From the Topic OP's point of view, once an Expert replies to his query, the subject is closed. Who will give a better response? Auto close the thread?
Nah, or, not quite. I suppose something like that would go: question-asker asks the question, thread is locked to others besides experts and OP (since OP might not provide sufficient information at first), then experts weigh in.
I suppose that sort of a thing would be easy enough to implement on a forum too, experts could simply be given mod rights to the relevant subforums and that's that.
That's kind of what Stack implements, users can edit their messages (and sometimes elevated users or "community" can edit others!), and add responses; and there's a comment section below each message/reply to discuss things more informally (that would be harder to emulate on an un-threaded forum).
As for the value of that -- I for one would certainly welcome the discussion. It shouldn't be locked, but... maybe could stand to be a little more restrictive than it is now, but in what way exactly, I'm not sure? Anyway, for my part, I certainly don't give perfect answers, most of the time I treat a post as a prompt and begin discussing whatever comes off the top of my mind on that subject. Might be (might, he says?..) superfluous to OP; might be about a cluster of topics around, but beside the central point; might be about a cluster of topics but misrepresenting their relative importance (classic topic: the number of articles about slotting ground planes vastly outnumbers the real-world applications of the technique!). Or I might simply make errors in writing it down, or thinking about it at all, even for subjects I know well; braining is hard!
So, some commentary, constructive criticism, is certainly welcome. And then, an improvement in information quality would be appreciated, I suppose. To the extent that can be easily done, anyway.
And to clarify, by "restriction", it would probably be in very minor ways -- things like, needing to show the least bit of interest in the subject, responsibility for the conversation -- for example, subscribing to the thread first, and then replies are available. Or maybe it's by category or something, so you're subscribed to the subforum, or the post is tagged with subjects, and when you subscribe to those, relevant threads show up on your feed automatically; etc.
For all its problems, this is perhaps one thing Stack does well -- ugly though it may be. It has, at least the impression that, if you make a careless reply, you're going to get snapped at and downvoted into oblivion, so you better make sure your information is on point. That's... a way to do that, I think.
Now, to be clear, I wouldn't want this place to become Stack-like. This is, and should be, a community. Community isn't something Stack is good at, at least as far as I've seen.
At best, there'd be, like... maybe a
Wiki or something* on the side, that's, hopefully, somewhat carefully cultivated, with rich, detailed, connected content useful in regards to common questions.
*Not that exact one (because that's specifically for the resources as shown), but, more for sake of saying: we kinda already have it.
But also, wikis have been tried in many places, and they rarely have sticking power. They end up neglected and unused. Something of a circular problem, there's nothing good there so no one visits, right?...
The problem ultimately is, good information takes a lot of time and effort to cultivate, and without people specifically responsible for it, and vested in it, it stumbles, or falls to ruin entirely.
And where Stack excels in that "market", is managing to be one of the top collections of useful resources on the net. That works great for a lot of mainstream subjects: computer science, SE where most of the time there's just a handful of things missing from, say, a successful install of le package-du-jour; even fairly informal topics like fictional writing (Worldbuilding, Scifi, even Roleplaying shows up on the sidebar often enough). The latter can probably bring more of a community discussion sort of aspect, which is interesting.
On the other hand, EE seems to be a subject just... manifestly poorly suited to the same approach? I've never been impressed by the quality of questions nor answers I've seen on the EE StackExchange. (Granted, there are plenty of unimpressive questions here, too, but more curious seems to be the fact that they're all pretty similar; and, see also the EE subreddit.) I'm not sure that it's a matter of common questions coming up often enough to be worth reviewing and improving, or if there's just very little resource to do so (i.e., most of us have something better [paying] to do? -- but then, CS/SE pays very well, and there are many excellent posts in that domain). Or maybe it's a matter of scaling, it's just not as big a community, so of course the frequency of questions, and pruning and polishing of answers, simply lacks; I don't know.
So, as concerns the discussing-a-subject-and-related-topics-around-it that I am wont to do..... there you go.
I hadn't contemplated much about the role and (internal) function of Stack before (and, presumably by extension, Quora and other crowdsourced information sorts of sites? -- I know even less about these, alas), so this has helped (I think?) my understanding of them. Perhaps writing this down (or thinking out loud..) has provided others with some perspective on those, and perhaps the possible role of our community in the greater internet community, those sort of things? Idunno.
I left a forum where I had participated for many years when they changed the board to include the concept of "Trophy Points" and "Trophies" for the number of replies and, I believe, Likes. That seemed rather juvenile for a very serious forum so I bailed. I'm not in the business of gathering up trophies.
No, I'm not a fan of the Expert concept but it would shorten up a lot of threads. Maybe that's a good thing, probably not.
Anyway, going back to this, for sure, any kind of metric needs to be chosen very, very carefully. Never underestimate the psychological will to
make line go up. As soon as you make an indicator a metric, it is no longer a good metric, etc.
For their part, I think (or, suspect, at least..), Slashdot, then later, Reddit and more, did a tremendous service in regards to the democratization of information. Bringing up/downvotes to the masses, brought scalable (and massive), self-curated content in return. And yes, all the problems which attend that -- it's easily gamed (karmawhores, trolls, bots), people are fickle, most just want a quick click of dopamine and on to the next post, etc. Very little critical review of posts/comments; insightful comments get downvoted to hell if they happen to be inconvenient/unpopular; uh, brigading (arguably under the general umbrella of trolls, but a different structure), the list goes on. And, best of all, it's only ever the illusion of democracy, of course; there always must be some group of mods/admins responsible for ownership and preventing abuse; and, inevitably, curating content according to their specific interests. These aren't easy problems to solve...
It's fairly surprising that we still don't have many better options than the benevolent dictator... Nice when it happens, but rare indeed.
Tim
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