I did a , but came up with no real helpful results.  Sometimes a subjective/argumentative question can be a helpful learning tool to help explore what others thing about certain subjects.  I've seen some pretty good "subjective" questions on StackOverflow get shut down pretty quick, even though the outcome of the discussion could have been really helpful.  So if we can't ask these questions on SO, is there a StackExchange site that will tolerate subjective/argumentative questions?
1774
Stuff like polls, recommendations based on subjective constraints, puzzles, webcomics etc. do not belong on the serious main SE sites, where professionals should be considered at work and having just a few spare minutes ("code's compiling") to answer questions, so they should not be distracted by such things. However, I'd also like to have a home for these things still using the SE engine. For the reason I mentioned before, this needs to be a separate place though. Let's call it four.[sitename-here].com.
120963
If Community ♦ flags something for low quality or because of consecutive closed questions or whatever, I always have to click that the flag was helpful (or declined):      To my understanding, it doesn't make a difference. So, why ask in the first place?
108415
About a month ago, we rolled out a new feature: . So far, the reception has been mostly positive, and I've definitely seen    posted in this form. But I've also seen something else, a side-effect you may have seen discussed here on MSO:     Ignore for a moment the specific details of the Q&amp;A pairs discussed in those two posts, and note the following: three poorly-asked questions, questions that ordinarily would have been closed, down-voted, and/or edited... But instead sparked a small outrage among the members who came across them. Now, we've known for years that self-answered questions can be problematic. Asking is hard. Answering is hard. Asking a question when you already know the answer can be even harder to do well. But that is - or rather, that should be - beside the point: plenty of people ask really terrible questions without bothering to answer them, and we've certainly managed to handle them over the years. If normal community-moderation is failing when it comes to self-answered questions, that's a problem. These are edge-cases at the moment. But if we're trying to encourage more use of this form to share knowledge on Stack Exchange (), it's something that needs to be faced. I'm presenting one possible solution below (in true gratuitous self-answer fashion), but what do you think? Would some other option work better? Is this even a real problem?
3101
I love Stack Exchange and really hope to see it evolve, maybe into a helper page for sites like Wikipedia. One of the problems I have as a user is the kinds of questions I generally have are for lists of answers, or to get a vague and rambling set of answers to dig through and collect the pieces I'm looking for. For instance, it would be nice to ask for a list of great food websites (as an example only) and then get a listing of these sites.  I'm wondering if there is a sub-section or side-section of Stack Exchange that offers this kind of back-and-forth that is restricted on the Stack Exchange topics normally? I get that sites like facebook offer this to one degree or another, and message boards, etc. But none of those sites have the indexing, tagging, searchability, and referencing options that Stack Exchange does. So I'm hoping that there is a Stack Exchange-approved model for this question that I just wasn't aware of yet.
122712
I and my friend used to ask programming questions on Stack Overflow, until we saw that 90% of our questions have at least 1 downvote and nobody cares to explain or at least give a clue why.  For example:        And many more on Super User... (can't see up/down count there)   It seems to me like you're allowing this kind if mingebag-ish behavior on purpose. Is it fun to click on a good question's vote count and see like +5/-3? Does it seem right to you?   It definitely doesn't seem right to me or my friend, who quit this website because of this.  Don't you think this must be stopped, possibly now?  You know, my problem here is that, when a question gets a downvote first (has overall negative reputation), it ceases to get views and thus less chances to get an answer. I came to stack overflow to get answers on my questions, not to have their quality or reason questioned.
106010
Downvoting legitimate questions on Meta because one disagrees with the question's premise has become a bit of a problem.     Question bans on users asking legitimate questions are a real possibility. Discussion can be suppressed.  Heavily downvoted questions fall off the front page, and no longer have any visibility.   If you disagree with the question or its premise, why not:   Vote on the question based on its clarity and usefulness.  That's how we do it on every other SE site. Express your disagreement in an answer explaining why you disagree, and allow your opinion to be voted/vetted by the community on its own merit.   You can still vote down questions that:   Do not demonstrate minimal research effort (close as duplicate of FAQ questions), or Are merely rants, or otherwise not constructive.   Feature requests are an exception.  Note recent change in :     Unlike normal Stack Exchange sites, Meta invites the community to   discuss, debate and propose changes to the way the community itself   behaves, as well as how the software itself works. On posts tagged   feature-request, voting indicates agreement or disagreement with the   proposed change rather than just the quality or usefulness of the post   itself.
