Do we have to be Stack Overflow?

Question

Okay, I'm a techie, a software programmer and architect, so I participate in a site that is highly technical. However, photography is really meant to be art, it is the essence of the shot. Do we really want a site like Stack Overflow here or do we want a site that celebrates all that is photography? The technology and the art?

Why do I ask this? Because I think we need to start thinking about photographic challenges on the site. Challenges, pitting our photos against one another, will help us become better photographers and the site is really well suited for the model. We can set up a contest in a 'question' that lasts for a certain period with the most votes getting the accepted answer and the question turned wiki to avoid any further reputation changes after decision.

After all, isn't our photographic outcome also a part of our reputation?

Answer 1

tldr version: Not here, a million times no. A related site if you must, but please not here.

I have never seen a community-run site able to post consistently interesting challenges that didn't devolve into a mutual-congratulation society, a firehose of vaguely-related submissions where few people ever look past the first dozen (or what's next to their own), and sometimes both. It's actually one of my hallmarks for "sites I probably won't like."

Successful executions of this sort of thing all have one thing in common: a small group of people (often one) with a consistent goal and the critical skills to evaluate success. The best systems have that person actively curating the interesting submissions, and often submissions are invisible to participants.

This is largely incompatible with the way SE is set up. It's difficult to be consistent by committee, and it's largely incompatible with users/participants voting on submissions. The largely subjective and de facto competitive nature (as soon as people con vote, it's competitive) creates conflict.

Voting also brings the inevitable Velvet Elvis Effect: popular is not the same as good. HDR, much maligned, is a great example: you can do it well, some people do, most do not. But the awful, horrible HDR is just as popular, or more, as the well-done versions. I don't think that's fair to the people who do good work, nor to the people fooled into thinking that "it must be good, look at all those votes."

Another aspect of successful executions is that they mirror other aspects of the site: challenges/assignments meant to instruct are best on sites dedicated to instruction. The best art-oriented projects come from art-oriented blogs. Strobist does strobist stuff (it's basically its own word now). People seek out those places for their focus; it's not something we have here, or are even interested in.

I think it's also not entirely fair to users to do poorly. Look around at other examples, and you can see that most participants are low-to-mid-experience photographers with no particular preferred working method. They usually have a mild technical inclination. This is a broad community, certainly, but it's still a bit of an echo chamber; you see the people who participate, you don't see the people who don't.

Answer 2

It would be nice to have chat used for photo critique/ challenges. I don't really want to see the challenges/critique on the main site though. This is a Q&A site, not a forum.

Answer 3

As it seems to be that allowing contests or challenges would not be a good idea, let me throw out an alternative. Recently, Che created a Photo.SE chat room in the new StackExchange chat service. We were discussing photo critiques there, and Che had the idea of using the chat to provide critiques, rather than the Photo.SE Q&A site.

I find it hard to argue with matt's logic, as trying to do any kind of photo challenge or critique using a forum would be less than ideal, and probably ultimately disastrous. However, given a real-time forum, such as chat, I think at the very least we could be successful with something along the lines of a critique night chat.

Rather than keeping challenges around forever in the form of a CW type thread, wing it and to something more ad-hoc on a real-time basis. Set up one night a month or something like that, and allow people to submit a single photo that they would like to have critiqued. Require people to "register" ahead of time, and have a moderator use the registration list to explicitly pick one person after another to submit their photo for critique. Give X amount of time for the other members of the chat to offer their critique, or perhaps do as Matt said and have a "vetted board" of a few skilled photographers do the critiquing.

Taking some kind of formal approach to this, I think we could have a regular, orderly but useful time to allow photographers to get some constructive feedback on their work, without it being disruptive or degrading into a "mutual-congratulation society". The chats would be logged, if anyone wanted to review them, but in general, the idea is that nothing is permanent or sticks around in a "forum-like" capacity where people can go off and congratulate each other but never really provide any kind of solid, useful, critical (which may need to be constructively negative) feedback.

Thoughts?

Answer 4

I'd love to see challenges here, but I think we shouldn't do this on the main Q&A site, for example to avoid flooding the main page (which, as was pointed out somewhere, is the main design element). Maybe having a tag that would show up on a separate tab, or other separate site, similar to this meta?

Answer 5

Stackoverflow has challanges, so why can't this site?

So Photo Golf is born. :)

Any ideas for concepts to make it challenging enough not to be flooded with pictures, still general enough that anyone could participate?

(Or anyone simply against?)