About that idea

in #steem5 years ago

To start with the beginning...

You probably know that I was(sometimes I still am) a contributor to the very popular Q&A site StackOverflow. It is a very complex website, forum and place where programming geeks spend time, learning and sharing ideas and sometimes a programmers heaven. It is most likely that if StackOverflow wouldn't existed, it would have been created, or the world as we know would have had another shape by now (it is true, that far I go).

That successful site has created so much valuable content, vital I can say, for the world of programming, that it is worth millions, if not billions of dollars, and it has a lot of daily traffic, so it is still successful. Most of this success the site is having is because of the contributors, which are just normal guys but with a lot of dedication and will to change the world for good. Those people are spending a lot of their daily time in order to clean the website from trolling and bad questions/answers and garbage comments that sometimes appear, some of them are regularly answering questions, trying to earn reputation (which is worth basically nothing by the way), trying to ask good questions and give good answers and guidance, for free. This is the definition of being good people, and a site driven by good people can not pretty much fail.

I guess we have a lot to learn from the people on StackOverflow and if we do that, we will increase a lot the value of Steem. But this is not the reason I am writing this article for, so just hang on with me for one more minute.

Since StackOverflow was so successful, the owners of the site (shame on me because I don't know them), have created an entire platform of self sustained web sites similar to StackOverflow. They form a network of Q&A sites where individuals who have no connection or duty to the people who develop the network, are contributing to each of them, serving different communities. You can find each of them in a place called StackExchange.

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Note: Just few of them had enough space to get into the screenshot, there are a lot of sites like that in the exchange and it is most likely that you have visited some of them without knowing it, when you searched for something over the internet.

The actual idea

You may see that, visiting the StackExchange, you meet some familiar names, and here is where we can contribute and help gaining a lot of popularity and advertise over the internet and the geeks' network. There are communities for Iota, Augur, Stellar and EOS.IO. These are very small communities and they do not even compare to what we have here.

If we manage to move a bit of the traffic and people that we have here to a Steem Q&A site located on the StackExchange, we will get a lot of popularity, while creating a strong source of documentation for the Steem blockchain, which will be very easy to maintain, and develop. On a model that already succeeded, we can create a place to keep all of our documentation, both of development and functional stuff like how curation works and all the rest. There are a lot of advantages and possibilities for Steem to grow, moving its documentation in that direction (rather than passing the information between people in all kinds of discord rooms and comments to blog posts), while keeping the possibility to update older posts with documentation which isn't possible right now on the blockchain.

The only thing which threatens this idea is the fact that the community may not develop so fast on StackExchange and if a community does not have activity there, it is closed. So, in order for this to succeed, we will need dedicated people with a lot of commitment and I believe I am targeting the right audience!

What do you think?