices is just too small, leaving the big picture disconnected from
the minutiae.

I was and am optimistic hearing about that European country and Github
recently - first thing I thought of was something to make that process go
better. I am your target audience for this. I want something like this to
succeed. Genuinely. We desperately need to open up new channels for debate in
democratic countries where we're currently suffering some kind of fatigue
that's making everything seem out of control (and in many ways it is because
our ability to debate is broken).

So, good luck with this, but at least take a fresh look at your opening pitch.
It's kinda weak.

------
dinkumthinkum
I agree that Github and StackOverflow (of course) are the wrong tools for
democracy. I also agree that what is proposed is not something produces better
policy debates. I don't intend to bring up any ill feelings but this is sort
of a very narrowly focused programmer's type view of solving a problem
inappropriately.

Ancient greek philosophers already figured out how to approach such matters.
The problem is, and I mean this sincerely, that people are either not truly
interested in honest intellectual discourse or are intellectually incapable
(in a very real sense) of engaging in such discourse.

To paraphrase Popper, there is no point in using logic in arguments with
people not interesting in being rational. As well, people that do not
understand what a non sequitur is even when it is pointed out are not going to
bring much to the discussion.

When you have congressmen that state, in hearings, that they see no problems
with CO2 because it is in their coke cans; what on Earth is reasonwell going
to do about that?

------
pointernil
It is really fascinating to see how this kind of problems still attracts
mostly "technocratic/by the numbers/binary" solutions.

This being said, i think almost every idea in this area should be given a
chance, should be tried out ... we don't have anything to lose but at least a
little to win given the _current_ democratic processes and their
postdemocratic endemic failures.

We clearly need new/additional democratic tools. This could be such a new one.
Not a perfect one but let's see how it works out. HOW it fails.

Finally, any hints towards non-technocratic tools & solutions in the area of
new-democracy? (other than liquid feedback)

------
niggler
"I love Github and Stack Overflow – for code."

I've been starting to question this recently for Github. Github does let
anyone put up code, but there's little curation (the stars give you a rough
idea but don't let you really drill down to what is really useful and what was
starred because someone did a show HN), which means there are plenty of not-
so-useful projects and projects with questionable licenses (no license
specified = trap)

~~~
Kiro

      no license specified = trap
    

I've never understood this. I suppose you're an advocate of MIT, which
basically means you can do whatever you want with it. So how does this differ
from having no license at all? Why do you need MIT?

~~~
Xion
The default is All rights reserved, so you need to provide a license for
anyone to do anything with the code of yours and sleep good at night knowing
you won't exercise your rights through persecution.

~~~
niggler
Heh you mean prosecution, not persecution.

------
ricknew
The pitch could be shorter, but it got me to sign up.

Democratic debate seems to nuanced to be classified as For/Against. Dialog
takes a back seat here as you have to drill down to another layer of for or
against.

Is there some inspiration to be found in <http://www.justiceharvard.org/> that
might be integrated into the next iteration?

Thanks for the work.

------
just2n
I think this is related:
[http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_the_internet_will_o...](http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_the_internet_will_one_day_transform_government.html)

------
EGreg
The issue of group management tools is a lot more complex. I have had to deal
with it for two years :)

<http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=135>

------
VikingCoder
I signed in to Reasonwell. The page keeps refreshing in a way that scrolls me
momentarily back to the top of the page. In Chrome.

~~~
olivier1664
In my case, I stopped when requiered to sign in.

------
drinchev
tl;dr

Recently in Bulgaria (EU country) we had a protest against the current
political system [1]. One week after the strike, the government resigned.
Three weeks within the protest, the non-government leaders of the strike
separated ideologically and had different suggestions for fixing the system (
new constitution with more rights for people, participation of non-political
organisations in the government, legal right to recall representatives from
the Parliament, etc. ) and probably no change will come to the current
government system, since we'll elect the same political structures, which
existed since forever here.

Conclusion : Democracy will always work through representatives with strong
ideas and power to establish media control with money. Nobody will ever listen
to "open-sourced" law-suggestions, since they will be poorly funded and
perhaps not very well understood by majority of people ( non-technical,
retirees, people living in the villages, etc. )

The story :

I'm living in the poorest EU Country. In January, people here had huge
electrical bills ( double of what they used to pay ) and for most people this
means no money for basic needs ( gas for their vehicles, inability to buy
quality food, stalling their mortgage payments, etc. ) [2]. Everyone here was
so desperate that the only thing they could do is to get out on the street and
protest against their poor income and way of living. On the second week more
than 300 000 people participated in the protests ( Bulgaria has 6 million
population ), which made the protests the biggest since the collapsing of
communism here. Two days later one boy set himself on fire [3], protesting
against monopolies, government and organized crime. More people went out on
the streets, because of this fact and more of them set their bodies on fire.

What people actually wanted was blurry. The protests began against the
electrical bills, went through the governing political party and ended with
demands for changing fundamental ways of our democracy ( changing the
constitution ). For one week the people of the streets even created non-
political organisation with discussions what they should do next. There were
many demands and ideas and no single leader ( there were some activists, who
were acting like leaders, but too separated to become one ) to take the
initiative and do something more about them. We were totally separated as a
nation. There was even a pseudo-government from bloggers in Twitter which was
between a joke and a real thing.

