Ask HN: Is StackOverflow being ruined by its mods?
See http://i.imgur.com/cGtm5.png. I'm not the question's author; I recently searched for this question, specifically pros/cons. Seems nowadays that about 5% of the questions on SO I look up and are perfectly legitimate to me are found to be locked, with a warning to others to knock it off. This is up from ~0% when I started using the site. Every forum I've loved eventually gets lock-happy mods. What does HN think? Am I the unreasonable one? I don't see how this question is unworthy according to the FAQ that SO refers to.
70 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 112 ms ] threadProgramming isn't a syntax only problem and has many steps before, and after it that are relevant in software engineering.
Maybe the mods are taking too much of a narrow programming syntax only approach. To me, that may exacerbate the issues of poor software because people are only searching for a means to the ends instead of understanding why to do things a certain way.
With the 400+ vote count for that question, and 50+ people taking the time to reply, I say yes indeed they are. It is definitely a programming question in my book, one whose answers could save me & others a lot of work/time.
That being said I thought about building a site to compete, but stackoverflow basically owns the market. I have no way of collecting users like they do.
The Internet is not going to run out of space. Just as with Wikipedia, "deletionism" is inevitably an attempt to fix some other problem that could better be addressed some other way. If there's a problem with duplication of questions, that's because the UI doesn't do enough to make the older questions easier to find. (Hint: let users vote on tags, and give karma to users who surf through the suite adding good tags to existing questions.)
Marginally-offtopic questions are especially harmless; if there's a problem with those, let the users police the site by downvoting. If that isn't enough, again, it's indicative of some other problem, such as the lack of some sort of gateway between different Stack Exchange sites.
Ultimately, the mere fact that a site like stackoverflow needs third-party moderation means there is room for improvement at the design level. It may seem that stackoverflow is the craigslist of Q&A sites, but I don't think so. It will be easier to dislodge than Facebook, I think.
Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page.
I see you have the same bad habit I do, which is to hit 'Reply' and start typing after having read the first third of a comment.
You cannot delete your account on stackoverflow without writing to the administrators via email. It is a manual process for them,and they don't delete your account they just rename it and prevent you from logging in. The questions do persist. I'm pretty sure they also deleted my "spam" questions when they banned me.
edit: the stack overflow account is the only one they deleted/renamed.
Here are my related accounts:
http://superuser.com/users/28269/russellballestrini
http://serverfault.com/users/27551/russellballestrini
I was active, honest, helpful and used my real name.
on stackoverflow my username was renamed to user221014
or
https://www.google.com/#q=user221014&oq=user221014
If you want to try again, stick around for some time. Add justifications / context to your answers. Some of your answers were of good quality and got appreciated. I wouldn't stop because some posts got closed. It is a community site after all and the big idea is that others can rewrite most of your post and if it gets improved that way, it's better if it stays around forever.
But no, AFAICS it's a programming technique memoizer. The important questions have mostly been answered. There will be new important questions, and they will be asked and answered. But between now and then it will mostly be black noise. The color illiteracy and aspiration. Asking how to reverse a linked list?
That lock-happy mod is the one of many fighting to keep these questions somewhere for people like you who push these silly conspiracy theories.
Stop it. It's annoying.
2. The mod took action but all mods took chances putting historical locks on question. There were many questions to clean up. So the mod didn't say squat, it was action by the mod which displayed a message by the system. Get it right.
3. Placing a question with a historical lock instead of closing and deleting is fighting to keep it in the system as much that is hard for you to believe seeing your extreme bias to mods of which you don't really what they do and why goes in the background. You really need to understand how this works instead of these claims. Mods see them, Stack Overflow users see them and they know it's false.
So straight to it,
_Why is it not a valid Stack Overflow question?_
Because it's not _definitively_ answerable. Keyword: definitively.
That's all there is to it. A 1-to-1 relationship with a question and acceptable (to the author) answer. Yes it's a programming question, it's a great question, it's an interesting question, it's a popular question _but_ there is no way to make an answer for it that can be acceptable without clumping it into one answer for the author. Everyone can have their opinion for the pros/cons. Stack Overflow is for definite Qs&As not discussions.
