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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

> In improv, you're always supposed to find creative ways to say "YES!"

StackOverflow isn't improv theater.

I think what the parent meant was that, in business, you have customers, and customers want things. You don't have to do exactly what your customers say--allowing opinion-based questions directly on StackOverflow would be dumb--but every demand does represents some kind of unmet need that you could profit by satisfying, whether by adding features to your current service, or by creating a new companion service.

The users of Stack Oveflow aren't the customers. The users are the product.

And by purposefully telling users to go away, Stack Overflow made itself less valuable to its customers.

Are you sure about that? One could argue that, by focusing on doing one thing well, they are more valuable to their customers, i.e., their intended audience.

I happen to think things have gone a bit too far on the moderating end over at SO, but at the same time, I wouldn't want it to be a free-for-all re: anything that has anything at all to do with programming.

I don't want it to be a free-for-all either. Which is why I suggested:

> They could have politely shuffled opinion-based questions to another area, maybe even another StackExchange site.

They have other sites for that; programmers.se and codereview.se. programmers.se turned out to be a toxic cesspool filled with self important moderators and members, but codereview.se is pretty good.

The problem is, they didn't migrate questions over from stackoverflow. They just made you feel unwelcome at SO.

Yeah, I have wondered why we can migrate questions to some .se sites, but not all (relevant) sites. For example, I can migrate to serverfault, but not codereview. I agree that SO can feel like a hostile place due to overly zealous users with close privileges.

Hi, I'm a Stack Overflow user with close privileges[1]. I've answered a lot of questions. I've also closed a fair number of questions. If you write a good question, it won't be closed.

A lot of questions that I end up closing are questions that don't have enough information to be answered, or that already have answers (i.e. are duplicates). Also, closed questions can be improved by the original poster by editing them, and then they can be re-opened.

Edit:

Regarding migrating questions, I've also wondered why it's not possible to migrate them to the appropriate Stack Exchange site. When you flag a question as being more appropriate for a different site, you're only given a few possible sites to migrate it to (I think it's currently only like 3 or 5 of the other SE sites). It's kind of annoying when you know that a question would be perfect for a different SE site, but you can't migrate it to there through the currently available tools.

I do know, however, that some questions won't be migrated because their quality is not high enough, even on the SE site where they would be a better fit.

[1]: http://stackoverflow.com/users/456814/cupcake

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/152480/python-blogs-that-...

That was "What Python blogs do you regularly follow?"

That's a good question. It wasn't just closed, it was redacted from existence.

Now, I happen to agree that it's not a good Stack Overflow question, but it could easily have been shuffled over to another Stack Exchange.

Which SE site though? That question is totally open-ended, it could generate answers forever. One of the key philosophies of the Stack Exchange sites is to suppress extended discussion.

That reads like a question I'd see on Quora. It's open-ended, has virtually no right or wrong answer, and calls for people to evangelize their favorites and perhaps even their own blogs (I realize this sentence might sound like an unequivocal criticism of Quora, which was not intended).

On cursory glance, a similar question actually is on Quora: http://www.quora.com/Computer-Programming/What-are-the-best-...

I'm also an SO user with close privileges[1]. As long as we're linking profiles, I was a beta user, have been around pretty much since day 1, and am in the top 0.2% of users.

This statement is simply not true.

> If you write a good question, it won't be closed.

How about this one, with 1419 upvotes (and hey; I'm in the list too!): http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9033/hidden-features-of-c

Or this one: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/194812/list-of-freely-ava...

Or: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2245196/c-urban-myths

Or perhaps: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/81584/what-ide-to-use-for...

Or, my favorite example, this insanely interesting question with an awesome, enlightening response: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/448673/how-do-emulators-w...

That question was closed as "Off Topic." What?! The implementation of an emulator is "off topic" on a programming QA site? WTF?

I can go on. Hell, here's an aggregated list of great questions, almost all of which are closed: http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-most-interesting-Stack-Ove...

All of those questions have a massive amount of upvotes, i.e., the community thought they were interesting, well written, and, mots importantly, useful. All closed as "off-topic" or "not constructive." Give me a break.

This is the crap I'm talking about. A bunch of self-important people with nothing better to do than enforce the rules in as strict a manner as possible regardless of whether or not what they are doing is actually making the site a better place.

[1]: http://stackoverflow.com/users/1053/ed-s

> All of those questions have a massive amount of upvotes, i.e., the community thought they were interesting, well written, and, mots importantly, useful. All closed as "off-topic" or "not constructive." Give me a break. This is the crap I'm talking about. A bunch of self-important people with nothing better to do than enforce the rules in as strict a manner as possible regardless of whether or not what they are doing is actually making the site a better place.

Don't have time to look through all of your examples, but I took a look at the first one. It's an open-ended question that doesn't have a single, definitive answer. It will generate discussion forever. That's the reason that it was closed (emphasis mine):

> As it currently stands, this question is not a good fit for our Q&A format. We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or expertise, but this question will likely solicit...polling, or extended discussion.

Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood have a very strict and specific philosophy/opinion regarding what kind of questions and answers make for a "good" Questions & Answers site. There are numerous blog and Meta StackOverflow posts talking about this philosophy. The idea behind suppressing extended discussion is that it makes it harder to find practical answers to actual, real-world problems when they're buried underneath a sea of un-focused discussion.

EDIT:

I think the generalization of community moderators on StackOverflow as "self-important" isn't entirely correct, nor am I convinced that it's even relevant either. Are there self-important people moderating StackOverflow? Probably, but that doesn't address the fact that people are following strict guidelines for usage of the site that were agreed upon over time by the site's founders, together with the most active participants of the site (or at least, those who most actively chose to participate in Meta).

These guidelines were put in place to "make the site better", at least in the opinion of the founders and the aforementioned participants of Meta. They weren't made up so that a bunch of "self-important" people could feel "self-important".

So, who are the customers then?

Advertisers and companies posting jobs.

The Q/A is the product, the users are the producers

Why do you always find a way to say "YES!" in improv?

Because it's engaging. It allows everyone to create new realities, and for other people to explore use-cases that the original creator never thought of.

I believe that kind of thinking belongs on sites like StackOverflow.

I believe, on the other hand, that that kind of thinking defines a very different kind of site than StackOverflow.

It might be a different kind of site that you would prefer to StackOverflow, but that's a different question.

Right, I'm not saying the guys who run StackOverflow need to allow me and my opinion surveys on StackOverlfow...

But the StackExchange platform allowed them to create Programmers.StackExchange.com, where opinion polls are welcome. EDIT: slightly more welcome, sometimes, maybe.

If they had figured that out sooner, and had migrated questions from StackOverflow, they could have done a much better job at engaging users.

Saying "your question is closed as off-topic" is totally different from "your question has been migrated". I commend them for the second, and I condemn them for the first.

and that's what makes /r/ so popular.

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