
Expatriates Stack Exchange - nsaparanoid
http://expatriates.stackexchange.com/
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rmc
Nice wealthy people from nice rich countries are "Expats". People from poor
countries are "immigrants". It's an interesting language hack society
developed.

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jzwinck
Within the expat community I think there is a different distinction. Expats
(to me, and to some of the people I know who use that term to describe
themselves) are on a temporary assignment ("secondment") for work. People who
move to another country on their own, without a company transfer, and/or who
intend to stay there indefinitely, are not expats. There are also plenty of
cases where an expat becomes "localized" and stays somewhere longer, but is no
longer considered an expat by their company, and perhaps no longer by their
local friends.

Different people use the term in different ways, unfortunately including what
you said. But the above is how I look at it.

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TillE
> People who move to another country on their own, without a company transfer,
> and/or who intend to stay there indefinitely, are not expats.

That first part is a really strange criterion which I've never seen before.

As for staying indefinitely, that's why I don't necessarily consider myself an
immigrant - I've been here for six years, but the future is always uncertain.
I might have a different opinion if Germany allowed dual citizenship through
naturalization, but they don't.

~~~
Dirty-flow
It's allowed but not for all nationalities.

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jfoster
It's hard to imagine how it could survive. Even the Startups site (supposedly)
didn't meet the StackExchange criteria because it only averaged 4.9
questions/day:

[http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/6243/startup-
busin...](http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/6243/startup-business)

StackExchange replaced Q&A sites that were completely backward in their
approach (eg. requiring signups to see answers), but StackExchange itself is
becoming a little bit backward. Questions that might involve some healthy
discussion rather than a straightforward answer get shut down too easily, and
they forfeit decent sites (eg. Startups, after 3 years!) just because they
didn't meet some arbitrary minimum activity criteria. The data dump download
doesn't even work, so now there's just a tonne of information that people
contributed which is lost.

(edit: data dump download actually does work, but it's still such a waste to
discard the momentum, Google indexing, etc.)

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mhp
Your thesis is that "StackExchange itself is becoming a little bit backward",
but the statements you use to back that up have been part of Stack Exchange
from the beginning. Also, the things you point out that are 'broken' are part
of the formula that makes the network succeed.

Stack Overflow was not built for discussion. The FAQ says: "Not all questions
work well in our format. Avoid questions that are primarily opinion-based, or
that are likely to generate discussion rather than answers." I understand that
you may want those types of questions to exist there, but that's not the
original purpose of Stack Overflow. (Sidenote: different sites, depending on
their topic or maturity do allow more open ended questions, but I believe you
may be referring to 'closing questions' on Stack Overflow). I sympathize with
this point though because I believe that there are probably a class of
questions that could exist on SO, that are currently closed, but may need to
be treated in a different way than normal Q&A.

Your second point about closing sites that aren't working is also intentional.
Some of your complaint was about the fact that the data dump was not
available, which was actually not true. It's also intentional that the data
dump exists so that if we decide the site is not a good fit for our goals,
everyone else can still reuse that data ( i.e.
[http://www.brightjourney.com/](http://www.brightjourney.com/) ) This might be
related to your first complaint which boils down to 'It's not hurting anyone,
why not just leave it there?' The answer to that is more complicated than I
can summarize here, but there are many different things that go into making a
successful community, and one of them is defining what 'successful' (and 'not
successful') means. And there is a process for dealing with 'not successful'
which is transparent. The criteria is not arbitrary. It's reasoned.

Joel Spolsky elaborates on this in the following talk:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpGA2fmAHvM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpGA2fmAHvM)

(I work for Stack Exchange.)

~~~
jfoster
I understand that it's intentional and what StackExchange perceives as being
necessary, appropriate, etc.

The problem is that this approach is under-serving the needs of
StackExchange's users.

I don't think that SE needs to be transparent here. It's up to you guys to
decide how you want to run your site. I just think the current approach will
result in the success of competitors that are less trigger-happy on shutting
down questions.

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yannis
I have been both an "expat" and an immigrant (UAE, Qatar, Libya). Here is the
difference. As an "expat" I never intended to stay in the country for long. As
a young immigrant I went to South Africa settled bought a house had kids and
businesses and eventually became a citizen.

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tobylane
I like to read /top/month or /top/year/ of many subreddits. With StackExchange
there is only top, and I can't see a way to come back a long time later and
see what's new in highly liked questions. Are there any third party sites that
cater to this?

Relevant because I imagine I'll read the top questions now, and again in a
year with many questions coming up both times.

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davidw
My instincts are that country->country specific forums are more valuable.
Americans in Italy, like me, or Australians in Germany, or Canadians in Spain,
or whatever. Because a lot of the value in these things is helping navigate
the local bureaucracy, culture, and lifestyle for someone who is new to it.

~~~
mirod1
tags should help, but after browsing the site, I am not sure they do.

Stackoverflow works well because it is really easy to scan only questions
about the topics I am interested about. The tags are quite precise and there
is general consensus on what they should be. I look at the "perl" tag, often,
or at the "XML" one... voilà!

With a "soft" subject, like expats, it's harder to filter interesting
questions. It doesn't naturally lead to accepted categories, and most of the
info I would be interested in wouldn't fit in a single one.

So either the site stays low-volume, and I can scan all questions, and rarely
find one that I am interested in. Or it becomes successful and chances are
that I will miss the threads I would have liked to read.

Bother...

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tinkertim
The site _just_ came out of private beta, so tags are a bit of a mess. We're
cleaning them up now, and working on conventions for location / country tags,
which do make narrowing questions much simpler.

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alandarev
What's up with stackexchange menu bar? It is in unknown to me language (if
language at all).

But if I view the source code or copy, I get plain English, what the hell?

Example: [http://i.imgur.com/Gcyrwpe.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/Gcyrwpe.jpg)

~~~
tinkertim
You have any browser extensions that might be misbehaving? (I work for Stack
Exchange). Nothing on our side could be sending that to you.

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alandarev
Using other stackexchange sites is fine.

I am no longer able to validate whether addon-less browser would work, as the
issue is mysteriously resolved now.

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tinkertim
I blame Cthulhu. Mystery solved.

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Hansi
Very nice, like it. Already came across some helpful questions and answers.

