boo

shouts hello echoes

wow it really is lonely in here

Our stats are good so far area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/92736/interpersonal-skills

Can agree to that, being my first beta site I'm rather interested to see how it progresses from private beta to public beta. Needless to say I am quite excited for that move! :D

I just hope we can keep our stats doing pretty well :)

Did I miss much in the past few days?

I have been busy avoiding social interaction in pre-college

As usual, chat lives up to its name

The stats here do seem pretty good

I've been visiting the site here and there, and occasionally contributing.

My only concern so far is that the questions I'm seeing are extremely broad.

I suspect that the site would be stronger if the general site guideline was "avoid general questions, ask about situations in your life that are difficult. Trust that the most nuanced underlying principles will better emerge from that frame of reference."

@BenI. The argument for broader questions is that they are more useful to users besides the person who asked the question which, is one of the goals of SEs

Looks as if there's a fine line between too broad and too localized that's going to be hard to find in this subject area. :(

yup

I wouldn't discount the use of the hyper-specific. Imagine that this site is wildly successful one day, and has tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of questions. What will make the site really useful, then, will be a library of responses to similar situations from which we can glean serious wisdom.

General questions tend to net answers that are less useful in reality, as every real situation has a bunch of real additional factors

@BenI. True, but, that assumes that everyone who asks questions is willing, and knowledgeable enough to answer hyper-specific questions accurately and usefully

In the ideal world, that assumption would make sense

But, in the real world, I fear we may have an abundance of more socially awkward people, due to the format of the site

If the site doesn't provide meaningful expertise, what is its purpose? Trust in the voting process to separate the wheat from the chaff. That's what SE does well :)

Well, if there is a massive disproportionate ration of noobs to experts, then having the experts focus on the hyperspecific questions would not be as usefull to the noobs as them answering the broader questions

@BenI. I agree with this. I also feel that Interpersonal Skills is going to be a site where even more specific questions still lead to answers that discuss universally applicable skills.

I'd argue that we should be asking questions as specific as possible. Many situations are not entirely unique.

This is a problem I have in my own SE as well. I have trouble articulating why questions that seem over-specific will ultimately result in more universal answers.

But the truth is that answers to a question like "How can I be happy?" just don't result in strong answers that point to deeper underlying wisdoms.

"I am 42, I have no job, I can't get out of bed at all except to feed, walk, and play with my dog, and Fido was just diagnosed with a terminal illness. I have 2 to 3 weeks until he is gone, and I need to to figure a way out. Help me." will truly bring you more universal answers, not just more specific answers.

@BenI. Sure, but for noobs, you aren't going to want 100 different "How do I get a girlfriend" questions

One universal "How do I get a girlfriend" question for each age group/social setting will be better than hundreds of personal "How do I get a girlfriend" questions

By "noobs" do you mean new SE users, or people who are not very wise? You can have experienced people on the site who nevertheless don't give particularly wise answers.

When I use the word "Noob" I mean people who are relatively new to both SE and the use of interpersonal skills

@10Replies I very respectfully disagree. "A guide to finding love for everybody" isn't useful for almost anybody.

If you narrow it down by age group and societal standards, "A guide to finding love at age 10 in the united states" Is probably good enough.

A 14 year old who wonders how she can know if it is okay to kiss back if her camp boyfriend tries to kiss her is a fundamentally different concern from a terminally ill 32 year old woman who desperately wants to have children before she dies, but is unwilling to saddle any man kind enough to love her with that responsibility.

And?

Those both aren't "A guide to finding love"

Which is different from a 32 year old who has never had a boyfriend, which is different from a 32 year old first-time divorcee who hasn't dated since high school, which is different from a 32 year old who is looking for romance in a new country where she does not speak the language well.

And all of those 32-year-old situations are rather different for a 70 year old in those same situations

Yes, but, if the vast majority of people asking these questions is going to be normal 10 yearolds looking for love, the answers will all be very similar.

