Summary: With the recent “REP-OCALYPSE” that happened over the weekend, we thought it was a great time to do another podcast – so come join Joel, Jarrod, and Josh as they talk about some of the recent changes to the site and the motivations behind them. JOEL: This is not necessarily a podcast, but it might turn into something useable, perhaps in the form of a podcast, maybe. The goal is to talk about all of the questions that are getting closed, aka REP-OCALYPSE NOW. Part One: there has been closing and deletion of very popular old questions going on lately. Are we happy with how this is going? What are the other options? This has come to a head because it got noticed all of a sudden thanks to the global reputation recalc. SHOG: This is a perfect storm. Prior to the rep recalc, an SO mod got it in his head that he should go clean up these old popular questions, since they’re totally inappropriate for the current standards of the site. He posted on MSO about it. Then, this rep recalc made a whole bunch of people painfully aware of a bunch of their stuff getting suddenly deleted. A lot of the stuff that got deleted was worthy of getting deleted. Some were valuable, though, and were worthy of discussion and possible salvation. JOEL: There are a few categories that the lynch mob is after that should stay open (They’re interpreting a particular rule too zealously.) One of these is talking about separate questions that all have the same answer. One of them is three different [identify-this-game] questions that all refer to the same game. SHOG: If you ask a bullshit joke question and it gets good answers, great! You broke the “only ask questions you really need the answer to” rule, but the page is now improving the internet. It has value. Good job! JOEL: An example: the center cannot hold. The activity in the answers should be protected, not the questions. Hidden features questions tend to devolve. They lose value after the top ten or so answers. JOEL: So! There have been a lot of bad questions that were deleted, and some higher quality ones that are hotly contested. So what about programmer cartoons, or boat programming questions? They get a million views. They bring people into the network. Making those pages be Page Not Found is violent! It breaks the internet a little! SHOG: A theory: this is a lottery. Most of the time you post stuff, and it goes nowhere. Sometimes it strikes a chord, people go crazy over it and generate a great page. JOEL: There are no new questions that this really affects. If somebody asked “what’s your favorite Pascal question” today, it would get closed in a second. Eric Lippert wrote a great answer a year ago on a question that pissed people off – it was a duplicate and a homework question and all sorts of terrible stuff, but the amazing answer redeemed the question. SHOG: We don’t want to encourage people to gamble. We can encourage them to put their money in the bank instead! JOEL: Back to the question. What is bad about keeping these lottery winner questions around? JOEL: New example: the programmer cartoons. It benefits us because there are lots of views, and because people laugh! It’s better than googling “programmer cartoons” because we have voting. JOEL: Programmer cartoons questions get closed. So is it okay to keep the weird exceptions around just because they were very successful? Concept #1: Famous RFC about TCP/IP over Pigeon that wasn’t serious. Did it break the internet? Did this one not real RFC turn all RFCs into Reddit? Concept #2: Purim Torah on Judaism SE. On Purim, you are required to break rules and get drunk. Purim Torah is a humorous fake discussion of Jewish law that you discuss as if it were serious. The Judaism SE community has decided to allow it during/around the time of Purim. Some of the questions are very funny. An example of a “Purim Torah” Stack Overflow question: What i[...]
