Hacker News Reader

Comment by frankjr | Hacker News Reader

> Discussions live in your project repository, so they’re accessible where your community is already working together. Their threaded format makes it easy to start, respond to, and organize unstructured conversations. Questions can be marked as answered, so over time a community’s knowledge base grows naturally.

I can imagine "GitHub Discussions" [0] cutting off a significant number of Stack Overflow questions.

[0] https://github.com/github/roadmap/issues/104

View on HN

If you didn't know, Discussions is already live for some repositories[1]

[1] https://github.com/vercel/next.js/discussions

This looks really cool. A sweet spot for certain kinds of questions that people abuse Issues for, but never felt right. Very important things like "what is the best practice for X" or "I have this problem but haven't yet isolated the cause, can anyone help?".

This is quite some timing for me, since the StackOverflow announcement earlier today had me thinking what could replace it. This is a clear, promising possibility.

> This is quite some timing for me, since the StackOverflow announcement earlier today had me thinking what could replace it. This is a clear, promising possibility.

What announcement? Are they planning to sunset something? All I could find was this blog post from the CEO, which was overly positive: https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/07/28/ceo-quarterly-blog-pos...

Overly positive is right - it smelled like BS to me. But perhaps I'm too cynical.

But is there any karma to be gained?

Honestly good point, they'll probably need to build a system for that and it could get tricky!

Codidact is slowly growing (as in, taking over communities that have been stranded on SO after the moderator hiatus that SO brought upon themselves).

https://codidact.com/

I'm fine with this, so long as the search engine optimisation is there. I often google for an issue with a particular framework or library, and rather than the first result being the documentation, the first result is somebody asking on SO about it. It would be great if the answer is "closer to the source", pardon the pun. It also means that related questions may be easier to find, and you may come across something else of interest while on the discussion page for that particular project.

It also means that rather than building up SO's capital, you're indirectly contributing to the open source knowledge base of a project. It'd be even better if the discussion were backed by a Git repo or something easily exportable so that you aren't tied to Github, though I suppose part of the motivation for this feature is doing exactly that.

Still, SO has been king for too long. And the king's crown has been looking rather tarnished for a little while now.

I really like the idea behind this feature. Being able to add a discussions 'forum' to my main project could be an excellent way to start building a community around the project.

Looking at the Discussions issue page - https://github.com/github/roadmap/issues/104 - it looks like this will be delivered to projects not in the Beta testing group sometime before Christmas?

Out of interest, are there any project admins around who can comment on how easy it is to moderate the Discussions threads? My one concern would be managing flame wars, and minimising inaccurate answers participants may offer each other.

> Out of interest, are there any project admins around who can comment on how easy it is to moderate the Discussions threads?

There's a soft NDA on people who are in the Discussions beta. It's also early enough that there's a direct pipeline to GitHub Staff on issues that are truly urgent, so it's really too early to say. The Issues moderation things like locking and org-level blocking definitely still exist and work in Discussions, though.

I'm looking forward to GitHub Discussions too. As well as helping foster community and contributers, it's also a clear separation from Issues, where I often see non-dev and peripheral questions being asked.

I've seen a few startups (For example https://www.getoutline.com/) using the GitHub Discussions beta as a defacto support forum. I like that use case and it seems like it will help both developers and users.

For devs, you'll get a forum setup without requiring time/money to set up your own hosting, which is big for small or bootstrapped projects. It will also help move specific questions out of your issues section/ticketing system.

For users, it lowers the friction associated with getting support since many already have a GitHub account.

Also discourse

Reply on news.ycombinator.com