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by DanBC 4275 days ago
"What's a list of good books about programming language X?"

"I'm switching from this programming language to that programming language; what are the important gotchas?"

2 comments

Followed immediately by the question being flattened by administration as "not a good fit" despite the previous existence of these types of questions producing excellent discussion and answers.

I think SE is awesome in spite of its rules, not because of them. The whole "discussion is bad mmkay" thing seems to be cargo-culted by the staff of these sites despite many examples to the contrary.

While I agree these kind of questions requires answers with some information, in reality most answers would be highly subjective. Same subjective answers can readily be found by simple web search. They also promote me-too wars and pointless debates on why my subjective POV is better than yours. Soon these type of questions would overwhelm the "real" questions and the participants who want more substance would move on.

This has actually been my #1 appalling thing about Quora. The questions being asked on it are so often such a low quality that I worry about if I'm getting in to some sort of intellectual ghetto. Consequently, I rarely want Quora to tell anybody that I was on that website. I have also developed perception that people very active on Quora have fairly low bar (note that there are many tech celebrities on it but they are usually one-offs).

Examples from current Quora frontpage:

"How do people who have been affected by "Bendgate" feel about it?"

"Why am I so scared to ask for help?"