| There's also the aspect on how you deal with simple questions that are asked repeatedly. But in my experience, both Reddit and Forums aren't dealing with it perfectly. For example, consider a PC hardware subreddit/forum. Let's assume people repeatedly (every few days) ask certain common questions such as "Should I buy the SuPerB A100 or A200 CPU?" or "Should I go for 16 GB or 32 GB of RAM?" or "Is the stock CPU cooler sufficient for the A200 CPU?" [1] Essentially, questions often asked by relatively inexperienced users which are - to some extent - obvious to the subreddit/forum veterans. In Forums, moderators often close threads with those questions with comments like "This has already been answered 100 times - research your question first". Unfortunately, exactly these topics are invariably going to show up first in your favorite search engine. And the built-in search function of most forums is borderline unusable, or gated behind registration (which IMHO is an anti-feature, I don't know who came up with that idea). In Subreddits, moderators create mega-threads for simple questions, with the effect that you have weekly giant threads that totally unorganized (since it's just a random collection of hundreds of unrelated questions) and unsearchable. Especially considering Reddit's search function has also turned useless at some point: I sometimes try to use it to look for terms that have definitely been mentioned a lot of times in a certain subreddit (e.g. searching for "Linux" in a Linux subreddit), but the search still didn't turn up any results. I guess one of the better ways to provide typical, standard answers to common questions is the Q&A format (Stack Overflow), but that comes with its own pitfalls. [1] After writing these examples, I realized they might not be optimal since those questions often do rely on the context (e.g. "Use 32 GB of RAM if you run a lot of VMs/use $memory_hungry_software, otherwise 16 GB is enough") - but let's assume for a moment these questions have clear standard answers. |