Friendly reminder! The 3D Printing Stack Exchange is in public beta.

3D Printing
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Friendly reminder! The 3D Printing Stack Exchange is in public beta. You can go there to ask or answer questions about 3DP.

One of the biggest sources of fragmentation and misinformation in our community is the fact that good technical content gets buried deep in old blogs and discussion threads where nobody can find it. Stack Exchange sites are a better way to generate lasting knowledge-bases than blogs, forums, or social media sites like G+. Good Stack Exchange Q&A content can then feed into non-interactive resources like the RepRap wiki.

This has the potential to become a really valuable technical resource for the community. But it needs more users!
http://3dprinting.stackexchange.com/

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This was a dumb idea to begin with, and it gets pushed every couple of months. That’s why it has no users.

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@ThantiK ​, why is it dumb?
Thanks

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A) Because everyones problem is different regarding 3D printing. It’s a new machine, it’s a new problem, it’s a new, unique solution. Stackoverflow works best when the solutions are generic and span multiple machines/languages, etc.

B) There are already a lot of communities which provide the very thing that this community looks to solve. RepRap forums, individual manufacturer forums, this G+ community, the facebook community, local hackerspaces, etc.

C) Stackoverflow is a dying ecosystem, the ability for people to downvote others, means that newcomers can feel intimidated.

D) No support for pictures. Lots of things need pictures to be diagnosed…just this simple feature relegates this stackexchange board to uselessness.

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@ThantiK the community desperately needs technical resources with better signal/noise ratio and mechanisms to reject bad information. The RepRap wiki is the best we have right now and it’s marginal at best.

All the alternatives you suggest suck at actually compiling or retaining information in a lasting / search-friendly format. So we’re constantly fighting a knowledge deficit and answering the same newbie questions over and over again. I’m not saying SE is the only possible solution, but it beats the pants off G+ for repeatable technical questions.

And yes, you can post pictures.

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The thing is, if it’s a good idea - you don’t have to constantly keep pushing it month after month after month after month. Know what happened with the 3D printing G+ community? We started it. We added a handful of people. And it exploded. Didn’t take months. Didn’t take weeks. It just happened - because it was a good idea. There’s an inherent disconnect between stackexchange and the type of people who need help with 3D printers. They’re on social networks. Twitter, G+, Facebook, and the like. They aren’t on stackexchange. Since nobody is ON stack exchange, nobody wants to GO to stack exchange. There’s no huge draw, no benefit over existing channels. The voting? Adds nothing.

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@ThantiK The fact there are a great deal of people signed up doesn’t mean that it’s a good reference resource or that number of people actively participate on a daily basis. There are maybe the same couple hundred (if that) or so of us that post on a regular basis other than to ask a question. It’s much more important WHO is offering the info rather than how many are participating.

I don’t see Stack Exchange as any better alternative in terms of suitability than G+.

Right now for non technical users I think Thomas’ You Tube channel is perhaps the best resource for learning but not all content is well suited for video. Sometimes it’s as easy as a reference chart or drawing.

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@ThantiK @dstevens_lv Dunno about you guys, but I find this place (G+) somewhere between marginal and useless for answering questions, since the page formatting discourages long-form content and you can’t post pictures in comments/replies. It’s good for quick stuff, but not anything that requires depth.

And yes, there are maybe a couple hundred active people here in 3DP-G+, compared to 30-40 on 3DP-SE in two months, that’s not too bad considering the fact that few people know to go there yet.

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That’s the thing – 3D printer problems aren’t long-form content. Each is unique and requires a unique solution.

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@ThantiK you’re thinking about the wrong kinds of questions. Some good examples where a “complete” answer is far too long for G+:

These would all be perfectly fine in a forum, but again, forums have mediocre searchability and god-awful signal/noise ratio.

I’m not saying SE is ideal… I just think it fills a gap.

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Honestly when I’m looking for an answer it goes in Google. Then after sifting through 20 posts on different sites I may find a useful answer. G+ has enough advanced users to answer questions with the benefit of many others getting access to it. The group is searchable so if the question was asked 6 months ago you ca gob find it. (Atleast it is now I looked at the new layout 2 months ago and you couldn’t obviously search just the group it searched everything) but it’s in here. Not all groups are the same the sla group I’m on gets 1 post a week, the cnc group a bit more. But like @ThantiK ​ said people will use the format they like, and this seems to be it.

