On the subject of a question/answer site: What incentive would I have to use it over well-established services, such as StackOverflow (and related stackexchange sites) or even Yahoo Answers...all of which don't cost me my DVC?
Because if your answer isn't on StackOverflow or Yahoo Answers or if the only person who can answer it is on AskDevs then you'll have to go to AskDevs. Some people in this community are the only people who can answer certain questions, in other cases the answer will be so difficult that no one is going to want to spend a hours,days, or months answering it for free on Yahoo Answers or StackOverflow.
Like if I ask the question,
what is the best way to increase the market cap for PPCoin?It's a specific question so it wont be on Yahoo Answers. It wont be on StackOverflow either. The more specific it is the less likely you'll find it there. Like if I ask:
what is a viable solution for Blockchain bloat? Even less likely we will see that on StackOverflow or Yahoo answers.
Now lets say I ask a hyper specific question like:
How can we maximize the security of Netcoin network while maintaining a decentralized power structure?Most people don't know what Netcoin is on those other sites because it's not even released yet. Most don't know much about hashing algorithms and even if they did, if we don't pay them they aren't going to invent a new hashing algorithm or a new algorithm to solve a particular problem so what I was aiming for with AskDevs was not just a site to tell stories or to ask random questions but a site to allow developers in the cryptocurrency community to in a structured fashion ask questions to the whole cryptocurrency community. To leverage the brainpower of the whole cryptocurrency community which I believe is immense and underutilized.
Zerocoin was invented to make Bitcoin more anonymous, but the question "How can we allow anonymous online transactions" could have been floating around in the community for months. Just like the question of how to build a distributed exchange floated around for months until it was resolved. Now the questions about market cap and how to increase market cap are still floating around and because they aren't all in one place we wont even be able to find the common community asked questions, and because all the solutions aren't in one place the next coin developer (such as Tacotime who is developing Netcoin) will not easily be able to look at all the solutions or algorithms which exist to make better coins.
This is the reason why we end up with so many cloned coins which are technologically worthless. AskDevs would act as a type of scientific journal where individuals can ask a question of unlimited complexity if the bounty is high enough to solve it. It has to be AskDevs because Stack Exchange and Yahoo Answers don't support Bitcoin and don't pay for solutions which means you're not going to get PhD level solutions from it even if some people have PhD level knowledge.
For reference:
http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questionssee the strengths and limitations of StackExchange.