There were a couple of Q/A posts here yesterday that got some pretty good engagement, and I was wondering if folks would be interested in a weekly pinned Q/A post?

I don’t think it makes sense at this point to do anything like reddit’s /r/AskScience does in terms of organizing themed panels or vetting people’s credentials, nor is that something that’s really supported by lemmy as a platform at the moment. It seems, though, that we do have a fair number of users around who are working scientists and engineers in a pretty wide variety of fields.

So: if a pinned Q/A post existed, would you ask questions? Likewise, would you contribute answers? Do you think it would be better to leave things as they are and just ask questions in post form? Let me know here in the comments, and also of course feel free to raise any additional thoughts or concerns you might have. If it seems like enough folks are interested I can set up a thread this week to try the idea out.

Edit: Okay, based on upvotes it looks like only about 3% of monthly /c/science users are interested enough in this to click the arrow, so I’m gonna leave it be for now (although it might be worth a revisit in the future). I think @[email protected] makes a good point about the possibility of a self-sustaining cycle, but the Q/A posts that prompted me to ask about this have actually gotten much more engagement than this pinned post did. Perhaps it’s because a lot of people are engaging with /c/science via their own feeds and not visiting the community directly? But either way it seems like, for now at least, individual question posts would probably get more engagement.

  • Auster@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    I’d imagine a centralized weekly Q/A post would get more engagement, and thus appearing more often when sorting by activity, which would then cause, by extension, more engagement. And this potentially self-sustained cycle could be good for Q/A.

    And I’d likely try to contribute with answers, but I might ask every now and then.