Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by charlieflowers 4945 days ago
Ironically, I don't think Stackoverflow does this very well.

It's a good article, and the point of researching every wheel ever is a good point well made.

But as a long-time Stackoverflow user, I've been frustrated time and time again by cases where extremely valuable content emerges on StackOverflow, but then the moderators come along and kill it because "it is not the defined purpose of this site."

Now they have the right to define the rules & purpose for their own site. It wouldn't bother me so much if the content they were killing wasn't so fantastic. But I have seen so many deep, excellent, rich blobs of technical content get cut out and cast aside, for the sake of adherence to some superficial guideline.

It seems to be exactly the opposite of "seeing what your users are doing, then helping them do it."
1 comments
codinghorror 4945 days ago
Well, as an extreme, and just for the purposes of setting boundaries, consider the case of pornography. Wildly popular.

It's sort of an open secret just how much traffic on Reddit comes from their NSFW subreddits: see https://twitter.com/codinghorror/status/154144207383171072

Should popular things always be encouraged?

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/01/the-trouble-with-popul...

link
antiterra 4945 days ago
I'm not sure if you're just intentionally being ridiculous or mistakenly thinking that you've got a good reductio ad absurdum argument going on. In any case, why exactly are you conflating "wildly popular" with "extremely valuable?"

Even if the grandparent post was about popularity, your statement is as unconstructive as this argument would be:

A: "You're intentionally putting way too many non-criminals in jail."

B: 'Ah, but for the purpose of setting boundaries, consider the extreme case where we don't put anyone in jail at all.'

link
kemayo 4945 days ago
The post you link to in that tweet only mentions one NSFW subreddit in the top 25, though. It's not a very good example of your point.
link
codinghorror 4945 days ago
True. In the original tweet I said literal or figurative porn, where figurative porn would be stuff that's overtly Digg-style entertainment junk food.

Maybe this is a better list:

http://redditlist.com/index.php

link