And one further thing to consider: if you are right, and we really need basically 7 love questions, then we don't need this SE to exist. We can figure out the 500 or so questions that will solve everyone's large, generalized problems, answer those, close the doors, and declare the site a success.

Obviously for more complicated situations you would need more specific advice

You need general questions for those whose problems will be solved by them, and specific questions for those who problems can't be solved by them.

luckily we need not bother with 10y olds, w/o proxy that is

@BenI. boxed stacks don't work that well either

"boxed stacks"?

closing the doors on a stack?

there is no such thing as a read only stackexchange

closed betas are boxed and while the data dump might be available, they are of little use

You need simple questions for simple problems, and complex questions for complex problems. As an example, there are a lot more 10 year olds looking for love, or wondering if the person they are attracted to also likes them than there are 10 year olds who were sexually abused.

I agree! I'm suggesting that the path to being closed is lined with broad, general questions.

This site needs to cater to both

Go with 14 year olds :) 10 year olds are generally not allowed on the site ;-)

lol

as I was saying ;)

@10Replies Why would "how can I program in Javascript?" be closed on StackOverflow?

And are they right to do that?

They are right

It is a different environment

I agree that it's a different environment. But what is the logic that leads to the determination that a question like that ultimately hurts their site?

I'm struggling to come up with a question as broad as "how do I program in Javascript" for interpersonal skills

"How can I be a good person"

There we go

That's a horrid question.

"How can I find love as an adult?"

(Which I think is the point)...

Your question is more akin to "How can I learn to program?"

True.

So, my key question is, why is "How do I program in Javascript?" a harmful question for SO, so much so that they must excise it from the community?

Because SE isn't google.

Could you break that down a little for me?

@10Replies I agree with @BenI. I don't think canonical questions will be good here, with the exception of maybe one or two scenarios (and I don't have any particular ones in mind).

At some point, to be honest, we can close some questions as duplicates of others. Different people may have similar enough situations.

I definitely think that there will be cases for canonical questions at some point.

I think canonical questions are useful about skills but not situations, if that makes sense. Having a canon "How can I get closer with a parent" question doesn't seem useful because of a hundred different variables. But "How should I make contact with an estranged parent" seems like a... more useful one.

ye

Maybe that's not actually making my case. The latter might be a more specific version of the former.

There may well be places where canonical questions are acceptable for various reasons, but on SEs, they should be the exceptions, not the rule.

The great strength of SEs is that, eventually, you type your specific issue into Google, and an answer to your exact problem pops up.

As long as we convince people who get there questions answered to stay and help out it might work

My home SE is Blender and hyper specific questions get few upvotes and views whereas questions like blender.stackexchange.com/questions/69605/… help many more users

@10Replies In the context of other SEs I've participated in, the question you linked looks very specific.

A few thoughts: first, the presence of the image itself makes that question quite specific, even if the specificity is not all in the text.

Also, this is a new SE. Among the big Questions we grapple with is, What do we aspire to be in the long run?

@BenI. How could you possibly answer that without needing to compose an entire book?

The answer to that question dictates a lot of the actions that have to take place at the beginning, even if not all of those actions are popular

@Catija which question?

@10Replies hyper specific questions and moreso excellent answers to those get only few votes on all the minor stacks

I'm not claiming any great wisdom here. Hell, I was only named a mod 2 weeks ago on a SE that is only about 4 weeks older than this one.

@HDE226868 I agree. We need to allow questions to be specific to a user's experience. We aren't a one-on-one self help site but people can have similar enough issues without having one overly broad, overarching answer that attempts to be everything to everyone.

@BenI. The one I replied to.

Sorry, I have to go right now. I'll be back later!

@Catija Exactly. And the point about us not being a help site is important. There are plenty of very general "How to do [X]" resources and how-to guides out there. Stack Exchange doesn't need to do that. It's possible for SE to explain a topic better even if it's already out there, but that doesn't mean that we need to duplicate existing resources. Generic questions already have generic answers.

@Catija exactly!