Ask HN: We need a better alternative for Q/A than stackoverflow

#1

Post by cryptofits » Thu, Oct 24, 2019, 5:40 PM UTC

I just saw this interesting discussion on Reddit and thought to open it here aswell.

>After being a contributing member, answering and getting a lot of reputation and upvotes, and after posting 6 (good) questions in stackoverflow, which were barely seen and mostly not answered, I got a question ban:

>"Sorry, we are no longer accepting questions from this account. See the Help Center to learn more."

>My questions were very technical and did not attract much attention. They were not downvoted though. I am an active software developer, and I only ask questions when I read the whole documentation and search for answers for at least a day. I only ask questions when I am unable to do my job at my firm because something is really off about a software dependency we are using.

>I use to get good answers when opening issues at the software project in github.

>But, of course, github is not for asking for user help. So, it's interesting that I get better answers at github than at a Q/A site like stackoverflow.

>I didn't know about the existence of a question ban at stackoverflow. Knowing about it leaves me worried about the state of software development in general. It's not much better than Facebook or the Chinese Government digital crap for that sake.

Original post: https://old.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/dh06m1/we_need_a_better_alternative_for_qa_than/

Re: Ask HN: We need a better alternative for Q/A than stackoverflow

#2

Post by LinuxBender » Thu, Oct 24, 2019, 6:26 PM UTC

This reminds me of an episode of Southpark. Eventually everyone agreed that Walmart was too big for their town, so they burnt it down. Then a local business started getting bigger and all the problems moved to that business. So they burnt that one down.

I think anywhere that you have a community of people, you end up with the same issues when the site gets really big or popular. I do not believe that anyone has found a method that makes everyone happy, at least not yet.

I have long since stopped posting, answering or editing posts on ServerFault.

Re: Ask HN: We need a better alternative for Q/A than stackoverflow

#3

Post by daturkel » Thu, Oct 24, 2019, 6:33 PM UTC

LinuxBender wrote: post #2

This reminds me of an episode of Southpark. Eventually everyone agreed that Walmart was too big for their town, so they burnt it down. Then a local business started getting bigger and all the problems moved to that business. So they burnt that one down. I think anywhere that you have a community of people, you end up with the same issues when the site gets really big or popular. I do not believe that anyone has found…

I think the same thing happened with Digg -> Reddit. People got sick of Digg and moved to the underdog, which has since grown to be much bigger than Digg ever was (with the pros and cons of that growth).

I would argue that the platform itself is kind of screwed when they try to maintain quality at scale. SO has pretty heavy handed moderation (by SO and self-imposed by power users) whereas Reddit has in many ways remained very anything-goes (with some inevitable limitations), and both receive flak. I think finding the balance is much easier said than done when you're at that scale, which is why when a newcomer arrives with a much smaller user base it always seems so much better.

Re: Ask HN: We need a better alternative for Q/A than stackoverflow

#4

Post by MattyMc » Thu, Oct 24, 2019, 6:34 PM UTC

I rarely ask questions on StackOverflow, but I use it every day. I'm a big fan of SO, although I'd love to see someone solve the problems you're describing and build an alternative!

Re: Ask HN: We need a better alternative for Q/A than stackoverflow

#5

Post by dragontamer » Thu, Oct 24, 2019, 6:34 PM UTC

Clearly, a new "internet community" needs to be formed. We've got a lot of classical communities: forums, Q&A (aka: Stackoverflow), link-aggregators + comments (Hacker News, Reddit), mailing lists, IRC, Discord, Github, Wikis... to name a few.

StackOverflow is trying to build an FAQ database. The Q&A format isn't really about answering questions, its about collecting questions that are popular / drive traffic, and to focus the community efforts on those popular questions.

------

I've hypothesized before, and I'll hypothesize again, that StackOverflow needs an archival process. A long time ago, I used to play a webgame called Utopia (and its "sister" game Earth 2025)... every 6 months or so, the world would be paused indefinitely, and a "new game" would be started.

6-months is too quick for Q&A formats, but I think a rolling "pause" cycle would be great for the StackOverflow system. Every 2-years, the Q&A database would be paused, all unanswered questions would be wiped out... all solutions permanently archived as "The winner" for those years.

For example: 2010 through 2012 would be one "cycle" of StackOverflow questions / answers. The question would have to be re-asked / re-answered in the 2012 through 2014 years (and the community can "reask" important questions every 2 years to ensure their continued communication).

The cycle of life / death of questions has caused the StackOverflow database to become too large. I think it needs to be archived, torn down, and rebirthed every few years. Its too much to expect an answer from 2012 to really remain relevant today in 2019.

