Stack Overflow is currently looking for moderators: http://stackoverflow.com/election/5<p>I really like Stack Overflow but I have noticed a few changes that I don't agree with.<p>- Fun questions are now considered to be off topic.<p>I don't understand why this happened. Work should be fun.<p>- Asking for directions is off topic.<p>Sometimes you need to ask which tool/product/etc. would be useful ... because comparing tools is boring and costs a lot of time.<p>So could a moderator even affect the direction Stack Overflow takes?
I would total vote for a more inclusionist moderator!<p>It's not really just about "fun" questions. Almost every second question of mine gets closed or almost closed. Stackexchange is rapidly getting more and more useless for me.<p>* The only kind of question that the people in power currently tolerate for sure is the kind of question asking for reference knowlege. What does this function do / how do I do <simple thing>? They are totally afraid of any question that might have multiple answers.<p>* Questions that are much more useful, asking for advice and personal experience, are very likely to be closed. More than once, I had to rephrase a question in a stupid way to get passed the censors. "What canvas libraries are there for GTK?" - closed. "I want to put shapes on a DrawingArea and move them around" - pretend to be stupid, get good answers.<p>* Physics.SE suffers from a similar narrowing-down in scope. You can ask high-level conceptional questions, and get pretty verbose answers. That kind of question I rather discuss with my colleagues over a cup of coffee.<p>You can't ask pretty much anything else. Ask how to calculate something - closed as "homework". No matter if you ask for a single step in your calculation, or you want a high level overview, it's both frowned upon. Actual homework? The devil, closed as "homework"! Research stuff? After you point out that it's not homework, you might get a few condescending comments with only hints because people insist it really is homework. Experimental questions? pah, that's so beneath them. And if you manage to slip a actual useful, interesting question past the censors, its probably because it's research-level string theory and nobody understands it.<p>I could go on for hours, but I guess everyone gets the point. There is no single thing on the internet that makes me more angry then pretentious deletionists that have taken over wikipedia, stackexchange, and many more great sites...
I think that the problem with "Fun" questions is that they are a slippery slope. If you start to allow them, you would very likely over time see a general degradation of the quality over of stack overflow.<p>You see the chances of you having your real question. Answered are directly related to the number of people reading it. (With the added complexity of it actually having to be the right person reading it but why get overly complicated?)<p>If you decrease the signal (real question) to noise ("fun" question) ratio, you increase the amount of garbage and reduce the number of serious questions that can be answered.<p>Imagine the "endgame" of fun questions over time, what if they start allowing "rage comics" about programming (f7u11overflow.com) ...<p>There is absolutely a place for "fun" on the internet, there is absolutely a place for "fun programming questions"... But it isn't stack overflow.<p>I'm not sure I fully agree with the tools research questions being OT, but I understand that they cannot have objective answers. Compare for example the answers to the question which IDE should I use? The programmers at JETBRAINS logon and say "jetbrains" then some MS programmers log in and say "VisualStudio" then the team that wrote eclipse log in and say "actually yeah, visual studio... Eclipse sucks"<p>Now someone has to put a green check mark beside one of those answers or leave it unmarked as unanswerable. Both are unacceptable really.<p>Best to avoid it.
The original <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/" rel="nofollow">http://stackoverflow.com/</a> is aimed to questions with a single canonical answer, ideally.<p>The questions in <a href="http://programmers.stackexchange.com/" rel="nofollow">http://programmers.stackexchange.com/</a> are a little more free and IIRC it allows “opinion” questions.<p>Also, “Software Recommendation” is in private beta: <a href="http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/60887/software-recommendations" rel="nofollow">http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/60887/software-rec...</a><p>For example, there are two sites for Math, one for normal questions and one for research level questions.<p>You can try to create your own, filling a proposal in <a href="http://area51.stackexchange.com/" rel="nofollow">http://area51.stackexchange.com/</a> .<p>The important thing is what type of questions you consider that are fun and useful and are not allowed now in S.O. Can you make a list of 5 good examples?
The problem with moderation at StackExchange went full throttle when they shut down the 3-year old Answers.OnStartups community just because it was receiving fewer questions per day than the minimum needed.<p>It was a thriving community of over 18,000 users and who's who of the tech scene contributed answers: Patrick McKenzie (patio11), Dharmesh Shah, Jason Cohen. Not to mention that Joel Spolsky himself was active in the community.<p>Unhappy with how they closed the community down with just a short notice, several people (myself included) rebuilt the platform from the ground up and re-launched the startup community at <a href="http://www.brightjourney.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.brightjourney.com</a>
SO has become a good practical example of what happens under a pure democracy. The moderators have control by way of their votes which are given to them by the users of the site. They get to choose what is good or bad for ALL users. The interesting and fun parts of SO were killed off a long time ago. It's the same thing that happened at Digg and other group think type sites. I'm not big into reddit but I'm sure the same applies there to some degree.
SO is a mess right now. It is sort of amusing that the questions and discussions I find the most interesting are always closed as "off topic" or unproductive or whatever their language is.
I asked a question yesterday that was voted to close within 5 minutes by an admin, followed by 3 more. It was a normal programming question in an area I needed help in. Luckily, several non-admins helped me out and answered my question. I consider myself an experienced programmer but programming is so broad and quickly evolving. Sometimes we just need a nudge in the right direction on new topics. I'm sure others are in the same boat. That is no longer acceptable with SO.<p>I used to be a daily visitor to SO and was active in the early days when Jeff and Joel were active and I felt part of the community. After recently seeing moderators rampantly closing questions as if to say 'I consider your question unproductive or unintelligent by my standards', I rarely visit.<p>Apparently Code Golf is considered a valid question while questions lacking extreme detail that may help people are not.....
What I found frustrating was my questions being marked as duplicate. Any iOS developers should know that things change rapidly between each version of iOS. Methods get deprecated, huge change can happen. When I'm asking a question about iOS 7, it is not a duplicate of the question asked about in iOS 6 even though it may look similar. Especially when all the top answers use methods that are deprecated.
There are still some really nice people on there though and I'm forever thankful for their help.
Our site, <a href="http://slant.co" rel="nofollow">http://slant.co</a> is for the subjective style questions that stack overflow closes. We're certainly not against fun content though :)<p><a href="http://www.slant.co/topics/413/~funniest-programming-related-jokes" rel="nofollow">http://www.slant.co/topics/413/~funniest-programming-related...</a><p><a href="http://www.slant.co/topics/670/~what-is-the-most-cringeworthy-microsoft-ad" rel="nofollow">http://www.slant.co/topics/670/~what-is-the-most-cringeworth...</a><p><a href="http://www.slant.co/topics/1211/~who-was-is-the-best-doctor-from-the-series-doctor-who" rel="nofollow">http://www.slant.co/topics/1211/~who-was-is-the-best-doctor-...</a>
I avoid Stack Exchange totally now because I can't stand the anger I feel when I find that two out of three things I search for and just about anything I post are "moderated" into oblivion for reasons having more to do with condescension than anything else. I think its moderators for the most part self select for personality disorder the same way that cops tend to do. But it's even worse than the cop syndrome because of the personal anonymity.<p>I sure like your reason on the other hand because it's the other hand.
Stack Overflow has a clear and defined direction. I think that's great, although I can understand the frustration for people who want the other questions.<p>If the SO software was available someone could set up a Stack Overflow Off Topic website (SOOT?) which could take all those other questions.<p>That would allow people who like talking about the best text editor or the best IDE or the most suitable programming language for math students to have a place to talk about them, while keeping distance form the SO branding.