Once again if this wasn't realized this question and those like it aren't going anywhere. It's archived. Please re-read the notice and stop calling out mods, they do a lot (and by a lot, I mean enough that they should be paid for doing it) of moderation work for free. They don't need unfounded claims.
See more at http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/126420/what-to-do-wi... and http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/126587/what-is-a-his...
On your #2, it seems you're saying the mod has to call it an off-topic question even if he/she is locking it for another reason. If so, then it wouldn't be the mods' fault, it'd be the SO developers'. It's still a path to ruination.
I disagree that a valid on-topic question for SO should be limited to definitely answerable questions (in this case, where a pro or con can be proven). If that's the case they should make that clear in their FAQ; I don't think they do that. While that can be their unwritten rule if they want, it makes SO much less valuable for programming questions for me, because not all programming questions I find valuable are definitely answerable, like the one I referred to. 400+ people (on net) found that question to be valuable. I don't think a question asking about pros/cons for a programming design decision is a discussion question. A discussion question would be more like "Would you store images in the database, or just links to files?" Even someone who prefers the former could potentially list out pros/cons for both choices.
There are plenty of examples of good questions being closed because they are perceived as generating too much discussion (esp. on the "programmers" se site). IMO, you've given us an example of SO moderation working.
In the case of milk, circumstances matter. Is the person drinking the milk an infant? Lactose intolerant? Travelling? Going on a 1-week camping expedition? On a diet? Diebetic?
The details are key to the question. If you answered the question "In a glass with chocolate chip cookies on the side", the parent of an infant following that advice would have a baby vomiting everywhere because they cannot digest milk protein.
The database question is similar. Are you storing favicons or 10MB RAW files? Is the database an archive with low traffic or the next Flickr? What database platform are you using? What resources are available to the questioner?
In the SO case, can the moderators be a bit strict sometimes? Sure, in my opinion. But I don't think this is indicative of any broad problem on SO.
The consensus for years has been to store a path in the DB to a file resource, and if you store images in the DB you should have a really compelling, edge-case reason to do so.
Storing images on a database - Jul 1 '09 - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1071636/storing-images-on...
Save image in database? - Apr 30 '09 - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/805519/save-image-in-data...
store image in database or in a system file? - Apr 19 '09 - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/766048/store-image-in-dat...
Where should I store photos? File system or the database? - Oct 9 '09 - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1546485/where-should-i-st...
To Do or Not to Do: Store Images in a Database - May 2 '09 - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/815626/to-do-or-not-to-do...
Store images in database or on file system - Dec 28 '10 - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4550197/store-images-in-d...
Store pictures as files or in the database for a web app? - Feb 18 '09 - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/561447/store-pictures-as-...
Storing a small number of images: blob or fs? - Nov 28 '08 - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/325126/storing-a-small-nu...
How to store images in your filesystem - Oct 7 '09 - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/191845/how-to-store-image...
User images - database vs. filesystem storage - Feb 25 '09 - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/585224/user-images-databa...
Should I store my images in the database or folders? - Apr 3 '09 - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/713243/should-i-store-my-...
Would you store binary data in database or in file system? - Mar 19 '09 - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/662488/would-you-store-bi...
storing uploaded photos and documents - filesystem vs database blob - Jul 9 '09 - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1105429/storing-uploaded-...
I came in here prepared to write an impassioned criticism of StackOverflow's aggressive moderation, but frankly you've made me understand exactly why they do it.
If you read into the FAQs / standards for questions, this one may not be off-topic, but is definitely low quality. Seeing the expression "is not considered a good, on-topic question", I would have to agree. If there's no specific option for "it's written in a bad way", then this would be the next natural choice. There's no initial research, no specific list of questions, silly title and a tone that would get edited pretty quickly these days.
Quora is happy to host this type of question. Quora responses aren't usually as well-informed as SO responses... but I don't find that a compelling argument for SO to allow these questions.
