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[Shinyuu]

Host: let me try to address that one specifically. SO engine is actually really good at finding related questions, which means there are higher chances to pull up one of the stale questions while looking for an answer. What happens next has a few options:

 

* you are satisfied with the top answer and you upvote it

* you are satisfied with another answer and you upvote that instead. Eventually that answer bubbles up

* you are mildly satisfied by any answer. You comment on it and OP gets a notification, getting a chance to react and update the answer

* you are mildly satisfied with question itself. You can either comment on the question and get OP to update it or you do create a new question. A person answering it will have the related questions visible and might link to one of the old questions or improve on it.

 

I can hardly explain why exactly that works, but I'm a commoner to Stack Overflow and three different Stack Exchange hubs and I see this behavior everywhere. Good stuff goes up, deprecated stuff goes down.

[Luminesce]

I didn't even see the related questions because on the one I checked there were none, only a massive list of popular articles on different subdomains. The related threads with scores do look good, although there's never that many compared to the massive list I mentioned, still present on every single page. Bothers me just a bit because flooding peoples' screens with that type of stuff makes them automatically ignore it, but it's not that bad. As an addition/complementary site to tulpa.info, the format seems decent.

 

There's just one ultramassive thing after that, then. Rewriting everything ever said that was worth reading on tulpas on another site. This is undeniably much more effort than manually going through our old threads and categorizing them all in our own system. Which probably isn't going to happen either, but my point is that this complementary site won't be very complementary for quite a long time - and yet it will be detracting viewers from the other sites. Would we be able to link to the "complemented" sites such as community.tulpa.info and reddit.com/r/tulpas in a visible and actually-clickable-by-random-people manner? Because it's not complementary if it's basically standalone. We can link to it, but if it can't link back then again I'm hesitant about using it. If it can cover its lack of content by linking to places with said content long enough to become valuable on its own - which will take a very long time - then it might survive the initial creation of a new resource site phase, where most other forums and sites fail.

 

These are actual questions by the way, I'm not trying to attack the idea. Just making sure it's actually a good one.

[Rasznir]

One thing I've seen happen on Stack Overflow is this. When duplicate questions are asked, now and then a user appears and votes for it to be marked as a duplicate, and when that happens, they specify the original question that it's a duplicate of. Typically, old questions that are very helpful to people don't usually die, but instead move up in the list of "Frequent" questions, from what I understand.

[Shinyuu]

There's just one ultramassive thing after that, then. Rewriting everything ever said that was worth reading on tulpas on another site. This is undeniably much more effort than manually going through our old threads and categorizing them all in our own system. Which probably isn't going to happen either, but my point is that this complementary site won't be very complementary for quite a long time - and yet it will be detracting viewers from the other sites. Would we be able to link to the "complemented" sites such as community.tulpa.info and reddit.com/r/tulpas in a visible and actually-clickable-by-random-people manner? Because it's not complementary if it's basically standalone. We can link to it, but if it can't link back then again I'm hesitant about using it. If it can cover its lack of content by linking to places with said content long enough to become valuable on its own - which will take a very long time - then it might survive the initial creation of a new resource site phase, where most other forums and sites fail.

 

Host: There are a few concerns that I will address.

 

"it might survive the initial creation of a new resource site phase, where most other forums and sites fail" — Stack Exchange has very strict rules on spinning up a new site that you can see if you browse around Area51. If they will actually graduate a hub from beta, they will only do it based on the numbers that will say the project is sustainable.

 

"Rewriting everything ever said that was worth reading on tulpas on another site" — There is a private beta process for that, to see if the format will work. Surely that's tons of work, but also it will help people to see if this is something that can happen.

 

"Would we be able to link to the "complemented" sites such as community.tulpa.info and reddit.com/r/tulpas in a visible and actually-clickable-by-random-people manner" — I actually don't know how far the mod access goes. Think of it in a different way though. We could easily set up an opensource clone of stack exchange and get same UI and all the referal links we ever wanted, but SE is still better. It's more visible and it circle-links all the exchanges, millions of other users.

---

Host: to elaborate more on the last point. We just got a random SE user wandering in and asking about what's "forcing" under one of the example questions. Tulpamancy is the top hot proposal on area51 at the moment :-)

[Luminesce]

Well, regardless, we need some basic links to tulpa.info and reddit at absolute least. If we can't link back to the main communities, then it's not a complementary resource, or a complementary site. Because complement entails a two-way relationship. And since this thing will need huge support from said communities, having some interconnectedness is a must.

 

I mean, aside from my basic problems I don't have any issue with it. But it's a lot harder to put effort towards something if it doesn't seem rewarding, and humans are really bad at doing things for "in the long run". The site won't magically become a huge attraction to experienced tulpamancers ready to answer questions (assuming we get a good amount of questions in the first place) on its own without that connectedness. And it's pretty lame if we can only link to it and not back, but not the end of the world, maybe.

[Shinyuu]

Host: that's a real concern that we could address as the proposal goes into beta. Can I consider you convinced enough to follow and upvote a few example questions, maybe write some of your own?

[Luminesce]

Already did. I like the concept of related questions that can be voted as relevant, because there were a couple of sites many years ago I used this feature with to learn.. everything said sites had to offer, eventually. I really doubt we'll ever match all of the topics threads have covered on tulpa.info's Q&A section, and the General Discussion board will remain unchanged as SE really can't simulate it too well. But I see no reason we can't put as much information on SE as people feel like putting, because even if it's not all the information the average user will ever need we should be able to cover the bases (of which there are tons) of tulpamancy, with the related questions features serving hopefully to draw out how long somebody reads before asking. Though it remains to be seen if this will work out, I'll help as long as it seems there's a chance.

 

 

Unrelated, buuuut Rather important to those using the Stack Exchange, I'm going to post some example questions that ask about the basic terms we'll be using such as forcing and wonderland. While anywhere else you should answer such questions with "Go look at the glossary/definitions page, dangit", since we can't necessarily choose to put specific information at the top of the site (as far as I can see), it will be best if we keep these questions relatively highly voted so that new users run into them early. I mean, first you have to vote them in in the first place. But later on, keeping absolutely basic questions as very highly voted should function similarly to having a basic Q&A linked up front.

 

Also, we're asking a whole lot of relevant questions right now. But how will they transition into the initial SE (and what do I call subdomains of Stack Exchange because that's getting old)? For example, I can't ask "What is Forcing and what does it entail?" myself, and then go on to answer it myself. Can I? Do we have to rely on others answering our own base questions? Because as someone who's checked tulpa.info every single day for two years, I've got a ton of questions I know people will need to see, but if I can't propose them myself (and preferably answer them too) that'll be an unnecessarily imposed limit on the growth of the site.

[Rasznir]

I'm pretty sure you can answer your own questions on a Stack Exchange site. I've seen questions on Stack Overflow in the past where the accepted answer is by the asker of the question.

[Shinyuu]

Host: the "subdomains" are called Stack Exchange Sites as you can see on stackexchange.com. I think I've seen them being referred as hubs and that's what I use still.

 

As for "initial" questions, those can be asked and answered during the private and public beta periods when the proposal gets enough support to go into beta.

[Luminesce]

There is a badge for answering your own question and getting a positive score, so it's at least slightly encouraged.

 

I know what I'll be doing.