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Ask HN: Where do you go to ask questions that don't fit stackexchange.com?

28 points by yeetard ↗ HN
Questions concerning technology, that aren't really "practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face" (Source: https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask) but at the same time are still way to technical or "goal oriented" in a way for places with a more colloquial attitude like reddit.com etc., and can't really be answered in a single paragraph, either because they are too open-ended and only were to be asked with the intent of gaining a more holistic understanding of a certain subject or because they're to complex?

You know, stuff that you would have originally asked in a forum about that specific topic, before they (the forums) all died off for no reason.

33 comments

[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 85.6 ms ] thread
de_nied
Sometimes, asking a question is not possible unless you personally find someone (or someones) qualified to answer it. Rather, you'd pick up a book and/or watch some YouTube videos regarding the subject. Then you can brainstorm and bruteforce attempts at understanding the topic until you finally achieve some level of comprehension of whatever it is you're trying to learn.

So most of this would boil down to RTFM, except it would be in published academic books or videos of "experts" discussing it. It would be up to you to define what an expert is. Choose carefully.

yeetard
>asking a question is not possible unless you personally find someone (or someones) qualified to answer it.

Ah, so we're at this old problem again (The you-need-to-know-the-right-people-problem). That didn't take long. How do I find experts that care about problem?

mkr-hn
First, spend decades building a big enough network to encompass every possible skill. Then, ask your question. It sounds like a coy dismissal, but it's true. You either spray and pray on public forums, or you build your own collection of someones who know someone.
yeetard
>Dude, just turn old

In all seriousness, I can't believe that we still haven't solved this. Crazy advanced social media but no workaround for the "networking problem". No, not gonna suggest we need a "productivity social network" or another meetups.com but could our existing social medias at lest be somewhat biased towards promoting content that connect people over common interest in the real world? Why can't they? (The answer is obvious).

Zababa
> but could our existing social medias at lest be somewhat biased towards promoting content that connect people over common interest in the real world? Why can't they?

Aren't they already? I've made a few very good friends through social media and it was mostly through common interests at first.

yeetard
Emphasis on "in the real world".
Zababa
Meet people on social media and once you like them, meet them in the real world. It worked well for me. Social media allowed me to cast a larger net and be more efficient at filtering people I liked from people I didn't like as much.
mkr-hn
Tech can help, like with CRMs and email, but I don't expect to see a total fix in my lifetime. 40+ years into the personal computer era and we still don't have anything that does the legwork. ML is the latest thing to make those promises, and I'm not betting on it doing better than I can before I'm too old for it to matter. I don't plan to wait for some digital savior to fix a human problem.
AnimalMuppet
Let's say I'm one of the few worldwide experts on X. Some random person on the internet wants to ask some questions about X. Sure, I've got time for them.

100 people on the internet want to ask me questions about X? No, I don't have time for that. (Yes, a few experts do. Emphasis on few.)

1000 people on the internet want to ask me about W and Y, which are kind of close to X, and about V and Z, which are farther afield, and want to rant to me about Brazilian jiu jitsu, and Yemeni politics, and time cubes, and how everything is Henry Kissinger's fault? I'm out. I'm changing my email and only giving the new one to people I trust.

At that point, if you want to ask me about X, you need to be one of the people that I've built up trust with over the years, to the point that I'll trust you not to abuse my email address.

So the problem becomes: How do we put (at least some) honest, interested seekers in connection with a few bandwidth-limited experts, without opening the floodgates?

yeetard
By delegating control to an algorithm.
yesenadam
I loved this[0] article by Sabine Hossenfelder, about her experiences working part-time teaching physics one-on-one to cranks and amateurs. I'd love it if there was a website where you could similarly book time/lessons/a video chat with academics in various fields. (For me, mathematics mostly, and I know who the half dozen people are I think could answer my questions.) They could charge whatever they wanted per hour, or decide what to charge you after reading your lesson request. Maybe they make enough money to mostly not be interested in that, or not have any spare time. Still... that would be amazing, a counterpart/complement to SciHub, for people outside the walls of academe.

As it is, I've had a lot of the same questions for 5 or 10 years, and just not known how to get answers. There are books/papers in those fields where I understand everything, and books/papers where I understand nothing, and not much in between.

[0] https://aeon.co/ideas/what-i-learned-as-a-hired-consultant-f...

phphphphp
May seem pedantic but it’s important to add some framing here:

How do I find experts that care about helping a person they have no connection to with a problem for no reward?

There’s lots of easy to access experts on every subject, however, you’re asking for their time for free: that’s a very different proposition.

If you’re happy to pay, just tweet or post on LinkedIn asking for an expert and offer to compensate them fairly, you’ll have offers in no times.

