[dherls]

Some of the alternatives that the author suggests (Slack, Discord, Matrix rooms) are so much worse to search for answers in. Stack overflow has many disadvantages, but it is extremely good at being a publicly searchable repository of answers to common questions

[scuff3d]

Yeah this is the biggest problem with Discord (and similar platforms) as an alternative. Discoverablity sucks. Even if you are aware and have access, finding useful information is a bitch.

[Suppafly]

>it is extremely good at being a publicly searchable repository of answers to common questions

Closed duplicate of <something that is totally different>

[tommica]

Yeah, even with that it is still better

[qaisjp]

The "closed duplicate" thing is blown away out of proportion than it actually is. I'm convinced people are just pooping on Stack Overflow, not because it's bad, but because they just like complaining about things.

[Suppafly]

>The "closed duplicate" thing is blown away out of proportion than it actually is.

I hardly use the site and it's happened to me multiple times. I'm sure people that rely more heavily on it see it all the time. I suppose it depends on the sorts of topics you're looking for help with, much like wikipedia or subreddits, a lot of the little niches are seemingly ran by assholes that would rather delete stuff than actually help people find information.

[mhh__]

I believe pretty strongly that almost every company should have some kind of internal SE

[davnicwil]

I agree, so much so that about 10 years ago I built a product that did this!

I launched to lukewarm reception, actually applied to YC with it and didn't get much of a look, nor an interview :-) and after a bit of (though certainly far too little) further hustle gave up on it due to circumstances leading me on another path.

Anyway, I was a tiny bit vindicated when about a year later I noticed Stack exchange themselves did a similar product, but as far as I know, it never really hit. They would advertise it in the side banner for quite a few years but it eventually seemed to go away.

It's weird that it didn't work, it always did seem like an incredibly good idea to me - just so good, it's obvious. If such a thing existed, it'd add so much to any company onboarding experience at a minimum, and would also have obvious ongoing value.

And it just seemed like a great strategy to get useful and up to date documentation: to gamify it. There's just an inherent incentive to become the 'Jon Skeet' of your organisation as it were, rather than making documentation this largely anonymous, thankless afterthought it often becomes in practice despite best intentions.

[Aurornis]

If it's any consolation, I feel like I've been pitched 10 different versions of this product over the years and I've encountered a lot of startups trying to do the exact same thing. You probably didn't get any YC traction because they'd seen the same thing so many times before. I wouldn't be surprised if we could find a YC batch or two that already contained this exact idea.

[davnicwil]

Thanks, and this might be it - it's even more obvious than I ever realised!

[DougN7]

I wish your solution was still out there. I’m still running an ancient OSQA site with no way to migrate to anything else.

[arccy]

consider feedback people get like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46086703

companies don't always reward answering questions...

[hombre_fatal]

The problem that comes to mind is that every question and answer that’s posted is something you have to maintain as part of your docs as they rot over time.

I’d be curious to hear what the common solutions to that are.

Maybe it can be used as a limbo to gather FAQs that get crystallized into the real docs and then deleted.

[klodolph]

I think a reasonable solution is “people who find the answer should observe that the question was asked eight years ago, and certainly double-check the answer”. If it’s a question about company internal codebases or operations, then you should have access to see the code or resources the answer is talking about.

[PunchyHamster]

Yeah, our wiki is full of old no longer actual/relevant articles and very little incentive to fix any of that vs go work on the next ticket.

I even pondered adding a bot that would create ticket out of oldest not-updated article for someone to go thru and verify it's still current/relevant

[begueradj]

Good documentation, communication channels and a healthy work environment where colleagues can communicate and help each other are much beneficial than an internal SE.

[hshdhdhj4444]

Documentation doesn’t solve the problem of Q/A situations.

Internal Stack Exchanfes are (were? I’m not sure whether they discontinued it…my old company had one but new one doesn’t) is really good at converting chat style communication into a permanent easily searchable record that can also be easily updated.

You can also avoid many of the pitfalls with stack overflow around over aggressive moderation (not really needed since the volume of questions won’t be as high), or inappropriate commenting of any sort (reach out to the individual directly or even to their manager), etc.

[cellio]

They still sell Stack Overflow for Teams (renamed Stack Overflow Internal or something like that), but the cost is pretty astronomical. If you want private Q&A in your company/school/etc and you've got anybody with the tech clues, you're better off downloading and setting up one of the free tools.

[shawn_w]

SE sells just such a thing. I think it's where a lot of their income comes from.

[danielheath]

The only suitable bit of tech that comes to my mind is Lemmy (the reddit-style activitypub thing).

[fijiaarone]

And we wouldn’t have a use case for Ai without StackOverflow & Google’s broken search.