> You seem to be trying to replace a basic peer-review of an engineering design that typically involves a paid team with advice from poorly-known, pseudonymous strangers with reputation crowd-sourced from a web site's user-rating system.
Yes that's a correct interpretation! In fact, I almost wrote something like "even though this is forbidden on SO, it's one of the most common kinds of conversations within and across teams in the workplace in my experience".
I also agree with pretty much everything else you said about how these discussions do happen in project-specific ways on mailing lists and such.
But I disagree that a generic version of this couldn't exist. (Maybe it can't anymore though, because everyone will try to do it solely with AI now because that's what's hot.) I think before the existence of Stack Overflow, you could have said all these same things about the kind of questions that appeared there. Prior to having a good place for getting factual answers from "poorly-known, pseudonymous strangers", it was necessary to get those answers from professors or or teammates or consultants or independent research, just like it still is for these more subjective questions.
I definitely agree that this is a more difficult genre than factual Q&A, and I don't begrudge SO their choice in what content to focus on, but I think it was a choice to go that route, not an inevitability.
Yes that's a correct interpretation! In fact, I almost wrote something like "even though this is forbidden on SO, it's one of the most common kinds of conversations within and across teams in the workplace in my experience".
I also agree with pretty much everything else you said about how these discussions do happen in project-specific ways on mailing lists and such.
But I disagree that a generic version of this couldn't exist. (Maybe it can't anymore though, because everyone will try to do it solely with AI now because that's what's hot.) I think before the existence of Stack Overflow, you could have said all these same things about the kind of questions that appeared there. Prior to having a good place for getting factual answers from "poorly-known, pseudonymous strangers", it was necessary to get those answers from professors or or teammates or consultants or independent research, just like it still is for these more subjective questions.
I definitely agree that this is a more difficult genre than factual Q&A, and I don't begrudge SO their choice in what content to focus on, but I think it was a choice to go that route, not an inevitability.