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- mdda 16y agoThis whole post perplexes me. I had no idea that there was such a thing as a StackOverflow 'community'. What's important to me is that Google (or whatever) gets to crawl the questions/answers (and tags, I guess, since I hadn't really noticed them either). The problem with forking is that while in the past I would quickly go for the 'StackOverflow' google links (since I've seen that the brand really stands for knowledgeable & helpful), now I've got to recognize more brands?
- mdda 16y agoDon't get me wrong : StackOverflow is an excellent resource, and I would definitely be a contributor if when one tries to 'up vote' something it didn't force you to log in with an unfriendly message... Perhaps the UI could track my mods (and meta-mod them) and pop up a box that says : 'you look like you know stuff - please Join Us!'
- agscala 16y agoWhy did they even bother breaking stackoverflow into various similar-yet-different websites? Originally, a question only needed to be specified by the associated tags. Now, in order to post a question the user needs to also pick the appropriate website AND the correct tags. I don't think having multiple websites actually made anything simpler; they give more room for people to bark at each other about asking in the wrong place. All that each website does is provide a filter so that when you want to browse through it, you see questions that are generally related by a certain topic. Wouldn't this have been better created with user-defined (or pre-populated default) tag filters and having remained contained in one website?
- keltex 16y agoThe problem is that topic nazis will jump all over you (i.e. close your question as off topic) if you dare ask a question that might be server administration based rather than a programming question.
- robg 16y agoPerfect example there where "server" + "administration", or heck even "server" alone, in the text is sufficient to classify the question. Add additional terms and classification gets more and more discrete. Tags are necessary for photos. I don't see how text is the same problem at all.
- thwarted 16y agoI somewhat feel the same way about twitter's hashtags. All it does it eat up the limited space already allocated. Why are you not putting words related to the topic in your tweet already?
- bmelton 16y agoI always felt that the hashtags were a good idea, but that everybody was using them wrong. If, for example, my tweet looks like this: "I had a great time posting on Hacker News #hackernews, #great_time" then I am doing it all wrong. I thought the smarter implementation would be to do something more like: "I had a #great_time posting on #hackernews" It doesn't eat up as much space, but the inclusion of the hash allows for content grouping and all the other nonsense it provides. The first time I saw it used in the first way, I was kind of sad for the author, as I believe that the intent was for them to replace words, and the author just didn't get it... but I've seen it misused more than I haven't, so either the world at large is doing it wrong, or I am misunderstanding something.
- eru 16y agoThis works best in (mostly) isolating languages like English. If your grammar forces you to modify words, you need some workarounds. Say, define certain tags as synonyms of each other.
- robg 16y agoWhat really saddens me is the necessary information is in the text already, especially when considering co-occurrences, to keep everything as one big happy family. The text separates the topics, we just have to be careful in calculating the differential weights.
- danilocampos 16y agoIt's a fair question. Watching Stack Overflow's balkanization is a little worrisome. It raises the complexity of the product, which adds friction to the task of getting a question answered. It's easier to go to the wrong place than it is to have content re-classified.
- petercooper 16y agoI agree with your argument on a logical, rational level. I can concede, however, that "branding" is important to people in ways they rarely care to admit. Having "a site" can feel different to people than carving out an area of interest with a search query, especially on a site with a "community." Communities form around sites and brands, not search queries. That said, I still agree with you despite appreciating the nuances of bizarre human behavior ;-) Sites like MetaFilter, Reddit, and Hacker News (to a lesser extent) have managed to spread their brands into multiple topic areas (and multiple "sites" in Reddit's case) without diluting people's sense of being a Mefite or Redditor.
- andreyf 16y agoI agree with your argument on a logical, rational level. I can concede, however, that "branding" is important to people in ways they rarely care to admit Bingo. One thing I remember from Jeff & Joel's podcasts when I listened to them was how much thought they put into facilitating a sense of a community on the site. Another is being surprised how technically competent Joel is, when it comes to technical CS stuffs (explaining the difference between the halting problem and NP problems, for example). He's also certainly no newbie when it comes to building a brand with a following.
- vog 16y agoWhile I agree that we need more people with deeper CS knowledge in the business, your particular example (halting problem and NP) is somewhat strange. Any CS student should have learned this in the 3rd semester or earlier, at least in my university. I wouldn't count that as an example of great technical competence. The halting problem, logic, complexity classes, type systems, evaluation models etc are basic concepts. So I'd rather be surprised if anyone who's said to be competent could not explain those.
- khafra 16y agoI'd be surprised if the average person who's been out of school and programming for at least a decade, let alone moved mostly on to managing programmers, could still remember the difference between an NP complete problem and the halting problem at an "can explain it to your grandmother" level.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- henry_flower 16y agoSo, if I have a non-programming question about Linux, I need to check first all 4 sites before posting the goddam question to one of them. Or even posting 1 question to 4 sites? Ha-ha. Very clever.
- kapitalx 16y agoOnce you fork, you can never merge!
- jiaaro 16y agoyou don't use git, do you? :P
- mfukar 16y agoForgive me if I'm wrong, but it's not a minor difference: Linux is a kernel, Ubuntu is a distribution.
- rpledge 16y agoNot sure who down voted you, you have a good point. I'm not a big StackOverflow follower, but if I had a generic kernel question I wouldn't ask it on a Ubuntu Q&A forum.
- robryan 16y agoThat's true, but feels very specific still for a whole site. Imagine if stackoverflow itself was on that specific a topic area. It would have never got big originally.
- praptak 16y ago"Linux is a kernel" As a topic of questions? I think not. I believe that most people when thinking "site for questions about Linux" would include both kernel and Ubuntu questions within the scope. And of course a lot more - gnu tools, "which distro?" questions, advocacy, apps-related questions, libs, configuring the X server...
