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Comment by davnicwil | Hacker News Reader

I had a side project which was basically this (at least this was my [company] for [x] summary of the project) a couple of years ago. I always wondered why StackOverflow weren't doing it, and after years of wondering this I just built it myself.

I tried to publicise it a bit (not a lot, in fairness) and didn't generate much buzz. I even speculatively applied to YC with it, with the beta written and running, and got no call for an interview even. After that I lost enthusiasm for the idea, and moved on to other things. Seeing this has reminded me of it.

What do people think of this? Useful product? Would you pay for it?

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It's a useful product. I'm actually surprised that the state of Stack Overflow clones isn't better. Although much of the value of SO comes from its knowledge base, the UI and organization and administration is nice to have pre-built. When I was looking around the top choices among open source/free were askbot (https://github.com/ASKBOT/askbot-devel) and osqa (https://github.com/dzone/osqa). There was also a plug-in for Confluence (Questions) and Answerhub (seemed to be the pro/paid version of OSQA). But none of them were as nice as stack overflow, which was surprising to me.

It's a vitamin, not a painkiller. Thus it will most likely succeed if a huge brand launches it like StackOverFlow.

I think it's very cool, especially for large teams at big companies, but I'm not sure I can see my company using it. They seem to prefer home-grown solutions for lessons learned and other knowledge bases, because there is inevitably some special feature that someone considers necessary.

Then, of course, you end up with huge exported spreadsheets in every single workflow. sigh

Q&A tools (or features for existing community/collaboration tools) are an common request in the enterprise space. Virtually every large organization has some kind of knowledge manager either trying to build, or manage tools for this sort of thing. It's hard to understand why you didn't get a response without more context.

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