8 ms·

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

91 points by cryptofits 7y ago

I just saw this interesting discussion on Reddit and thought to open it here aswell. >After being a contributing member, answering and getting a lot of reputation and upvotes, and after posting 6 (good) questions in stackoverflow, which were barely seen and mostly not answered, I got a question ban: >"Sorry, we are no longer accepting questions from this account. See the Help Center to learn more." >My questions were very technical and did not attract much attention. They were not downvoted though. I am an active software developer, and I only ask questions when I read the whole documentation and search for answers for at least a day. I only ask questions when I am unable to do my job at my firm because something is really off about a software dependency we are using. >I use to get good answers when opening issues at the software project in github. >But, of course, github is not for asking for user help. So, it's interesting that I get better answers at github than at a Q/A site like stackoverflow. >I didn't know about the existence of a question ban at stackoverflow. Knowing about it leaves me worried about the state of software development in general. It's not much better than Facebook or the Chinese Government digital crap for that sake. Original post: https://old.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/dh06m1/we_need_a_better_alternative_for_qa_than/

LinuxBender 7y ago
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.
- daturkel 7y ago
  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.
  - LinuxBender 7y ago
    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.
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    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.
    - maps7 7y ago
      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.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
MattyMc 7y ago
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!
dragontamer 7y ago
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. ------ 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-processing-a-sorted-array-faster-than-processing-an-unsorted-array/11227902 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.
- xingped 7y ago
  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.
sixhobbits 7y ago
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-8fa6b979645b https://blog.apollographql.com/goodbye-slack-hello-spectrum-...
- CM30 7y ago
  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.
  - esyir 7y ago
    I heard someone a while back mention that he treated discord like verbal discourse: ephemeral. Perhaps not everything needs to be logged.
    - twunde 7y ago
      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.
    - CM30 7y ago
      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.
z3t4 7y ago
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.
- harshitaneja 7y ago
  Can you please recommend dinner IRC channels?
  - harshitaneja 7y ago
    *Can you please recommend some irc channels?
    - z3t4 7y ago
      There are many programming channels on Freenode (IRC server)
zwieback 7y ago
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.
AndreFvchs 7y ago
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.
detail-oriented 7y ago
Maybe your questions are not appropriate for stack overflow, do you mind linking your profile or sharing the questions?
- colejohnson66 7y ago
  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.
gremlinsinc 7y ago
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.
- hbcondo714 7y ago
  Something like experts-exchange.com?
  - htrp 7y ago
    And so we come full circle...
  - gremlinsinc 7y ago
    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...
htrp 7y ago
StackOverflow is also pivoting more towards enterprise.
rllyboredonline 7y ago
No we don't :P
chhanchhiya 7y ago
This is interesting book
giardini 7y ago
Usenet was great, but the WWW and the hunt for child pornographers drove providers off: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet It is still available: https://www.techradar.com/news/the-best-usenet-providers https://www.techradar.com/news/the-best-usenet-providers
Fire-Dragon-DoL 7y ago
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)

91 points by cryptofits 7y ago

LinuxBender 7y ago

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.

daturkel 7y ago
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.
- LinuxBender 7y ago
  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.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  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.
  - maps7 7y ago
    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.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

MattyMc 7y ago

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!

dragontamer 7y ago

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. ------ 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-processing-a-sorted-array-faster-than-processing-an-unsorted-array/11227902 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.

xingped 7y ago
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.

sixhobbits 7y ago

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-8fa6b979645b https://blog.apollographql.com/goodbye-slack-hello-spectrum-...

CM30 7y ago
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.
- esyir 7y ago
  I heard someone a while back mention that he treated discord like verbal discourse: ephemeral. Perhaps not everything needs to be logged.
  - twunde 7y ago
    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.
  - CM30 7y ago
    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.

z3t4 7y ago

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.

harshitaneja 7y ago
Can you please recommend dinner IRC channels?
- harshitaneja 7y ago
  *Can you please recommend some irc channels?
  - z3t4 7y ago
    There are many programming channels on Freenode (IRC server)

zwieback 7y ago

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.

AndreFvchs 7y ago

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.

detail-oriented 7y ago

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

colejohnson66 7y ago
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.

gremlinsinc 7y ago

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.

hbcondo714 7y ago
Something like experts-exchange.com?
- htrp 7y ago
  And so we come full circle...
- gremlinsinc 7y ago
  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...

htrp 7y ago

StackOverflow is also pivoting more towards enterprise.

rllyboredonline 7y ago

No we don't :P

chhanchhiya 7y ago

This is interesting book

giardini 7y ago

Usenet was great, but the WWW and the hunt for child pornographers drove providers off: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet It is still available: https://www.techradar.com/news/the-best-usenet-providers https://www.techradar.com/news/the-best-usenet-providers

Fire-Dragon-DoL 7y ago

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)