The SE Network covers a wide variety of subjects. Some communities are more active than others. Over the years, I've used a variety of online forums to ask questions, but there is a convenience in having a single hub like SE to cover everything from computer programming to Christian Hermeneutics and Theology, Questions about Jewish law and tradition, Worldbuilding, Physics, Car repair...
If this family of sites ceased to exist, where would we go?
CodidactThis would be my top recommendation. It's currently being developed by the very same people that left this site, fed up with the ongoing controversy that Stack Exchange seems to generate on a consistent basis. It's completely open-source, community driven, and free. It has a growing list of communities.
Same place I always go: Google, and then click the first link that doesn't look like garbage. The fact that right now that first link is more often than not an SE answer and maybe later it won't be doesn't actually change that process.
I can probably count on one hand the number of times I've had an actual question that isn't already asked and answered elsewhere.
This is a community oriented Q&A alternative without commercial interests, that is already running for a couple of communities. At the time of writing this answer, it already has
More communities can be added, see https://topanswers.xyz/meta?q=211#question and as user of Stack Exchange you probably won't believe it, but the time scale for bug fixes and feature requests is more like 6-8 minutes/hours instead of 6-8 months/years!
I think as of now, there aren't real alternatives:
Codidact is just emerging. I hope it will work out, but who can say right now.
Quora is already a really large network, but it lacks in various ways. And most notably, the Quora management is driving forward their "Quora partner program" that basically motivates people to bulk-create crappy questions. Yeah, a great community about to be ruined by the company running the servers. You can ask decent questions there, and get really good answers in many areas, but plenty of the experts are leaving that platform because of the aforementioned wave of (really) low quality questions.
And yes, I do not see Quora as a real alternative, it comes with severe restrictions. I am mainly saying: you can (or could, in the past), get really great expert advice in that place, too.
https://www.reddit.com/ covers a fair amount of topics, has a large user base, and all of the content can be accessed without any registration.
Downsides of Reddit:
PS: I'm not advocating for Reddit, I'm just trying to help explore Q&A options other than Stack Exchange, because Quora has major issues (e.g., one can't write question details and has no available dumps) and other options mentioned in this thread so far have a very small user base or aren't even launched yet.
FYI: Meta QA progam: posting the same question on several QA websites
Hopefully, in 2 years time, to my own decentralized Q&A mesh node page.
I'm not ready to announce anything specific, but I'll be watching other Q&A projects evolve, learn from their successes and mistakes, and take the best from their experience and implement it in a way that I see would be best for me, my colleagues at work, and my personal project's small community.
I believe the knowledge should be free, open source, and in the hands of the global worldwide community, and all who want should be able to roll their own instance of a Q&A platform and have a say in how it's run, but the knowledge should be copy-able in case one instance goes bad, so that the others can pick up its remaining good content.
If someone else beats me to this goal first, I'll combine my efforts with theirs, as I would in any other collaborative online development. For now, while the content here is still free to copy with proper attribution, I'll continue normal use of the network, and then take the good stuff with me to a better place. And for being able to do this I thank the original creators of this network for their forethoughtfulness.
Nowhere.
Hopefully that's true of the students, too. They'll be forced to study and learn and do proper research like we did in the olden days, rather than getting spoonfed solutions to use to get qualifications that they haven't actually earnt, then enter (and dilute) the industry for quick bucks without really even knowing what they're doing.
Not trying to be rude; this is just the truth of it.
I expect the answer will be very different for the large sites than the small sites.
For a small site, two or three users can easily cover the cost of hosting it themselves and few modulation tools are needed. Having a single login for a network gives few benefits if all independent sites allow logging on with Google/Facebook.
If small sites are truly independent of each other, there is no reprotention risk to other sides, and hence no need for cross site enforcement of rules. However, the "hot question" list is also lost, so it is a lot harder to get new users.
For a large site like Stack Overflow, income needs to be generated to cover the running costs and staff costs. Great tools are also needed for modulation.
