What do you think of my questions?

[Dani]

I’ve been trying to be as proactive as possible with asking discussion-style questions on DaniWeb almost every single day.

I figure a lot of the types of questions we used to get around here can easily be solved with ChatGPT nowadays, so instead it’s all about just chit-chatting with other techies and trying to foster the type of content that doesn’t encourage copying and pasting answers straight out of ChatGPT.

What are your thoughts? What could I be doing better? And, most importantly, why am I the only one asking questions?! Why don’t you guys want to chime in with some of your own? :) Better yet, what could I do to encourage you to post questions every so often?

[Reverend Jim]

I find that most of my questions are so specific (like questions about wxPython controls) that they are best posted/answered directly on topic specific forums such as wxPython.org. While there was talk about wxPython here many years back, there seems to be little to no interest in it, or even straight Python these days. Everything seems to be SEO, back links, and web apps, and I have zero interest in those topics.

As for general discussion questions, I can think of those in face-to-face conversation but they don't translate well into thread based conversations where people get upset when conversations go off topic. But when questions are asked I am happy to participate.

I've also noticed a number of first time posters who ask questions like, "What is the best X for Y", then answer it themselves under another username (same IP) pushing X. I've been referring to that as "spam-seeding".

[Dani]

I find that most of my questions are so specific (like questions about wxPython controls) that they are best posted/answered directly on topic specific forums such as wxPython.org

While I fully agree that we don’t have a lot of Python users around here nowadays, I would strongly encourage you to ask your questions both here as well as Python-specific places. You can even take that a step further such that if your question gets answered elsewhere, update the thread here with the answer that helped you. If you don’t start discussions about topics, then we don’t grow an audience about those topics.

We have a lot of SEO-related content because I started asking SEO-related questions myself, and that grew an audience about the topic. (Yes, it also encouraged a lot of spam, but that’s a story answered in another thread.)

Back in the day, we had C++ questions being asked every so often but no one around to answer them. Members like Narue eventually came around and saw that there were questions being asked and left unanswered that they were able to answer, and doing so made them feel useful and needed. That’s the reason they stuck around to begin with. Eventually, we became the most popular C++ community on the web, getting far more questions asked and answered per day than any pre-existing c++-specific community on the web. That was a good ten year run.

[Reverend Jim]

I would strongly encourage you to ask your questions both here as well as Python-specific places.

Consider it done.

[Dani]

Yay!! And thanks. It really comes down to if we don’t take the initiative and create content about a topic, then we for sure won’t wont build an audience about that topic. Python is popular enough nowadays to do that with. It’s not like it’s an archaic and very specific technology where 100% of people only ask about it on the manufacturer’s website, and so building our own community around it would take having to create a shift in people’s perceptions and behaviors.