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Ask HN: How do I make my niche knowledge discoverable for future rabbit holers?

5 points by acheong08 ↗ HN
Over the past week, I've went pretty deep into a few rabbit holes that I'm sure a few others will fall into years later. There are a few old threads asking the exact same question that never got answered in decade old archived forums.

How do I answer the question in a way that it will appear in future searches? Is it socially acceptable to ask&answer the question on stack overflow as a form of documentation?

8 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 23.2 ms ] thread
zer00eyz
Blog post, then link on as many relevant places as possible ... here, reddit etc...

You can link off to all the old post, tell a story, provide an answer.

rareitem
Yeah, future hole rabbitters will look for that information on the internet, so make it available on the internet
acheong08
I don't think it's interesting enough to write a blog but helpful/difficult enough that it should go somewhere, maybe as just a 5 line explanation and some code samples. I wonder if there is a site for infrequently asked questions similar to stack overflow but for people to document niche short things and make obscure links more discoverable with a gelbooru-esq tagging system. If that doesn't exist, I would definitely build one myself if not just to host my own collection of random snippets
ahazred8ta
There's usually a relevant Reddit subreddit. Include enough search terms at the bottom of your post and your solution will be discoverable. For redundancy, put it in something like a github gist as well. Also email or contact some of the people who previously asked the question.
nicbou
Put it on a static website that you fully control.

I started doing this years ago for German immigration and it turned into a career. My personal blog is also full of similar stuff about cars, motorcycles and tech. People still find those answers years later.

hiAndrewQuinn
My own answer to this question last year came in the form of https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/til, which is just a messy list of Markdown files. The lowest-effort thing I could think of. That messy list gets built into an actual website by the https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/til-site repo, which you can see at https://hiandrewquinn.github.io/til-site/.

I used your plight, and your catchy name, as inspiration to abstract this pattern out into a new software project. I hereby present to you, the first, bleeding-edge draft of Rabbitholer: https://github.com/Siilikuin/rabbitholer

Thank you for being my muse! I've wanted to scratch this itch for a long time now.

I don't have a good answer for SEO yet, beyond "pick words good and people will find it". But that gets easier and easier with practice.