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Comment by newaccount74 | Hacker News Reader

I disagree. FAQs are very useful.

The difference between a FAQ and the manual is that typically the manual is comprehensive and organized by topics, while the FAQ is sorted by how frequently people need the information.

If you have a FAQ, then users can scan a dozen questions and see if their question is answered, and in 90% of cases they find the answer.

So the benefit of a FAQ is that you have a single page that contains the most important information across all topics. You don't need to know how the docs are structured, you don't need to know the terms of art to search for, you can just scan a few lines of questions on a single page, which people can do very quickly.

I guess you could put the same information into a document titled "Overview" or "Quick Start" or "Most Important Info" but using the common term "Frequently Asked Questions" makes it easier for customers to know where to start looking.

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Completely agree. As a user, I often find FAQ pages to be the single most useful documentation pages.

I rarely read the entirety of the documentation for something, but I usually will read the entire FAQ for something I'm interested in. It has a far higher usefulness-to-length ratio than most documentation, since if done properly, everything in the FAQ was useful to somebody (or hopefully many people).

It's also arguably the best format for certain types of information. For many things, there are "obvious" questions one would ask about them (e.g. "Does this take into account X?", "What about Y?"). When I think of these when reading about something, I'll check the FAQ, and it's often presented right there. It ends up being by far the easiest way to get answers to these types of questions.

FAQs are very useful if they really are FAQs like stackoverflow.

If there is some person "making up" FAQs it is rubbish. When CEO orders that "we need to make FAQ, make one" but no one is actually asking any questions that is the worst.

FAQ should be consisting of actual questions and then best would be each variation of way how people asked it to point to the right answer. Ideally FAQ should be curated by a person or first line support.

Synthetic FAQ is the same as documentation - someone writing things up and organizing it in a way they think. Ideal FAQ should help find question and answer that is already asked by someone else in a way that broadest possible audience would ask it.

Stack Overflow is not a FAQ. Stack Overflow is a Q&A site with millions of questions.

A FAQ is a list of 5-20 questions that quickly answer questions without having to read the docs or trying your luck on Google.

Sure, but some of its questions are frequently asked. That’s what the parent was referring to: real questions by real users that sometimes are upvoted by thousands of users.

You can even get a FAQ in a standard format by visiting the “Popular” tab.

For me most of the questions I ask are mostly answered and have multiple up votes. For me SO is definitely FAQ and one that is done well.

You could say that, for an FAQ to work how it's supposed to, the Qs need to be real Qs and need to actually be FA.

But yeah, even though that seems pretty self-evident, people manage to mess it up anyway.

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