I'm building an alternative to stackoverflow- thiscodeworks.com
Reasons why I felt the need to build an entirely new website for code snippets is because as somebody who was learning to code, I found the site incredibly daunting and unfriendly for newbies only favouring expert coders on the platform. Because:
- I can't upvote or post comments because I dont have enough reputation.
- If I'm confused, how do I ask for help if the only way to say something is post an answer?
- The snippets aren't recyclable. Meaning they are always in response to somebody else's problem. As somebody learning to code, how do I change this code to fit mine? Once again, I'm stuck figuring it out.
Anyhow my website (thiscodeworks.com) is a work in progress, but I hope I can resolve these problems & more for others like me. Suggestions welcome!
SO is the way it is because it is worse than useless to have a beginner friendly Q&A site. Many questions are so basic that they can be figured out with a minimum of effort or a quick look at documentation. A site full of low effort questions, quite possibly from CS majors looking for homework help, isn't doing anybody any favors.
If you can't be bothered to answer a couple of questions in the name of getting involved in the community, the community is probably better off without your input.
“Where is babby come from” would be a pretty popular question too, but it’s not the right forum.
I wish though that StackOverflow turned such questions into a chat/discussion instead of closing/deleting them. They have the tools to do that when comments start becoming too chatty.
Unfortunately, a site like SO works because of network effects. It was bootstrapped as far as popularity because it had two well known founders - Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood.
I wish I had some ideas about how to get that first critical mass.
Good luck attracting experts to your site... without incentive for experts to participate it will likely just be the blind leading the blind (i.e. newbies helping newbies - which could possibly be a good thing!).
Reasons why I felt the need to build an entirely new website for code snippets is because as somebody who was learning to code, I found the site incredibly daunting and unfriendly for newbies only favouring expert coders on the platform. Because:
- I can't upvote or post comments because I dont have enough reputation.
- If I'm confused, how do I ask for help if the only way to say something is post an answer?
- The snippets aren't recyclable. Meaning they are always in response to somebody else's problem. As somebody learning to code, how do I change this code to fit mine? Once again, I'm stuck figuring it out.
Anyhow my website (thiscodeworks.com) is a work in progress, but I hope I can resolve these problems & more for others like me. Suggestions welcome!