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Welcome to the Power Users community on Codidact!

Power Users is a Q&A site for questions about the usage of computer software and hardware. We are still a small site and would like to grow, so please consider joining our community. We are looking forward to your questions and answers; they are the building blocks of a repository of knowledge we are building together.

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Meta What should our take be on software recommendation questions?

Requesting recommendations for particular apps is not a good fit for this site. These are essentially "shopping questions", which are disallowed on other Q&A sites for good reasons. These rea...

posted 3y ago by Olin Lathrop‭

Answer
#1: Initial revision by user avatar Olin Lathrop‭ · 2021-11-14T13:54:59Z (almost 3 years ago)
Requesting recommendations for particular apps is not a good fit for this site.  These are essentially "shopping questions", which are disallowed on other Q&A sites for good reasons.  These reasons have been discussed at great length elsewhere, but briefly, the drawbacks of such questions are:<ol>

<li>The answers go out of date fast.  They become useless, even damaging, to the long term archive of knowledge.

<li>There are usually many valid approaches.  Distinguishing which is best requires more detailed specification of the problem than the type of users that ask such questions write.

<li>Even with detailed specification, the importance of various attributes are judgement calls, which are often highly personal.

<li>The votes end up creating a popularity contest, not a list of alternatives sorted by merit.  Those who have found a way to solve the problem have gotten used to their way, are comfortable with it, and often resist alternatives.

</ol>