SO is good, but it could be much better without so many locked on-topic questions. I don't want to ask a question there, even if it's clearly not a duplicate, with lock-happy mods there. I don't like having my time wasted.
They say you should be soliciting answers rather than opinions... and, for better or for worse, that is probably why this was locked.
A question asking for pros/cons of storing images in a database (vs. links to files) is not too subjective in my book. It's a typical programmer question.
Any question - such as this one - where the answer is "it depends" better be a work of art, or have an answer that explores all the considerations in exquisite detail, or it's going to get closed. Because there's no "one right answer" to this question.
It's "on topic", but not a good question.
That goal sounds good in principle. In practice, very specific programming questions often (if not usually) have multiple correct answers, with the best choice for a particular scenario being made by evaluating pros/cons just like the question I referred to. Some languages embrace multiple ways of doing things. For example, Perl's motto is "there's more than one way to do it".
http://programmers.stackexchange.com/
But then, on the other hand, you have tags on Stack Overflow that are almost separate sites in and of themselves. Usually this happens when companies start using Stack Overflow as the defacto support forum for their product (a lot of Google stuff uses this, e.g. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/google-apps-script or http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/android etc)
The above plus SO's popularity (and prominence in search engine results) are the very reasons I find the moderation a bit over the top. IMO, it should be up to the community, not a handful of mods to decide which questions are valuable and appropriate. Some questions, while they don't have a specific answer, are extremely valuable to gather opinions, particularly for those who don't have as much experience in a given subject.
So yes, I find the moderation disturbing and over-zealous, but will continue to put up with it since it is the best resource for finding quick answers to questions.
And how does the score system encourage that? You often see people with negative score for wrong answers, how is that encouraging?
1900 locked questions, out of which just over 1700 are locked because they were merged into duplicates, or migrated to other Stack Exchange sites.
< 200 locked questions out of 3.3 million doesn't seem so bad.
Well, there's another possibility... A lot of those 200 locked posts were created when Stack Overflow was still very young, and are quite popular - they're locked because they turned into discussions or polls and are pretty much played out when it comes to getting anything answered, but keeping them around preserves whatever value made them popular. It's hardly surprising that you might stumble onto a few of the more popular posts regularly - there are a lot of links out there to some of them.
It's pretty safe to say that something like this - http://stackoverflow.com/q/686216/ - doesn't need more answers, and doesn't need to be repeated. But it's there, locked, in the archive for those who want to refer back to it.
Stack Overflow has a fairly specific rubric for judging questions, and a central part of it is the requirement that they have a single verifiably correct answer. The example question does not, and it runs afoul of the guidelines in multiple other ways. The example question is something for a conventional discussion board or mailing list - it's not a good Stack Overflow question.
Also, whereas you're like the fourth person here to say the questions must have a single answer, that requirement is not called out in the SO guidelines at http://stackoverflow.com/faq. The closest I see there is "You should only ask practical, answerable questions". A question asking for pros/cons of storing images in a database (vs. links to files) meets that criterion in my book.
(They have decent transcripts there)
Jeff & Joel talk about the concept of what makes a good question a few times -- the way they got to there is interesting and worth listening too. Actually, the whole series of podcasts is an interesting view into the thoughts of founders starting a company.
There are lots of other places where such questions can be discussed.
Stackoverflow is not the place to discuss all kinds of philosophical questions.
If you have a specific question, best with source code, then go ahead. But please don't make stackoverflow a copy of Hackernews, Reddit, comp.db.advocacy or similar.
I like Stackoverflow most when it can give real direct support for a practical problem.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/194812/list-of-freely-ava...
http://serverfault.com/questions/68883/linux-command-line-be...
Recently I've stumbled on question which I would be thrilled to continue the discussion on them had they not being set to "Locked". So yes, I really think SO is killing a healthy discussion from that perspective.
off-topic: In Hebrew there is a children song which in loose translation means: "It's not so pleasant to see a closed kindergarten"[1]. I guess this feeling applies to stack overflow discussions as well. It's not that fun to find an interesting question being locked.
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnRCI8aLt_Q