We didn’t technically need a questions feature in the first place (there’s nothing stopping you from writing questions as posts), but having an explicit feature sends a strong signal that this is an encouraged norm.
We also didn’t technically need to implement “answers” as a type separate from comments, but we did so to help ensure that people would approach questions with a different mindset than typical posts. (i.e. actually try to figure a thing out, rather than just sort of meander around on the internet).
I actually considered not only adding Related Questions, but making them the default way of interacting with question posts (rather than submitting an answer), based on the notion that people seemed to be rushing to answer hard questions when the correct next step was to break it down further. (We ultimately decided not to do this)
2. Enabling other features and architecture
Another reason we created answers (rather than just using comments), was that an Answer type makes it a bit more sensible to do things like “mark a question as Answered” (so that future people who search for the question will find a convenient Question/Answer pair). We haven’t actually built that feature yet but still plan to.
Similarly, we’re interested in a Related Questions because they suggest ways of more easily rearranging question pages and question sequences. For an Open Question, you can look at a high level overview of what subquestions have been answered and which haven’t, which suggests a different way of engaging with the overall topic.
Two clusters of reasons:
1. Nudges/incentives.
We didn’t technically need a questions feature in the first place (there’s nothing stopping you from writing questions as posts), but having an explicit feature sends a strong signal that this is an encouraged norm.
We also didn’t technically need to implement “answers” as a type separate from comments, but we did so to help ensure that people would approach questions with a different mindset than typical posts. (i.e. actually try to figure a thing out, rather than just sort of meander around on the internet).
I actually considered not only adding Related Questions, but making them the default way of interacting with question posts (rather than submitting an answer), based on the notion that people seemed to be rushing to answer hard questions when the correct next step was to break it down further. (We ultimately decided not to do this)
2. Enabling other features and architecture
Another reason we created answers (rather than just using comments), was that an Answer type makes it a bit more sensible to do things like “mark a question as Answered” (so that future people who search for the question will find a convenient Question/Answer pair). We haven’t actually built that feature yet but still plan to.
Similarly, we’re interested in a Related Questions because they suggest ways of more easily rearranging question pages and question sequences. For an Open Question, you can look at a high level overview of what subquestions have been answered and which haven’t, which suggests a different way of engaging with the overall topic.