Ask Fedora compared to Stack Exchange

Here is my thought:

I think Canonical did great by creating their askubuntu community. It’s massive and people do participate in it for various reasons. Some of them are:

  • Thread/post is never closed.
  • Answer/suggestions can be downvoted or be upvoted. This will filter out the best solution to try.
  • User can comment on someone’s answer.
  • Easy to read different answers/suggestions. And not confusing it with the answer’s comment.
  • Page looks much smaller & discrete even if it contains 20 new solutions to try.
  • Upvote/downvotes matters. It motivates people to participate and contribute. In some cases, the job profile of such a network can be an asset.

I wish there was AskFedora stackexchange network.
Regardless, Ask.FedoraProject is not that bad. It’s good enough but not compare it to likes like Askubuntu.

I want to know what you to think. Maybe I will learn something instreating.

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Yeah, I too am a big Stack Exchange fan. I think it is a good system – although it also has some serious flaws. Our earlier incarnation if Ask Fedora was basically an attempt to replicate that, but it never really worked out, for I think three reasons:

  1. The software we were using wasn’t really a good copy of Stack Exchange
  2. We didn’t have the backing of the larger Stack Exchange network
  3. A lot of users need more of a back-and-forth, conversational diagnosis of their problem than Stack Exchange really supports well.

So, we decided to go with this approach instead.

Ask Ubuntu is kind of a weird thing. It goes back to the early days of Stack Exchange expanding beyond Stack Overflow. I don’t think today’s SE network would support a Fedora-specific site even if we wanted one. Personally, as a former moderator on Unix & Linux Stack Exchange, I think splitting out Ubuntu was an unfortunate choice and to the detriment of all. If you’re a Fedora fan active on Stack Exchange, I encourage you to ask and answer Fedora questions there. There are a lot of Fedora questions and ansewrs on Unix-SE, Stack Overflow, Super User, and Server Fault. You can bookmark this filter to follow them all:

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What I like of Discourse (this forum’s platform) is that it does not provide downvotes. We can only upvote (like) posts, avoiding negative feelings.

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That’s one way to look at it. But downvote discourage people to not comment something which is bad or bad practise, or not-quite-right-to-explain-like-that situation.

If u notice stackexchange networks, sometime the accepted answer receives lesser upvotes than the new improved version of the same question. And people will notice such answer people the website works like that. 1st priority is given to highly voted answer and than to accepted answer.

But websites like ours, if a user after a year or so comment a new answer which is more good (like ELI5) than it is barely noticeable to the new user.

Another cool thing about website like stackexchange is that search engine website like Duckduck put the answer upfront in side panel if the question or search string matches the question asked in stackexchange network. Saves a lot of time.

I think Discourse is modern but it need some traditional ingredients which we see in Stackexchange. Old is not always bad if it works and respond properly.

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