Sure, GH lags SO considerably on the size of the knowledge base, but I don't think that's very important since, due to the rapid pace of tech, content rapidly loses value with age (consider all of the jquery or flash content, or content pertaining to old versions of libraries or frameworks).
What matters more is the rate at which content is generated, and I think GH has a pretty competitive story considering that people naturally want to ask the project maintainers/community questions directly (as evidenced by all of the GitHub Issues which are formulated as questions) and considering GitHub's significant share of those maintainers/communities. I posit that new content will increasingly appear on GH Discussions.
Please don't mistake this for some exaggerated "GH is going to kill SO" argument--SO will do fine, but there is a compelling story for why MS wouldn't spend $1bn on SO.
> Sure, GH lags SO considerably on the size of the knowledge base, but I don't think that's very important since, due to the rapid pace of tech, content rapidly loses value with age (consider all of the jquery or flash content, or content pertaining to old versions of libraries or frameworks).
This is a weakness of SO and really the whole knowledge base business model (Q&A or not). You think you're building up this network-effect moat. "We have the best question-askers, answer-givers and answered questions. So everyone comes here!"
But, knowledge goes stale. "How do you X in JS?" is different than it was 10 years ago. People don't want a historical archive of how it was 10 years ago, they want to know today!
Then, like you say, GitHub brings in a whole new weird angle. Why ask on some other site when I have a spot where the maintainers and users hang out? Since my loyalty to SO is approximately zero, I'm just as likely to click on the Google result that takes me to GitHub if it looks more promising.
That's you though. It's not about loyalty, it's about Stackoverflow almost becoming a verb like Google. Many many people are used to using it, it's brand is very powerful. I don't see some competing tool stealing lots of mind share.
Btw the thing about talking to maintainers directly is already done on small communities on discuss pages (ElixirForum for instance), on Discord, IRC and many other channels. None of it actually hurt SO.
TomTom and BlackBerry had great brands, marketing and great software stacks. I still correct the google maps voice when it tells me to take the third exit on the roundabout. It’s “roundabound”. The people who ran those companies didn’t see anybody stealing their businesses either. Yet they are well and truly gone.
Not sure TomTom had as dominant a brand for navigation as Stackoverflow has for Q&A. Stackoverflow is pretty much alone in this space still which is pretty amazing when you think about it.
How do you define a moat?
For me it's anything that gives a company an advantage over it's competitors. It can be patents, tech, but also brands.
Take Coca Cola for example. Now obviously it has a moat right? Where is this moat coming from then? If you think about it it's mostly the brand, not anything to do with taste. Same can be said about different beers or about Nike, Levi's, Apple (arguably) etc etc.
Good question. It might be a difference in degree rather than a difference in kind. Consider the social media space: if you want to build a Twitter clone, you could do so in a pretty short amount of time with a pretty small team. You could buy ads to get everyone to know your product's name. Those ads will bring in enterprising early adopters, but no matter your ad spend or the quality of your platform (you could even include an edit button for pete's sake--and for free at that!), you're very, very unlikely to unseat Twitter. The reason is that Twitter's product isn't its platform or even its brand--the product is the social network i.e., the network of users and the interactions between them. That's moat.
> If you think about it it's mostly the brand, not anything to do with taste. Same can be said about different beers or about Nike, Levi's, Apple (arguably) etc etc.
Brand is king in fashion (and to a lesser extent, low margin consumer products like cola or cereal) because fashion is largely about signaling status. I don't think this effect extrapolates to SO.
I think it's perhaps a little clearer to frame it this way:
SO has a network effect moat, not a corpus-size moat (I don't know that SO was ever thinking the size of its corpus would stave off competitors--they probably were correctly assuming that their user-base was their moat). The network-effect moat keeps the rate-of-change of the corpus higher than competitors, which is where the value is (not the size of the corpus). This moat has held up really well apart from (maybe) GH Discussions, which seems (to me) likely to succeed because GH has a similarly large network of experts.
We agree on the corpus-size not being a moat, and maybe SO does themselves.
More directly, I question StackOverflow's network effect. Compare it to Craigslist, IMO the best example of network effects ever. It is their sheer size that has entrenched them. They're also not vulnerable to groups moving to another platform (rise and fall of everything from AIM to Snapchat).
