Ask HN: We need a better alternative for Q/A than stackoverflow

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-...

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.

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

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.

True, not everything does need to be logged. General chit chat being ephemeral is fine.

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 wrote a post about how to extract slack posts to a Google sheet (but of course it could go to an email list too): http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/3126

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).

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.

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.

I agree on heavy handed. Some fellow moderators were clearly power tripping and none of the site owners would discourage the behavior. There is also quite a bit of elitism.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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".

I've got both the accepted flag and a bunch of upvotes on answers I posted over 2 years after the question was originally answered. Often it was the question and the discussion that helped me find the actual solution that I was then able to post and snag a necromancer badge for.

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.

> 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.

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...

Questions that have negative score and have no answers are automatically deleted after some time.

Man the feels. I played the heck out of Utopia. But yeah Utopia's internal kingdom forums would get wiped out every season. It would take a little while for the Crystal Ball app to update. I think an archive system for the Q and A format isn't a terrible idea but you could take it further and build actual knowledge dbs that collected the best info sources and paired them with relevant books and tutorials where appropriate.

We can get the most relevant answers on top if the algorithm decays voting power for historical votes. Fresh votes will keep relevant answers at the top.

There's no way to automatically know if an answer from 4 years ago is still relevant today.

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.

It's softer than the original proposal: instead of archiving an answer (reducing vote weight to 0) at an arbitrary time, we do it gradually at an arbitrary rate.

What you are describing would be insanely hard to get right, but its exactly what we need.

The best part about cycles is that you don't have to get it right on the first cycle. There's always the next cycle to improve the rules.

I think the precise problem of letting this version go into a new form of volumes, is giving the people on meta a task of "improving" one set of rules.

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.

> StackOverflow needs an archival process

https://archive.org/details/stackexchange

I am not sure about the cycle you describe but purging some questions is a good idea.

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.

An additional feature suggestion: if you really wanted to add value, require version and software that the question relates to, and track those against release repositories. That way, when you're looking at some sort of bug resolution that applies to version 2.x of 'some package' from 2014, and you're 5 years in the future on 4.x, you can use that as a heuristic that "maybe this doesn't apply to me".

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.

Something like experts-exchange.com?

And so we come full circle...

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...

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.

Why would anyone pay? There needs to be some incentive.

The only problem I see with dropping posts from indexes or visibility on age is not all topics move at the same rate. For example, a JS front-end topic might be dated after only a year, but a question about some systems programming issue or slower moving topics might still be relevant after several years.

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.

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!

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.

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

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.

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.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet

It is still available:

https://www.techradar.com/news/the-best-usenet-providers

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)

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.

Can you please recommend dinner IRC channels?

*Can you please recommend some irc channels?

There are many programming channels on Freenode (IRC server)

StackOverflow is also pivoting more towards enterprise.

No we don't :P