The War of the Closes (blog.stackoverflow.com)
1. “On hold” will replace “closed” on newly closed posts
2. New close reasons are nicer and clearer
3. Questions edited by the original poster automatically go to the re-open queue
2. New close reasons are nicer and clearer
3. Questions edited by the original poster automatically go to the re-open queue
106 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 180 ms ] threadThis one is the most useful, I think. I've stumbled across closed-for-duplication answers before via google searches and found myself wondering what the question duplicated.
http://i.imgur.com/VcqqSN9.jpg
You see questions with 400 upvotes closed by some user who has been on the site for 6 months and is autistic about earning internet points.
You pick "off-topic" and is asks if it would be "on-topic" somewhere else and offers some suggestions.
Would be wonderful to see a complementary service to stackexchange's (with the HN community that might be a possible venture? ;)), but in most of the cases I can recall, Quora is just that. Quora has the same "noise" problems as stackoverflow, what with "which ipod is best? lol", but for genuinely interesting questions, meta or opinionbased, Quora is the place I most often see that.
Do you have any example 400+ upvoted questions you can point to that aren't of the type "everybody bring out all the snippets you've been saving, this time we're putting on a show"?
It's not complicated: questions and answers. This is common in sitebuilding though: "so unique we are." Well, at the end of the day it's just posts and comments, so quit milkin' it. A question that receives answers fits, I don't know how you could say otherwise.
However, this is all just a nice example of NIH Syndrome on SO's part, since these are lessons that have been learned by anybody who's hung out in a large IRC channel with kick/ban bots and arrogant ops, as well as being practiced on a web level for over 10 years by the likes of Metafilter.
It also reads to me like they want to have their cake and eat it too. They want the community part without the humanity, since people's irrelevancies in questions fall into more than the 6 (or however many) preset reasons for closure. This may be an incontrovertible attribute of SO: their "model" (as criticized above) does not allow for the community, "topical identity" if you will, they are seeking to impose themselves,.
Yeah, if you're trying to re-create Yahoo! Answers.
http://www.reddit.com/r/Psychonaut/comments/o1zjo/ban_memes_...
I can only pray that SO doesn't fall victim to it too and I support the admins in restricting content as long as it is subject to oversight and is not overdone.
You may not realize it, but language like this is not only grammatically incorrect (you can't be autistic about something), but could be pretty offensive to people who are either autistic or have a friend or family member who is.
Why use a neural development disorder as a derogatory term?
Because it's derogatory to accuse someone of disordered neural development.
I didn't say autistic as an insult to those people but as a way to colorfully describe behaviour that is typical of people with autism.
I love the fact that such a service exists but their moderation policies are (were?) not the least bit friendly
(And I apologize if my response came off overly harsh. I tried to soften it.)
I would fully admit to not engaging the community in the same way most devs have on SO and I understand that in order for the SO community to be successful it needs just as many people helping others as it does people asking questions.
I've been on there for two years and some change and maybe I'm at fault for not scrutinizing the rules when I first joined (I belong to many forum communities so that I can seek similar assistance and help others and they tend to be very hands off moderation wise), but I think that myself, like others, seek out the community on StackOverflow to answer a one off question from time to time and maybe there should be very clear policies about this kind of interaction (or some considerations given to users who use the system in this way but find it hard to contribute because of lack of expertise or because easier questions have already been answered by others).
Also if my rep could carry over from some of the other networks (ie: I might not be able to answer your Redis questions but I can sure contribute to the Wordpress network) that might help my grievance a bit. That solution does open up other problems, but you get my drift.
I had a question about about alternatives to Amazon's Product Advertising API that was there for a long time. I felt like it was fairly useful to people. It had 20+ upvotes and a dozen favorites. Then one day it disappeared without warning and leaving no trace it ever existed.
I hope the new approach helps, but strict arbitrary off-topic lines are still going to come across as hostile, IMHO. Especially when there is no StackExchange site that the question is on-topic for.
> Questions on Stack Overflow are expected to relate to programming or software development within the scope defined in the FAQ. Consider editing the question or leaving comments for improvement if you believe the question can be reworded to fit within the scope. Read more about closed questions here.
The second part links to a section of the FAQ (now the Help Center) that explains why questions are closed.
http://stackoverflow.com/help/closed-questions
The off-topic bullet links to a detailed section on what kinds of questions you can and cannot ask.
http://stackoverflow.com/help/on-topic
The other truly irritating thing about SO/SE is their propensity for closing opinion based questions. I am sure that I am not the only one that finds domain experts arguing about for example, the merits of 1 library over another, or language A over Language B, rather useful (I often use their answers as a basis for further research to see if I agree or can find supporting evidence). Allow the community to vote up the opinion based answers they like and downvote the trolling/flaming answers.
Thanks for the general support.
