<story><title>Not Constructive, a place for the discussions not allowed on Stack Overflow</title><url>http://www.notconstructive.com</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rmrfrmrf</author><text>I apologize in advance for sounding like an elitist prick, but in my mind, community-driven sites like StackOverflow, Reddit, Wikipedia, are prone to the noise of do-nothing armchair experts (especially in this economy with the unemployment rate) who have nothing better to do than stir philosophical debates over nothing.&lt;p&gt;As a person with a job who actually needs answers rather than reading through pages upon pages of discourse that goes absolutely nowhere, I appreciate StackOverflow&amp;#x27;s approach to moderation. StackOverflow is a place for specific questions and specific answers, not subjective nonsense questions like &amp;quot;how secure are sessions in PHP?&amp;quot; that, on this &amp;quot;Not Constructive&amp;quot; website, I imagine will be flooded with answers ranging from &amp;quot;PHP SUXXX LOL GO PYTHON&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;In my opinion, sessions are inherently broken blah blah blah&amp;quot;. While the moderators may be able to mitigate these issues a little bit, the problem isn&amp;#x27;t so much with the answers as the &lt;i&gt;question itself&lt;/i&gt;, which has no &amp;quot;correct&amp;quot; answer.&lt;p&gt;So, while I can see why people with a lot of free time might want to go to NotConstructive as a diversion, I foresee this site as little more than an informational black hole of back-and-forth BS.</text></item><item><author>neya</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t know who you are. But if you are the creator of this site, you have my respect from the bottom of my heart.&lt;p&gt;Stackoverflow was wonderful when it was started the way it was. The moderated content was extremely useful. But later, they decided to screw everything up by doing some stupid things like assigning too much power to moderators.&lt;p&gt;I always used to assume SO was more like the real world democracy; if something isn&amp;#x27;t right, you could fix it yourself being an ordinary citizen. However, on SO, that&amp;#x27;s not the case anymore. There is a moderator on top of the users who decides what&amp;#x27;s right and what&amp;#x27;s wrong. And he goes into a &amp;#x27;rage mode ON&amp;#x27; by flagging genuinely useful questions as &amp;#x27;inappropriate&amp;#x27; or &amp;#x27;not suitable for SO&amp;#x27;, as he pleases.&lt;p&gt;How can you challenge his decision? God knows. I&amp;#x27;ve searched round the site to report moderators. Good luck with reporting some rogue moderator. I like the fact that you can flag something offensive easily, but I don&amp;#x27;t like the fact that it&amp;#x27;s not as easy for the reverse.&lt;p&gt;Forget the moderators. Let&amp;#x27;s say you want to ask something about security with sessions in PHP. Good luck finding answers on SO. Your question will be migrated to some weird subdomain.stakcoverflow.com for which you need a separate account to maintain and collect your badges from scratch, again.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s why I knew there would be a day when someone would start something like this. Nonconstructive nails it for me. And hopefully for other disappointed SO fans too.&lt;p&gt;Thanks for creating this.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Quarrelsome</author><text>My major disappointment with SO is how we lost the desire to be helpful and ended up with the desire to be &amp;quot;correct&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;There are many questions that I would find helpful that get instantly closed because they are &amp;quot;not constructive&amp;quot;. I&amp;#x27;d like to hear my peers opinions on the respective merits of the latest javascript frameworks but that&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;not constructive&amp;quot; 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 &amp;quot;current&amp;quot; aspect of meta. if you&amp;#x27;re late to the party then you&amp;#x27;ve missed the discussion and we&amp;#x27;ve already decided.</text></comment>
<story><title>Not Constructive, a place for the discussions not allowed on Stack Overflow</title><url>http://www.notconstructive.com</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rmrfrmrf</author><text>I apologize in advance for sounding like an elitist prick, but in my mind, community-driven sites like StackOverflow, Reddit, Wikipedia, are prone to the noise of do-nothing armchair experts (especially in this economy with the unemployment rate) who have nothing better to do than stir philosophical debates over nothing.&lt;p&gt;As a person with a job who actually needs answers rather than reading through pages upon pages of discourse that goes absolutely nowhere, I appreciate StackOverflow&amp;#x27;s approach to moderation. StackOverflow is a place for specific questions and specific answers, not subjective nonsense questions like &amp;quot;how secure are sessions in PHP?&amp;quot; that, on this &amp;quot;Not Constructive&amp;quot; website, I imagine will be flooded with answers ranging from &amp;quot;PHP SUXXX LOL GO PYTHON&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;In my opinion, sessions are inherently broken blah blah blah&amp;quot;. While the moderators may be able to mitigate these issues a little bit, the problem isn&amp;#x27;t so much with the answers as the &lt;i&gt;question itself&lt;/i&gt;, which has no &amp;quot;correct&amp;quot; answer.&lt;p&gt;So, while I can see why people with a lot of free time might want to go to NotConstructive as a diversion, I foresee this site as little more than an informational black hole of back-and-forth BS.</text></item><item><author>neya</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t know who you are. But if you are the creator of this site, you have my respect from the bottom of my heart.&lt;p&gt;Stackoverflow was wonderful when it was started the way it was. The moderated content was extremely useful. But later, they decided to screw everything up by doing some stupid things like assigning too much power to moderators.&lt;p&gt;I always used to assume SO was more like the real world democracy; if something isn&amp;#x27;t right, you could fix it yourself being an ordinary citizen. However, on SO, that&amp;#x27;s not the case anymore. There is a moderator on top of the users who decides what&amp;#x27;s right and what&amp;#x27;s wrong. And he goes into a &amp;#x27;rage mode ON&amp;#x27; by flagging genuinely useful questions as &amp;#x27;inappropriate&amp;#x27; or &amp;#x27;not suitable for SO&amp;#x27;, as he pleases.&lt;p&gt;How can you challenge his decision? God knows. I&amp;#x27;ve searched round the site to report moderators. Good luck with reporting some rogue moderator. I like the fact that you can flag something offensive easily, but I don&amp;#x27;t like the fact that it&amp;#x27;s not as easy for the reverse.&lt;p&gt;Forget the moderators. Let&amp;#x27;s say you want to ask something about security with sessions in PHP. Good luck finding answers on SO. Your question will be migrated to some weird subdomain.stakcoverflow.com for which you need a separate account to maintain and collect your badges from scratch, again.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s why I knew there would be a day when someone would start something like this. Nonconstructive nails it for me. And hopefully for other disappointed SO fans too.&lt;p&gt;Thanks for creating this.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>neya</author><text>My frustration isn&amp;#x27;t fueled by sitting by an armchair and imagining about a philosophical problem that doesn&amp;#x27;t exist yet. I am talking about a REAL issue of Stackoverflow. While my php sessions example was average indeed, I would point you out some specific hurdles faced myself while using the site.&lt;p&gt;For example, while securing cookies for authentication (language independent, but try JAVA for this example), you could use two routes - Either Encrypt then HMAC it or, use something that combines this both by default (like AES-GCM). Now, if you search on this particular subject on SO, you would find genuine questions messed up and half of them migrated to crypto.stackexchange.com and the rest to security.stackexchange.com. And this is the crux of my parent comment.&lt;p&gt;Sorry if I appeared to be sitting on an armchair thinking about what debates I could stir while in reality I&amp;#x27;m just like any other developer out there trying to find something useful from the site, hoping to make it better.&lt;p&gt;And yes, your apology for being an elitist prick is accepted.</text></comment>