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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

#21

Post by lonelappde »

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…

People didn't "get sick" of digg. Diff abandoned it's users. Digg launched a big overhaul "v4" aimed at cheap impressions the drove people away.

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

#22

Post by yabadabadoes »

dragontamer wrote: post #19
ghostbrainalpha wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think the precise problem of letting this version go into a new form of volumes, is giving the people on meta a task of "improving" one set of rules.

I think the current SE site questions/answers should be prefixed, new namespaces should register with new COC/TOCs and we should allow a free for all of linked questions, answers, comments, etc with people deciding their own web of trust for what portions of the Q&A web they want to see.

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

#23

Post by gremlinsinc »

I'd like to see a SO clone that has a subscription model that's optional but then when you upvote something you're giving that person some SO cash which they can cashout or apply to their monthly subscription.

Subscriptions would be a 'name your price' model, site would take like 10% + 2.8(stripe fees).

Questions would drop off indexes, related questions, etc after 1 year - but remain visible for 3 years, moderators can flag evergreen content as 'eternal', if they deem it likely to be relevant in 5-10 years, or part of pop culture...maybe have some flags they can give it like reddit posts. Archived | Popularity-extended-life.

Perhaps make invisible posts still visible to contributors, saved bookmarks, etc if logged in, but definitely won't show up unauthenticated or in google.

I think combining SO w/ something like codementor as well and code reviews would make for a good business model imho, really there's a lot of stuff in the 'learning to code space' that could apply.. could even have different views for questions --for instance people could post a video instead of text for a response, then you could auto load text or video or 'unified' views.

Lately I find myself using reddit more than SO, so maybe a customized reddit that's geared just for tech would be better... with slack-like communities built in, but the ability to wikify/read the chat logs online for further help/context.

Something that's broken by subtopics like reddit or into 'channels', w/ chat, wiki, and maybe built in awesome-lists, dev-docs, dev-tools, etc would be pretty sick.

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

#24

Post by colejohnson66 »

detail-oriented wrote: post #20

Maybe your questions are not appropriate for stack overflow, do you mind linking your profile or sharing the questions?

I just checked the Reddit post, and as of posting this comment, the OP has not posted their handle, let alone a link to their profile.

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

#25

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#26

Post by hbcondo714 »

gremlinsinc wrote: post #23

I'd like to see a SO clone that has a subscription model that's optional but then when you upvote something you're giving that person some SO cash which they can cashout or apply to their monthly subscription. Subscriptions would be a 'name your price' model, site would take like 10% + 2.8(stripe fees). Questions would drop off indexes, related questions, etc after 1 year - but remain visible for 3 years, moderators…

Something like experts-exchange.com?

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

#27

Post by htrp »

hbcondo714 wrote: post #26
gremlinsinc wrote: post #23

I'd like to see a SO clone that has a subscription model that's optional but then when you upvote something you're giving that person some SO cash which they can cashout or apply to their monthly subscription. Subscriptions would be a 'name your price' model, site would take like 10% + 2.8(stripe fees). Questions would drop off indexes, related questions, etc after 1 year - but remain visible for 3 years, moderators…

Something like experts-exchange.com?

And so we come full circle...

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

#29

Post by gitgud »

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…

Questions with no answers are still useful, if I solve a bug, I'll try and answer the unanswered question for future Googler's (including myself)

Information shouldn't be removed it's just ranked badly in SEO as it's not as useful.

Stack overflow is quite a fine tuned system, I'm not sure there's much you could do to make it better, without sacrificing something else on the platform.

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

#30

Post by dragontamer »

gitgud wrote: post #29
dragontamer wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Questions with no answers are still useful, if I solve a bug, I'll try and answer the unanswered question for future Googler's (including myself) Information shouldn't be removed it's just ranked badly in SEO as it's not as useful. Stack overflow is quite a fine tuned system, I'm not sure there's much you could do to make it better, without sacrificing something else on the platform.

> Questions with no answers are still useful, if I solve a bug, I'll try and answer the unanswered question for future Googler's (including myself)

Under the "2-year cycles" model, you'd simply recreate the question, and then self-answer it. There's no reason why you should be searching the archives to know if a question was useful some point in time in the past: if you think its useful, then self-ask and self-answer.

If someone thought that a question from 2011 was useful (but is up for deletion), then they can simply re-ask the question in 2013, 2015, or whatever future date. By "refreshing" a question, you will get better community opinion for which questions are popular enough to deserve more attention.

The good thing about the 2-year limit is that moderators will no longer delete your question for "duplicate" anymore. So you have better assurance that your efforts won't be wasted.

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