I’m in the same boat. 10k rep on SO and softeng.se, and I barely participate anymore. For me the most frustrating part is that the rules forbid vague questions with opinionated answers, but that at this point in my career most of the things I find interesting are all like that so there’s almost nothing I want to get answers to that I can ask.
Software architecture questions are very difficult to ask without triggering overbroadness. Another category that is off limits are getting started type questions, again they’re considered too vague (but that’s the whole point, the user doesn’t know where to start). And the illogical ban on pointing to research involving statistics also drives me batty. I’ve had arguments with moderators before where my answer was bad because it pointed to capers jones’ research, one of the most authorative sources of good software dev practices.
I always feel like it’s a game of dodge the moderator bot to get questions to not be closed, unless they’re of the boring easy to answer briefly and precisely variety.
I'm sure the moderator feels entirely justified by closing this question, and going by the rules they are perfectly right, but it still feels wrong to me to turn this user away instead of working with them to figure out a way to make their questions fit the website's format.
But, that takes a lot of work, and moderators are volunteers whose time is entirely on their own dime. I suspect that if the stackexchange network had paid moderators the outcome would be very different, but they probably don't have the funding model to support that. I myself also don't do moderator duties on the SE network, so I really shouldn't be blaming the moderators. I merely want to point out the frustration and the non-optimal outcome, not lay blame at the moderators' feet.
At an arms length it really seems like there should be some kind of delineations of the questions.
"What document backend to use with Drupal?" is a question whose answers are in constant flux. It is a bad match for and Authoritative Language Compendium. But it's also the kinds of thing people wonder about, it's a relevant tech question, and the dialog around something like that is easily as valuable as the accepted answer since everyone is skinning a different cat.
So instead of "overly broad, no discussion for you" I'd rather see those questions get routed to "conversation-SO" instead of "reference-SO"...
> "What document backend to use with Drupal?" is a question whose answers are in constant flux. It is a bad match for and Authoritative Language Compendium. But it's also the kinds of thing people wonder about, it's a relevant tech question, and the dialog around something like that is easily as valuable as the accepted answer since everyone is skinning a different cat.
IIRC, they did something like that. It was called programmers.stackexchange.com, and I used it a couple times and it was great.
Then some power-that-be decided it "wasn't working" (probably because it didn't fit the SO only-kind-of-good-question rubric) and changed the focus be a clone of SO with some minor difference in emphasis.
People weren't interested in maintaining the early programmers.se site. It was a "what to browse when there's nothing else to do." As the crud started piling up the options were either abandon it completely (that was threatened) or clean it up along with the associated rules of what makes a good subjective question.
It takes a lot of work to maintain a free for all site by the community. It takes less work by the community to maintain a heavily moderated site.
The culture of a site is a reflection of how much work people are willing to put into keeping it that way.
You'll have to be more specific about what that "crud" is, as SO's culture seems to have a tendency to reclassify the baby as dirt and throw him out with the bathwater.
> the options were either abandon it completely (that was threatened) or clean it up along with the associated rules of what makes a good subjective question.
Seems like there should have been more options on the table than "abandon" or "remake in SO's image." SO has a better population to answer subjective questions than most of the alternatives it tries to push people towards. They really should have been more flexible.
> There’s an even longer list of things that really belong on the new Programmers Stack Exchange, which appears to be degrading into fairly stupid water-cooler nonsense, and could benefit from an infusion of more meaty subjects, like these proposals:
> It was a the era of "what should I name my cat?"
A lot of those links 404 for me, but a lot of that stuff could have been taken care of by being better at defining what was on and off topic, e.g. it's a site for subjective questions about programming, rather than programmers answering subjective questions. SO has the moderation resources to handle that.
SO might have had the moderation resources. The early PSE site didn't (as described in https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/200144 ). The moderation actions trying to deal with that were done mostly by diamond moderator fiat and occasionally Jeff or Joel saying "no."
The community that was there at the time wasn't doing any significant moderation or curation of those questions. Consider https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/4417... and consider is that useful? curated? Should "Quit my last job." (entire answer) be there? or "I tried to apply good programming technique to a language such as TI-83+ BASIC."? Count how many times "read books" or some variation is in that list.
