Do we have a StackOverflow Collectives group for Elixir?

Chat / Discussions
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I just heard about SO collectives:

I don’t know if we have a collective there (couldn’t find one for Elixir), but in the chance we don’t have one, I would like to discuss the idea.

I understand the purpose of SO Collectives is to build a community, much like the one we already have here.

The strongest counter-argument I can think about this would be “We already have a community, why have another in SO”. And that is a fair point.

However, from personal experience, most managers and people that are not aware of Elixir rely a lot in StackOverflow data and metrics. Most of them are unaware of this very same forum. I have been in companies that used SO data to discredit Elixir, citing the low number of questions as a “valuable indicator that no one is using it”.

So my argument for it would be more on the line of “giving visibility to the community”. People would find Elixir in SO collectives, and eventually find this forum after. At the very least we would enter the radar of more people, which can only be positive.

What do you folks think? I am missing something? What are your thoughts?

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I was active on SO for a long time, and I can say that this forum is superior to that format in every way and most of the contributors that were active there moved on pretty much.

I think the collective is just a marketing move, so that companies like google, amazon can pay to show their logos on tags and market their features and services, never saw it actually being used for something useful.

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I would agree with the OP. Every single time I am training someone new in Elixir they struggle for a day or two because they assume that the Elixir forum is “just some forum” and not the central community discussion place and where you’d generally go to ask for longer form troubleshooting help or discuss nuanced ideas.

I have also similarly had people use the volume of SO interactions to discount Elixir. It also is where new people go automatically when trying to figure something out.

Since the thread a couple weeks ago about how to bring in new people as a language and community, I think having a serious presence on SO would be the best way to do it. I like this forum and I want its culture to continue, and think we should consider it continuing on a platform that has better SEO and discoverability in the wider tech ecosystem/Internet, even if that means we’re not hosting it

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There are couple of people (including me) that are always perceptive and give great quality answers on SO, the thing is that the number of questions was and is very limited for the last 3-4 years, and from them only a few are focused and have a good quality.

The biggest problem I don’t like about SO is the format of the conversation, more complex and involved questions are just hard to reason about, and then asking the author for more details is a burden.

I agree that small technical questions like How do I do A in phoenix are more fit for SO and they just kind of clutter the forum, it would be better for beginners to ask these questions on SO.

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Yeah. There’s a part of me that just wishes SO would do some sort of federation and allow searching across platforms like fediverse style apps

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@D4no0 I understand you prefer this community over SO. That is a fair opinion to have (which I share as well), however I would like to focus this discussion on the main point:

  • Should we create a SO Collectives group?
  • Would this be an effective strategy in spreading Elixir’s awareness ?
  • Could we use the Collective SO group to bring more people into this forum?

I am off the opinion that the to these question is “yes”.

I am interested in more opinions, and if possible, a course of action to take.

@felix-starman Your experience is quite similar to mine, I see :smiley:

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I wouldn’t say that, I like that community as much as I like this one, even though I moved away from SO, because I favor the better support offered by elixirforum, and the quality of the questions.

If you plan on making the collective, I will join and offer support in form of quality answers and help.

The only thing that still bothers me, is how effective are actually these collectives and how they are different from just using the elixir tag? The only thing I see about them are those colorful logos, but once again I now rarely use SO to search for answers and the places I would search (for example android) doesn’t have a collective.

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