I don't actually search StackOverflow. I end up there through Google. If Google starts pointing me somewhere else, or the search previews start looking better for somewhere else, I'm going there. It's not like if I try to sell a single bag of concrete on anywhere but craigslist, which would end in failure.
I'm sure in the M&A docs there was some disclosure like "75% of our traffic comes through Google. If Google started directing people to other sites, that would have a material impact on our business."
> But, knowledge goes stale. "How do you X in JS?" is different than it was 10 years ago. People don't want a historical archive of how it was 10 years ago, they want to know today!
I want both! With commentary!
And SO is particularly hostile to this, with their "duplicated question" giving canonical status to obsolete answers.
Good point. When I wrote that comment I was imagining the value of something like Datomic, which could let you see the result of a query at any point in time. In 2014, how did someone answer this question?
GH Discussions is great when the question is closely tied to a particular repo. I don't see how it competes with SO for things like design patterns, algorithms, programming language usage, etc.
I wonder how much of SO fits in the "particular repo" category? Not so much for my interests, but I imagine the chunk for popular web frameworks is huge.
Anecdata incoming: a few years ago when I was doing stuff with c# it seemed like everything I needed was already on SO answered by some dude with like a million kudos or whatever.
Recently I need some python + mariadb answers and most of the top ones are out-of-date enough that I can't even use them (deprecated packages). I was a bit surprised TBH.
“Average technology has 3 answers a week” factoid actualy just statistical error. average technology has 0 answers a week. Jon Skeet, who lives in cave & answers over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted
Yeah, GHD has not been well-marketed, but I've used it a couple of times and it has been very useful. I have similar experiences where SO questions can be pretty dodgy based on age--for example, for Rust I rarely bother looking at answers from 2016 because so much has changed since then. Some technologies are more stable than others.
Usually a highly voted answer that is no longer correct will be updated through time. I don't have any data to support this claim but it's what I see happening.
Probably, but that furthers my point: that "update" is new content. The original content is not especially valuable; the new content--the user activity--is where the value is.
I'd say a lot of that stuff increases with value to an individual over time, but has less demand.
Some of those SO discussions are the only references to ancient legacy code that is useful, when asking any questions about it today would not get any answers.
So, depending on how we calculate value, if we ignore demand, it can be more valuable.
SO is OK for very narrow questions that have concrete definitive answers. Unfortunately, SO's self-appointed police force will shut people down for any deviation from "the rules" (as they interpret them), or sometimes for no reason at all.
Github issues, on the other hand, seems to be receptive to open-ended "why" questions which would be smacked down hard on SO. Github has a higher barrier to entry. You have to know where to go, but if you're in the right place it's a much nicer community with more classy and professional conduct. Also, it doesn't have a gamification aspect to it, unlike SO, and thus fewer irritating/persnickety types are attracted to Github because they can't really score points.
I must agree, their reach must be insane! Although my last question was like 3 years ago, I do visit it at least twice a week for quick answers.
I feel like most “often asked” questions has been answered. I very seldomly find that creating a new question is necessary as most things is covered in past awnsers. However for package related problems, GitHub issues has become the go to.
And that's why this line of concern is worthless: SO already exists. GHD can refer to that all day long without having to reinvent the Library of Alexandria (which in hindsight could have used a backup, but still).
Unless..."Prosus" pulls a Google+DejaNews and obscures SO's availability or paywalls it or, or, or...
For people who read SO (rather than ask and answer), SO is useful in the places where the documentation is lacking.
The way to integration that content into an existing project would be to document it better - possibly with a FAQ for development questions. That doesn't really need CC licensing (its helpful, but not essential) in that people who want to contribute documentation can already do so.
Just pull up a SO tag for the library, find the top voted question, and figure out where it goes in the docs.
Q&A shouldn't be used as an alternative to documentation.
What matters more is the rate at which content is generated, and I think GH has a pretty competitive story considering that people naturally want to ask the project maintainers/community questions directly (as evidenced by all of the GitHub Issues which are formulated as questions) and considering GitHub's significant share of those maintainers/communities. I posit that new content will increasingly appear on GH Discussions.
Please don't mistake this for some exaggerated "GH is going to kill SO" argument--SO will do fine, but there is a compelling story for why MS wouldn't spend $1bn on SO.