Do you use it? Do you like it? If you don’t like it, do you think it can be improved sufficiently or should it ideally be replaced with something else?

What do you think of the broader StackExchange community as a whole?

  • DessalinesA
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    4 years ago

    Mixed feelings for me.

    I obvi don’t like that its not open source or self-hostable, and that it isn’t easy to start a new stackexchange type site. I also really dislike the gamification / reputation system, because it leads to a few power users being really overly domineering about questions and answers.

    IMO here or reddit make for a better answer system, especially one where discussion / answers isn’t just a single flat node, but in a whole tree. Also why should there ever be a checkmark for “answered”, just use your answer ranking system. So many questions, especially in constantly evolving languages like javascript, have a 2014 answer, a 2018 answer, a 2019 answer…

    The one thing I really like about stackoverflow tho, that makes it really great, is the de-duping of questions: I don’t have to search through 10 threads of people asking the same question, because they’ve been closed in favor of other questions. The power users don’t always get that right (they sometimes close questions that are not the same as the others), but it is nice in that the same questions don’t get asked 10 times each week like they do on reddit 101 communities.

    • AgreeableLandscapeOP
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      4 years ago

      I really think that a comment tree is a must for support communities. It’s really hard to parse a long list of comments with everyone talking over each other.

      • DessalinesA
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        4 years ago

        Yeah its really strange when platforms decide, “okay we’re gonna have comment depth limited to 1 maximum!”

        • AgreeableLandscapeOP
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          4 years ago

          I think it might be an optimization decision. I imagine recursively loading comment trees takes a toll if your website gets really big.

          • Scholar_Succulent
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            4 years ago

            Another problem I see is the same that happens to Wikipedia: having a unique source of truth is convinient