HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

Your thesis is that "StackExchange itself is becoming a little bit backward", but the statements you use to back that up have been part of Stack Exchange from the beginning. Also, the things you point out that are 'broken' are part of the formula that makes the network succeed.

Stack Overflow was not built for discussion. The FAQ says: "Not all questions work well in our format. Avoid questions that are primarily opinion-based, or that are likely to generate discussion rather than answers." I understand that you may want those types of questions to exist there, but that's not the original purpose of Stack Overflow. (Sidenote: different sites, depending on their topic or maturity do allow more open ended questions, but I believe you may be referring to 'closing questions' on Stack Overflow). I sympathize with this point though because I believe that there are probably a class of questions that could exist on SO, that are currently closed, but may need to be treated in a different way than normal Q&A.

Your second point about closing sites that aren't working is also intentional. Some of your complaint was about the fact that the data dump was not available, which was actually not true. It's also intentional that the data dump exists so that if we decide the site is not a good fit for our goals, everyone else can still reuse that data ( i.e. http://www.brightjourney.com/ ) This might be related to your first complaint which boils down to 'It's not hurting anyone, why not just leave it there?' The answer to that is more complicated than I can summarize here, but there are many different things that go into making a successful community, and one of them is defining what 'successful' (and 'not successful') means. And there is a process for dealing with 'not successful' which is transparent. The criteria is not arbitrary. It's reasoned.

Joel Spolsky elaborates on this in the following talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpGA2fmAHvM

(I work for Stack Exchange.)

⬐ jfoster

I understand that it's intentional and what StackExchange perceives as being necessary, appropriate, etc.

The problem is that this approach is under-serving the needs of StackExchange's users.

I don't think that SE needs to be transparent here. It's up to you guys to decide how you want to run your site. I just think the current approach will result in the success of competitors that are less trigger-happy on shutting down questions.

This. Here's a video of the speech in question: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpGA2fmAHvM

We generally believe that it's important to keep the quality on Stack Overflow high, so that when you click on a stackoverflow.com result on Google, you can trust that you're going to get something good. That means that Stack Overflow is not just a host where anyone can type things into the Internet, and we host it. It's a curated environment.

⬐ btilly

I have come to accept that your definition of quality and mine do not agree.

This is not to say that most of what is closed shouldn't be closed. But your existing policies consistently drive away conversation that I'd like to be involved with, and contributers like me.

As a concrete example, I'm quite sure that my most upvoted answer on SO is on a question that would be instantly closed and deleted under current guidelines if it came to the attention of the SO policy lawyers who volunteer to "moderate". See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/93526/what-is-a-y-combina... to verify.

⬐ sp332

A lot of the people with moderator powers on SO got them by contributing highly-upvoted content over time on the site. Anyone with enough karma can close or re-open a question.

⬐ dionidium

I doubt that one would be closed. It has a definite answer (or could at least be re-asked in such a way as to limit discussion).

Incidentally, the answer just after yours is mine (lwburk), so don't draw too much attention to closing the question! What I'm more upset about is that the accepted answer is nothing more than a link (and has a lot more votes than your much better answer). That is definitely a historical accident. If these answers were each given today, yours would be voted much higher and his would be closed.

⬐ btilly

Looking at http://stackoverflow.com/faq I see the requirement that, You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face. There is no way that the question fits that criteria.

I've had personal interaction with moderators over that exact issue. I personally enjoyed answering algorithm questions. However it came to my attention that any time moderators notice that type of question, they close them for exactly that reason. (No matter what the wishes of people who ask and answer that type of question might be.)

As for the historical accident - I agree. I'm amazed that an answer given years after the question was asked got as much attention as it did.

⬐ dionidium

Maybe you're right.

Regarding the historical accident: I was the one who suggested that you post that answer there after I saw you post it here [0]. I posted my answer a little while after that. I'm pretty sure all of our upvotes came from Hacker News.

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2769132

⬐ joelthelion

Just tell Google not to index these questions. Don't censor whole ranges of questions for an arbitrary and mostly wrong definition of quality.

⬐ eduardordm

SO defines quality by rhetoric and writing style, not so much by content. Again, how can you define what is low quality if you are deleting baselines?

I literally clicked randomly on a subject I know about to read a question and its answers:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15305764/angularjs-clear-...

The question is wrong, the answer is bad. Didn't get 'curated'.

Now take this one, a very useful question, great answers. It was 'curated' and it's only there because of page views:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/194812/list-of-freely-ava...

SO should let us decide what is good or not, people don't like to be 'moderated'.

⬐ dionidium

Here's what I think is happening. The moderators on SO have decided that there are certain classes of questions that are unacceptable and should be closed. I agree, so far.

Now, that question is of that class, so it has been closed. However, there are exceptions. Normal humans are good at making exceptions and should have made one here. A certain type of personality -- one that's over-represented in engineers -- likes to create systems that don't have exceptions. They like to create abstractions. And then you get this.

It's also why you have people who still organize their email, even though search obviates that problem.

⬐ Shog9

FWIW, it's not the moderators who've made these decisions...

Like it or not, the types of questions you see allowed or discouraged on SO are in large part the result of years of discussion, debate, and collaborative moderation by a rather large portion of the userbase on SO. Even the handful of people able to take unilateral action to include or exclude questions are elected - hence the event that instigated this thread to begin with.

Ultimately, the folks with the most power over these decisions are the ones using the site. If you don't like what's being closed, cast your re-open votes and convince others to do likewise.

That particular question ended up being closed and reopened multiple times, and discussed heavily on meta. Ultimately, it reached the point where it was simply unmaintainable, in spite of the hard work of many people involved. So it was locked to preserve it.

If you visit some of the more well-maintained tag wikis, you'll notice they contain sections for freely-available books amid links to other useful learning resources. This tends to keep them smaller, easier to maintain, and much more likely to be maintained by folks who know something about the topic. Example:

http://stackoverflow.com/tags/php/info