Its too much to expect newbies, today in 2019, to know that some question was answered in 2010. Its too much to expect old moderators to comb through old questions and "update" wiki answers with information in 2019 to "fix" problems from 2010.

Case in point: modern compilers use cmov and avoid the branch-prediction question. This question is no longer relevant on modern compilers: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11227809/why-is-processi...

Yes, its important and tells an important tale about how compilers worked back in 2012, and yes it should be archived. But time has moved on, the world is different now and the Q&A Database is failing to keep up with the changes.

Re: Ask HN: We need a better alternative for Q/A than stackoverflow

#6

Post by sixhobbits » Thu, Oct 24, 2019, 6:36 PM UTC

I see more and more people moving to Slack communities for the QA that they used to post on SO. This is sad - slack is a closed protocol and is not searchable. Answers are only available to a subset of the tech community and only for a limited time (no one really searches before asking the same question again but someone will usually prompt with "that got asked a couple of days ago" in cases of extreme duplication.)

Spectrum [0] is heading in the right direction to counter this but it's still a walled garden.

[0] https://blog.apollographql.com/goodbye-slack-hello-spectrum-...

Re: Ask HN: We need a better alternative for Q/A than stackoverflow

#7

Post by z3t4 » Thu, Oct 24, 2019, 6:39 PM UTC

When I dont find anything on the web I go to IRC. It can take some time to get an answer so in the meantime I go to other channels and answer questions or just hang out participating in interesting discussions.

Re: Ask HN: We need a better alternative for Q/A than stackoverflow

#8

Post by xingped » Thu, Oct 24, 2019, 6:43 PM UTC

dragontamer wrote: post #5

Clearly, a new "internet community" needs to be formed. We've got a lot of classical communities: forums, Q&A (aka: Stackoverflow), link-aggregators + comments (Hacker News, Reddit), mailing lists, IRC, Discord, Github, Wikis... to name a few. StackOverflow is trying to build an FAQ database. The Q&A format isn't really about answering questions, its about collecting questions that are popular / drive traffic, and to…

I'm not sure if this is what you're suggesting, but if you mean to say that non-accepted solution answers to questions should be wiped out, I don't think that's a good idea. Many times my question might be roughly related to the question I landed on, but not exactly and a non-accepted solution is actually the answer to my question rather than the accepted solution.

Re: Ask HN: We need a better alternative for Q/A than stackoverflow

#9

Post by dragontamer » Thu, Oct 24, 2019, 6:46 PM UTC

xingped wrote: post #8

dragontamer wrote: post #5

Clearly, a new "internet community" needs to be formed. We've got a lot of classical communities: forums, Q&A (aka: Stackoverflow), link-aggregators + comments (Hacker News, Reddit), mailing lists, IRC, Discord, Github, Wikis... to name a few. StackOverflow is trying to build an FAQ database. The Q&A format isn't really about answering questions, its about collecting questions that are popular / drive traffic, and to…

I'm not sure if this is what you're suggesting, but if you mean to say that non-accepted solution answers to questions should be wiped out, I don't think that's a good idea. Many times my question might be roughly related to the question I landed on, but not exactly and a non-accepted solution is actually the answer to my question rather than the accepted solution.

Oh, I mean the myriad of questions with no answers at all should be wiped out. If no one was able to answer a question within the 2-year timeframe, it needs to be "re-asked" for the next cycle. No point in archiving something like that. And its a lot of effort to expect newbies to search all of the unanswered questions before posting questions of their own.

The "wrong" answers (or unaccepted answers) serve a point in the discussion, and in many cases, "wrong" answers are more helpful to me. But the "voting period" for these answers should be closed at the "end of the game".

Re: Ask HN: We need a better alternative for Q/A than stackoverflow

#10

Post by cannonedhamster » Thu, Oct 24, 2019, 6:59 PM UTC

dragontamer wrote: post #5

Clearly, a new "internet community" needs to be formed. We've got a lot of classical communities: forums, Q&A (aka: Stackoverflow), link-aggregators + comments (Hacker News, Reddit), mailing lists, IRC, Discord, Github, Wikis... to name a few. StackOverflow is trying to build an FAQ database. The Q&A format isn't really about answering questions, its about collecting questions that are popular / drive traffic, and to…

Man the feels. I played the heck out of Utopia. But yeah Utopia's internal kingdom forums would get wiped out every season. It would take a little while for the Crystal Ball app to update. I think an archive system for the Q and A format isn't a terrible idea but you could take it further and build actual knowledge dbs that collected the best info sources and paired them with relevant books and tutorials where appropriate.