[ygra]

> Any question could easily include a Reddit-style discussion tab to facilitate discussion.

This exists in the form of chat, and extended comment discussions migrate there. That being said, any question that requires extensive discussion is likely not a very good fit for SO because it's probably ambiguous, unclear or otherwise hard to answer exactly.

[nolok]

Chat is instant. Blink and you will miss it. It isn't suited at all for thread discussion where they might be months between additional answers and comments.

Or move it to zulip or zulip like so it's at least threaded in a way that works over months. But as is it's just two different purpose tool and cramming one's use case in the other just doesn't fit.

[pasc1878]

But SO is not meant for discussions.

It is to provide answers (preferably one) to a question.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Their "migrated to chat" feels alot like "wished away to the cornfield".

For one, it's almost never a chat. You go there, and the other person who might be talking last posted 12 hours ago. That's not an immediate conversation. These are still "comments". It's a clumsy interface. Then, despite no longer having to be a "comment on a question" like in the main interface, it's still this crappy pseudo-IRC that doesn't give you full markdown to work with.

> That being said, any question that requires extensive discussion is likely not a very good fit for SO

Such they claim.

[nottorp]

> That being said, any question that requires extensive discussion is likely not a very good fit for SO because it's probably ambiguous, unclear or otherwise hard to answer exactly.

So basically SO isn't a tool to improve your skills but one to turn you into a copy/paste monkey?

[dijksterhuis]

I mean, if you can copy/paste my answer here into your codebase, I would be very surprised.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/52206576/write-spark-dat...

[nottorp]

I'm surprised you didn't get a mod complaining there's nothing to copy/paste in there :)

[HeyLaughingBoy]

Stated a little more politely, that was its original purpose, yes.

[playingalong]

20K+ karma in SO. I have never used SO chat. I don't come to SO to socialize. To me chat means socializing.

[tracker1]

I'm in a similar point... though tbh, most of my points are just entropy from being fairly active early on. I don't use SO chat either... if I want/need something closer to chat, I'm more inclined to join various dev channels in IRC/Libra.

[oezi]

Those are really the only questions which need SO though. If it would be clear how to ask or answer the person wouldn't need SO.

[geraldwhen]

This exact type of discussion comes up on GitHub issues, and quite often some combination of replies hides a true solution.

[OwlsParlay]

I'm always surprised Discourse was never integrated into SO.