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Comment by beachy | Hacker News Reader

In the old days, we had intranets, knowledge bases, wikis and we tried manfully but unsuccessfully to somehow get people to document the good shit so others could use it for reference material.

Seems we've now given up on that and the new working model is just to blurt out questions in some push system, bugging everyone in the process, and then hope that someone blurts back an answer.

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I wish that I could install a version of Quora on my company's local network which would preserve that Q & A knowledge and make it more searchable.

Tangent: It has been 7 years since their founding. How does Quora make money?

Its surprising no-one's working on that, given Yammer is basically a SaaS Facebook.

Or maybe they are, but they can't be found. I've noticed this before, but you can't google for something like "SaaS version of Quora" because all you'll get is results - in Quora - about SaaS. Same for "in-house Quora". So maybe someone does offer a Quora-like product for the enterprise, but they're consigned to invisibility.

Askbot exists[1] -- its look-and-feel is more akin to StackOverflow than Quora, but it's pretty widely deployed[2][3]

[1]: https://askbot.com/ [2]: https://ask.fedoraproject.org/ [3]: https://ask.libreoffice.org/

The blurting has no bounds. I recently had someone tell me over slack that the company is contemplating a spin-off, blurting out a few lines describing the strategy, and asked if I could get back to them on possible system implementations / integrations / ideas. There were blurts along the lines of, 'and if we can't find a saas offering to integrate with, we might have to build our own, but maybe we should make it generic because there could be a market for it.....'. I was basically thinking, 'how about you fucking idiots carefully document a well considered, serious proposal, and then ask my advice. Or invite me to a brain-storming session, in person, so we have an actual discussion.'

'Blurt' seems like a good name for a chat system...

I mean, one of these unified communication/Facebook-clone thing-a-majiggers is called Yammer...

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/yammer

yeah but in slack you 'pin' that blurt to the channel and can accumulate useful blurts

Except searchability of pinned stuff is terrible and often the only way to see the entire message requires clicking on it which "scrolls" up that point in history, incurring the CPU, memory, and network load of getting everything in-between. This is horrifying when you're remote working from a country with somewhat dodgy Internet connectivity. IRC takes almost no bandwidth and an IRC client takes minimal system resources, Slack by comparison is a hog.

Documentation in a Wiki is way preferable.

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