What are questions where "every answer is equally valid"?

Question

Short version: Is this the same as a question "without a definitive answer"?

Long version: Personally, I understood "subjective" to mean, "without a definitive answer", yet I keep seeing questions on this subjective question site closed because they lack definitive answers. I understand the requirement that not all answers be equally valid to mean that there should be some reasonably obvious criteria for determining if a certain answer is "more valid" than another answer. This could be "correctness", but since subjective questions often defy correct / incorrect assessments, I would think it could also be some other reasonable criteria, such as "thought-provoking", which maybe should be specified in the question. I think a good litmus test for this is, "Could you downvote something for being less valid, and support your claim based on the question?" E.g., "Down-voted because this is common sense and not thought-provoking." Does this seem like a correct understanding? Can you provide me with a better interpretation, so I don't run afoul of this rule again? Should this be clarified in the FAQ?

Commentary: I suspect a non-official reason people understand this requirement as "needs a definitive answer" is that it stops threads where everyone has something to contribute that can easily grow very large. People enjoy these questions, perhaps partly because everyone can contribute meaningfully, so more people read and respond and they get a lot of votes. While I understand frustration when this is blatant "rep-farming", I think there is at least one class of questions which are best answered by accumulating a lot of answers and letting the cream rise to the top. This becomes a sort of process of "community inference", and lets the community explore topics that maybe aren't yet understood well enough to have a "right answer" yet, or maybe are too complex to ever be fully answered. While I agree that the reputation system has an undesirable result for these questions, I feel like the problem is with the SE system and not with the questions.

I am especially frustrated because I find that many software test questions fall into this category, and right now programmers.se seems to be the best site available for these questions (I've voted for the QA Area 51 proposal, but it's stuck in the "commit" phase). Lots of the work that testers do requires inferential analysis, and being able to draw from wider ranges of experiences with questions like these is a big help!

Disclaimer: I did post a question that falls into this category. My goal wasn't to farm rep, and I considered if it was appropriate to mark 'community wiki', but decided against it based on this meta thread on the purpose of 'community wiki'. I was frustrated when it was closed but glad to see discussion over the closure (followed by it being re-opened), and thought the discussion was really good and the general topic deserved a full thread on meta.

Answer 1

It's a common misconception that subjective means "without a definitive answer": in reality, subjective means "valid based on one perspective". This is in contrast to objective, which is "valid for all perspectives".

So a subjective question that's interesting and useful for others is one that gets answers that are based on people's experiences: it's useful to hear how other programmers have handled certain problems because their experience is useful knowledge. That is, for any one problem a programmer might face, other programmers have likely had to deal with the same problem and can share their perspective on how they handled it.

Again, this is in contrast to a site like Stack Overflow, where there's very likely one real way to solve a problem, and it's likely any competent programmer will give you the same answer.

The key factor in both a site like Programmers.SE and Stack Overflow is that questions solve real problems: whether the answer to the problem is an objective answer or a subjective answer based on one person's experience.

To this end, the Stack Exchange network is not a discussion board: it's not your role, as question-asker, to ask thought-provoking questions. Your role, as question-asker, is to ask a question you personally need the answer to.

It's nice that you want to contribute to the community, but questions that just create lists of things because that's a question you think would be a nice, chatty question to ask is filler: it takes up the space of some other question that a person asked because they actually need some help with a problem they're having. Creating those types of questions actually hinders the community and makes the site a less useful place for people needing help.

If you want to have a place where you can just shoot the sh— with other programmers and do community-building activities like asking thought-provoking questions, I humbly suggest setting up a PHPBB instance or seeking out the numerous existing programming communities on the web and in your area.

Answer 2

Not having a definitive answer and not having an answer at all are two different things. One type of question that is discouraged at this site are "poll" questions. If I remember correctly the first rendition of your question was something along the lines of, "What is the most outrageous bug you have ever encountered?" There is no answer to this question, subjective or objective; it is just a survey so to speak. One criteria that might help you to evaluate the legitimacy of question is: Does the question ask how to solve a problem? Or, is the question asking for advice that applies to a wide audience?

I would personally argue that your question even in it's final rendition could use some editing. I know what you are trying to ask, but I still think that it is incomplete. I think the more appropriate question would be, "How has/does discovering and fixing bugs increased your skills as a developer?"

Answer 3

In addition to what Mark and Pemdas have said, I'd like to add that another important distinction (far as belonging on P.SE or not goes) is whether or not reading a question's answers would help one become a better programmer.

In that sense, I liked the twist you put on your question: how did you learn from your bug and how did it help you later vs the other incarnations of the same question that simply asked for a list of "fun" bugs. The former might help someone by exposing a vulnerability they never thought of. The latter is just fun to read, but has little substance behind it.

The difference there is subtle and others might disagree, but in my mind placing extra criteria in the question (such as requests to elaborate on the answer or restricting answers to bugs that people were personally involved in fixing) helps guide upvotes/downvotes on good/bad answers. A question like that has a better chance of being useful. That alone isn't always enough to "save" a question from being closed, but it certainly helps.

I think I summed up the issue with questions that just ask for a "list of X" here. Directions to restrict answers to one item per answer (to simulate a survey) are almost never followed and the whole thread degenerates pretty quickly more often than not.