I’d argue the problem is not that the forums are gone, it’s that people aren’t looking to help for free when there’s so many other ways to put value out into the world — better run a podcast about your favourite subject than answer emails about it.

mkr-hn
(concurring, not arguing) I've certainly learned more from a curated set of podcasts than I ever did spending too much time on forums.
b3morales
You're right, but it's also not quite as dire as you make it. Experts generally speaking are vulnerable to nerd sniping. The key is to have an interesting problem to ask them about. (The definition of "interesting" is going to vary from expert to expert, though.) If you have that and you can find a place where they congregate, they will be eager to give you an answer. Not so much in order to help you, but in order to satisfy their own curiosity or demonstrate their own knowledge.
pavel_lishin
Sadly, I usually ask in one of my Slacks or Discords. This is sad, because the question evaporates into the aether, but in those communities I know enough about the people to tell who might be able to help, and who has the time and bandwidth to discuss this with me.

It's also mostly async, but synchronous enough that we can have a reasonable discussion without it taking two weeks.

the_only_law
Discord and Slack communities could probably be helpful and I know a few that have some smart people, but on average they tend to be “bottom heavy” full of people just getting started and questions more advance that a typical noob question can go ignored.
pavel_lishin
I would almost never join a Discord/Slack to ask some specific question; I always ask people I already know. The level of effort is pretty high! Join, learn rules, figure out where and how to ask a question, then sit there and monitor things synchronously so people don't ignore you/forget you.

I really, really miss the abundance of forums. The only thing like them left these days with any sort of population is subreddits. There are still forums dedicated to niche topics, but they're rare.

the_only_law
There’s been a handful of times where the answer to my question exists seemingly only on some old Usenet archive.
yeetard
The question is, why did they disappear? Did people just stop caring about things? Who in the right mind would ever want to use reddit -in general- and who would want to use it as long as there is a traditional forum for <topic>?
pavel_lishin
Reddit is _fine_ for this; it's just another place to host forums. The significant problem with reddit is that you have less control over it than an independent forum - but even with independent forums, someone can always take their ball and go home. (Usenet doens't suffer from this, though.)

And I don't know why it disappeared! Maybe because Slack and Discord finally opened up group chat to the masses who didn't like IRC. (Like it or not, Slack and Discord have defacto replaced IRC as the systems of choice for most people who don't know what DNS stands for.)

the_only_law
Reddit would have been fine if they didn’t make the UX as god awful as possible on a mobile browser. The day they cut off the old. subdomain I think they’ll be in for a surprise.
yeetard
Yeah, general channels are too ADHD and inferior to dedicated threads.
f0e4c2f7
This is my move too and I believe it's a large part of why Google isn't as good as it used to be.

At one time your or my question would have been indexed into a search engine. Now it's mostly blogspam.

I think there is a lot of value to be unlocked if you could find a way to index discord channels (would probably have to work with discord on this due to their terms).

Of course slack and discords incentives aren't nessecarily aligned to want to do that either.

leafnode1
Do you know of any good discord servers? If you do then would you mind sharing an invite link??
dalmo3
> This is sad, because the question evaporates into the aether

Whatever happened to spectrum.chat? I know, GitHub killed it. But the real question is why no one else seems to be able to build an indexable chat platform?

pseingatl
Reddit. Metafilter. Metafilter seems to be not as popular as it once was. This means an answer won't be immediate. RTFM won't help when you want to know industry best practices, for example, or want to find someone who's been through an experience you're about to suffer. TripAdvisor. Google unfortunately won't be of much help.
barrysteve
Metafilter turned incredibly political in 2014 after jessamyn left. It made the site less useful for non-Americans.
aendruk
In a forum about that specific topic! NixOS, OpenStreetMap, and Rust all have active Discourse instances.

For things that are too vaguely defined for that, I’ll bring it up at the local “Linux” user group, which in practice is just a nerd social group with an active group chat and biweekly gatherings.

dan1234
Usually Reddit, since that seems to have replaced a lot of forums. Obviously pretty hit & miss depending how active a subreddit is…
tra3
You're looking for Ask.Metafilter [0]. The "Popular questions" [1] section is usually full of gems:

- Seeking a Paradigm Shift: What is an article or essay that you have read that caused a dramatic change in your thinking / perspective / life? [2]

- How to become a person who just goes out and does things? You: a person who goes out and does things, just because. Things like hiking, going to the farmer's market, casual day trips to nearby places, checking out local events, etc. Nothing in particular really, just things outside the house. What does your thought process and mindset look like? How do you decide when to go out and what things to do? How do you keep track of what events are going on in your locale so you remember to go to them? How do you trick yourself into going places when you are feeling ho-hum about it? [3]

There's a wide gamut of questions. I've asked some random things before and gotten good responses.

[0]: https://ask.metafilter.com

[1]: https://ask.metafilter.com/home/popularfavorite12

[2]: https://ask.metafilter.com/354882/Seeking-a-Paradigm-Shift

[3]: https://ask.metafilter.com/355442/How-to-become-a-person-who...

swah
So this would kind of a mentoring help, right? I feel like that is one of the main advantadges of working inside a Big Co. Its hard to do the same without being part of a group.

What probably works best "outside" is writing a blog post with your problem, and throwing that into HN/Reddit for discussion.