- mfukar 16y agoI'm not going to argue semantics here; if you happen to have noticed, the Unix/Linux, Ubuntu and SuperUser sites all have overlapping areas of interest. Does that mean they should all be one? The StackExchange people seem to think not, and when it comes to justification on appropriate and on-topic questions, the meta sites and the opinions of the moderators are good enough for me.
- Robin_Message 16y agoBEGIN-DICTIONARY-UPDATE-PACKET Linux - 1. a free Unix-type operating system. 2. (technical) the kernel of that operating system. See also GNU+Linux, GNU/Linux, Stallman R., bikeshedding, pedantry END-PACKET Ubuntu is a distribution of the Linux OS, so there is likely to be a large overlap in the questions - e.g. "How do I do X in bash (BTW, I'm on Ubuntu Randy Racoon)?" Many users may not want to ask a question outside the home forum of the distro they installed; conversly, most questions will apply to more than one distro. Merging these makes sense, except for community effects.
- pkaler 16y agoI use both StackOverflow and Quora every single day. I think StackOverflow's approach of staying on topic and building a community around a topic is great for bootstrapping. But in the long run I think the Quora approach is better. I like seeing startup topics and then serendipitously seeing topics about motorcycles. I don't think I'll ever see a StackExchange topic on motorcycles.
- andreyf 16y agoI don't think I'll ever see a StackExchange topic on motorcycles. Wy not? there's one about bicycles: I don't think I'll ever see a StackExchange topic on motorcycles.
- viraptor 16y agoI've got a strange feeling that they could leave the sites in one piece if they allowed users to completely remove some tags. Right now you can ignore some stuff, but that doesn't always help. As much as I'd like to ignore-but-not-remove some questions (like Ruby-related ones - I don't use it, but would be glad to keep an eye on what's happening there), I also want some of them to disappear completely. For example right now there are ~10 iphone / ipad / iwhatever / obj-c related questions. I don't have any interest in those technologies and they just get in the way. To lesser extent this applies also to flex, asp.net and java-ee for me. I'm really surprised this option is not available and I think that for many people this would be sufficient to actually remove many off-topic questions from their view. No need to split the community, since people might actually see something random they know answer to, even if they're not interested in the area normally - for example many sysadmins could give quick answers to most of the "programming" bash questions.
- SandB0x 16y agoThe tags on the very front page need to be improved. "Ignored" tags on the front page just fade the text, rather than filtering. However you will probably be happier using tag-specific views. Questions tagged as Ruby: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/ruby http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/ruby Questions tagged Ruby AND Javascript http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/ruby+javascript http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/ruby+javascript Questions tagged Ruby OR Javascript: "http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/ruby http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/ruby or javascript" (or rather http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/ruby%20or%20javascript http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/ruby%20or%20javasc...) I suspect many Stack Overflow answerers do it this way round with a large number of tags, rather than trying to ignore tags they don't like.
- viraptor 16y agoWell... that actually removes one part of SO I like - sometimes I read a question that seems interesting in some way, even though it's not from my area of expertise. It makes it easier to find out new trends, sometimes discover some cool libraries / ideas I should look at, etc. I like the randomness of the frontpage. Or actually, I liked it before half of the page was grayed out.
- redacted 16y agoBecause this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/ubuntu?sort=newest http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/ubuntu?sort=newest http://superuser.com/questions/tagged/ubuntu?sort=newest http://superuser.com/questions/tagged/ubuntu?sort=newest http://ubuntu.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=newest http://ubuntu.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=newest http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ubuntu?sort=newest http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ubuntu?sort=n... is obviously a good situation for people trying to ask questions or find answers.
- codinghorror 16y agoIndeed, if only someone could invent some kind of search engine to find all that information across all those websites..
- redacted 16y agoTouché. Finding information is well handled by the search engines, I retract that part of my comment. Asking the question in the first place is not helped by search engines though.
- albertzeyer 16y agoThis was often discussed in the past: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/49367/why-not-one-single-stackoverflow-closed http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/49367/why-not-one-si... It is terribly annoying and often has hit me myself. Some programming related question about Xorg? -> moved to superuser. Some filesystem question about iPhone on superuser? -> closed because mobile phones are offtopic. Some question about OpenID on superuser -> moved to serverfault (actually, it has pointed out in the end that it was programming related...). Question about JVM performance -> closed as too argumentative. Question about Bash on stackoverflow -> moved to serverfault (because I didn't put the word "programmatically" into my question). Question about ACL in the MacOSX filesystem on stackoverflow -> moved to superuser. Ok enough of this. The point was probably already clear in the original post. I really wonder what we can do about it. I like Quora for being universal. And I like Stackoverflow because of the somewhat better management (despite all the different sites) and many details. And the killer argument for Stackoverflow: Everything is open, all content becomes cc-by-sa and I can download the full database. Sort of like Wikipedia. And I often get much more and better answers on SO (probably just because more people are using it). So I mostly end up asking on SO (or related sites). I am not sure if they ever will fix/change this mess. I hope that they do at some point but I actually doubt it. Maybe another solution would be another, new and open solution which just works as SO but is just as general as possible (and some more simple way to filter for a bunch of tags). The database of SO could be imported there and some metasearch-engine could also be linked with it which automatically searches and links questions on other sites.
- caf 16y agoMoving a question is far too easy. It's impossible to vote against a move, so the tables are tilted firmly towards the over-eager question-movers. You can't even vote to un-move it once it's happened, unless you happen to have enough rep on the recipient site.
- codinghorror 16y agoI would say that Yahoo Answers, answers.com, allexperts.com, wikianswer, askville, answerbag, yedda, and the hundreds of other generic "answer" sites have proven that this is a bad idea.