7140
There are many general resource questions that ask questions such as "what is the best programming language?" or "How do I implement this commonly-confusing thing?", which get closed for being subjective or generalized.  While these are currently outside the scope of SE, many have generated .  Therefore, I suggest that instead of closing these questions, the best ones should be relocated to a new sister site like this:     assorted.stackoverflow.com (or any other prefix)   I've looked around and seen something like this suggested before, but what I found suggested things such as a compiled FAQ or separate site (which is similar, but then would be hard to search since all site questions would be merged into one long list).  Of course, I understand the implications of such a heady statement, and the effort that would be required to accomplish this must be immense.  However there are good reasons for this change:     This would provide a place to ask subjective questions, which means instead of closing questions against the community's will, misplaced questions can be migrated. This can discourage repetitious questions that continuously ask the same popular questions.  It certainly wouldn't get all of the duplicates, but it might help. This would encourage users to write new, useful questions that are inherently subjective,  but are still very helpful.   A number of technologies could accompany this that could make integration simpler:   Each site has the sub-site in the main toolbar listed between "chat" and "main/meta".  This allows for quick navigation between the sub-sites. The new sub-site could have its search results automatically included in the "main" portion of the site so that it can be seen by people posting their questions on the main page (to help avoid duplicates). Either a new rating system could be imposed which does not affect the user's rep (i.e. is local to the question only) so that the questions can be ordered by rating, or rating can be taken out altogether.  I don't recommend tying in the rating with the parent site because the sites may become indistinguishable. Allow for migration to the new sub-site.  Perhaps require less migration votes to move to this particular sub-site because A) it still pertains to the actual subject matter, and B) Migration would be more frequent to this sub-site.   Finally, if this would become a reality, Stack Exchange would likely require a change to their mission statement to include that there is a small subsection devoted to the most highly-valued subjective questions, or something along those lines.  Now, nothing ever gets done without first being discussed, so how does everybody feel about all of this?  NOTE TO DOWNVOTERS Thank you for your interest.  Downvoting does not mean that you dislike my post.  Do not downvote because the question happens to be a duplicate of a question that by all means, I would never have found without stumbling across it myself (yes, I took a good hard look before I asked this one).  Remember that downvoting is only meant to indicate a bad question or for feature requests, a poorly thought-out request.  I took a lot of time writing this request; because you do not agree with it is no cause for the (to quote another user) "Haterade".
27916
tl;dr  Due to the special nature of Meta and the high rate of "lost souls", should we try out the Ask a Question Wizard here on Meta Stack Exchange too?  General idea  In case anyone doesn't know yet, . It guides new users towards writing better questions.  I think that such a question wizard would be useful on Meta Stack Exchange too, for three main reasons:   . There are four types of questions on Meta, each represented by the different required tags: , ,  and . Especially bug reports can often be split into a certain structure (what's wrong, how to reproduce, why I think it's wrong, examples). The same holds true for feature requests. Such a structure is ideal for a question wizard. Quite a few users  and . While the Meta community is well prepared to deal with these posts quickly, they lead to an less-than-ideal first impression by the new users and they distract the community from more important issues. Site-specific questions are often off-topic. This  since nowhere is it hinted at in the help pages (and there are a lot of old, not-yet-closed SO-specific questions from a prior era of this site) and can lead to unnecessary drama. If we add an honeypot into the wizard to catch this case (and ideally redirect them to the proper meta site), we could prevent this.   As Sonic said, there's an  new users need to read and confirm. However this doesn't really prove effective right now and we might need to try stronger tools (e.g. question wizard).  Therefore I think that we should test the Ask Question Wizard here on Meta too.  Implementation details (help welcome)  I think the wizard should have six main entry points:   I want to discuss a specific post or action from any Stack Exchange site. (-> honeypot, redirects to the appropriate per-site meta) I have a question regarding the use of Stack Exchange sites (-> support mode) I think I found a bug while using the Stack Exchange sites  (-> bug mode) I have an idea for improving the Stack Exchange sites  (-> feature request mode) I have a discussion I want to start about Stack Exchange communities or their rules  (-> discussion mode) I have some other (e.g. programming) question  (-> honeypot, redirects to )   Coming from these choices, the user would either be redirected to a landing page explaining, why this is not the right community and offering some alternative choices or they would follow the guided assistant.  For 1. the user might be asked on which site the post/action is. Maybe the system could show the three sites where the user was recently active/has the highest reputation on.  support mode would ask the user for these details:   what do you want to achieve? what have you tried? what is your current problem?   bug mode would ask the user for these details:   bug description how to reproduce the problem why do you think that this is wrong? (possibly) examples   feature request mode would ask the user for these details:   what is your goal? how do you think could this be achieved? why will the community benefit from this change? (possibly) details   discussion mode would ask the user for these details:   which rule do you want to propose/clarify (optionally) examples/why is this rule required?   Note: the above implementation details probably require some revision. Feel free to edit/suggest improvements for both wording and details.
