Joel Spolsky: Merging Season

#1

Post by edanm » Fri, Sep 17, 2010, 9:13 PM UTC

Joel Spolsky: Merging Season
blog.stackoverflow.com

Re: Joel Spolsky: Merging Season

#2

Post by swanson » Fri, Sep 17, 2010, 10:26 PM UTC

Ugh, so now there is a Programmer StackExchange separate from StackOverflow? Were the off-topic, 'water cooler' posts really that bad?

Re: Joel Spolsky: Merging Season

#3

Post by andywhite37 » Fri, Sep 17, 2010, 10:39 PM UTC

swanson wrote: post #2

Ugh, so now there is a Programmer StackExchange separate from StackOverflow? Were the off-topic, 'water cooler' posts really that bad?

I agree with "Ugh." There are way too many stack exchange sites. And moreover, the pedantic "on-topic/off-topic" debates work well with the programmer culture, but it gets tiresome really fast when you want to just ask a question about how to do something simple on a basic web app.

Hopefully the core team will make strides to eliminate the duplication and over-segmentation of all these Q&A sites.

Re: Joel Spolsky: Merging Season

#4

Post by ary » Fri, Sep 17, 2010, 10:44 PM UTC

"Do we really need a site for each individual content management system?"

It's interesting that CMS specific sites were even proposed. In my experience (mostly with the Drupal community) CMS advocates tend to be pretty tribal and desire a narrow focus. A cross-CMS Stack Exchange site would probably seem like it was full of noise to everyone involved. What would deemed to be signal VS noise would depend entirely on one's CMS of choice.

Re: Joel Spolsky: Merging Season

#5

Post by patrickaljord » Fri, Sep 17, 2010, 10:52 PM UTC

Quora is doing just fine with one big site only.

Re: Joel Spolsky: Merging Season

#6

Post by smackaysmith » Fri, Sep 17, 2010, 10:56 PM UTC

Sweet wood floors.

Re: Joel Spolsky: Merging Season

#7

Post by SkyMarshal » Sat, Sep 18, 2010, 12:59 AM UTC

patrickaljord wrote: post #5

Quora is doing just fine with one big site only.

Yes, much better model imho - put it all under one roof, and make it easy to find and expose only topics you're interested in. Similar to Reddit's subreddits in that respect, both work well.

Re: Joel Spolsky: Merging Season

#8

Post by spc476 » Sat, Sep 18, 2010, 1:26 AM UTC

Perhaps it's just me, but this sounds like Joel is trying to recreate a web-based, centralized Usenet.

Re: Joel Spolsky: Merging Season

#9

Post by ojbyrne » Sat, Sep 18, 2010, 1:35 AM UTC

spc476 wrote: post #8

Perhaps it's just me, but this sounds like Joel is trying to recreate a web-based, centralized Usenet.

Not sure that's a bad thing. Many innovations seem to be about recycling old communities for new mediums.

Re: Joel Spolsky: Merging Season

#10

Post by callmeed » Sat, Sep 18, 2010, 2:26 AM UTC

I had high hopes for the SE platform back when you could pay to host your own. I've lost fascination with it now. StackOverflow is great but everything else ... Meh.

Browsed the cooking one and even submitted a question. Most of the best best answers are simply links out to other popular food sites/blogs. If that's going to be the case, it's doomed IMO. At least with SO you get solid answes with code in the answer.