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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

#31

Post by gremlinsinc »

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?

It should be 100% free for all features...the subscription model is more like Patreon meets Medium, where money is pooled and shared w/ contributors who provide the most value.

Except unlike Medium there is no paywall. No limits on views/etc...

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

#32

Post by jolmg »

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…

> StackOverflow needs an archival process

https://archive.org/details/stackexchange

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

#33

Post by stevenwliao »

dragontamer wrote: post #14
stevenwliao wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's softer than the original proposal: instead of archiving an answer (reducing vote weight to 0) at an arbitrary time, we do it gradually at an arbitrary rate.

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

#34

Post by esyir »

CM30 wrote: post #17
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.

I heard someone a while back mention that he treated discord like verbal discourse: ephemeral. Perhaps not everything needs to be logged.

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

#36

Post by twunde »

esyir wrote: post #34
CM30 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I heard someone a while back mention that he treated discord like verbal discourse: ephemeral. Perhaps not everything needs to be logged.

The issue is that Slack and discord are essentially ephemeral verbal discourse AND that they often become the _default_ mode of communication. This isn't bad as a small community, but does limit the growth of these communities. Newcomers are at a disadvantage as are anyone that's out sick/vacation etc. Anyone who's worked somewhere where major decisions are made in hallway conversations and never documented should understand the problem.

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

#37

Post by gitgud »

dragontamer wrote: post #30
gitgud wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, but answering a unanswered 5 year old question still brings benefits to the community, I just don't think it warrents deletion, as it won't be ranked highly unless you specifically search for it.

Another reason to preserve the question is for context. Many of my problems have been solved by discovering that someone else had the same error message, but they had different circumstances which leads to clues and possibly discover the root cause, this then could allows you to answer the ancient question (even if it's no longer relavent to the asker).

There's nothing worse than googling an error and having zero results show up...

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

#38

Post by vonseel »

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…

The only problem I see with dropping posts from indexes or visibility on age is not all topics move at the same rate. For example, a JS front-end topic might be dated after only a year, but a question about some systems programming issue or slower moving topics might still be relevant after several years.

Yesterday I was searching for utilities to find and remove duplicate files and a stackexchange question was returned. I was skeptical of the results since many were dated from 2011-2012, and I think they indeed were out of date, but sorting the comments by most recent lead me to jdupes which appears to be the best current solution for that problem.

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

#39

Post by threecoins »

gremlinsinc wrote: post #31
hbcondo714 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something like experts-exchange.com?

It should be 100% free for all features...the subscription model is more like Patreon meets Medium, where money is pooled and shared w/ contributors who provide the most value. Except unlike Medium there is no paywall. No limits on views/etc...

Even with those fake internet points, Stackoverflow has the problem 0f voting ring, throw money in, and they will only get worse. Then your focus moves away from building content to optimizing against voting rings.
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