Late to the party and I apologize as I have not read everything (in this thread much less on the site). I also don’t have a lot of personal time, so my participation will be limited. Just wanted to throw my thoughts into what I would look for in an SE alternative and you can take or leave it as you like.
One of the great advantages that SE has is in the number of different communities that it hosts. This is also one of the greatest disadvantages of their family of sites. Users (old, but especially new) often are confused as to where they should post a particular question and this results in a large number of post closures due to off topic posts, especially on sites that may have topics that overlap to some degree. This adds to frustration and wasted time by posters and members of the communities. Or users who might participate on one topic may not do so as they spend their limited time on only a few communities.
How would I re-imagine such a site? A much more ambitious effort than the present SE that isn’t evolved based on old technology. Make use of today’s much easier access to processing power, cheap storage, and advancements in machine learning (which should be key to any such new endeavor in my opinion). Take advantage of advances in technology that were simply not available with SO was first being put together.
Build a single site for any topic and start users at a “blank slate” where they can search existing questions/answers or ask questions. They may only see some sort of “hot topics” list of questions which allows them to start “curating” their view of the site.
As users make use of the site, the site learns about what interests them; what they visit, what they like/dislike (i.e. vote), what they ask about or answer, etc. As the site learns about a user, it can start showing them other questions in which they may have an interest. Give them the ability to split things that are found for them into different self-configurable “views” of some sort (work related, hobby, etc).
You now have a site that never has the need for a question being closed as “off topic.” Closures now only need to exist because they are duplicates or “bad” in some way.
Let the site “tag” questions (and answers?) automatically based on post content, but allow the community to adjust the tagging with reinforcement learning (disliking tags, liking potential tags, etc). This should allow the site to better adjust which users see which questions automatically.
Let the tags be divisible into more specific tags in some sort of tree structure. If the question is tagged with “Networking” let me add the “Wireless” sub-tag to it rather than having “Wireless” as a totally separate and unrelated tag. This would also allow for content to be tagged more specifically. For example separating server network interface configuration (which often carries a “Networking” tag) from questions about networks (switches/routers/etc) from questions about social networking.
Let all users “vote” on everything, but when users vote on something (questions, answers, tags, etc), those votes aren’t equal. Weight them as appropriate to what they are voting on and their “activity” in that “area” (based on their votes, what they have posted, others’ votes on their posts, etc). For example, if SE ran this way, my votes (likes/dislikes) on “wireless networking” question/answers/tags in particular may carry the most weight, “networking” a fair amount, “security” a small amount and “programming” topics very little. It might only take a few users active in “Wireless” to vote to add/remove the “Wireless” tag to a question, but MANY more users who have little/no activity with wireless questions.
Weighted votes can also be used to help automatically combat things issues like “sock puppets.” If a high percentage of a user’s votes are toward questions/answers of a single user (or a small group of users), decrease the vote weight. Accounts that are only created to make a couple votes won’t carry the weight to seriously impact any sort of ranking.
Don’t show vote counts. These aren’t really productive and can influencing voting of other users. Just rank/sort the answers “silently” by their weighted vote.
Let the community determine the correct answer to a question. This prevents the “unanswered” questions because the original poster never selects an answer or where they accept what is actually an incorrect answer. Mark the answer that is accepted by the user who asks the question in some way and give that “vote” more weight, but don’t make it the deciding factor for the correct answer. Let vote weight decline over time in some fashion, allowing for correct answers to change over time when necessary (how many times is an answer posted 8 years ago no longer the “correct” answer today?).
Minimize the need for moderation as much as possible. Let moderators focus on issues/disputes that need user intervention (rude/abusive posts, spam, etc). Don’t make them housekeepers for maintaining the content of the site (closing topics, adjusting tags, etc). As users are more active on the site, give them more options to help maintain content (again based on what the site has learned about the user). If users take advantage of those options, give them more opportunity.
Introduce some sort of gamification. It isn’t perfect, but clearly it works and helps foster community activity or so many successful sites/services wouldn’t make use of it. Just figure out a way that doesn’t create a large separation between “elite” users and other users (especially new users). Something more cosmetic than functional would likely work for most aspects of the site.
Anyhow, those are some of my rambling thoughts on how I would build a more ideal SE alternative, if I had the time/ability/resources to do so. I know details of implementation would be difficult for such a site, but if done well it is something I would personally much prefer to spend my time on than the SE network of sites.