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Guys, I read through all your comments and they all make sense! It’s pros vs cons of SE vs others vs others, considering each individual’s searching & learning preference style.
For me, during my past 1yr 3mths of 3D printing, my main help were: manufacturer’s forum & G+ - 3D printing.

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My experience of stackexchange is that the folks there are more concerned about the phrasing of questions and responses than they are for the content. I usually avoid it.

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What I’m reading between the lines from you guys is that you don’t like the voting/reputation and community curation/policing mechanics. That’s the “special sauce” for SE. There is a built-in mechanism for making the cream rise to the top, and content that doesn’t fit the format or has no lasting value gets downvoted. It’s fine if you don’t like that mechanic, but it IS different, and it DOES improve the site focus and usefulness.

If you don’t like it, don’t go there. That’s fine.

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@Nathan_Walkner That’s not what we see in reality, sooo…

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@Nathan_Walkner Right, so we should all just give up and let the assholes win. Good plan.

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@Nathan_Walkner I’m proposing that people who like the format can participate in both places, because SE and G+ are different. Really don’t understand why you’re so hostile to that concept.

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@ThantiK , you’re right that the “Help, my printer isn’t working” threads are not a good fit for Stack Exchange. Honestly, 3D printing is not a developer activity, and most of the questions that get asked would be better-directed at the printer manufacturer’s tech support, but the market has proliferated so fast that most of the companies don’t have anything worth calling technical support, and even if they do, the people there usually aren’t knowledgeable enough to give the right answer to any but the most basic questions. This is why things like forums and social networks with short-lived content are optimal.

3D printer development questions, on the other hand, are better answered with a few well-considered posts from experts, which are then made searchable so that others can find them and not need to track down experts to ask again. Social networks like G+ don’t operate that way, and SE will not, and should not replace them for that. There are still some important development discussions that go on though, both occasionally here and in more targeted mailing lists, which would work better there. It’s a bit of a shame that SE has a question-and-answer format, though, because most of those conversations currently take the form of someone presenting something that they’ve been pontificating on and requesting comments from other experts. Almost makes you want to ask some questions you already know the answers to just to seed the platform…

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Like many others, I’ve used StackOverflow as a reference for an innumerable number of programming questions, with great success. But until reading this post, I didn’t realize there was a 3D Printing StackExchange so thanks for posting it here.

If you’re willing to listen to a bit of feedback - now that I’ve checked it out I can see why it’s not so popular. You know how when you’re new at something a good teacher will say “there are no dumb questions”? It seems like the tone on that forum is quite the opposite - while there are a few good “reference” questions with some great and detailed answers, there are also a bunch of questions that are downvoted, closed, or marked as off-topic because they are too vague or not phrased to the liking of some of the site’s users.

The SE forums (by design, and to their credit) favor logical questions with logical answers, rather than vague questions or questions that don’t have “one” (or two) right answers or that have to be caveated in a million different ways.

But 3D printing is not programming, most people are new to it, and many of the questions that need answering are not as clear-cut even to people who have done this for a while (e.g. - What print surface should I use if I have trouble with sticking? Glass! Kapton! Blue Tape! A tapestry of Gecko legs glued to the inside of a cow’s stomach!)*

A reference that provides answers only to the “logical” questions is going to be rather limited in its scope, and therefore in its reach. Couple that with the intimidating tone of some of the commenters (or even the mere disappointment someone must feel at having their question “closed” because it’s just not good enough) vs. any of the manufacturer forums, G+ feed, or even reddit groups, and it is clear why when someone has a question it is preferable to turn to one of the friendlier alternatives.

I do like StackExchange, and it would be nice if a reference for 3D printing similar to the StackOverflow corpus could be created, so I hope you take this feedback constructively and use it to improve your forum. Best of luck!

*The correct answer, of course, is PEI (at least this month AFAIK but that may change next week or maybe it’s already changed and I haven’t heard of it).