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Joel Spolsky: Merging Season

blog.stackoverflow.com

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Re: Joel Spolsky: Merging Season

#11

Post by staunch »

ary wrote: post #4

"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 on…

My first reaction as well. If that's true though, how do we explain that Stack Overflow itself has done so well? People are at least as tribal about languages.

Re: Joel Spolsky: Merging Season

#12

Post by psadauskas »

staunch wrote: post #11
ary wrote: post #4

"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 on…

My first reaction as well. If that's true though, how do we explain that Stack Overflow itself has done so well? People are at least as tribal about languages.

I program professionally in Ruby, Javascript, Erlang, and some Java. Add in the pieces of each, HAML, JQuery, GWT, and the languages I like reading about, such as Haskell and Lua, and thats a good % of SO. It would be much more annoying if it was separate sites.

Also, lots of info about most languages is useful, even to other languages. I imagine its much less so for CMSs.

Re: Joel Spolsky: Merging Season

#13

Post by derefr »

spc476 wrote: post #8

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

Well, a part of it (the comp.* hierarchy), perhaps. In fact, this seems to be a pattern—Facebook is really just a new soc.*, etc.

I wonder if there's a good pointer to potentially-profitable market gaps here: pick some part of Usenet, and turn it into a website that tries to centralize all discussion on that topic to itself.

Re: Joel Spolsky: Merging Season

#14

Post by zacharypinter »

Interesting that he mentions "we made one big site for all programmers and told them to use tags and, lo and behold, it worked." One of the most frustrating things about using stackoverflow.com is finding a good question and having it be marked off topic or moved to another site to die.

I was recently trying to compare ereaders (with the iPad in mind) for technical PDF's. I thought stack overflow might have other programmers asking the same question, so I searched and found the page/question I was looking for. However, it was moved to superuser.com. Then, it was moved to some gadgets stack exchange. By the time it was on the gadget site, nobody was adding to it. Now, the gadget site is closed due to inactivity and I can't find the question's active URL (if there even is one anymore).

For reference, I think this was the original question on stack overflow:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3000902/e-readers-for-pdf...

Overall, a very frustrating experience.

Re: Joel Spolsky: Merging Season

#15

Post by adolph »

While scanning this article I was struck by an uncanny likeness of Spolsky's article to very old Philip Greenspun posts about photo.net and the ArsDigita system, complete with nice random photos of wolf-like dogs. In my awareness, and to my interest, frameworks to meet psycho-social challenges in software development are still so lacking. I'm glad that Spolsky and Atwood are working on this.
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