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GitHub Discussions Beta

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Re: GitHub Discussions Beta

#41

Interesting. Will this be rolling out to other repositories at some point to beta-test?

Yep! We're going to try it out in a few interested communities, and if people like it, we'll make it available GitHub-wide. It's early, though, and we want a chance to learn what works and iterate on a smaller scale before introducing it to everyone.

Quibbling over the details is a given, but people are going to like it. It fulfils such a clear need.

Re: GitHub Discussions Beta

#42
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

StackOverflow actively discourages "discussion"—it is for questions and answers. If anything, I'd say it overlaps more with issues than this.

I don't know what stackoverflow discourages, but tons of projects explicitly mention "ask questions on stackoverflow with this hashtag" Having a place to do this right next to the source code would be welcome (as long as there is global search as well) E.g. https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/debug-application-cluster/t... Stack Overflow Someone else from the community may have already asked a similar question or may be…

They send you to SO with questions which have specific answers. If you want to have an actual discussion that involves multiple people, SO is not the place and will close the question very quickly.

Re: GitHub Discussions Beta

#43
post #18

GitHub is slowly eating the surrounding cities. Github pages replaced our hosted sites. Projects replaced Trello/Waffle and friends. Actions replaced Travis/CircleCI. Sponsors is about to hit Patreon, and now Discussions aims for a piece of StackOverflow pie... I think they are doing great in terms of performance and UI, it's hard to resist the convenience of having everything linked together in a coherent way. But t…

Why would it backfire? This centralized approach is the entire model for competitor Gitlab which has grown without issue so far.

I understood the point to be that to do all these things well is very difficult for a single product / company. I worked at a startup where our solution was to replace five other solutions. Only customers with the simplest use cases found that it worked. The complexity from the breadth makes achieving the requisite depth for a good experience difficult.

Re: GitHub Discussions Beta

#46
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what stackoverflow discourages, but tons of projects explicitly mention "ask questions on stackoverflow with this hashtag" Having a place to do this right next to the source code would be welcome (as long as there is global search as well) E.g. https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/debug-application-cluster/t... Stack Overflow Someone else from the community may have already asked a similar question or may be…

In terms of displaying content, asking questions is a very different thing to discussion. If you've ever had to trawl through forum threads trying to find answers, it is a nightmare. StackOverflow is much more heavily moderated and curated to keep the answers from being buried. In general, you aren't going to be able to discuss something on SO, and people aren't going to find answers in discussion boards because they…

I know what you mean, but given great search, this is not going to be massive difference. But the ability to link to source code lines/issues/pull-requests as part of the discussion is going to be good.

Here's the thing - I would bet there's an overwhelming majority of users, who "discuss" and ask on GitHub issues anyway. And half the job of repo owners is to close such issues.

So it's not like the natural behaviour of users is to go to stackoverflow for questions/discussions anyway. This just channels existing behaviour

Re: GitHub Discussions Beta

#48
post #35
post #18

GitHub is slowly eating the surrounding cities. Github pages replaced our hosted sites. Projects replaced Trello/Waffle and friends. Actions replaced Travis/CircleCI. Sponsors is about to hit Patreon, and now Discussions aims for a piece of StackOverflow pie... I think they are doing great in terms of performance and UI, it's hard to resist the convenience of having everything linked together in a coherent way. But t…

I can't wait for stack overflow to fall out of favor. There's few places as beginner-hostile as SO. If you get enough points, you get the close button, which effectively is telling newcomers to RTFM in nicer words.

Yeah, and it's full of low quality drive-by responses by people using it to build their personal brand. Not quite on the same level as say Quora, SO seems to have better checks in place to keep things from degenerating that much. It's definitely present though, just less overt.

Re: GitHub Discussions Beta

#49

They just need to create an integrated gitter clone now, or maybe buy it from gitlab. Also this step pretty much kills discourse, doesn't it?

GitHub bought Spectrum (spectrum.chat) in 2018: https://spectrum.chat/spectrum/general/spectrum-is-joining-g... But I would caution against integrating too many tools into GitHub. As a user, I like that GitHub errors on the side of saying no. You don't want to end up with a bloated product.

As long as they retain the option to disable certain features on a repo, I am wholly in favor of consolidating the development stack into GitHub. Easier to mandate 2FA and other security procedures when your team doesn't have to juggle several sites.

Friendly aside: the expression is "err(s) on the side of..."

Re: GitHub Discussions Beta

#50

Interesting. Will this be rolling out to other repositories at some point to beta-test?

Yep! We're going to try it out in a few interested communities, and if people like it, we'll make it available GitHub-wide. It's early, though, and we want a chance to learn what works and iterate on a smaller scale before introducing it to everyone.

Is there any way to apply for the beta? I'm maitaining few communities that could really use this feature!
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