You raise two concerns, though:
1. Upvotes - this is tricky. The problem with never allowing questions with lots of upvotes to be closed is twofold:
- Sometimes, what's allowed changes over time. Communities start out allowing almost anything "What's a good snack to help programmers stay awake?", but eventually decide that they need to limit things to a narrower focus. If communities who do that can't close those questions, they'll attract more like them. - Some popular things are way off base to start with. You might be able to attract a ton of upvotes for an xkcd post, but you really wouldn't wan't the site full of them just because they're broadly loved.
2. opinion based questions - the changes are designed to help a little with what you're worried about: "primarily opinion based" now explicitly acknowledges that many good answers incorporate some expert opinion. But you still want some limit, no? "Which is better, Ruby or PHP?" isn't good for anybody, and the new reasons are designed to make it clearer that some opinion is ok, if it comes from expert experience or can be supported by facts, references, etc. Where that line belongs is for each community to decide.
Back On Topic:
1. With the examples you gave I can see there are going to be issues, however I have seen many, more focused examples with sometimes a very large number of upvotes, get closed. Typically a question along these lines will be closed - "What is the best book to learn C++ if I already know Java?" In this case there is no correct answer and the answers will be completely opinion based, but there are still many good answers (and books) that will be relevant.
2. I agree with you that such a broad based question should be closed but even more focused questions are also closed, very similar to the one I used above where there can be quite a few valid - and completely different opinions.
I realise that it is a balancing act and for sure you are moving in the right direction. I am hoping that opinion based questions/answers will be given more leeway going forward.
We're in a young-enough industry and practice that opinions are really the coin of the realm--there is not the same standard accept methodology you'd see in, say, mechanical engineering.
To pretend that opinions aren't somehow a useful component of learning here is absurd--all the more so because beginners need opinions to start. Once they learn more, once they get exposed to other ideas, then they can form their own opinions. But to pretend that this happens in a vacuum is quite wrong.
Your example "Which is better, Ruby or PHP?" is exactly where opinions, properly backed-up, are useful: a good answer will say "Well, Ruby has these great metaprogramming features, but PHP has a much larger developer pool, and so on". Bad answers will of course just be "ruby is teh 1337 n00b". If only there was some kind of way that Stack Overflow let users filter good answers from bad answers...
At the end of the day, opinions and their debate are what are most useful to a beginner, especially when they don't know what questions to ask or issues to consider. The big failing right now is that you aren't trusting your community enough to filter out the garbage.
In our field, again, there are a great many questions which seem to only be matters of opinion--and that's okay! That's fine! That's how people work, and to pretend otherwise is foolish.
Many architectural decisions in computing are heuristic, right? Many solutions are the result of opinion, because nearly everybody outside of hard-core mathematicians and computer scientists lacks the language to even describe their problems in such a way as to avoid opinion. Even the folks that do have that ability are likely working on a problem where the assumptions are incomplete and ill-defined anyway.
This is a faulty binning of questions into "is question about opinion" and "is question that is not matter of opinion". I posit that the former bin is quite useful and shouldn't be worked against.
In the "but, questions and answers!" vein, it's the "answer" part that's important. I believe they've come out and said they only want to handle questions that have one single answer, in full knowledge there are many questions that don't fit in that mold.
Architectural decisions are a red herring: they don't want to answer heuristic-driven architecture questions. That's not in their scope.
No one's saying those questions aren't useful. They're only saying that SO is not the place for them. This is not complicated. As a programmer, avoiding feature creep is something you almost certainly already understand. It's basically the same.
Disclosure: they have closed a few of my answers that I actually went to some length to make good - but apparently "which library" type of questions are not appropriate for a programming Q&A site?!? Go figure.
Exactly.
Also, answers (by themselves) cannot be closed, only questions can be closed.
And that's where you wrong, they would fit perfectly if you made an effort to accommodate them instead of being dogmatic about them.
Just because they can legally ignore user feedback doesn't mean that they should.
There's nothing stopping you from setting up your own opinion-only SE clone.
Your observation is a perfect example of a fact which is not an answer.
So why keep asking?
You'll get better results creating it yourself, or persuading someone else to create it.
Don't make it never, just raise the threshold?
Make it require X moderators to agree before it can be closed.
Make it so that opinion answers don't get rep.
Make it so the questions are put on hold and go to meta stack overflow.
(I don't acctually use stack overflow; apologies if you already do that.)
The closing of popular questions by a mod on a drunken power-hungry semantics trip is to the exclusion of the community is very off-putting for the regular members of the community who do the majority of the answering.
Note that this would fit perfectly in the "too broad" reason for closing.
I agree with top comment (as of now) that SO stance on it is arrogant and display lack of respect for great community. I also don't like that SO staff attribute their success to stance on this issue. Yes SO is very successful and by far the best place to learn/seek help the reasons are plenty: great interface, very fast, great search, great reputation system, a bit of luck as well. It doesn't mean every decision you took contributed to your success. Do you really think that closing popular/upvoted questions based on some arbitrary policy thus stopping discussion for the sake of stopping it (it's not as it clutters the site or anything) makes anybody more happy about the site ?
I still often search for most popular SO questions in history, many of them closed and containing a lot of great information. It's sad to think that a lot more was lost due to overeager closing. Forunately it was better at the beginning so some of those discussions developed a bit before being shut down.
