On: Ask HN: Is StackOverflow being ruined by its mods?

[genwin]

Thanks. To me it's simply a matter of whether the question is on-topic for programming. If so, don't lock it for being off-topic. It seems so simple, especially when the question gets 400+ net votes and 50+ responses. They should let their users decide, with their votes, whether a question is off-topic.

SO is good, but it could be much better without so many locked on-topic questions. I don't want to ask a question there, even if it's clearly not a duplicate, with lock-happy mods there. I don't like having my time wasted.

[dbecker → genwin]

I could be wrong, but I don't think it was closed for off-topic (non-programming). I would guess it was locked for "not having an answer."

They say you should be soliciting answers rather than opinions... and, for better or for worse, that is probably why this was locked.

[genwin → dbecker]

Clearly for worse, considering that the lock reason is (in boldface): "it is not considered a good, on-topic question for this site".

A question asking for pros/cons of storing images in a database (vs. links to files) is not too subjective in my book. It's a typical programmer question.

[MattBelanger → genwin]

The goal of SO is to have questions with ONE correct answer, and to have that answer there.

Any question - such as this one - where the answer is "it depends" better be a work of art, or have an answer that explores all the considerations in exquisite detail, or it's going to get closed. Because there's no "one right answer" to this question.

It's "on topic", but not a good question.

[genwin → MattBelanger]

If that's SO's goal then I would say they've left a big hole in their strategy for a competitor.

That goal sounds good in principle. In practice, very specific programming questions often (if not usually) have multiple correct answers, with the best choice for a particular scenario being made by evaluating pros/cons just like the question I referred to. Some languages embrace multiple ways of doing things. For example, Perl's motto is "there's more than one way to do it".

[icebraining → genwin]

The "competitor" is Programmers.SE: the other site of the same network for more subjective, high level QA.

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/

[codeka → icebraining]

It kind of annoys me that we've got all these "kind-of, sort-of" related stack exchange sites for programming and whether one question belongs on Stack Overflow, or Programmers.SE or cstheory.SE or whatever is often quite hit-and-miss.

But then, on the other hand, you have tags on Stack Overflow that are almost separate sites in and of themselves. Usually this happens when companies start using Stack Overflow as the defacto support forum for their product (a lot of Google stuff uses this, e.g. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/google-apps-script or http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/android etc)

[genwin → icebraining]

Thanks. SO should change their FAQ if they want questions like the one in the OP to go to this other site instead. Looking at http://stackoverflow.com/faq, the question is (to me) on-topic for SO. It's not good enough to just have a "competitor" that's a better fit for the question.