Stack Overflow utterly destroyed the other answer sites for just this reason: they make choices based on what is best for the user, not Stack Overflow. Check the traffic of Expert Sexchange, or Quora, vs. the entire SO network. If all you care about is short term gains, you lose to the company that wants to build a trusted brand.
At least that's the way I think it should work out, and in this case I think it has. There is such a clear delineation between good and evil in this market, and such a clear leadership position held by the "good", that it's interesting that folks are wringing their hands worrying about whether SO gets enough impressions out of this. They don't need/want merely impressions. They want your trust and your participation. I know where I go when I have a question...how about you?
I started seeing this feature a few weeks ago, and I love it. They even bold exactly the segment of the answer you're interested in. Amazing stuff.
I basically treat it like any other link in Google that just happens to have the text I want formatted differently than other links. In most cases I end up clicking the link anyway to verify the context is correct.
Also Quora forces you to signup even to view all answers/comment. (or you have to do silly url hack, appending ?share=1). Secondly the quality of answers on Stackoverflow network is much better than Quora. Lastly, I have seen some answers deleted by Quora mods for their personal reasons.* There is no way such thing can happen on Stack Overflow.
* this [0] is the question I remember. Directi is an Indian company. And mods who work for Directi deleted the answers which showed Directi in badlight. It doesn't matter whether answers were correct or not, let the downvotes decide them, but this kinda of censorship is not cool.
Yes - I deleted my Quora account after catching them doing search-engine cloaking. Their policies make it clear that their priority is juicing numbers for eventual resale rather than building a useful resource.
Lastly, I have seen some answers deleted by Quora mods for their personal reasons. There is no way such thing can happen on Stack Overflow.
First, there is no way that there is "no way such a thing can happen" on SO. SO has moderators who are human. They have guarded themselves against becoming paywalled by putting a CC license on everything they make, but there's no technical solution that can solve moderators being human.
Second, there are people who complained specifically about the pettiness of the mods. Google for complains about Stack Overflow and you'll find them, including on HN.
EDIT: it now occurs to me your specific complaint may have been "mods deleting answers." But mods on SO can delete questions, answers, and comments. You can find people talking about this in meta.stackoverflow.com, among other places.
As much as I love the Stack Exchange sites, I also have occasional complaints about moderation. Our stuff (Webmin and Virtualmin; which whether one likes GUIs for sysadmin tasks or not, is downloaded 3 million and several hundred thousand times a year, respectively, and so is a very real part of sysadmin infrastructure in a lot of places) gets asked about occasionally, and no matter where it is asked, including on Server Fault (about system administration) there will often be a mod saying it is off-topic. Not sure what their bone to pick there is, but I don't really hold a grudge. I'd just as soon folks come to our sites or mailing lists to ask questions, anyway. It's just an odd thing some mods do.
Note that high-reputation users can see deleted questions and answers on SO, and petition for them to be undeleted. So there is at least a check on the ability of the moderators to delete things for personal reasons.
Most of the complaints about deletion or closing on SO are not about it for petty personal reasons, but instead a general community mindset that is a bit too quick to jump to closing imperfect questions, questions that are close to duplicates but not quite, questions that are somewhat subjective but still have a lot of users interested in them, and so on.
>> Note that high-reputation users can see deleted questions and answers on SO, and petition for them to be undeleted.
While overall, SO's a great place to get questions answered, the problem, in my mind, is that there might be a disconnect between the high-reputation users and newbies who asked and the newbies come to SO to find answers to the questions that do flagged down or deleted.
While I don't think that any of the high rep users are newbie haters, I do think it can be challenging for them to see things from a newbie's point of view.
In my experience, the standard newbie questions have all been answered. A quick search is all it takes to find the answer. The problem, of course, is that newbies rarely know the right questions to ask (read: search), which is to be expected because they don't posses the right amount of domain knowledge.
>> The problem, of course, is that newbies rarely know the right questions to ask (read: search)
When I'm "learning a new tech" -- let's use switching from Rails to Node as an example, I usually go to Google first.
Ask a question like "why would I choose Framework X over Y" in Google's searchbox, and your top results will have the same question on SO, except that it has been closed because the answer is opinion-based. The few answers to the closed question are usually fairly objective and insightful and leave me wishing that more people were able to add their 2 cents.
Sometimes newbies ask a broad question to get a big picture perspective (from multiple people answering) that can't be provided by a couple of blog entries found in Google results. And yes, those questions might elicit opinionated responses, but I would argue that the responses add more value to SO than they take away.
Ah, if your problem is about opinion questions like that, I recommend you not try to get StackOverflow to support that. StackOverflow is specifically geared towards objectively answerable questions; solving an actual problem that can be solved by code. "What's the best framework" or "why is framework X better than Y" will never fit well into its model.
I recommend starting another site, tailored for that kind of question, if that's something you're interested in. I imagine it would look pretty different than SO; instead of simply sorting by votes, you'd want to group answers by "reasons to prefer X" and "reasons to prefer Y", each of which could be voted on, and with optional discussion threads to clarify each one of them, or something of the sort.
