Q&A features on Discourse arrived in stages in an attempt to solve the problem of answers buried in a forum thread.[1] It started with the Solved plugin that lets users select a post that solved their problem. For Stack Exchange veterans, that’s similar to the “accepted answer” functionality. In my experience on Meta Discourse the post that solves the OP’s problem is only occasionally the one that solves my problem. It’s a familiar pattern to what I’ve seen on Stack Overflow: the asker tends to accept the first answer that helps get past the immediate roadblock even if a better answer comes along later. So I find myself still needing to read long threads to find what I’m looking for.
That’s where voting comes in. Letting people vote on posts/answers and causing those votes to reorder the list of answers means readers can find the best answer according to the wisdom of the crowd. Good answers are self-contained so that they can be consumed independently of other answers. Responses to answers are relegated to comments, which are (in theory) second-class objects.
Since answers literally compete with each other, Q&A is inherently confrontational. I believe this is an advantage for finding the truth of a matter. For all the problems with Twitter these days, I think their Community Notes feature does good work highlighting misleading content. To the degree the system works, it does so by allowing trusted users to rate notes and only showing the best on according to community consensus.
Discussion forums tend to be more collaborative. The discussion can end up far afield of the initial topic as one thing leads to another. Of course that’s exactly why they are less useful for finding a solution. The answer you are looking for might be a tangent that doesn’t get explored: “Oh! I figured it out. But how do I …”
All long help threads should have a sticky globally-editable post at the top saying ‘DEAR PEOPLE FROM THE FUTURE: Here’s what we’ve figured out so far …’
One problem I’ve had from the Stack Overflow beta is that askers don’t have any idea what experts consider to be a good question. To flip it around, experts struggle to understand why new users can’t grok existing resources and assume laziness. If the answer is clearly written in the manual (chapter 32, section 12, subsection 4, paragraph 2) why would anyone bother to ask? They must not have bothered to look. This still happens in a discussion format, but the culture of collaboration rather than confrontation usually softens the criticism.
So the people least equipped to decide are currently given the responsibility to Toggle Post Voting If the question is genuinely difficult to answer or if the question is so easy a quick reply will sort the OP out, the forum format does the trick. But if it’s an interesting question that benefits from self-contained answers and voting, it would be better in the Q&A format. If it’s a question asked over and over in the forum, it would be especially helpful to flip the switch and turn it into the start of an FAQ.
Probably the most promising project Stack Overflow abandoned was the mentoring experiment in which askers could connect with mentors in chat to discuss questions before they were posted. It worked!
We used a rating system where “good” questions have positive ratings (or neutral with an accepted answer), “neutral” questions have no interactions, and “bad” questions have negative ratings. Within that system, mentored questions had a much higher share of “good” questions, and way fewer “bad” ones. Good questions increased from 18% of all questions asked by that population to 25%. Bad questions decreased from 30% of questions to 25%.
All of these results are statistically significant, with p < .05.
So that leads me to an ideal flow:
- Topics always start as forum discussions. (Example: a proposal to make it easier to find category and group ids.)
- At any point in the future someone (but maybe limited to higher trust levels) can designate a post (including a reply) as a “good question”. (Example: if the initial post isn’t a good question, maybe my reply would be.)
- The post is automatically reposted as a question (with a link to the context) that has post voting turned on. (This isn’t currently possible in Discourse, but I can imagine a plugin doing this. Maybe add an optional edit step so that the person promoting the post can clear out the cruft.)
- [Optional] Direct replies to the post are copied over as answers and the authors of those posts are notified so they can edit their answers. (Maybe hide these answers until they are edited so that people won’t be sucked into a confrontational system without their consent.)
I’m getting excited about this idea. It solves the “everything must fit into the Q&A box” problem of Stack Exchange while also solving the “nobody can find their answer in this wandering discussion” problem of forums. The key would be motivating people to “promote” posts into questions. Perhaps the best part is that it means questions automatically have the context Stack Overflow questions often lack. Hmmm… maybe I’ll look at writing my first plugin.
Not dissimilar to the problem Stack Overflow was designed to solve, coincidently. ↩︎