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by spolsky 4843 days ago
That is not our opinion ;-) We believe that the highly open ended, conversational questions generate heat, not light. They are AWESOME and we LOVE THEM, but NOT ON STACK OVERFLOW. Stack Overflow is a place where you go to get an answer to a programming problem, and what you find there should be just that -- the answer to a programming problem. It's not an online forum or a place to discuss open ended "why" questions. There are a million of those on the Internet already.

(Personally I'm a fan of a little site called Hacker News for this purpose... but I've never found the answer to a programming problem on Hacker News. And I've never found french fries at a Pizza store, and I don't fault Pizza stores for not selling french fries)
2 comments
Achshar 4843 days ago
While I agree it's your call to make entirely but those "million of [sites] on the Internet" don't have the community like SO. I cannot expect Jon Skeet to answer my question on yahoo answers or experts exchange or any other site for that matter. Sometimes products have to change according to user's needs.
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pseut 4843 days ago
The community isn't a given. Some of the stack exchanges that allow more open ended questions are somewhat useless. I'm thinking of the stats one in particular[1]: you get a ton of questions where it is clear that the questioner will be unable to determine which answer (if any) is correct. Here's a random example I found after 3 seconds of looking:

http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/32007/which-statist...

Fairly open ended, possibly answerable, but the OP will have no fucking idea if an answer is good or bad. (Apologies if the OP reads Hacker News).

Now, the fact that the stats stack exchange also encourages students to ask questions about homework introduces the similar problems, so I can't be sure that the open-ended nature of these questions is the main cause of the site's suckiness, but I'm pretty sure it contributes. And I don't want to participate in that forum even though I waste a shit-ton of time online on places like HN and prefer stats to startups.

[1] http://stats.stackexchange.com

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Smudge 4843 days ago
> There are a million of those on the Internet already.

Experts Exchange and Yahoo Answers come to mind. ;-)

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