What matters more is the rate at which content is generated, and I think GH has a pretty competitive story considering that people naturally want to ask the project maintainers/community questions directly (as evidenced by all of the GitHub Issues which are formulated as questions) and considering GitHub's significant share of those maintainers/communities. I posit that new content will increasingly appear on GH Discussions.
Please don't mistake this for some exaggerated "GH is going to kill SO" argument--SO will do fine, but there is a compelling story for why MS wouldn't spend $1bn on SO.
This is a weakness of SO and really the whole knowledge base business model (Q&A or not). You think you're building up this network-effect moat. "We have the best question-askers, answer-givers and answered questions. So everyone comes here!"
But, knowledge goes stale. "How do you X in JS?" is different than it was 10 years ago. People don't want a historical archive of how it was 10 years ago, they want to know today!
Then, like you say, GitHub brings in a whole new weird angle. Why ask on some other site when I have a spot where the maintainers and users hang out? Since my loyalty to SO is approximately zero, I'm just as likely to click on the Google result that takes me to GitHub if it looks more promising.
I wonder how much of SO fits in the "particular repo" category? Not so much for my interests, but I imagine the chunk for popular web frameworks is huge.
Recently I need some python + mariadb answers and most of the top ones are out-of-date enough that I can't even use them (deprecated packages). I was a bit surprised TBH.
Also TIL GitHub Discussions is a thing.
Some of those SO discussions are the only references to ancient legacy code that is useful, when asking any questions about it today would not get any answers.
So, depending on how we calculate value, if we ignore demand, it can be more valuable.
Github issues, on the other hand, seems to be receptive to open-ended "why" questions which would be smacked down hard on SO. Github has a higher barrier to entry. You have to know where to go, but if you're in the right place it's a much nicer community with more classy and professional conduct. Also, it doesn't have a gamification aspect to it, unlike SO, and thus fewer irritating/persnickety types are attracted to Github because they can't really score points.
I feel like most “often asked” questions has been answered. I very seldomly find that creating a new question is necessary as most things is covered in past awnsers. However for package related problems, GitHub issues has become the go to.
Unless..."Prosus" pulls a Google+DejaNews and obscures SO's availability or paywalls it or, or, or...
The way to integration that content into an existing project would be to document it better - possibly with a FAQ for development questions. That doesn't really need CC licensing (its helpful, but not essential) in that people who want to contribute documentation can already do so.
Just pull up a SO tag for the library, find the top voted question, and figure out where it goes in the docs.
Q&A shouldn't be used as an alternative to documentation.
