Comment by Josh Montgomery on "Why ask technical questions on Hashnode instead of StackOverflow?"

For me, what I've noticed is that SO doesn't really allow opinionated based questions, meaning there is no room for any gray area, while here on HN, I think not only is it allowed, but encouraged.

For example, here is a question that would almost certainly get down-voted within 5 minutes of being posted:

Should I use jQuery or vanilla javascript in my small side project?

There is no right answer here, it's all how you feel. Those kind of questions are frowned upon on SO, while on here you could have a healthy discussion going on days on the pros and cons of both.

Hey Josh Montgomery, I agree with "SO does not really allow opinion-based questions" and that's the point to this: they don't want opinions based questions.

And I do not think the question you put in your answer is a technical one. It's a discussion. And this has to be encouraged here, not in SO.

I mean questions like "what's wrong with my code?"

Thanks for your response!

Tetri Mesquita - They seem to love giving opinionated "answers", though. StackOverflow is a trash heap of irrelevant approval when it comes to finding a true solution. They are SEO-geared, not user-friendly, and it shows in spades.

hashnode.com/post/imo-hashnode-greater-stack-over…

Agreed, however SO IS good for finding quick answers to simple questions, for example, if you forget the syntax or something along those lines. But for the most part, especially in recent years, it just seems like they are striving for perfection in the Q&A philosophy (perfect question asked, perfect answer given) which will never happen, and it degrades the quality of the site.

I actually started off on Experts-Exchange asking tech questions, and then answering them more predominantly. Back in the early years, it was a nice sense of community, folks were decent to one another, and the mods weren't Nazis. And for the most part, the people haven't changed all that much, but the site has, as a new redesign would come out every couple of years, and to me at least, each new iteration made the site harder to use and was geared more to trying to make money, which is understandable, but it drifted away more and more from the core concept of Q&A.

Search Hashnode