Over many years of using messageboards, forums and reddit, I’ve had the ‘search, don’t ask’ ethos drilled into me, the idea being that creating new threads to ask simple questions is a bad thing because it decreases the signal-to-noise ratio of content.
But now that we’re trying to grow a new platform, it occurs to me that a lot of appeal in established platforms is the searchable index of knowledge that has come out of people’s questions being asked and answered.
In light of that, do you think we should be creating question posts more enthusiastically to build up our library of information, even if it might be stuff that could potentially be answered by doing a reddit search?
Yes.
New rule I have adopted - going forward, any time I struggle to find good search results on something and find myself wanting to append “reddit” onto the query, I will instead be creating the thread on an applicable forum on a federated site. I recommend others do the same.
It may not give me the immediate answer I’m looking for, but with a bit of patience we can hopefully rebuild a library of knowledge in a more stable way, not vulnerable to the whims of corporate profit.
That’s a great idea! I’ve kept adding reddit to my queries (because it works), but I need to change that
You know what? That’s a damn good rule and I’m humiliated that I didn’t think of it. Count me in.