80725
I have posted different suggestions in the recent days, that many users didn't like. Although some are common practice in other forums, and some even if you don't agree are true (ie, new users get "bullied" by higher rep users many times).  I see that if users with a different way of seeing things, come and ask something here, and it gets downvoted, how is this different way of seeing things will ever affect this forum? I have been downvoted so much, I have each time less "voice" in here. I am not sure even if you can run risk of being banned here.  SO is a highly developed site, many things already implemented, it is hard to suggest something that everyone that has been here for long while will agree, something ground breaking. I suggested things that I as a responsible SO user, but with low reputation, I haven't asked many questions.  I think people on SO should be nicer to new users, I am not saying to allow them do whatever they want. Just be nicer.  So what should I do —    Quit in my attempt to participate in Meta because I will continue being downvoted?  just never propose any new idea, try to harvest Reputation by posting bugs, trying to answer things that are not too controversial so I don't get downvoted? Then when I finally have tons of reputation I can go and shutdown the reputation of new users that suggest new Ideas.   I think it is fine not to agree with me. But why do I lose reputation on meta because of a question that is proposing something new? If most people deem something not good for SO, well my question was useful. I mean my very downvoted ideas got attention, it was a useful discussion. The result was "we don't want that here", but it was useful, in the future other people won't need to ask the same. So is it really right to lose reputation because of that?  Edit:  I am adding this, because I think that by putting myself as example my point was a bit lost.  The FAQ says:     Are upvotes and downvotes different on meta?      Voting here works a bit differently from other Stack Exchange sites.   On Meta Stack Overflow, voting is often used to express agreement or   disagreement, not to point out a lack of quality or helpfulness.   Please don't be concerned if you receive downvotes – members of the   community may simply disagree with your bug, feature request, support   issue, or the nature of the discussion.   Some people in the comments have stated they don't even look at the reputation because of this very reason, which totally makes sense. But basically it means they are ignoring a part of the website's functionality, because it is not useful for that.  So does it make sense to lose reputation for something that people doesn't seem to consider?  I mean it is not the same to be downvoted on SO for posting "nonsense" and to be downvoted here for posting something others don't agree with. And I am not even talking about me, I am sure this has happened to everyone.  If it worried me that I am losing reputation, as it is I would have deleted the posts that are making me lose reputation. That is not my point.
37075
Historically our beta site has discouraged self-answered questions. The site has been running for 6 years (3 questions/day, 98% answered, 3 ½ answers/question, and very few questions are closed). The topic of the site can be a bit &quot;&quot; (like Parenting, or amateur History), sometimes opinionated, and not entirely dry and technical like Stack Overflow. We have discouraged self-answered questions -- because, as one of the moderators says,  I'm strongly opposed to giving green light to quasi-questions posted with the sole intent to share an opinion, an unsolicited teaching, rambling, philosophical musings etc. [...] self-answering [might be] utilized to take advantage of the SE platform to push unsolicited info at the audience [...] I'm not convinced we should greenlight a random newbie getting on the proverbial soap box [...]. How are we to decide who is allowed to get on the box and who's not? I suppose the main issue here is community self-moderation or rather the lack thereof.  My experience of other SE sites has been that self-answering isn't an important feature -- that the large majority of topics, and of the most upvoted answers, are all people answering other people's questions. So IMO if the community votes it wants to avoid people using self-answered questions to preach on the topic of their own choice (i.e. by posting a rhetorical question and self-answering), then that's fair enough -- i.e. it's not a huge diversion from SE's core mission as a Q&amp;A site. I'm aware that SE also usually  and hopes its sites may become like Wikis (which IMO is fair enough when the subject matter is like SO's). My fear is that self-answered questions may be:  Mostly summaries of or references to material already available online elsewhere A bit spammy (e.g. a summary of something on the OP's blog or YouTube channel) Someone might flood the site with unlimited self-answered topics It can be preachy -- users who disagree in their answers within one topic might use further self-answered questions to continue their disagreement into other topics People (or trolls) might post extremist, unorthodox, unwelcome, controversial views on topics of their own choosing.  Someone recently argued though that &quot;experts&quot; want to be able to post self-answered topics and won't frequent the site if they are not allowed to.  What's your experience (and on which site)?  Are self-answered topics a problem, a distinct category, difficult to control or to quality-control?  How do you (do you even) prevent people posting the kinds of low-quality or problematic content which I listed above)? What implements the prevention -- is it the community, the moderators, or some site-specific policies about what content is welcome?  Do self-answered questions seem a bit spammy sometimes?  says,  Always solve the asker's problem. A good answer should at minimum allow the person whose question you're answering to solve their problem. Not all questions can be answered this way, but if you don't think you can write up a complete solution then you're better off looking for a different question.  ... but a problem with self-answered questions is that there isn't even an asker -- the post is unsolicited, it's not cooperative like answering someone else's question.    Historically when someone posts a question in order to self-answer it, a moderator says, &quot;That's not really conventional on this site, this is a Q&amp;A site which is preferably for answering other people's questions&quot;. So we've had little experience with allowing self-answered questions -- and having to quality-control or moderate them. How does a site cope with the various kinds of problem listed above, without deprecating all self-answered questions categorically?