It wasn't moderated or curated. Such pile on "give a pithy answer" was acceptable. And it made the site - trying for the more conceptual and architecture questions that Joel was asking for in his blog post harder to find, and they would get drowned out by the popular fun questions. That lead to https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/01/31/the-trouble-with-popul...
Its not that those aren't interesting questions, its that they are the wrong fit for that format. There are better places to ask for the best programming joke than Stack Overflow and Exchange sites.
And so, with the lack of moderation and curation from the fun days of Programmers.SE a different philosophy of the site was able to establish itself... and the site grew in activity.
The culture of a site is a proof of work. You have to work to maintain it. If there isn't work to do it, it can change. Its probably far to late to change to the less moderated version of the site again. However, if one wants to do that, actively work to curate the site so that those questions are acceptable.
MathOverflow has a fair number of fun and soft questions - but that comes at a lot of work of moderation and curation from the entire community... which they do. The community on other sites that wants those fun and soft questions has not shown as much a desire to curate them, and so others moderate them (not desiring to curate them either).
It's not a worthless question. If you're talking about subjective questions, obsessive curation is not the answer.
> Should "Quit my last job." (entire answer) be there?
Sure, considering there were better answers that had far more votes. It might have been better if it wasn't, and moderation could have taken care of it.
Answers like that are certainly not an indictment of the format.
> Its not that those aren't interesting questions, its that they are the wrong fit for that format. There are better places to ask for the best programming joke than Stack Overflow and Exchange sites.
That's never the kind of think I asked or liked at programmers.se, but like I said before, they threw the baby out with the bathwater.
You haven't really convinced me that subjective questions are "wrong for the format." All you've really shown it that an unmoderated free for all produces some garbage that doesn't fir in a high quality tech Q&A site.
The real answer for why programmers.se failed is probably that the powers-that-be weren't willing to spend the time and resources to meet a new challenge, so they gave up and did something else.
Its not a worthless question. However, its worth is drastically diminished by having so many answers, and so many joke answers in there. That people didn't want to curate it so that the joke answers and duplicate answers are removed and set a standard for providing an answer that is more than one line is why that type of question is closed - it takes too much time for the community that wants to maintain the site to curate it and keep it at a quality that matches the rest of the site.
The format that SE provides is a very direct Q&A that tries to cut out all of the excess and gives a single good answer. There are other sites that are better cut out for polling questions and other sites that do a better job of "what is the best ...?"
Trying to make everything fit in the SE framework puts a burden on the community that moderates and curates the material, and at some point people have said "enough" because they don't want to and others haven't stepped up to do it.
The "wrong for the format" is part of the design of the site. Note here that we're talking in a thread. You can follow the discussion. SE was designed to make discussions awkward. When there's a discussion on a site of significant scale, it becomes unmanageable and detracts from the Q&A focus. If that is a good design decision or a bad one is up to debate - but it is the design decision of SE. And there are so many other places where that discussion could be had. Why not ask that question here? or over on a competing discourse site ( https://www.askquestions.tech was started by April who wrote the post that sparked much of this)?
If Programmers (now Software Engineering) has failed is also up for debate. The name change wasn't so much of a "it failed" but rather "people keep getting the wrong impression of topicality" because yes, it took too much time to keep trying to keep the topic on what the powers that be wanted to moderate and no one else was willing to do the job of curating the content of the larger programmers scope... and after all, they're all volunteers - its really hard to make volunteers volunteer to do something they're not interested in doing.
Software architecture questions are very difficult to ask without triggering overbroadness. Another category that is off limits are getting started type questions, again they’re considered too vague (but that’s the whole point, the user doesn’t know where to start). And the illogical ban on pointing to research involving statistics also drives me batty. I’ve had arguments with moderators before where my answer was bad because it pointed to capers jones’ research, one of the most authorative sources of good software dev practices.
I always feel like it’s a game of dodge the moderator bot to get questions to not be closed, unless they’re of the boring easy to answer briefly and precisely variety.