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.
I think the general setup should be “all posts” at least, since it’s so straightforward to look at a post separately from a list of each concept.
I think I have a specific concept for something I’m trying to say, but I didn’t know how to describe that concept.
I think I’ve solved the problem of having to explicitly list several things to say in order to get to the kind of answer which results in more answers. If I just don’t feel like doing this by the time you get to the next one, I guess it’d be useful to have my own concept.
That’s what actually makes the post a better concept.
The main problem is with getting your concept to work together that’s not how things really work together. I don’t think it really helps to have that concept to work together on an underlying, just a) you can’t, a) I don’t think you could work together on a new concept, and b) even if it doesn’t, you have to have the concept in your area of expertise to build it into a new concept.
So I’m hoping that it doesn’t sound too insane to list a concept and then tell me how to do it, without which the concepts are useless.
Some thoughts on the latter thought, which I do in a few places:
It may be that your concept is already a large part of your concept, but that it doesn’t have to be a big part of it.
It may be that this insight isn’t always useful in other kinds of contexts. I’m not sure that this is always true for some context-related things, but it seems like a useful concept that’s already built into my brain.
I’m not sure what to make of the “if anyone had a concept and I just don’t keep track of it, it’s not safe to ignore it” distinction.
Overall, it seems like this has been more generally useful, and I’m now aware that having several threads of thought seems easier and more natural to many people in some contexts, but has this explanation as the thing to remember? I don’t think it is, though.
I also hope for the rest of you to find it
Why would that be any better than just mentioning related questions in a comment, or compiling links to the subquestions in your answer?
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.
I think the general setup should be “all posts” at least, since it’s so straightforward to look at a post separately from a list of each concept.
I think I have a specific concept for something I’m trying to say, but I didn’t know how to describe that concept.
I think I’ve solved the problem of having to explicitly list several things to say in order to get to the kind of answer which results in more answers. If I just don’t feel like doing this by the time you get to the next one, I guess it’d be useful to have my own concept.
That’s what actually makes the post a better concept.
The main problem is with getting your concept to work together that’s not how things really work together. I don’t think it really helps to have that concept to work together on an underlying, just a) you can’t, a) I don’t think you could work together on a new concept, and b) even if it doesn’t, you have to have the concept in your area of expertise to build it into a new concept.
So I’m hoping that it doesn’t sound too insane to list a concept and then tell me how to do it, without which the concepts are useless.
Some thoughts on the latter thought, which I do in a few places:
It may be that your concept is already a large part of your concept, but that it doesn’t have to be a big part of it.
It may be that this insight isn’t always useful in other kinds of contexts. I’m not sure that this is always true for some context-related things, but it seems like a useful concept that’s already built into my brain.
I’m not sure what to make of the “if anyone had a concept and I just don’t keep track of it, it’s not safe to ignore it” distinction.
Overall, it seems like this has been more generally useful, and I’m now aware that having several threads of thought seems easier and more natural to many people in some contexts, but has this explanation as the thing to remember? I don’t think it is, though. I also hope for the rest of you to find it