My major disappointment with SO is how we lost the desire to be helpful and ended up with the desire to be "correct".
There are many questions that I would find helpful that get instantly closed because they are "not constructive". I'd like to hear my peers opinions on the respective merits of the latest javascript frameworks but that's "not constructive" so it gets shut down.
I like to help people so I occasionally decipher weird English and try to work out what they need.... too often my submission of my reply is then blocked because the question has been closed.
I dislike their rules about posting to jsfiddle (you must post enough code in SO for the question to stand alone).
I dislike the cliquey and "current" aspect of meta. if you're late to the party then you've missed the discussion and we've already decided.
> we lost the desire to be helpful and ended up with the desire to be "correct".
But that's the whole point of StackOverflow. Right on the about page is their mission statement:
Ask questions, get answers, no distractions
This site is all about getting answers.
It's not a discussion forum.
There's no chit-chat.
And while yes, it may be interesting for you to know what the "latest and greatest" of the Javascript frameworks is, that's really not the point of the site.
Why? Because the answer is inherently subjective. It's open to interpretation and flame wars. In a year, it will also be obsolete.
Compare that to a trivial question, like:
How do you create a while loop in C++03?
Which is incredibly basic, yet will always have 1 correct answer that will then be added to SO's vast knowledge base.
There's also the great side effect of StackOverflow then becoming a place for real-world problems for actual practicing programmers rather than a debate forum. The "best Javascript framework" might sound like a great topic for you, but it's also indicative that you haven't actually started any work on a project, compared to, say a person trying to figure out how to do two-way binding in Knockout.js. I'd much rather have a site full of real-world issues that are getting solved than a site dedicated to theory-based bickering.
So what about the questions pertaining to "obsolete" frameworks, should we scrap those too?
As exciting as this judgement of what is good information and bad information is its somewhat ironic that this categorisation is....... subjective. We have merely replaced flame wars with these debates. I don't think the time sink of productivity that you're evidently susceptible to (look at us both here!) is something that avoidable through censorship but a struggle that everyone must learn to deal with.
"How to create a while loop in C++03" is as you stated a terrible question become obviously this person hasn't even started on a project. Why don't they read a book? Is this their homework? ;)
Whereas when I found the closed question on javascript frameworks I was looking to make some major modifications to an existing web site. Problem is that its not as user-friendly as I'd like and the Javascript is becoming a mess so I think it would be a good call to go with backbone or knockout but I want a few sample opinions as part of my _research_.
But according to a response you gave me elsewhere, talking to peers that are probably more experienced in a given part of the field doesn't count as research. D:. According to the parent of this response my work related questions aren't even "real-world".
My issue with SO is they made a tool for developers who used it in many different ways. Then over the course of the next year and a half they started locking down on how _they_ wanted it used, (and by "they" I mean the most aggressive culture that prevailed amongst the owners/mods) I just find this a disappointment and a missed opportunity.
I had contributed over 10k's worth of rep there but after a while I just stopped going. It stopped being fun, it was no longer a community, we were no longer trying to help others as our primary goal. It made me sad.
SO has always had a very specific purpose in mind, and this has been advocated by Jeff Atwood, et al since the beginning. It was never meant to be a discussion based site. In fact, to quote the man himself,
"At Stack Exchange, one of the tricky things we learned about Q&A is that if your goal is to have an excellent signal to noise ratio, you must suppress discussion. Stack Exchange only supports the absolute minimum amount of discussion necessary to produce great questions and great answers. That's why answers get constantly re-ordered by votes, that's why comments have limited formatting and length and only a few display, and so forth. Almost every design decision we made was informed by our desire to push discussion down, to inhibit it in every way we could. Spare us the long-winded diatribe, just answer the damn question already." [0]
The entire point of StackOverflow is to answer questions as quickly, accurately, and efficiently as possible. You want more discussion? There's a chat room available. You want long, permanent discussion about (e.g.) the merits of various JavaScript frameworks? You're on the wrong site.
Plain and simple, SO is not (and never was) meant to be "a tool for developers who used it in many different ways". It was meant to be sued in one way: ask a concrete, specific, real-world question and get one specific answer that will always be correct.
Discussions about obsolete frameworks are fine. People still use them. If you are asking a question with a concrete answer that will not change, go for it. And by will not change, I mean that an answer about how to do something in Python 2.6 will never change, even though the version itself has been superseded by Python 2.7 and 3.x. That's still the right way to do the thing you want in Python 2.6.
Perhaps to most important point you are making is that "this judgement of what is good information and bad information is ... subjective. We have merely replaced flame wars with these debates." But the thing is, no one is really debating. This question was answered when the site began. Or certainly not long after. SO is a finely tuned machine, really, really good at one thing: answering practical questions in a practical way.
In fact, read up on the Coding Horror article referenced above[0]. Jeff Atwood talks about Discourse, a framework he and some other folks are trying to put together to address the need for a really good discussion-based environment. He makes the point that forums are the place where these discussions happen and are saved for posterity, and that's how it should be. When talking about the option of Stack Exchange as an online community for discussion, he refers to it as "quite frankly, terrible", because "We only do strict, focused Q&A there."
That really should put the issue to rest. SO is not a place to have open ended discussions. That's what forums are for.
I always thought the purpose was to kill off expert's sex change but I appreciate your post and the quotes. I don't really think how its ended up is right or wrong just not what I was hoping it would become.
It's a bit of a shame because the only thing going for expert's sex-change was the communal aspect of helping people (although obviously this process was used to extort $) but SO has lost that a bit.
The issue is that there are now three parties. On mailing lists and IRC channels its typically just two. One seeking help and one-to-many helping. But on SO there is a third one that is seeking to identify whether or not the two parties should be allowed to be exchanging information in the first place.
But that's Jeff's dream and he's achieved it. Maybe its just not for me. That's fine, I'm a bit of a weird one to be fair and don't really expect to be catered for. The only thing that bitterly disappoints me is that save the idealogy through moderation it works almost exactly how I'd want "my perfect Q&A site" to work (I think the format is actually better than a forum). The technology is there but they just chose correctness as their #1 priority.
There are many questions that I would find helpful that get instantly closed because they are "not constructive". I'd like to hear my peers opinions on the respective merits of the latest javascript frameworks but that's "not constructive" so it gets shut down. I like to help people so I occasionally decipher weird English and try to work out what they need.... too often my submission of my reply is then blocked because the question has been closed. I dislike their rules about posting to jsfiddle (you must post enough code in SO for the question to stand alone). I dislike the cliquey and "current" aspect of meta. if you're late to the party then you've missed the discussion and we've already decided.