Community sites tend to develop enforcers who limit what is considered acceptable speach on the site
Community sites tend to develop enforcers who limit what is considered acceptable speach on the site. The enforcers tend to be among the most ardent users of the site. These enforcers do 2 things: they keep the site focused on whatever the enforcers consider to be core to the site, and they limit the potential of the site. In this regard, this conversation about what is appropriate, and what is not appropriate, on Stack Overflow, is fascinating to me:
I don’t get it. Why do people ask so simple questions? Boredom? It can’t be lazyness since it would have been easier to find the answer with google then putting it up here. Spam. – Caffeine Mar 1 at 18:15
For some the question is not simple, and he is asking for a detailed explanation about the operator, as you can see by the answer he accepted. – Ólafur Waage Mar 1 at 18:19
@Olafur – the & operator is fairly simple. He doesn’t want a detailed explanation, he wants AN explanation, because he’s been using it without knowing what exactly it does. While I admire his willingness to admit that he doesn’t know it and desire to learn it, it’s still more of a Google question. – Chris Lutz Mar 1 at 18:39
It’s not about wether the answer is simple, but if posting it here means simply copying it from somewhere else. This is redundant. It feels to me, that some people are really using SO to kill spare time. Maybe I’m a bit biased, but I like SO for puzzles and not for chat-like questions. – Caffeine Mar 1 at 18:41
Wouldn’t it be good if you could find an answer for any programming question on SO? The only way this would ever happen is if “simple” questions get asked as well as “puzzle” ones. On that basis, methinks this a valid question. – da5id Mar 1 at 22:41
September 1st, 2009 at 6:02 pm
[...] hafiz, as Darren said, I think the site will provide the best service for straight-forward code questions. I think spec work is ethically questionable. Possibly people might occassionally post open-ended questions, but for such requests there are already many other services – the WP-Pro list, or even eLance. Having said that, I’ll qualify the above by saying I do not want to be a censor. I notice on Stack Overflow some people are highly critical of some of the questions that get asked. I’d like to take a broad view about what is permissible, so as to avoid some of the arguments that I point to here: http://www.teamlalala.com/blog/2009/…h-on-the-site/ [...]