4 ms·

Given the fact that Stack Exchange has been community vs. company for years now, and all SE answers are Creative Commons licensed, I wonder how hard it would be

by snazz 7y ago

Given the fact that Stack Exchange has been community vs. company for years now, and all SE answers are Creative Commons licensed, I wonder how hard it would be to create a clone, import all the old questions and answers, allow the existing (community, not SE staff) moderators to moderate, and create accounts for everyone who had one on SE. Appearing as high in Google search seems impossible, but if the community got behind it this could fix the SE problems once and for all.

luckylion 7y ago
> Appearing as high in Google search seems impossible, but if the community got behind it this could fix the SE problems once and for all. There would also be very little traffic, because "the community" are generally the people answering questions and explaining things, they aren't asking questions. Without the people needing help finding the site (Google rankings), nothing happens.
eitland 7y ago
I think it would be wise to leave a good chunk of the mods behind. It has been an idea for me for a while to create a site where - questions are answered - and useful answers rewarded. Note there is no "good" in front of questions, and answers are rated by their usefullness, primarily to the person asking the question and secondary to everyone else, not by how well they conform to a site script. In particular, if someone wants to ask what JavaScript framework should I choose in 2020 and someone finds it worth answering and the asker of the question likes the answer, then: Fine! Duplicate questions? Fine! Answering by pointing to a previous question? Fine! Answering again without mentioning the previous question? Fine! It should be a site for people wanting to ask or answer questions, not a site for people who want to be mods. Now, since that would be the purpose of the site and not something abstract like: make a repository of everything we know, all these questions and answers will be fine. There should also be some inflation or maybe even better "karma tax" so both accounts and questions lose something like 10% (or a dynamically calculated percent) of their value each year, so we aren’t stuck with "Top JavaScript libraries for 2019" on top of the lists forever. Another thing I would consider is making it harder to create accounts as soon as possible.
- jasode 7y ago
  >I think it would be wise to leave a good chunk of the mods behind. [...] Note there is no "good" in front of questions, and answers are rated by their usefullness, primarily to the person asking the question and secondary to everyone else, Yes, the moderators are often vilified instead of praised but this gives a false impression that an alternative Q&A site with different mechanics (i.e. no moderators) would be superior. The "game theory incentives" problem with your proposal is that the desirable experts who answer the questions benefit from the strict moderation. Almost every proposed Q&A alternative to SO prioritizes the question askers and underestimates the answerers. These 2 perspectives contradict each other: (1) Moderators are useless: The question askers just want to ask their question. There are no "stupid questions". They don't care that their question is a duplicate. Therefore, the mods are just a-holes on a power trip and just get in the way. (2) Moderators make the site usable: (Unpaid) experts with some spare time to answer questions don't want to wade through duplicate questions or do someone else's homework assignment disguised as a Q&A, etc. The mods aggressively filter out as much junk as possible to keep the expert answerers from abandoning the site. When discussing "platform economics", economists often like to identify the "constrained supply" because that dictates where to prioritize efforts. In Uber, the constrained supply is the drivers, not the passengers. In dating apps, the constrained supply is women, not men. In a Q&A website, the constrained supply is the expert answerers and not the question askers. (This matches our intuition that generating new questions is "easy" and a larger population can ask them but answering questions is "hard" and therefore it's a smaller population that can do it.) Therefore, the mods make the site a little better for the people answering the questions. Another economics thinking framework is Frédéric Bastiat's "seen vs unseen": - What's seen : a question gets "closed as off-topic". This action is very visible. It feels like an insult to the question asker and adds to the perception that SO is unwelcoming to newbies. - What's unseen: cleaned up questions make the queue a little more sane for experts willing to spare time looking for (hopefully interesting) unanswered questions to answer. This positive effect on the queue is invisible. It's not easy for experts to comment on moderator actions they don't see because that's the whole point: filter the queue down to something more manageable and make it less annoying for the answerers. If you deliberately optimize a new Q&A website for the question askers (i.e. no mods) at the expense of the contributors answering the questions, the experts will avoid it. That leads to a hypothetical website with less answers and lower quality answers. That will make it less popular with the question askers which is opposes the goal of making the site better for those seeking good answers to their questions.
dooglius 7y ago
If you're willing to pay for the hosting, everything you need is already at https://archive.org/details/stackexchange https://archive.org/details/stackexchange
na85 7y ago
Any clone of SE would suffer the same fate, I imagine. The community is the worst part of SE by far; I've never witnessed a more toxic, unfriendly, ego-stroking dumpster fire of people tripping over each other to be first in line to complain about minimal working examples and how the question is off-topic/overly-broad/a dupe/whatever.
- JeremyBanks 7y ago
  The community has become angry because their ten years of requests for better tooling to to manage the mess have been entirely ignored, and now the company is using that anger as an excuse to ignore further community requests, and to start aggressively censoring criticism across their network of sites. Nobody wants to be angry. Nobody wants it to be like this.
  - asveikau 7y ago
    I haven't been very active on there in years, but I might put it more simply. SO was more fun 10 years ago. As it got more popular, average question quality went down. This gives too much room for the primary purpose to be a site to criticize the quality of the question.
  - Nextgrid 7y ago
    I used to contribute quite a lot on the [php] tag back in 2013 and I can vouch for the quality of the questions being horrible already. Lots of beginner-level crap who couldn’t even spell out their question properly, let alone do some research or provide enough information to understand or reproduce their problem. I eventually moved on and deleted my account. I came back on a more niche site (IT security) and reached a decent amount of reputation but frankly I feel like most of the relevant questions have been asked already and there’s little else to add.

