Comment by codekilla
9 years ago
It would be really, really great if you could somehow hook this up to Discourse so people could comment on and ask questions about the article. Allowing people to ask questions and having others answer like MathOverflow would I think bring a lot more clarity. Many different kinds of people want to understand material like this but may need the math unpacked in different ways.
I don't see how Discourse will be better than something like HN or reddit. There's also a submission to Reddit[1].
With discourse, I think there will be more noise and a lot of time will be wasted scrolling through unnecessary replies. What's good about the thread-like nature of HN/Reddit is that you'll have proper context and the rating system does its job so everyone's time won't be wasted.
Questions can be answered here and on Reddit too. I think Reddit can be sometimes more helpful than HN when it comes to answering 'easy' questions so I would go there if you have any simple questions.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/63f3uk/r_w...
I disagree. The most useful replies can be upvoted to deal with noise, and using mathematical formulas to help explain responses is absolutely crucial. I can't tell you how helpful it has been to be looking at an obscure proof, post a question to Math Overflow, and have the answer explained in an intuitive way with reference to the symbols and notation used.
These articles on distill I believe could greatly benefit from this. Let the community help distill.
I see where you're coming from. But maintaining another service and the added expenses, community managers, spam control etc. might be a bit much for something that intended to be a publishing platform.
And if there is a question that requires more control, like math formatting, etc. I would actually suggest posting to cross validated[1] and then linking it here.
[1]: http://stats.stackexchange.com/
1 reply →
HN doesn't work if someone has a question in 2 weeks. Both HN and reddit have an incredible skew towards current things (sort of in the term news aggregator, although current = "whatever was recently submitted", not necessarily = "news"), which doesn't really fit posts like this that are relevant for longer. A subreddit might help, but even there things fall off after a while, regardless of the discussion status.