Works for me!
It sounds like your site needs some sort of support for those more opinion-based questions that work poorly in the conventional Q&A format. But you want them as feeders; you don’t want to banish them. Would that type of content be well-served if you had a different kind of post that sits alongside the standard Q&A? If you had a “discussion” post, where there’s a question but all feedback is in the form of threaded comments so people could discuss those opinions at length, would that be useful?
Yes, this would definitely help for a broad class of questions that we don’t serve well but which would help build the community. Particularly, “help me make this photograph better” posts, which aren’t really questions and don’t have an answer, but get people thinking and talking about actual photographs. (This brings up another need: a lot of photography questions are visual in nature and hard to give unique titles. “How could this landscape be improved?” isn’t really useful.)
This might also be good for the equipment recommendation questions.
We also struggle, though, with the reception of non-discussion questions where the answer is not a formula or number. See How to decide whether a portrait should be in color or black and white? or What are photographic “typologies”?, both of which are on topic but attracted immediate downvotes and close votes.
In the first example, the question is somewhat subjective, but is definitely answerable — and answerable with one or more good, comprehensive answers, not a discussion.
In the second case, I’m afraid, the situation is primarily that the community didn’t have the knowledge to recognize the question (resulting in something like the embarrassing “my kid could paint that!” comments at the art museum).
In both cases, more than the software, it’s about the cultural expectations of the site. But those are fed by the site’s design and features.
Regardless of how these posts are structured (Q&A or discussion or something else), would it help if you could clearly segregate them, so that alongside “main” and “meta” sections of the site you also had “recommendations” (or whatever you want to call it)?
Yes, I definitely think more categorization would help. In fact, it might be valuable to split out:
- Gear Recommendations
- Technical questions and how-tos
- Improve my photograph!
- How was this done?
- Art, composition, history
(Or something like that. That’s off the top of my head.)
Are any of these problems/questions common enough that they would be served by canonical posts or blog posts? For the latter I don’t mean a separate blog, but blog posts integrated into the site proper. (A blog post would be a post that doesn’t accept answers.)
Yes. This would really help with one particular thing which drives me crazy: “How do I measure things using my camera?”
All of these are capabilities we’re planning to have in some form, so I want to test those plans against your needs. What parts of this would help you, and where are there still gaps? Do you have suggestions for other approaches that would work better for Photography?
Cool. 