For example: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1218390/what-is-your-most... Is great read for someone starting with VIM,it got people excited, many upvoted and many participated. Do you really think closing it contribute to quality of the site ? Another example: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9033/hidden-features-of-c So many posts like the most upvoted answer in first and OP in 2nd (after edits) weren't written because of your policy. It's just sad :(
You could always make the number of moderators required to close a topic increase as the topic rises in popularity.
A +4 question might need 2 moderators to close but a +2000 question might need 12 moderators to close.
The problem with opinions is that, to someone who is not knowledgeable, it may not be immediately clear which opinion holds more weight. In turn, this may end up confusing the reader even more, or worse yet, it may mislead them. This is especially true because even when an opinion is correct, its correctness may be context-sensitive, and this may cause the reader to make the wrong decision based on the correct opinion.
In software there's many ways to achieve a goal, not a single unique factual answer, thus many answers are context-sensitive and not absolute truths. Sure we can determine to some extent the correctness of the answers, but many of them are contextual and based on factors that are based on opinion/experience.
The voting system in and of itself encourages users to infuse answers with opinion.
If only there was some facility in Stack Overflow to let users add weight to an opinion, either by signaling agreement or explicitly rounding it out with comments--man, that'd be really useful, wouldn't it?
Opinions aren't something that are bad. Facts, especially to somebody that doesn't know what they don't know, are often less useful. If you punish opinions, you also discourage people from answering with extra background on a topic and creating useful discussion.
They have said several times that the site is not for discussions. I don't know what is so difficult to understand about that.
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-su...
and
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/01/the-trouble-with-popul...
If you only click one link here, click the second link.
Is this actually true? My understanding was that no one could directly close a question, but rather that you can cast close votes (and 5 of them closes a question).
What is the distribution of those upvotes against reputation, though? Anybody can upvote. Only users with significant reputations can issue votes to close a question.
If domain experts think that a question should be closed, but an overwhelming number of beginners, non-participants (eg. people viewing the HN front page) or ill-informed think otherwise, then what should happen?
Theoretical questions/design questions or..?
I'm confused.
There's also a Computer Science site for more theoretical questions (http://cs.stackexchange.com/), and Theoretical Computer Science for research-level CS questions (http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/).
I'll be interested to see if the new "close reasons" will actually improve this problem. My guess is that it won't and there will still be overly draconian closures of edge-case topics that are relevant to multiple communities.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/62222/centos-or-debian-as...
But looking through my history, I was slightly incorrect-- at least one was closed as "not constructive" rather than "off-topic." (I remembered incorrectly because it's true the question is not about programming specifically)
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3630506/benefits-of-ebs-v...
The question resulted in answers based on facts and expertise that I found extremely helpful. It was almost exactly what I was looking for when I put the search into google. The question got 161 upvotes and the best answer got 150. The most upvoted answer included 6 factual statements, 1 assertive opinion, and 1 testimonial.
Here's an example of a question closed as off-topic from serverfault. I honestly have no idea why, or where such a question should be asked:
http://serverfault.com/questions/5111/how-to-test-real-netwo...
Once again, I found it on a google search and the first answer had exactly what I was looking for. Minutes later I had downloaded iperf and had used it to run the tests I wanted to run. Yet the question is locked with a disclaimer about how it's only preserved for legacy reasons and it's not on-topic for the site.
To be clear, I don't have a strong preference for where these questions get asked and answered so long as the answers are high-quality and an itinerant surfer like me can find them and active+fruitful discussions don't get permanently squashed because the question caused a red-flag in some moderators pruning algorithm.
Subject: How to test real network throughput between two points?
Body: What are some of the better tools/utilities for testing real bandwidth across a link? In my case I am testing the real throughput across a wifi bridge.
The question body is what turns it into a conversation, personalized with subtle details and information less likely to emerge from a highly-organized, more-generic and less organic "shopping list" presentation.
Of course, I don't know if it has one answer or two answers. That's why I asked the question!
Of course, they should be handled properly. They should be tagged as such, and managed differently from the other questions. For example, they could expire after a while, at least if they are not renewed.
But you know what would be a better rule? Questions with over 50 upvotes cannot be closed as "irrelevant" unless they are moved to a different StackExchange site.
Closed questions are not deleted, still appear in search results, and sometimes are helpful at that role.
It's even more farcical when you consider the abject snobbery SO has toward the "other Q&A sites." That has been there from the beginning, and to be sure many of the criticism of those sites are well deserved. But, SO has deeper problems, in some ways, particularly with the zealotry, but it is masked by the fact that there are so many technical people still on SO or, even if many have left, they have gathered such a large corpus that they will remain the big kid on the block.
But at least they are trying to address it, if only at a surface level.
I find it pretty frustrating when searching a topic and SO's unanswered or closed questions are at top the of SERPs.
We're stepping up efforts to remove closed unanswered questions more promptly though, since those won't be answered and just end up being noise in the search results.
For details, see: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/78048/enable-automat...