Open forum versus questions only community
What are your thoughts on an open forum versus a forum that only allows questions. For example, Indiehackers allows all types of posts where producthunt and wip.chat are questions only.
What are the pros and cons for each and which is best for a specific community type?
From the perspective of the person who runs a community, questions are quite good for SEO purposes, as searchers tend to phrase things as questions. (See both Stack Overflow and Quora for examples of this in action.)
Questions can also be a bit longer-lived. Discussion topics are typically scoped by date, and sink out of existence over time (see: Reddit, Hacker News, Indie Hackers), whereas Q&A sites tend to keep their questions around forever, and steer people toward answering and viewing existing questions rather than asking duplicates.
Of course, this only works if you have universally-applicable questions with evergreen answers. For example, "How should I grow my business?" is a question that's different every time it's asked, depending on who's asking and the context they provide. That's rarely true for the programming questions on Stack Overflow.
Also, another type of content to consider is link posts. Sites like HN and Reddit allow people to share and discuss links to external content and news. You can technically do that on Indie Hackers, too, but it rarely happens, because that's not what people really come here for.
This is such a great answer.
Another distinction I like to draw between communities that have an upvote feature is whether or not they allow you to upvote your own post. I've always liked that usually the communities that do allow you usually do it for you automatically.
This comment was deleted 8 years ago