But it’s sometimes hard to gauge who is an expert if it’s a topic you are unfamiliar with. It helps if someone mentions (“I have been doing this for the last 5 years”) or wrote a literal book on the subject.
Lately [2] I had no enough time to look up, and usually dang post a link before I see the repost.
[1] Best in my opinion. Usually the top one, but sometimes the second one, or a mix of a comment and a reply.
[2] In the last few years...
Forum software like Discourse also reliably brings them up in an effort to avoid deduplication of discussion.
The best discussions are also springboards for articles, books, and sometimes whole companies.
It is closer to a book index than a table of contents (to use older information technology tools) but one where the whole index is not accessible.
Think about those millions of people, interacting for billions of hours online over almost two decades now. What is there to show for it at the end of the day? If even 1% of that exchange its somehow "valuable", it means there is a lost opportunity. And it will be kept thrown away in the future.
Wouldn't it be useful if we somehow could use technology to persist the "better" bits across this ever growing digital ocean? Something like wikipedia but autogenerated from diverse sources, with no claim to "truth", but rather a concise, searchable repository of whatever people are interested and are discussing online.