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Comment by darkchasma | Hacker News Reader

The only complaint I have about Stack Overflow is when you're looking for a library or toolchain and want to get a feel for some of the pros and cons of each of the tech currently being used. I understand the argument of why these questions are killed. But I also have to think that there is value in these conversations.

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I share that feeling, but I also have to restrain it in the face of the fact that Stack Overflow doesn't seem like it's about discussion, or at least not open-ended discussion. It's about getting expert answers to focused questions, not polling for data or asking opinions.

However, I really wish someone would build and maintain a "Stack Overflow" for open-ended discussion. It'd basically be a classic forum (in terms of content) but with a different layout.

Maybe you're looking for http://www.discourse.org/about/

Yes, the distinction between discussion and expertise killed some of my enthusiasm as a contributor. In the end I decided to just enjoy the service as a user.

This sounds like a clever comment about Discourse. http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/02/discourse/.

Well, once again I've learned that someone is always thinking about what I'm thinking, and in this case, doing a much better job implementing it.

I find Quora great for open-ended discussions that are banned from SO

We're building something for this. Example: http://www.slant.co/topics/217/~best-css-preprocessor (we currently only have the pros, but cons are coming)

This looks awesome! One pet peeve: when I scroll all the way down and click "next", it should automatically scroll me back to the top, so I don't have to do it myself. Too many single-page apps make this mistake!

Thanks mate! Agreed on the scrolling, I'll file a bug :) if you have any other feedback or ideas I'd love to hear them, either here or at Stuart@slant.co

I suspect that the Stack Overflow community would agree that there's value in those conversations. And they'd also assert that they belong somewhere else, since Stack Overflow questions are meant to have right answers.

It's worse than that, there's pretty much no effective way to use the site to learn about a topic. It's a very effective Q&A site but that's all it is; it was meant to be slightly more but has never managed to achieve that. I'd say there's a very big opportunity in there for anyone who wants to try to compete.

Actually, I've used Stack Overflow to learn things by trying answering questions I don't know much about. Most of the time I don't succeed in answering them, but I always find out a lot while trying to research/figure it out.

Your mileage may vary

My complaint is that almost every web-related javascript question is answered with "jQuery". I didn't ask about jquery, I asked about javascript god damnit. I understand it's the right answer in many cases, but the full answer should be: "You can do it like this or much easier using library like jQuery".

Obligatory meta.

http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/48195

But then you have the power to make it abundantly clear that you don't want answers that depend on jQuery. If you do get a "but you can do this with jQuery" without also supplying a pure javascript answer, then downvote.

so true, jQuery is like a plague on there. I want vanilla Javascript results.

Then all you gotta do is ask for them. Just tag your question as `javascript` and ask for a "pure javascript" solution.

It probably doesn't work. It's like lots of Windows batch file questions get answered with "install cygwin and then use this arcane invocation". Given that I'm one of the few who who can competently answer such questions without installing anything else (with a slightly more arcane invocation) I often find that a little sad. I almost thought about going around answering Unix shell scripting questions with PowerShell answers, but Pash isn't that far yet.

True. But many questions that come up, that were already answered. And for years jQuery was fancy and most answers to JS questions are that way. Only recently people start to use pure vanilla JS 5. Thankfully the community adds new pure JS answers to old questions... though you have to scroll down to the bottom of the page.

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