Reddit as a StackExchange Alternative

StackExchange has had a rough week. Concurrently, I’ve been getting back into answering questions on r/learnpython. The combination of the two events made me wonder: could Reddit be a viable alternative to StackExchange?

Personally, I’ve never had a bad experience with StackExchange and have never experienced any of the harshness that others have described on the site. On the other hand, while I’ve managed to rack up a whopping 301 points, even those few points have been earned cautiously. I think long and hard before posting either a question or an answer. Arguably, that’s what makes StackOverflow and co. so great. In theory, it attracts extremely high quality content. Reddit, not necessarily.

And yet! I enjoy interacting with people on r/learnpython so much more. I’ve probably posted a dozen questions there myself and answered somewhere on the order of 100-1000. (I had a script that counted at one point but lost it). Sure, the quality of my contributions is certainly lower, but integrated over the number of interactions my net benefit to other programmers is probably higher on r/learnpython. I contribute what I can when I can instead of being nervous that the question is a duplicate.

The obvious answer to “Can you replace StackExchange with Reddit?” is “No”. And that’s also the correct answer. But…Reddit also has a really nice API.

Is there a way you could aggregate Reddit Q&As to emulate StackExchange’s quality?

The answer to this question isn’t so obvious to me. I don’t have many specifics on what such an aggregation would look like, but I think it could have some interesting properties. For example, a common StackExchange complaint is that accepted and/or top answers are often stale. I run into this a lot. Perhaps Reddit’s more chronologically focused algorithms could be leveraged to address this issue?

Clearly, this is still a nascent idea for a long-term solution to a complex problem. But in the meantime, for those of you who want to take a breather from StackExchange, try Reddit! Even as is, it’s fun!