Ask HN: We need a better alternative for Q/A than stackoverflow
>After being a contributing member, answering and getting a lot of reputation and upvotes, and after posting 6 (good) questions in stackoverflow, which were barely seen and mostly not answered, I got a question ban:
>"Sorry, we are no longer accepting questions from this account. See the Help Center to learn more."
>My questions were very technical and did not attract much attention. They were not downvoted though. I am an active software developer, and I only ask questions when I read the whole documentation and search for answers for at least a day. I only ask questions when I am unable to do my job at my firm because something is really off about a software dependency we are using.
>I use to get good answers when opening issues at the software project in github.
>But, of course, github is not for asking for user help. So, it's interesting that I get better answers at github than at a Q/A site like stackoverflow.
>I didn't know about the existence of a question ban at stackoverflow. Knowing about it leaves me worried about the state of software development in general. It's not much better than Facebook or the Chinese Government digital crap for that sake.
Original post: https://old.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/dh06m1/we_need_a_better_alternative_for_qa_than/
52 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 123 ms ] threadI 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 a method that makes everyone happy, at least not yet.
I have long since stopped posting, answering or editing posts on ServerFault.
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 remained very anything-goes (with some inevitable limitations), and both receive flak. I think finding the balance is much easier said than done when you're at that scale, which is why when a newcomer arrives with a much smaller user base it always seems so much better.
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 focus the community efforts on those popular questions.
------
I've hypothesized before, and I'll hypothesize again, that StackOverflow needs an archival process. A long time ago, I used to play a webgame called Utopia (and its "sister" game Earth 2025)... every 6 months or so, the world would be paused indefinitely, and a "new game" would be started.
6-months is too quick for Q&A formats, but I think a rolling "pause" cycle would be great for the StackOverflow system. Every 2-years, the Q&A database would be paused, all unanswered questions would be wiped out... all solutions permanently archived as "The winner" for those years.
For example: 2010 through 2012 would be one "cycle" of StackOverflow questions / answers. The question would have to be re-asked / re-answered in the 2012 through 2014 years (and the community can "reask" important questions every 2 years to ensure their continued communication).
The cycle of life / death of questions has caused the StackOverflow database to become too large. I think it needs to be archived, torn down, and rebirthed every few years. Its too much to expect an answer from 2012 to really remain relevant today in 2019.
Its too much to expect newbies, today in 2019, to know that some question was answered in 2010. Its too much to expect old moderators to comb through old questions and "update" wiki answers with information in 2019 to "fix" problems from 2010.
Case in point: modern compilers use cmov and avoid the branch-prediction question. This question is no longer relevant on modern compilers: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11227809/why-is-processi...
Yes, its important and tells an important tale about how compilers worked back in 2012, and yes it should be archived. But time has moved on, the world is different now and the Q&A Database is failing to keep up with the changes.
The "wrong" answers (or unaccepted answers) serve a point in the discussion, and in many cases, "wrong" answers are more helpful to me. But the "voting period" for these answers should be closed at the "end of the game".
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
https://archive.org/details/stackexchange
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.
Spectrum [0] is heading in the right direction to counter this but it's still a walled garden.
[0] https://blog.apollographql.com/goodbye-slack-hello-spectrum-...
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.
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.
I wonder whether some of the attraction of slackfor community and q&a is the immediate feedback and the ephemeral nature of the questions. If I am looking for an answer, I want it asap. And maybe it is easier to ask or answer questions because both go away? At the least it means that the answers will avoid some of the SO issues (where the best answer is 10 years old and has been superseded).
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.
Usually I set a bounty of 50 points to draw attention if my question didn't get any answer on SO. Works really great so far, only very few questions remain unanswered.
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.
Except unlike Medium there is no paywall. No limits on views/etc...
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet
It is still available:
https://www.techradar.com/news/the-best-usenet-providers