[aeorgnoieang]

[2] isn't an example of "subjective editorial decisions"; your question was off-topic because 'recommendation' questions are prohibited. For that tho, there's a Stack Exchange sister site:

- [Software Recommendations Stack Exchange](https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/)

I don't like that 'decision', i.e. to not allow recommendations, but I understand the reasoning behind it, that recommendation questions are basically polls. [But isn't everything on which people can vote basically a poll too? Obviously yes in my opinion.]

[ken]

I never understood it, either. By that reasoning, almost any technical question is an "opinion" question asking for a "recommendation".

For example, pretty much any question about C string handling has many possible answers, e.g., [1] admits that comparing two strings is "rather broad" and the various answers there recommend looping over each index and comparing chars with ==, sscanf, strncmp, regexes, and PEGs. Opinions galore!

But if you want to know the difference between AWS EC2 and EB [2], even though there's one pretty clear answer, somehow the admins unanimously find the question to be "primarily opinion-based".

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16013031 [2]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25956193

My hunch is that due to the desire for longevity of content, there's a large unspoken bias in favor of questions about simple programs, and against questions about remote services (which are more likely to disappear or change, even though that's not likely to happen with major AWS services), and that the question closure explanations like "primarily opinion-based" are just a smokescreen.

[fhood]

Also there seems to be no problem with users who submit opinions instead of answers.

Q: How do I do X extremely specific thing that I need because I have an unusual case that needs this specific thing.

A (top voted): Why would you want to do X? You shouldn't do that. I clearly know more about your problem than you do because I assume everyone on here is a college student and not a developer working with a large mostly static codebase. You should do Y instead. It is much better.

[nt8eo923nt45]

I find this disingenuous. It is a very common scenario that a new user knows of some way to solve some part of their question (or just thinks they do), and assumes the best/easiest/fastest/safest/whatever answer involves using that technique. This is exactly the scenario that Alex Papadimoulis referred to in his blog post[1] that I have to believe was the inspiration for his site The Daily WTF[2]:

> "A client has asked me to build and install a custom shelving system. I'm at the point where I need to nail it, but I'm not sure what to use to pound the nails in. Should I use an old shoe or a glass bottle?" >...[potential answers] >b) There is something fundamentally wrong with the way you are building; you need to use real tools.

The answerer is often telling the person, what you are trying to do sounds like a really bad/inefficient/ineffective/whatever solution. The common way to solve this is Y because of reasons A, B, and C. Are you doing something where those reasons are not a concern?

[1] https://weblogs.asp.net/alex_papadimoulis/408925 [2] http://thedailywtf.com

[fhood]

I have no problem with alternate solutions, but for gods sake, at least answer the original question as well.

[kristianc]

This seems to be a common thing across all online support communities, even ones where the software company has outsourced support to their community. I'd love to see a solution to it, as it makes discussions incredibly frustrating to read.

[fhood]

I have a solution. If a user repeatedly does that without also providing a solution to the original question then ban them.

[shagie]

In the world of “stack overflow is unfriendly to new users”, banning a person providing an answer that other people have found helpful seems to be a suggestion that would take SO in the direction of yahoo answers.

Stack Overflow’s approach appears to be all answers are acceptable. This isn’t just for the person who asked the question but everyone else too.

If a person is not providing good answers and people are down voting those poor answers, there is an automatic answer ban in place... but that requires people to down vote poor answers.

[kristianc]

No. SO absolutely can be opinionated about what constitutes a good and a bad answer. SO's job is to get to the right and most helpful answer fast. You can't always rely on the community to root out bad actors.

[slavik81]

Be the change you want to see in the world. Downvote bad answers. Upvote good ones.

[payne92]

I get what you're saying about their 'decision' to prohibit 'recommendation' questions, but my point is that it doesn't make any sense. It's a distinction without a difference, as many, many questions on the site are 'recommendations' or 'how do I':

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1942298/wrapping-a-c-lib...

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/127803/how-to-parse-an-i...

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1006289/how-to-find-out-...

..etc..

I don't understand why "how to generate a USPS label" (my question) is different than any of the above examples.

[shagie]

Do you have any examples of such questions asked in the past... let’s say four years?

The problem with recommendation questions is that they are very time consuming to keep curated and useful. You’ll inevitably have 50 answers of which 20 are duplicates and difficult to delete because of up votes on them.

The community moderation for “just close them quickly” is much less than the community moderation necessary to curate them.

Anyways, https://www.slant.co is set up to do recommendations better than stack overflow could conceivably do. Not all questions are best asked on stack overflow.

[payne92]

Examples of questions about the existence of API and library functionality in the past four years? (with recommendation answers) Sure:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46718944/facebook-graph-...

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7120806/skype-python-api

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/34010978/elasticsearch-h...

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26305704/python-mixed-in...

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49524937/fast-bipartite-...

... etc ...

I get the idea of avoiding "what's the best programming language?"-type questions, but to the point of my original comment, the application of the policy feels very uneven and therefore "oddly subjective".

[shagie]

The application of the policy depends on people with moderation abilities seeing it. The first link for example has only been seen about 50 times a month for the past 5 months.

The Skype question is a bit older Its actually 6 years older and has only been seen on average 100 times a month. The answer is "yes, look at [broken link], and [obsolete python library at source forge]". It needs some curation. Are you up to doing it? The other answer says that the answer was action in 2011... and compares it to using IE5.

The fourth link (python mixed integer linear programming) is interesting in that its three and a half years old, has only one answer and has been updated in the past 5 days. The author of that answer has done almost 20 revisions keeping it up to date since then. This is the work that needs to be done on posts to keep it useful and relevant.

Compare with the second answer to Elasticsearch HTTP API or python API:

> You may also try elasticsearch_dsl it is a high level wraper of elasticsearch.

Thats it. A lot more work is going to need to be done to that post to make it useful. That said, this isn't a "does this exist" question its a "Which technique is better for my occasion? The elasticsearch RESTful API or the python API for elastic search (elasticsearch-py)?"

The Fast bipartite matching actually matches that criteria.

The point I'm trying to make is that it takes a lot of work to keep the good questions of this sort good and useful. Otherwise, they end up like the Skype question and become worse than useless in that they make it harder to find the answer on other sources.

[nerdponx]

The entire Stackexchange network, in my opinion, suffers badly from fragmentation into hyper-specific Q&A sites. Why software recommendations do not fall under the Superuser purview is beyond me.

[shagie]

Super user has difficulty with recommendations too. The effort upon the community to curate the content on a large site takes a very dedicated team. Past efforts to have such failed and the curation of the question dropped off along with its quality.

Moving software recommendations to its own site allowed a community to form there that was engaged with that curation.

That said, I believe the SO engine fails spectacularly with recommendations. I find https://slant.co to be a better resource that has its engine dedicated to recommendations (rather than Q&A).

[Noumenon72]

I have never heard of Software Recommendations Stack Exchange, and I've been frustrated for years by how many useful recommendation questions I come across that are closed. They should put a link to Software Recommendations Stack Exchange on questions that are closed for that reason.

[shagie]

Software recommendations has a very small community. If even a small fraction of the questions that get closed as recommendation each day re-asked their question there the 9 questions a day they currently get would get lost in noise. Give [this meta post](https://softwarerecs.meta.stackexchange.com/a/762) a read.

[Noumenon72]

Thank you for showing me where this had been discussed before!