
Ask HN: We need a better alternative for Q/A than stackoverflow - cryptofits
I just saw this interesting discussion on Reddit and thought to open it here aswell.<p>&gt;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:<p>&gt;&quot;Sorry, we are no longer accepting questions from this account. See the Help Center to learn more.&quot;<p>&gt;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.<p>&gt;I use to get good answers when opening issues at the software project in github.<p>&gt;But, of course, github is not for asking for user help. So, it&#x27;s interesting that I get better answers at github than at a Q&#x2F;A site like stackoverflow.<p>&gt;I didn&#x27;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&#x27;s not much better than Facebook or the Chinese Government digital crap for that sake.<p>Original post: 
https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;opensource&#x2F;comments&#x2F;dh06m1&#x2F;we_need_a_better_alternative_for_qa_than&#x2F;
======
sixhobbits
I see more and more people moving to Slack communities for the QA that they
used to post on SO. This is sad - slack is a closed protocol and is not
searchable. Answers are only available to a subset of the tech community and
only for a limited time (no one really searches before asking the same
question again but someone will usually prompt with "that got asked a couple
of days ago" in cases of extreme duplication.)

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-...](https://blog.apollographql.com/goodbye-slack-hello-
spectrum-8fa6b979645b)

~~~
CM30
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.

~~~
esyir
I heard someone a while back mention that he treated discord like verbal
discourse: ephemeral. Perhaps not everything needs to be logged.

~~~
twunde
The issue is that Slack and discord are essentially ephemeral verbal discourse
AND that they often become the _default_ mode of communication. This isn't bad
as a small community, but does limit the growth of these communities.
Newcomers are at a disadvantage as are anyone that's out sick/vacation etc.
Anyone who's worked somewhere where major decisions are made in hallway
conversations and never documented should understand the problem.

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LinuxBender
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 a method that makes everyone happy, at least not yet.

I have long since stopped posting, answering or editing posts on ServerFault.

~~~
daturkel
I think the same thing happened with Digg -> Reddit. People got sick of Digg
and moved to the underdog, which has since grown to be much bigger than Digg
ever was (with the pros and cons of that growth).

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.

~~~
lonelappde
People didn't "get sick" of digg. Diff abandoned it's users. Digg launched a
big overhaul "v4" aimed at cheap impressions the drove people away.

~~~
maps7
Yeah, I didn't want to move away from Digg really. I wished they had just
moved back to v3 or quickly introduced a v5. It feels like they just gave up.
I would love to read something from Kevin Rose or someone else about what went
down.

------
dragontamer
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 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...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11227809/why-is-processing-a-
sorted-array-faster-than-processing-an-unsorted-array/11227902)

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.

~~~
xingped
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.

~~~
dragontamer
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 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".

~~~
gitgud
Questions with no answers are still useful, if I solve a bug, I'll try and
answer the unanswered question for future Googler's (including myself)

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.

~~~
dragontamer
> Questions with no answers are still useful, if I solve a bug, I'll try and
> answer the unanswered question for future Googler's (including myself)

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.

~~~
gitgud
Yes, but answering a unanswered 5 year old question still brings benefits to
the community, I just don't think it warrents deletion, as it won't be ranked
highly unless you _specifically_ search for it.

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...

------
gremlinsinc
I'd like to see a SO clone that has a subscription model that's optional but
then when you upvote something you're giving that person some SO cash which
they can cashout or apply to their monthly subscription.

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.

~~~
hbcondo714
Something like experts-exchange.com?

~~~
gremlinsinc
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...

~~~
threecoins
Even with those fake internet points, Stackoverflow has the problem 0f voting
ring, throw money in, and they will only get worse. Then your focus moves away
from building content to optimizing against voting rings.

------
MattyMc
I rarely ask questions on StackOverflow, but I use it every day. I'm a big fan
of SO, although I'd love to see someone solve the problems you're describing
and build an alternative!

------
zwieback
SO is fantastic for finding existing answers but I've had mixed success
getting specific questions answered. It's hard not to get your feelings hurt
by haters, especially if you put in the effort to answer questions others have
asked.

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.

------
detail-oriented
Maybe your questions are not appropriate for stack overflow, do you mind
linking your profile or sharing the questions?

~~~
colejohnson66
I just checked the Reddit post, and as of posting this comment, the OP has not
posted their handle, let alone a link to their profile.

------
AndreFvchs
Sorry to hear you got banned, did you ask SO support to resolve the issue?

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.

------
giardini
Usenet was great, but the WWW and the hunt for child pornographers drove
providers off:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet)

It is still available:

[https://www.techradar.com/news/the-best-usenet-
providers](https://www.techradar.com/news/the-best-usenet-providers)

------
Fire-Dragon-DoL
Stackoverflow did that. No discussion on the questions as well as only
questions with objective answers make it a useless website for a lot of
developers, aside from using it as a documentation or examples website (which
is what they want and achieved)

------
z3t4
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.

~~~
harshitaneja
Can you please recommend dinner IRC channels?

~~~
harshitaneja
*Can you please recommend some irc channels?

~~~
z3t4
There are many programming channels on Freenode (IRC server)

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htrp
StackOverflow is also pivoting more towards enterprise.

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rllyboredonline
No we don't :P

