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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

#41
post #34
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.

True, not everything does need to be logged. General chit chat being ephemeral is fine.

But a lot of communities use it for a lot more than basic chit chat. I've seen open source projects where relevant info is only shared on their Slack server and nowhere else. Companies often get useful resources shared on their Slack instances that never gets backed up elsewhere for later.

And in the gaming world, it seems like Discord is the default method of communication for the game development, modding, speedrunning and hacking/datamining communities. For instance, most of the relevant techniques used for speedrunning Zelda Breath of the Wild are only found in the Discord server, or a Google Docs linked from it.

There needs to be a separation of the ephemeral from the non ephemeral here, and communities need to share the latter on publically accessible sites instead.

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

#42

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 am not sure about the cycle you describe but purging some questions is a good idea.

I flagged for deletion some of my own questions which were bug discoveries and are not relevant anymore. Or ones which deal with a version long gone.

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

#43

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…

[deleted]

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

#44

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…

An additional feature suggestion: if you really wanted to add value, require version and software that the question relates to, and track those against release repositories. That way, when you're looking at some sort of bug resolution that applies to version 2.x of 'some package' from 2014, and you're 5 years in the future on 4.x, you can use that as a heuristic that "maybe this doesn't apply to me".

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

#46
post #7

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.

Can you please recommend dinner IRC channels?

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

#47
post #7

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.

Can you please recommend dinner IRC channels?

*Can you please recommend some irc channels?

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

#48
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 that have negative score and have no answers are automatically deleted after some time.

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

#50

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...

Why would anyone pay? There needs to be some incentive.
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