Well, the question asker will always see it (they’ll receive a notification). The act of answering it will also:
a) put it on the recent discussion section
b) it’ll also appear in on the slightly revamped Questions page, where both “Top Questions” and “Recent Activity” are sorted by which questions were most recently commented on. (“Top Questions” are “questions with 40 or more karma, sorted by recently commented/answered”).
We’ll be putting some work into figuring out how to keep questions take up “the correct amount of attention” (i.e. enough so old, important questions aren’t lost track of, but without cluttering the frontpage). If an answer is good, we will likely also curate the question along with the answer.
This could motivate me to spend minutes or hours answering a question, but I think it would be insufficient to motivate me to spend weeks or months. Maybe if there was an option to also submit my question answer as a regular post.
I do think that when you’re tackling something that’ll take weeks or months, it’s quite likely you’ll end up with multiple posts worth of content. In that case I think the “Answer” part would look more like linking to a separate post (or sequence) and summarizing it, than writing the whole thing in the answer section.
(I’ve also been thinking about having high-quality answers getting displayed as part of the question’s post item, so rather than the “primary author” being the person who asked the question, the top answer author is given prominent billing)
Well, the question asker will always see it (they’ll receive a notification). The act of answering it will also:
a) put it on the recent discussion section
b) it’ll also appear in on the slightly revamped Questions page, where both “Top Questions” and “Recent Activity” are sorted by which questions were most recently commented on. (“Top Questions” are “questions with 40 or more karma, sorted by recently commented/answered”).
We’ll be putting some work into figuring out how to keep questions take up “the correct amount of attention” (i.e. enough so old, important questions aren’t lost track of, but without cluttering the frontpage). If an answer is good, we will likely also curate the question along with the answer.
This could motivate me to spend minutes or hours answering a question, but I think it would be insufficient to motivate me to spend weeks or months. Maybe if there was an option to also submit my question answer as a regular post.
I do think that when you’re tackling something that’ll take weeks or months, it’s quite likely you’ll end up with multiple posts worth of content. In that case I think the “Answer” part would look more like linking to a separate post (or sequence) and summarizing it, than writing the whole thing in the answer section.
(I’ve also been thinking about having high-quality answers getting displayed as part of the question’s post item, so rather than the “primary author” being the person who asked the question, the top answer author is given prominent billing)