22700
Recently on SO, I've been noticing a lot of link-only comments on (admittedly bad) questions.  The typical comment looks like this:        Now, my first instinct is to flag the comment as "not constructive" or "too chatty", but the fact is that the blog post linked to is actually good advice.  On the whole though, the way it is being wielded like a blunt instrument comes across as—at best—lazy arrogance in my opinion and is not adding anything to the network.  Can we ban "What have you tried?" links like we did with ?  An example:    To be clear, I'm not proposing that we stop people asking for clarification or expecting askers to explain themselves properly. I just don't think comments like these are particularly constructive.
47876
Guys, I just wonder if people are allowed to have civilized discussion (on any IT topic) on this forum without actually being accused of starting a row. I'm asking this question for a reason that few days I've asked few questions referring to VM, JIT etc. and compared them to C++ way and despite the fact that I've explained myself that I'm not starting any agro with anyone, that I'm really just genuinely curious, my post was first closed and then removed. I'm asking: What's wrong with asking nonstandard questions which sometimes my be quite difficult to answer? Thanks
43237
appears to have been question banned because of two unpopular Meta suggestions. (He says so in )  Look at the two contributions that appear to have gotten him banned. Like those of many others, they may not be of perfect quality, but they are not actively harmful to the site, either. As it stands, you can get question blocked on Meta simply for asking questions that aren't popular with the Meta crowd.  Why does the team insist on keeping the question ban active on Meta?  Why can't real problem users be dealt with through manual moderator action? Don't tell me it's a problem of scale; as far as I can see, actually toxic users are very rare on Meta.  People will frequently complain that Meta actively discourages the expression of unpopular viewpoints and suggestions. With the threat of question bans in place, I find those complaints difficult to refute. I hate that.
26350
I've often seen questions getting questioned and people coming up with anwsers that are totaly irrelevant.  For example, in  I was looking for a library that adds attributes in a certain order to XML documents. Someone on Stack Overflow was asking about this, and all he got was people telling him that this is not XML standard and he shouldn't do that. I needed ordering attributes too because of readability, but all I found were useless answers. I had to ask the question again and provide reason in order to get useful answers.  Providing a reason for a question might be a good thing, but is it really so hard to answer questions, even if who asked did not explain all the details about his reason for asking?
55941
I have question  I am sure this is valid question - I am not new on SO. It was closed no comments on the question. Given that the SO is here for a while - there are lot more users who can close questions (lot more than it was a year ago). Some users might not even understand the question but have power to close it. I think to prevent blatant actions - SO should implement a mandatory comment post if a user votes to close a question.
87691
Is there a Stack Exchange site where users post their questions not to get answers or to get up voted or down voted for quality, but to decide on which site to post their questions? If not, does anybody else think that a site like this should be created? Up votes and down votes could be allotted for how obvious the correct site to post to is. For example, a question that obviously asks about why their code is broken would be sent to SO possibly with down votes. However, a question that spans both programming and academia where it is unclear which subject is dominant, could get up votes for its complexity and deserving to be asked.   Is helping to decide where questions go a function of Meta Stack Exchange or should another site be created?  Are there any negatives to creating a site like this?
57689
I've noticed a distressing tendency for questions that seem basic or overly short to be immediately closed and downvoted into oblivion.  Case in point:   Within a minute of being asked, this question received 12 downvotes and was closed as "not a real question".  That particular question is a very real, non-trivial question, but it had somewhat poor grammar and looked a little like a much simpler question.  Can we try to be a little more accepting?