by snazz 7y ago

luckylion 7y ago

> Appearing as high in Google search seems impossible, but if the community got behind it this could fix the SE problems once and for all. There would also be very little traffic, because "the community" are generally the people answering questions and explaining things, they aren't asking questions. Without the people needing help finding the site (Google rankings), nothing happens.

eitland 7y ago

I think it would be wise to leave a good chunk of the mods behind. It has been an idea for me for a while to create a site where - questions are answered - and useful answers rewarded. Note there is no "good" in front of questions, and answers are rated by their usefullness, primarily to the person asking the question and secondary to everyone else, not by how well they conform to a site script. In particular, if someone wants to ask what JavaScript framework should I choose in 2020 and someone finds it worth answering and the asker of the question likes the answer, then: Fine! Duplicate questions? Fine! Answering by pointing to a previous question? Fine! Answering again without mentioning the previous question? Fine! It should be a site for people wanting to ask or answer questions, not a site for people who want to be mods. Now, since that would be the purpose of the site and not something abstract like: make a repository of everything we know, all these questions and answers will be fine. There should also be some inflation or maybe even better "karma tax" so both accounts and questions lose something like 10% (or a dynamically calculated percent) of their value each year, so we aren’t stuck with "Top JavaScript libraries for 2019" on top of the lists forever. Another thing I would consider is making it harder to create accounts as soon as possible.

jasode 7y ago
>I think it would be wise to leave a good chunk of the mods behind. [...] Note there is no "good" in front of questions, and answers are rated by their usefullness, primarily to the person asking the question and secondary to everyone else, Yes, the moderators are often vilified instead of praised but this gives a false impression that an alternative Q&A site with different mechanics (i.e. no moderators) would be superior. The "game theory incentives" problem with your proposal is that the desirable experts who answer the questions benefit from the strict moderation. Almost every proposed Q&A alternative to SO prioritizes the question askers and underestimates the answerers. These 2 perspectives contradict each other: (1) Moderators are useless: The question askers just want to ask their question. There are no "stupid questions". They don't care that their question is a duplicate. Therefore, the mods are just a-holes on a power trip and just get in the way. (2) Moderators make the site usable: (Unpaid) experts with some spare time to answer questions don't want to wade through duplicate questions or do someone else's homework assignment disguised as a Q&A, etc. The mods aggressively filter out as much junk as possible to keep the expert answerers from abandoning the site. When discussing "platform economics", economists often like to identify the "constrained supply" because that dictates where to prioritize efforts. In Uber, the constrained supply is the drivers, not the passengers. In dating apps, the constrained supply is women, not men. In a Q&A website, the constrained supply is the expert answerers and not the question askers. (This matches our intuition that generating new questions is "easy" and a larger population can ask them but answering questions is "hard" and therefore it's a smaller population that can do it.) Therefore, the mods make the site a little better for the people answering the questions. Another economics thinking framework is Frédéric Bastiat's "seen vs unseen": - What's seen : a question gets "closed as off-topic". This action is very visible. It feels like an insult to the question asker and adds to the perception that SO is unwelcoming to newbies. - What's unseen: cleaned up questions make the queue a little more sane for experts willing to spare time looking for (hopefully interesting) unanswered questions to answer. This positive effect on the queue is invisible. It's not easy for experts to comment on moderator actions they don't see because that's the whole point: filter the queue down to something more manageable and make it less annoying for the answerers. If you deliberately optimize a new Q&A website for the question askers (i.e. no mods) at the expense of the contributors answering the questions, the experts will avoid it. That leads to a hypothetical website with less answers and lower quality answers. That will make it less popular with the question askers which is opposes the goal of making the site better for those seeking good answers to their questions.

dooglius 7y ago

If you're willing to pay for the hosting, everything you need is already at https://archive.org/details/stackexchange https://archive.org/details/stackexchange

na85 7y ago

Any clone of SE would suffer the same fate, I imagine. The community is the worst part of SE by far; I've never witnessed a more toxic, unfriendly, ego-stroking dumpster fire of people tripping over each other to be first in line to complain about minimal working examples and how the question is off-topic/overly-broad/a dupe/whatever.

JeremyBanks 7y ago
The community has become angry because their ten years of requests for better tooling to to manage the mess have been entirely ignored, and now the company is using that anger as an excuse to ignore further community requests, and to start aggressively censoring criticism across their network of sites. Nobody wants to be angry. Nobody wants it to be like this.
- asveikau 7y ago
  I haven't been very active on there in years, but I might put it more simply. SO was more fun 10 years ago. As it got more popular, average question quality went down. This gives too much room for the primary purpose to be a site to criticize the quality of the question.
- Nextgrid 7y ago
  I used to contribute quite a lot on the [php] tag back in 2013 and I can vouch for the quality of the questions being horrible already. Lots of beginner-level crap who couldn’t even spell out their question properly, let alone do some research or provide enough information to understand or reproduce their problem. I eventually moved on and deleted my account. I came back on a more niche site (IT security) and reached a decent amount of reputation but frankly I feel like most of the relevant questions have been asked already and there’s little else to add.