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Comment by orf | Hacker News Reader

Why wouldn’t they just use a stack overflow subdomain for this?

I know this argument doesn't work well in this example since it's Amazon. But in principle, centralizing data on the internet around a few big services is not a good thing.

These days forums and IRC channels are replaced with Facebook and Discord. An untold amount of code is hosted on GitHub. And now Stack Exchange is the go-to platform for Q&As.

I understand it's convenient and those services have a network effect behind them. But something is lost. Something that made the internet great, where everyone hosted and shared their own content.

I agree with your general point about avoiding centralized data, but StackExchange definitely stands as unique since all of its posts are in the creative commons. Due to that, I think SE is one of the few bastions for sharing knowledge since it doesn't own its users answers.

Not saying that SE is the end all be all of QA forums, just that it's a much better centralized system than you are giving it credit.

Stack Exchange - or more precisely their moderators and power users - gets to decide which content is allowed and which isn't. For example which questions are marked duplicate (even if they aren't) or which questions are off-topic (even if it's not clear). And yes, theoretically the community can change the guidelines. But at one point the organizational inertia is so big, the proposition becomes "take or leave it".

And it's not just Stack Exchange that has this problem. Wikipedia too.

That's not how you get promoted

You're thinking of Google, not Amazon.

Amazon has plenty of over-engineered crap made for optimizing promo docs.

Example?

I have about 5k rep points on SO. Almost all from answering questions. Not a lot - but enough to know how to appropriately ask a question. My $0.02 is that the only questions that seem to get traction on SO are the questions that have been asked a million times in slightly different variations. I never get meaningful answers to novel questions even when the question is absolutely specific and reproducible

Control of content moderation, usage policies, and integration with their own internal support APIs I would guess.

Personally, I don't understand why they don't have an open-source documentation repository, given that a lot of their docs are garbage or hard to find... It's pretty well known that the boto3 / terraform etc. docs are a better place to find API documentation than AWS

they do. the docs are open source and you can propose changes to them

https://github.com/awsdocs

shame on me, that news is three years old!

> the boto3 / terraform etc. docs are a better place to find API documentation than AWS

The boto3 documentation is AWS documentation…

Because amazon has a fork of everything worth something. The list would probably max out HN's max comment size.

As someone who does not understand why StackOverflow is so popular, find many of the posts there to be low quality, and believes that internet should be decentralized I think it is better for platforms to host their own communities instead of outsourcing it to places like StackOverflow, Discord, Reddit, etc

The thing I'm wondering about is why they didn't make use of StackOverflows bew Collectives feature. Yes, launching your own thing gets somebody promoted, but in this case I think collaborating with SO could have made sense.

lol poor guy who launched it slaving for the whole year thinks it will get him promoted. Wait till he goes through a cycle, gets shot down, demoralized, leaves AWS and they backfill with fresh meat.

Cue the circle of life

oh my god. I think i'm right before the "gets shot down" stage

Not Invented Here

They didn't re-invent something either. It's really is a copy-paste from stackoverflow

Or make their docs, tutorials, and UI better?

I find AWS documentation to be one of the best out there. Consistent across all their products, very detailed and easy to navigate. I am curious what you found to be lacking in their docs.

examples of most/all of the parameters is lacking

sample output/responses is almost always lacking, I usually need to perform an a cli call to see what the output will be.

Their error messages/codes seem to vary with time / aren't consistent / aren't documented. There are about five different messages I get if my token has timed out I've seen.

And I'm mostly an ec2/s3/r53 user, aka the oldest apis. What are the other ones like?

> And I'm mostly an ec2/s3/r53 user, aka the oldest apis. What are the other ones like?

Horrid. Try to use Athena + Glue + S3 and the fun is guaranteed. Add GDRP and least privileges principle to the mix and there is even more fun.

> I am curious what you found to be lacking in their docs.

The current version of the product.

That’s very non specific. What exactly is lacking in all documentation right now.

For example a document explaining how to implement the least privilege principle for what any customer wants to on their platform. Well, I know the answer, there is no way for a customer to achieve this, so you have to engage the support.

It's been a while and I don't have the frustrations written up. However, implicit in "we're starting our own SO" is the recognition that the docs aren't enough.

Because they want to own, operate, and moderate their own site. Having SO run the site wouldn't accomplish that.

If built right, this allows for better observability for their teams into important topics.

Because this will require an amazon login and be a walled garden they control 100%.

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