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Comment by Smudge | Hacker News Reader

Stack Overflow should realize that they're actually the perfect platform for asking open-ended why questions. Not having a definitive answer is what makes many of these questions so interesting.

Who would be harmed if those questions were left open (other than the anally-retentive)?

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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)

> There are a million of those on the Internet already.

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

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.

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

IIUC, programmers.stackexchange.com is where "why?" questions should be asked. And IMO this sucks. I hate the SO fragmentation problem.

The community doesn't really agree with that. It's a little more subtle:

http://meta.programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/171/what...

programmers.stackexchange.com is even more deletionist that stackoverflow in my experience.

I absolutely support the somewhat firm hand that they employ to keep out open ended questions and discussions. I certainly believe this is needed to keep out all the garbage, and to keep places like SO from deteriorating into Usenet, or Slashdot.

If someone wants a discussion, or slightly off-topic questions there's other places to do that, and SO is not obligated to accommodate everyone.

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