>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/
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-...
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.
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.
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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-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.
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet
It is still available: