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Comment by jc4p | Hacker News Reader

Just curious, what do you think we could be doing that we aren't?

Also thanks for teaching me a new idiom :)

In general, experimenting more. You've tackled the narrow use case of a single question with answers, but is that all SE can be, or should be? The thing that I think SE is most lacking is better ways to tackle the sheer amount of data on the site. There's a lot of information there but in general it's not very well organized. Go back to the original announcements about the launch of SO and see what it was supposed to be and how it has either lived up or not to those ideas.

Try this thought experiment: if a stack exchange competitor showed up tomorrow, what sorts of features would it have to have to make you start waking up in a cold sweat every day?

Luckily a lot of us are on the same page as you :)

One of the things I consider a main detriment of our current product is that for the vast majority of users it's built to be transactional. Search, land on SO, read, go back to work.

On our currently in development mobile apps we're trying out something different, for the first time at scale we're pushing content to users rather than having them search for it as the number one utility of the product. The apps have a "Feed" which is machine learned interesting for you questions.

I love it since I search SO at work but when I get home or am walking around town I can open my app and instantly lose 30 mins (at least) to reading and interacting with very interesting content. I can't wait to see if others like it.

Thats a great start but there are other ideas too. Why isn't SE as useful for people in other professions, like product managers or data scientists or marketers who are also looking for answers to their work problems? The key is that just replicating the site is not the answer, you need to really focus on community dev and getting the thought leaders from those professionals involved. Lastly, along with the 'feed' implementation, you can also start curating other content from the web that could be useful to the users of your site. example: If I am particularly interested in Javascript, I get a feed of curated resources from around the web that will help me learn about the latest and greatest in Javacript. Thats whats missing today and thats why SO is a transactional site

I actually originally had something related in my post but removed it: I won't personally consider the site I work on a success unless my mom uses it. She's a physics PhD and she once in a while stumbles onto physics.SE when searching online but she doesn't actually use the site.

I think SO and Server Fault are the size they are because they have an intrinsic advantage over our other sites. People in the target audience work and live in the same tech ecosystem as a website, with something like physics that's an initial burden.

SE itself also has a high barrier to entry. Every one of our sites has it's own rules and definition of what type of content is acceptable. This is for a very good reason, seeking out absolute answers to questions. Most other websites on the internet live to foster discussion, but we're not a forum.

Making stack exchange a common name (in more than our sizable niche) is one of our company goals, but I don't really know what we can do to get past the initial issue I mentioned and reducing the second would hurt our product.

It's quite an interesting idea to be more proactive about bringing thought leaders to out lesser known sites, I don't know if we could do it just directly since most thought leaders are very busy people who already have a dozen places people ask them questions but it's something to think about. We already consider expertise of contributors in Area 51, our incubator for new website ideas.

Perhaps while we may not be able to get the top 1% of thought leaders onto our websites without giving them a really hard question to answer (my mom loves difficult questions, god knows how many times she used to run into my room and say she solved a question I asked her in passing days prior) but it might be possible to bring in up-and-coming thought leaders. A lot of my friends from the health and fitness industry (were I used to live) might want to use our Physical Fitness Stack Exchange site to foster their own personal brand.

I can understand that being an absolute answers to questions makes sense for some of the technical fields where the answers are black and white. However, as you start branching out to other forms of questions, like your mom's who is a PHD in physics, sometimes the answers are not absolute, but its the discussion around them that unearths something really powerful. So, why not test that out in one of your websites? Whats the worse that can happen? You can change it back.

To your initial issue, yes reaching out to the upcoming thought leaders could be great. I know of a few friends in fitness industry who send me thoughts via email. But don't discount the ability for you to get the top 1% thought leaders. Have you tried it? You would be surprised by how many of them actually want to show their leadership and 'help' others.

BTW Thanks for reading my answer. I usually am a silent browser of HN and felt compelled to answer since I have been thinking about this a lot. Would be happy to jump on skype to chat further.

I guess programming is particularly fast moving and information becomes obsolete very quickly. A book about mobile app development written in 2005 would be laughably obsolete today. A mechanical engineer on the other hand can probably still find value in books written in the 1960s.

So there's less need to be constantly feeling out new undocumented territory in other professions.

My main with stack overflow, as it gets older, is answer rot. A couple of times I have come across answers which have become out of date, but it is non obvious to me the best way to reopen the question (I, along with most readers don't have the karma to edit questions / answers )

Maybe write a comment, "This is out of date. Can someone update this?" You might even want to flag the question. You can also add a new answer and downvote the obsolete answer. Getting enough points to edit questions is pretty easy.

Everyone can edit questions and answers (if you don't have the full-on privilege yet, your edit will go in a queue and be vetted by more experienced users).

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