Later on a lot of disputes around democracy went through the media. And yes,
the media is very powerful tool. Every political party here pays a lot for
every single minute television time and nobody of the non-political small
leaders of groups could actually say anything constructive ( they had poor
experience, no PR agency against their back, no specialists to say "This is
impossible", etc. ). The parties ( a lot of them corrupt [4] ) took control of
the population again. Everything was a storm in a glass of water. No real
change in the way our country is ruled.

The world is so digital now. The poorest country in EU has one of the fastest
Internet access worldwide [5]. We had good programmers, who work cheap. Darin
Dimitrov is on second place in the StackOverflow top users chart [7]. We have
it all, as a structure, for more e-oriented government [6]. But in the end
nobody out of the political system will ever want to change something so
fundamental and loose power and money for letting people say "I disagree" more
freely.

From my own experience nobody will ever try to integrate something so radical
in the current democratic world ( In US everyone votes for two major parties,
here the major political parties for the new elections are more than 6 ). And
yes, the people are right, the democracy is illusion almost everywhere!

Here is a demo. What will happen if I as a member of the community want to
change the StackOverflow background color, to say ... fuchsia. Will I ever be
allowed to do that? Of course, not. What if I convince more people and even 6
/ 10 moderators to do that. They won't do it, because nobody up there will
ever do what most users want, but simply do what's ( probably ) better for the
community. Which is great. But what will happen if I create a lobby and
sponsor those moderators, it will be easier then. That's what real democracy
is.

Linux is a great open-source model. But we all know who says "Yes" or "No" in
many of the final decisions ( for good ).

I'm glad that hackers are very, very loyal and hardly influenced by selling
good community-driven ideas for profit. But what will happen when someone else
gets on top of such projects. Perhaps the government? I don't want to pay a
"tax" for using the kernel, but everything else in my own country I'm using,
comes with a tax ( pollution, rainwater, tax for green energy, tax for owning
( not driving ) a car, etc. )

So yes, it is a nice idea, but it will never work outside of small tech-
community, since nobody puts irrational people ( thinking for their own profit
) and lobbies in the equation.

[1] : [http://www.ibtimes.com/bulgarian-government-announces-
resign...](http://www.ibtimes.com/bulgarian-government-announces-resignation-
after-nationwide-strike-against-power-price-hike-1095350#) [2] :
[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/20/desperate-
bulgarian...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/20/desperate-bulgarian-
man-s_0_n_2915808.html) [3] : <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plamen_Goranov>
[4] : [http://news.yahoo.com/bulgaria-ex-minister-faces-
corruption-...](http://news.yahoo.com/bulgaria-ex-minister-faces-corruption-
charge-over-eu-171515055.html) [5] :
[http://www.bloomberg.com/slideshow/2013-01-23/top-10-countri...](http://www.bloomberg.com/slideshow/2013-01-23/top-10-countries-
with-the-fastest-internet.html#slide4) [6] :
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Government> [7] :
[http://stackoverflow.com/users?tab=reputation&filter=all](http://stackoverflow.com/users?tab=reputation&filter=all)

~~~
LatvjuAvs
Relying on "strong leaders" are one of biggest downfalls of humanity. Not
relying on yourself is one of your pitfalls, it will go on and on and on until
enough is enough or you will die and someone else will take place in pitfall.

Loathing politicians, looking for savior, looking for strong political leader,
waiting for someone. Protesting against yourself on the street. Putting
someone in charge then putting them away with hope that someone else "good
enough" will take place.

Age of heroes are gone.

------
jpswade
What problem does this solve?

------
pjbrunet
Three words: Stack Overflow Paywall

~~~
niggler
Then Stack Overflow would be the Expertsexchange of 2013

~~~
pjbrunet
The difference is, people would pay.

Classic bait and switch. That's how things have played out since Geocities.
You young guns sweating over Stack Exchange points don't remember those days.
That's why you register a dot-com, to protect your content.

~~~
jsmeaton
The content on all SE sites is licensed under the
<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/> cc-wiki license. I wouldn't
be worrying about a bait-and-switch.

~~~
pjbrunet
They're not bound to that license. Are you a lawyer?

It's just another content farm looking for unpaid labor.

~~~
jsmeaton
Wow you're really quite negative regarding Stack Overflow. Is there a reason?
Many many many people find it an excellent resource for their problems, and
others find it a great place to sharpen their tools. Do you have the same
attitude towards wikipedia?

~~~
pjbrunet
I agree it's an excellent resource. I have several profiles there
<http://stackoverflow.com/users/722796/pj-brunet>

Because it's an excellent resource, it could be monetized with a paywall. We
can't predict the future but we can learn from the past.

They're already monetizing it with <http://careers.stackoverflow.com/employer>

They don't really have much competition but I think <http://snipt.net/> is a
good alternative in certain situations.

------
Helianthus
Has the Quora problem. I can't experience it working. You know what makes
things democratic? When they're immediately visible, not hidden behind a
login.

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LatvjuAvs
People are afraid of freedom and in same time are saddened by having not
enough control. Failing to realize there is no sweet middle spot.

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L0j1k
My primary problem with Stack Overflow is that someone's information may or
may not be correct, but more often than not, they will defend their
information to the death in order to secure reputation. In other words, rep
whores. You also get a lot of weenies who will downvote a particular solution
into oblivion because it simply uses a different pattern than they would like.
In other words, brogrammers concerned with telling you how to smoke your
cigar.

~~~
L0j1k
It should speak volumes about the truth behind my comment considering it's a
downvoted opinion here.

