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davnicwiltoday at 2:59 AM3 repliesview on HN

I agree, so much so that about 10 years ago I built a product that did this!

I launched to lukewarm reception, actually applied to YC with it and didn't get much of a look, nor an interview :-) and after a bit of (though certainly far too little) further hustle gave up on it due to circumstances leading me on another path.

Anyway, I was a tiny bit vindicated when about a year later I noticed Stack exchange themselves did a similar product, but as far as I know, it never really hit. They would advertise it in the side banner for quite a few years but it eventually seemed to go away.

It's weird that it didn't work, it always did seem like an incredibly good idea to me - just so good, it's obvious. If such a thing existed, it'd add so much to any company onboarding experience at a minimum, and would also have obvious ongoing value.

And it just seemed like a great strategy to get useful and up to date documentation: to gamify it. There's just an inherent incentive to become the 'Jon Skeet' of your organisation as it were, rather than making documentation this largely anonymous, thankless afterthought it often becomes in practice despite best intentions.


Replies

Aurornistoday at 3:28 AM

If it's any consolation, I feel like I've been pitched 10 different versions of this product over the years and I've encountered a lot of startups trying to do the exact same thing. You probably didn't get any YC traction because they'd seen the same thing so many times before. I wouldn't be surprised if we could find a YC batch or two that already contained this exact idea.

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arccytoday at 9:21 AM

consider feedback people get like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46086703

companies don't always reward answering questions...

DougN7today at 4:55 AM

I wish your solution was still out there. I’m still running an ancient OSQA site with no way to migrate to anything else.