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

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

#11

Post by stevenwliao »

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…

We can get the most relevant answers on top if the algorithm decays voting power for historical votes. Fresh votes will keep relevant answers at the top.

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

#12

Post by zwieback »

SO is fantastic for finding existing answers but I've had mixed success getting specific questions answered. It's hard not to get your feelings hurt by haters, especially if you put in the effort to answer questions others have asked.

On the whole, though, I don't think it's time to ditch SO. Compared to pretty much everything on the internet it's still super great.

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

#13

Post by bryanlarsen »

dragontamer wrote: post #9
xingped wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've got both the accepted flag and a bunch of upvotes on answers I posted over 2 years after the question was originally answered. Often it was the question and the discussion that helped me find the actual solution that I was then able to post and snag a necromancer badge for.

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

#14

Post by dragontamer »

stevenwliao wrote: post #11
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…

We can get the most relevant answers on top if the algorithm decays voting power for historical votes. Fresh votes will keep relevant answers at the top.

There's no way to automatically know if an answer from 4 years ago is still relevant today.

Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Trying to tie an algorithm to "age decay" is the wrong solution, because it will decay too quickly for some questions, but not quickly enough for other questions.

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

#15

Post by LinuxBender »

daturkel wrote: post #3
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 rema…

I agree on heavy handed. Some fellow moderators were clearly power tripping and none of the site owners would discourage the behavior. There is also quite a bit of elitism.

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

#16

Post by ghostbrainalpha »

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…

What you are describing would be insanely hard to get right, but its exactly what we need.

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

#17

Post by CM30 »

sixhobbits wrote: post #6

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.)…

This is a depressing trend in itself, and not just for QA setups either. Way too many communities seem to exclusively post on login only walled gardens like Slack and Discord, where stuff gets lost very easily and search engines can't index anything.

As you said, it makes it very annoying to find said information later, especially if you're not already part of the community/don't know where to look.

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

#19

Post by dragontamer »

ghostbrainalpha wrote: post #16
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…

What you are describing would be insanely hard to get right, but its exactly what we need.

The best part about cycles is that you don't have to get it right on the first cycle. There's always the next cycle to improve the rules.
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