This is what I've been working on with RISC-V, and you have no idea how much resistance I get when I try to fix the problems relating to calling conventions, inline assembly and system calls.
I don't want to have to explain what I'm doing from the beginning every time I have a complex question about how to make a function call from inline assembly. It has really turned me off from stackoverflow as a whole. Sorry for the rant.
I think your project is awesome, and really shows that we can improve the base upon which everything rests.
It's also a crap shoot when you try to solve a routine task. You might read through 1500 lines of people arguing before you get to the right answer, get an almost right answer, or no answer.
If you are working in a language which has good documentation (say Python or Java) you are best off learning how to look up the right answers in the official manual quickly and let your competitors waste time with stack overflow.
What is a way to fix this? Is this some part of an endless long-cycle of adoption for social networks over some kind of crossing-the-chasm style adoption curve? Or is there a structural way to fix it? Stackoverflow is better than its predecessors, but clearly is much less valuable now than for its first few 5 years or so.
For me SO could be more powerful if more answers would link or refer to documentation/github landing pages supporting/documenting their solution.
Often I see some weird way to implement something in the .NET world, especially Core/.NET 5, search Microsoft docs and find an 5-10-min read article updated last Wednesday that explains in-depth (relatively to a SO post) three different newer way of doing it.
A big weakness of SO, as I see it is aging. Most upvotes and marked-as-answer is most likely also the oldest.
Maybe the page could warn for old answers or highlight newer answers that are gaining traction.
Maybe questions and answers should be encouraged to specify version of tools. Asking identical questions for V1 and V2 of a tool should not be met by "POSSIBLE DUPLICATE" warning or get downvoted to oblivion. Posts shouldn't need "EDIT 1 updated for V1", "EDIT 2 updated for V2", as this is OK with 2 versions but what about 10?
Maybe points (or some score system) should decay over time? Idk. But I think something needs to be done.
It's not just that social networks go bad the way cheese goes bad, but also that any "social network" business becomes opposed to the interests of its user base at the moment it becomes a "sustainable" business (e.g. the users would want 100% of the surplus to go to improving the system, but management, employees, investors and such won't agree)
Once you are #1 in the Google Economy there are many reasons to say "why try harder?" Questions might have better answers some place else but there is no one site that threatens the SO hegemony. Also, a site like SO has a proven compatibility with Google SEO -- if you made any big changes to a site like that there is a high risk that your traffic would drop catastrophically.
What I would do:
StackOverflow Q/A are all available by a "cc-by-sa" license, so it would be a good starting place for something better: an "antisocial" project curated by a small group of people. Take the top 0.1% of questions from SO and only the best answer and strip away the "socialjunk" (e.g. see "chartjunk") and you are starting to get there.
A system like that could justify itself it were your own personal knowledge base, but to make something generally useful I'd expect to curate 100 questions a day for 3 months or so: about 10,000 questions in all.
There are a number of methods that could speed up that curation a lot, not least of which is that you'll find some authors who consistently write great answers and others who consistently get upvoted with mediocre answers, etc. No amount of analytics will make up for zero manual curation work, you could be maybe 5x as productive once you've curated 10,000 questions and developed some automation.
I had the notion their membership was limited, like a country club or fraternity or something, to a fixed number. To join, someone else had to first leave. I can't now confirm this, so I probably misremembered. Regardless, I've always liked this idea.
Wiki claims a distinction between virtual communities and social medias. The Well, MetaFilter, Ravelry and others have membership fees. Some have verified identities. Those frictions would certainly deter most dysfunction, antisocial behaviors now plaguing social medias.
I think curated social media is mostly fruitless. Having done a lot of online moderation, I honestly don't know how u/dang and others pull it off.
Culture and civility is much easier with preventative measures, like verified identity.
It was down voted to a negative score initially. People posted irrelevant/unhelpful comments that I had to hurriedly refute before the question was closed and deleted.
To be fair, I have tweaked the question since, so it probably makes more sense than it did when I initially asked it. But I feel that is something the community should help with.
Is there an incentive from the real world to answer questions
Apparently so - if you look at the “Customer Questions and Answers” section of Amazon product pages, there is a remarkably high proportion of answers like, “I don’t know, I haven’t opened it yet” and “I’m not sure, I bought it as a gift”.
No, that is sleazy as anything “growth hacking” from Amazon.
If you bought product X and some months or years later “Sam” posts a question on Amazon that isn’t answered, Amazon will send you an email with a subject line that is a variation of “Sam has a question for you about Product X, can you help?” and the body would be something along the lines of “Dear foo, Sam wants to know if <insert question regarding Product X here>? Click here to respond to Sam and help her out!”
In that context, you can easily see why people reply with such otherwise useless “answers.” When someone personally asks you a question you don’t know the answer to, responding with “sorry, I bought it for my husband as a gift and I don’t know,” is not just perfectly valid, it’s also the polite thing to do. But that answer is posted to the website in the genera Q&A as of you had viewed the question and then instead of passing on a question you had no answer for, you chose to reply with a useless answer.
Occasionally AMZN will send out questions others have asked about products to you in the form of an email if you have previously purchased the same product.
Some people mistake those for questions directly asked to them instead of realizing where their answer will be posted.
StackOverflow doesn't do that AFAIK.
See my other reply. It’s not fair to even say the user is making a mistake; it’s Amazon purposely manipulating users into thinking they’re being personally asked a question to game their way into getting more answers.
I guess it's a ROI issue. Low effort answers to many easy questions gets you many points, while novel questions which requires thorough understanding is high effort and few points.
I don't want to have to explain what I'm doing from the beginning every time I have a complex question about how to make a function call from inline assembly. It has really turned me off from stackoverflow as a whole. Sorry for the rant.
I think your project is awesome, and really shows that we can improve the base upon which everything rests.