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I understand and agree that opinion based questions are a bad thing on Stack Overflow, but shouldn't we have a place to ask this kind of question? There are so many times where I look at different frameworks and have to make decisions that will affect the next 3 years of my life without actually having all the pros and cons of both sides.

So my question is: Is there a place to ask these questions?

And if the answer is no, could that be a new Stack Exchange sub-website?

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  • 4
    Why no? If you really dislike that kind of questions, you should agree with me so you can ignore that sub-website...
    – Pluc
    Oct 17, 2013 at 12:19
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    Stack's mission seems to be repo of knowledge, not opinions. There hardly is a need for a repo of opinions, as opinions change. But on chat it might be a bit more OK.
    – Mołot
    Oct 17, 2013 at 12:19
  • @Pluc if you really want to suggest such a site, it should to go Area51 (area51.stackexchange.com). But I fear that's a pretty fundamental no go.
    – Bart
    Oct 17, 2013 at 12:20
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    See this excellent answer on what happened when a similar proposal to allow subjective questions was put into place on what became programmers; basically it nearly died under the weight of low quality questions before the rules were tightened up
    – Richard Tingle
    Oct 17, 2013 at 12:22

1 Answer 1

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Nope. There is no site in Stack Exchange network where you can ask opinion based questions. And I disagree with your feature request for creating a site for opinion based questions because the goal of Q&A site is to ask questions to get answers not opinions.

Also, our goal is to have Q&A which helps other future users too not only OP.

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    There is undoubtedly a need for opinion questions to be answered. SE is the de facto site for tech questions now - it should have such an opinion based section - and it should be clearly marked. There is an obvious, clear need for this.
    – niico
    Feb 4, 2017 at 12:22
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    The use case of having opinion-based tag could be trying to figure out the best practice of using a particular programming tool. Or "which of these similar tools should I use and why" types of questions. This way we will unify the way we work, not diverge it.
    – Eduard
    Apr 14, 2018 at 15:44
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    "Also, our goal is to have Q&A which helps other future users too not only OP." Are you implying that other users would never have the same opinion-based questions? There are hundreds of opinion-based questions on this site with tons of views and tons of upvotes.
    – NetherGranite
    Nov 23, 2018 at 7:01
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    As of now, here are a few counter-examples to this answer: softwarerecs.stackexchange.com , codereview.stackexchange.com and worldbuilding.stackexchange.com .
    – Brian
    Jan 24, 2020 at 14:25
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    Big part of programming art lies in writing code that other people understand and find it easy to maintain and extend. There is hardly an absolute truth in "what is well readable and comprehendable". There are design patterns, but even knowing them all well stil doens't mean producing good code. For such issues you really need people's opinions, and since we developers face similar issues, I'm sure those opinions would be helpful for future users too.
    – amik
    Feb 20, 2020 at 8:45
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    I completely disagree. If not on Stack then when on Earth I would ask opinion based questions about programming?!
    – Mykhailo Seniutovych
    Apr 26, 2020 at 6:04
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    This is really too bad as I often have opinion-based questions that are technical in nature (e.g. choosing between frameworks or platforms). I haven't found another site where I could post such questions (at least not one that has the same wealth of technical knowledge as the users do here).
    – Michael C
    May 10, 2020 at 12:57
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    If the policy is to have no opinion-based questions on the network, that is fine. However, I would argue that "Also, our goal is to have Q&A which helps other future users too, not only OP." should not be considered part of the counter-arguments answer. There are many times when opinion has helped me, even an out of date one, as It informs me how opinions have changed over time. Opinion based where the OP accepts an answer tells the reader that solved it for them.
    – Gregory William Bryant
    Jun 18, 2021 at 8:51
  • I would agree however to support opinions, you would need to allow duplicate questions, as opinions can change and accepted answer to those opinions can be different based on context.
    – Gregory William Bryant
    Jun 18, 2021 at 8:55
  • Opinions form ideas which can help imagining meaningful answers to questions.
    – ShinTakezou
    Sep 16, 2023 at 17:15

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