>Ask a question like "why would I choose Framework X over Y" in Google's searchbox, and your top results will have the same question on SO, except that it has been closed because the answer is opinion-based. The few answers to the closed question are usually fairly objective and insightful and leave me wishing that more people were able to add their 2 cents.
They are often very outdated too - some were closed 3, 4, 5 years ago and never updated.
I don't really think that you're right that high-rep users can't see things from a newbie's point of view. Most high-rep users got there by being good at seeing things from a newbie's point of view, and thus being able to explain things well to newbies.
The answers that get the most upvotes, and give you the most reputation, are the basic problems that everyone has, since then everyone finds that question, and upvotes the answer that solves the problem for them.
I'll note that as a high-rep user (top 0.1% overall), I more often see the moderate-rep users as the ones closing a lot of questions. The high-rep users are busy getting more reputation by actually answering questions, it's the moderate rep users that have just enough to be able to vote to close that wind up spending all of their time policing the site.
The biggest problem that I have with SO is the review queue, which queues up questions that have close votes or flags, in order to get a quicker resolution, and rewards people with badges for spending a lot of time reviewing questions that they don't really know much about. I've seen so many slightly vague questions closed because of that, when if you had actually just spent a few minutes getting the user to clarify via comments, you could have figured out what their actual problem was and answered it. But because there's a review queue, and badges for reviewing lots of questions, answers, edits, etc, some people just spend all their time in there rather than actually trying to answer or clarify.
Anyhow, I very frequently hear vague complaints about SO, but it's much more informative to look at particular examples. Do you have examples of questions that have been closed that you don't think should have been? As a high-rep user, I can vote for them to be re-opened, and as an experienced user I can help reword them and make them more clear so that they will be more likely to be reopened and less likely to be closed.
By the way, one thing that can be challenging is figuring out, from a question that doesn't provide enough information, what the user is asking. This is hard for anyone to figure out, newbie or experienced user. The best way to avoid this is to ask questions clearly. State the exact problem you're trying to solve, show a small code example that demonstrates the problem, state what you've tried in order to solve it. And state a question that can be solved objectively; there's no way to provide a good, unambiguously correct answer to an opinion question, and the whole reason for StackOverflow to exist is to provide good, unambiguously correct answers, not to prompt endless discussion threads in which everyone discusses their favorite X.
If you follow these guidelines, you should generally be able to get a good answer on SO, and not have your question closed (unless as a duplicate, which is another way of solving your problem by redirecting you to existing answers).
> First, there is no way that there is "no way such a thing can happen" on SO. SO has moderators who are human.
I agree. It may be possible, but highly unlikely. However I am yet to witness such thing happen on SO or read someone's experience on the same. I agree, SO has different problems with moderation, but mostly they are related to community, not personal level.
Regarding edit, yes mods also delete questions/answers on SO. But they are still visible to high rep users and you can still talk about it on meta to reinstate. No such system on Quora, afaik.
Not to mention that SO's content is released under a Creative Commons license, and for exactly this reason. Google doesn't really even need their permission to do something like this.
Extremely ironic that you post this in response to Google search results, which have become a prime example of choosing what's best for Google over what's best for the user after first decimating the opposition.
And so far still pays off nicely for Google, even though the results are getting shittier and more biased year after year.
The only lesson here seems to be "destroy your opposition first, before you start focusing on ruthless exploitation". Let's just hold off on drawing conclusions about SO until another decade.
I agree. I was a Google cheerleader for years (and still hold some GOOG, though one of these days I'll do some research and find a new company to move it to). But, I have lost a lot of trust in them. I use DDG for search, Firefox for browser, though I still have a lot of data at Google. But, in this case I don't think Google's behavior is misaligned with user interests or with those of SO.
Who's the "user"? I sometimes find useful information on SO, but I would never think to ask a question there ("closed because ..."), much less play their "gamification" of Usenet. They're less terrible than the "?share=1" people, but that's not saying much.
Their traffic and user engagement says they have a lot of "users", and vastly more than their competition (despite the huge hype about Quora, they got absolutely wrecked by SO/SE).
I don't go in for the gamification stuff, but I like finding correct answers without the bullshit of forced logins, SEO trickery, ghosting of answers, etc. I login to SO/SE because I get value from it (I ask questions and logging in let's me get notifications when someone answers). I suspect the gamification is the least of what they got right. The core things they got right are that they respect their users, they make it easy/quick, they give you the best answer where you expect to find it (including in search engine results and without logging in), and they treat the content as thought it belongs to the community rather than the company. It's kinda like what reddit (and HN) got right. The upvotes are ancillary, but fun sometimes.
At least that's the way I think it should work out, and in this case I think it has. There is such a clear delineation between good and evil in this market, and such a clear leadership position held by the "good", that it's interesting that folks are wringing their hands worrying about whether SO gets enough impressions out of this. They don't need/want merely impressions. They want your trust and your participation. I know where I go when I have a question...how about you?