Introducing Designing Sound Exchange!

We’ve got a brand new feature on the site today! We’ve added a discussion area…

Welcome to Designing Sound Exchange!

We’re calling it a discussion area and not a forum, because it’s not really set up like a forum. Many long time readers may remember a site called Social Sound Design, and we’ve modeled DSE after it. If you remember how that site was, before it merged with Stack Exchange, skip this next paragraph.

For those of you who never used Social Sound Design, it was a self moderated place where people could ask questions about gear, technique and aesthetics. Any member could ask a question, and any member could throw up an answer. The more active discussions stayed at the top of the list, and the best answers to questions stayed at the top of the response queue…meaning you didn’t have to hunt through the full thread to find it. Having an answer didn’t mean the discussions were closed though, they stayed open for people to keep debating and exploring. The thing that made Social Sound Design special was that it was a focused community; one that centered around sound designers. The community it served was niche, so we could get into some very deep and detailed discussions.

That community aspect changed when SSD merged into Stack Exchange. We were suddenly part of a much larger community, and one that was nowhere near as focused as it had been on SSD. We started seeing questions about mp3/media players, setting up home A/V systems, or how to record Skype conversations. The types of questions and discussions we loved were quickly drowned by a flood of questions many of us had no interest for participating in. The previously active users from SSD quickly stopped coming to the site, and that community never really recovered. Every couple of months though, you could find at least one of those users on Twitter or Facebook asking what could be done to fix or revive it. The smartest answer was always, “Build and host it yourself.” Asking sound designer to delve that deeply into web development is next to impossible though.

Fast forward a couple of years, and there are now plug-ins available for WordPress based sites (i.e. this one) that emulate the Stack Overflow system. That means we could create something very similar, right here on Designing Sound! We’ve spent the last month conducting tests; first just testing out plug-ins and configurations…whether or not it would work…then with a small group of some of the original core members of SSD. We’ve hammered out all of the bugs we can, so it’s time to open it  up to the rest of our community.

We’ve placed a permanent link to it in the menu bar above, and the url is Exchange.DesigningSound.Org.

We hope you’ll join us there!