Lemmy is obviously inspired by Reddit. My map of the fediverse obviously not complete, so I ask myself if there is some free as in free software comparable to a q/a platform like stackoverflow?
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I like Lemmy a lot! But I think the changes to the UI would be quite substantial (like dumping the ever deeper nesting of answers), and even some data model changes might be required. Like already said, you can’t accept answers here, and there is no score system - be that for the better or worse, but I think that discriminating between questions with and without accepted answers bears some user value, and the score is part of what really gets users going.
Are the votes not a score system? There’s a number next to each comment. It’s not even clear to me that Stack Overflow’s “accepted” is meaningful… how often does it differ from the highest score? Maybe 1 in 100? Depending on who asked, they might not even be the best person to determine the best/accepted/whatever answer (though more and more SE just nukes those questions outright).
The problems with SE have everything to do with their culture and Wikipedia-channeling-exclusionist policies. They want ever-more-narrowly focused questions until it becomes impossible to ask interesting questions they do not consider off-topic. God help you if your question is tangentially related to a second SE (even if it doesn’t belong there), they’ll punt it there, and then those guys will close it because it’s off-topic.
You can’t fix culture. And I’m not sure how you grow a new one that would end up any differently.
You’re right that SE’s culture is awful (I just today experienced an example proving your point).
With the score I mean the user’s score. I’m still undecided if it is a good thing at all, because in a way it rates people, but on the other hand you could say the quality of your posts determines your rating. After all, it’s gamification. Once you implement a metric for something, people will start optimizing the metric instead of what’s being measured, which is another point in favour of ditching a user score.
Having an accepted answer or not gives you a quick hint though if further engagement is requested. I’d think of it as a useful marker for people coming to the platform where their time is best spent.
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I think a lot of that can be done with almost no modification to the back end, since it’s pretty flexible and it’s not that different, the GUI would need to be done from scratch but it’s the easiest thing to code, and Lemmy devs have said a couple of time they would like the back end to be used in different ways.
You can’t accept an answer …
… oftentimes the accepted answer isn’t the right answer or is outdated -> who cares about accepted answers :D
Well, the accepted answer is most probably the one that solved the problem for the asking person. I don’t think it should be that easily discarded. 😉
I use SO almost daily, and its accepted answers 90% of the time are not the best ones, and are often became wrong since they were originally answered.
Usually a question is never “dead” or “answered”, but needs to be constantly updated each year for the new / best way to solve something, accounting for new libraries, programming language or app updates, etc. IMO Q/A forums should always feel alive, and having something with the finality of being “answered”, doesn’t make too much sense.
At least they do let you vote on answers like here, which is the best way to see what’s correct.
This might be an actual use-case for hot-sorting comments
One wonders if their paradigm of “an accepted answer is accepted forever” is unhelpfully skewing them towards pure computer science problems (how can I implement this algorithm) rather than the practical sort (how do I solve this problem/issue).
Though, I will say that I don’t entirely disagree with the idea that questions should focus somewhat narrowly on a targeted language/platform (of course, if someone opens a question about a different language or platform CLOSED AS DUPLICATE).
It probably shouldn’t. It can be used as a sign of appreciation because like you said, it solved OP’s problem.
This may be a use-case for pinned comments
Its not federated, but there is https://www.question2answer.org/ , which is self-hostable at least.
I did build some things into lemmy tho to make it work well as a question / answer / QA type forum. When you create a post for example, it searches for old posts with similar terms, because usually the biggest issue in QA is repeated questions.
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Will have a look at it, thanks.
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Strongly agree that this is ripe for federating. I feel like shared knowledge is almost more important to federate than social media stuff because it would be good to allow it to be accessible to everyone.
Possibly related, possibly not, but it would be great if something like this was done for various common forms of applied knowledge, like public databases of recipes and cooking, and various kinds of crafts and craft making. Like a wiki except for doable things that require nuanced knowledge or process.
I understand that there are private sites for things like this, like instructables and god knows how many cooking sites, but knowledge posted in a reference format rather than a Q & A format may be a good thing to target as well.
I think doing this in the form of Q & A is sort of outsourcing the process of researching what topics need elaboration to the community (which is not necessary a bad thing). Instructables etc. exist, but tending questions right hits the spot where people obviously struggle. Therefore, I believe that Q & A is a worthwile thing.
Some time ago, Fediquest was mentioned to be in development for this purpose, though it could take some time until it’s complete. You can ask @MatejLach@social.matej-lach.me on Mastodon about how the progress is going and the work to be done?
