alt Hacker NewsLove the idea but getting people to move to another platform requires both
- "nothing about the new thing is worse"
and
- "some things are better".
Any migration must also defeat social network effects ("I'll wait for everyone else before I migrate")
Still it is exciting to see energy for this.
Would be great to know what (if any) alternatives exist with a similar UI to Stack Overflow - open source or other.
Replies
> nothing about the new thing is worse
That is definitely not true. There is some complex set of coefficients that play into when people are willing to mass migrate, but needless to say the road to where we are today with platforms was not a linear slope upward. In many cases, like the move from forums to social media platforms, there were obvious problems basically the entire time, but one of those things is surgically good at consuming your attention and one is not.
From what I've seen, communities don't migrate; they fragment. It's very hard to get a group to move, even if the new option is clearly better in the ways that matter to the group.
When I left Stack Exchange I joined the Codidact project, which is FLOSS and run by a non-profit foundation (disclosure: I'm on the board). We still have lots of things we want to improve (we're a very small team), but probably our biggest challenge is adoption -- attracting enough people who want to do Q&A and related knowledge-sharing somewhere that puts communities and people first and isn't driven by revenue goals. We've got communities for software development, Linux, and others, and I'd love to see them grow.