I wish SO had the courage of its convictions and stopped all locked pages from being seen by search engines. That way unhelpful links wouldn't waste people's time when searching for answers.
Again and again we found that Stack Overflow would try to get rid of some of the most helpful ages I had found.
For a while, more often than not it seemed, if you found a helpful answer it was locked or somehow on its way to destruction.
I don't see this as often anymore but I also don't see that many good results in my search engine anymore and I don't know if it is because search engines has become more and more useless or if it is because Stack Overflow deleted a good chunk of the most useful questions they had.
> I wish SO had the courage of its convictions and stopped all locked pages from being seen by search engines. That way unhelpful links wouldn't waste people's time when searching for answers.
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.
The stack overflow model works well for a certain type of question. Part of this is the reaction to the resources of 2008 - trying to find things on page 15 of the a thread in the Java community forums.
While there are many possibly helpful questions that could be asked, not all of them are a fit for the format. That was a design choice made on day 1 and is backed deeply into how the software works and the way people interact with it.
Still, people asked those questions. The problem is that while they are interesting questions, and everyone wants to answer them - that reduces their value while at the same time putting more work on the community to try to keep it useful. Look at https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9033/hidden-features-of-... and consider the challenge of keeping it useful and relevant. If you were to try to add an answer to that post (if it weren't locked and closed), would you read through all 296 answers to make sure you weren't repeating someone else?
Some of these questions were recognized as taking more time of the people trying to maintain the site and focus on the questions that it handles well and were locked. The other option would have been to delete them, but stack overflow tends to have a "we don't delete useful content or break the web" philosophy.
There are other sites that handle the types of questions that Stack Overflow doesn't handle well quite well themselves. Quora does anecdotes well. Slant.co does comparisons. And so on.
> While there are many possibly helpful questions that could be asked, not all of them are a fit for the format. That was a design choice made on day 1 and is backed deeply into how the software works and the way people interact with it.
The issue I and I guess many of us here is talking about is that it seems the Stack Overflow community - or rather a vocal minority in the community I guess - are downvoting and flagging questions that where ok for the format.
The structure of Stack Overflow wants a question that has a problem that has some code that isn't behaving correctly and can be solved.
The list of "any better ways" is without bound or qualification as to what "better" is.
That type of question would probably be better suited to a higher density communication medium such as chat or a true forum (with threads). Stack Overflow was intentionally designed to make that type of question hard to answer.
Its not that it isn't a good question - just that it isn't a question that fits well into the SO format. That should be ok, there are many other places where such questions can be asked.
That’s the point. The site automatically deletes question with negative score. They disappear for most users, they even disappear from “my answers” section of my profile, despite I have enough reputation to view them if I have a link.
> which... really is "design an entire system for me" type question.
For a professional working with multimedia stack on Windows, the original question is clear. The question received two good answers before these edits. The 4 web developers who closevoted the question are obviously incompetent in the domain, but for some reason unclear to me they decided to closevote.
> is still getting into discussions in the comments.
No it’s not. All the comments were written before I’ve edited the question.
> The structure of Stack Overflow wants a question that has a problem that has some code that isn't behaving correctly and can be solved.
Consider then having people ask the questions that are 'interesting' here, on HN. There's Metafilter. There is IRC, slack and discord channels, twitter, GitHub issues, mailing lists. People have fairly consistently tried to do spin offs of Stack Overflow (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6062876 is one such example - it didn't work, it is rather challenging to get enough people active to keep it active - see https://www.askquestions.tech as another). There are even people still posting on usenet ( https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/comp.lang.javascript )
There are lots of them out there. They're not as big as Stack Overflow, but that's part of what allows them to have a less focused mission... and many of the other formats support the interesting questions better than Stack Overflow can.
Consider the impact on HN if every time someone asked an opinion question or recommendation for resources, the people pointed here. Hundreds of posts a day fall into this bucket... would HN be able to moderate it? Would people stop looking there when the top 30 were within the past 30 minutes and all by green names?
I used to be active on another part of the SE network... and we could easily get overwhelmed when people on SO tried to be helpful and point people with questions that weren't quite right for SO in our direction. Without that person being active on our site too, they often failed to realize that it wasn't a good question there either... and we'd have to try to explain that they were misdirected and no, we're not being elitist but the question needs to be closed here too. For a small site, we could easily get half of daily questions being from "helpful" misdirections. ( https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions... and https://codereview.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5777/ )
> Hackers blow off questions that are inappropriately targeted in order to try to protect their communications channels from being drowned in irrelevance. You don't want this to happen to you.
> The first step, therefore, is to find the right forum. Again, Google and other Web-searching methods are your friend. Use them to find the project webpage most closely associated with the hardware or software giving you difficulties. Usually it will have links to a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) list, and to project mailing lists and their archives. These mailing lists are the final places to go for help, if your own efforts (including reading those FAQs you found) do not find you a solution. The project page may also describe a bug-reporting procedure, or have a link to one; if so, follow it.
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To the "It's too big" - yes it is. I believe that that is really at the core of the problem. The avenues where I go for help now tend to be small to the point where on some of them I know every single person by first (real) name.
Having a small enough stream where I can read the entire day's stuff that interests me easily along with being in an environment where the "we are professionals, don't be a jerk" is enough of a moderation pressure that it isn't even an issue.
I believe that a variation on activity pub ( https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ ) is the right way to go in the long term, with small sites that moderate and the ability to programmatically screen posts. Not sure how... but something in that nature. And if some other site keeps pushing your site crap, blacklist it and stop accepting it. And to an extent, I'd even be willing to pay for it (for someone else to keep the quality standards that I want).
> While there are many possibly helpful questions that could be asked, not all of them are a fit for the format.
The way I look at it is this: if I have a question about something, and do a search, and end up on a SO page, and the contents of that page usefully answer my question, then by definition, the question was fit for the format.
Too often I run into a "locked as off topic" question that fits the above description, and I worry that someday someone is going to go through and delete all the supposedly off-topic questions. Or, just as bad, discourage people from asking questions like that in the future and make the site overall less useful.
