| I think that the site is a nice idea in theory, but it's another technological solution for a social (interpersonal) problem, and I see two major aspects of it. 1. The people who would rely on this site should really consider upping their reading and social skills to determine if they should even consider expending the effort to respond in the first place. If it's deemed worth it to respond, get a feel for the language the question-asker is using to see if it's someone with vast dev experience but new to a certain system, someone with mid-level or just enough experience, etc., before one types out a response. This could be its own article, but this is a huge problem. 2. There are a lot of people who simply do not care that HackerNews/StackOverflow/etc. are communities and are just looking for answers to their questions. I've come to see that people can make all sorts of guides and resources like https://xyproblem.info/ and community-specific resources like for IRCs, Discord channels, etc. but there are simply people who, while they aren't vindictive, don't give a shit about a given community's etiquette. The people who care enough will at least scan these guides and try their best. My biggest concern is that both of these aspects overlap and if this was actively used, there'd be situations where: - Experts/those knowledgeable in a certain domain but lacking in social acumen will lazily link these answers to people who are new but who have at least scanned community guides and have tried their best to create a post, leaving the new user feeling like they're simply being turned away - The same group noted above will perform the same deal with someone who doesn't care about the given community and just wants an answer, inciting this individual's vitriol and perpetuating the cycle of apathetic or "control freak" experts and outsider chumps expecting free work for no effort Solving the StackOverflow empty downvote problem is hard, but simply adding a hyperlink to someone else's pre-written words as a SO comment is not the right move. |