On Sat, Oct 30, 2010 at 11:34 AM, Ketil Malde
Stack Overflow and Reddit are at least improvements over the traditional web forums, starting to acquire some of the features Usenet had twenty years ago. Much like Planet-style meta-blogs and RSS syndication makes it liveable to follow blogs.
Very much this. I mourn Usenet's potential as much as anyone, but life goes on. I'll also note that some "private" sites take reasonable steps to promote openness. To use Stack Overflow as an example again, all content on the site is under a Creative Commons license and they provide torrents of raw data dumps containing everything but private information about users. So if someone wanted, it'd be possible (probably even easy) to do something like mirror all the content in the [haskell] tag somewhere on haskell.org without any advertising or extraneous SO-related stuff cluttering it up, perhaps re-organized into a more structured FAQ format.
The important thing is making all the resources visible, and bringing stuff together. HWN is great, I don't follow Reddit, but I do click on the links that look interesting. Is there something going in the other direction, pointing SO users to mailing list threads, for instance? Most web-based email archives seem to suck - where can we point to a nice URL to get an overview of a -cafe thread?
Well, it's always good form to provide relevant links in SO answers, but I'm more likely to direct people to the wiki on Haskell.org, the online Haskell report, Hackage, various blogs, or occasional research papers. I have seen relevant -cafe threads mentioned on occasion, typically using the archive at haskell.org/pipermail and linking to a specific message. As you say, most email archives leave something to be desired. As far as I know, the best way to find anything in old -cafe threads is to do a google search with "site:http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/", and there's no good way to get an "overview". Especially as topic drift leads to subject lines being uninformative (I mean, "Edit Hackage"? What?). - C.