
Fork it - bhousel
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/fork-it/
======
agscala
Why 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?

~~~
petercooper
I 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
_I 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
While 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
I'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.

~~~
vog
I disagree, because the NP completeness and halting problem are very different
concepts. Confusing those means not having understood them in the first place.

However, things would be different if it was about something like "NP hard"
vs. "NP complete" vs. "NP". That kind of details are easily forgotten if one
doesn't work in that field.

~~~
khafra
Well, BQP and FBQP are very different concepts, but I doubt anyone who hasn't
actively studied complexity theory in the last few years could explain the
difference. Same goes for NP-complete and Entscheidungsproblem; if you don't
use it, you lose it.

I mean, anybody with a CS degree should know that the halting problem has
something to do with predicting whether a given Turing machine will ever stop;
but that's not "explain it to your grandmother" level.

------
albertzeyer
This was often discussed in the past:
[http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/49367/why-not-one-
si...](http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/49367/why-not-one-single-
stackoverflow-closed)

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.

~~~
codinghorror
I 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.

~~~
cookiecaper
Why? Those sites have done pretty well. I think it's a good idea. I really am
annoyed by the variety of SO sites and the juggling you get when you encounter
something that requires an overlapping of disciplines. It's pretty common for
sysadmins to need to do a bit of programming and programmers to do a bit (or
more) of sysadminning, and the questions aren't always immediately separated.

It should all be consolidated into SO and SO should be given "super-tags" or
"categories" for server admin, programming, etc., and then you don't need a
bunch of different sites/designs with fewer users. In short, take the reddit
approach; allow users to subscribe to categorized channels that interest them
and compile the front page based on that.

~~~
codinghorror
yes, exactly like we're doing with the stackexchange.com homepage, perhaps?
[http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/customizing-
stackexcha...](http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/customizing-
stackexchange-com/)

------
redacted
Because this:

<http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/ubuntu?sort=newest>

<http://superuser.com/questions/tagged/ubuntu?sort=newest>

<http://ubuntu.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=newest>

[http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ubuntu?sort=n...](http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ubuntu?sort=newest)

is _obviously_ a good situation for people trying to ask questions or find
answers.

~~~
codinghorror
Indeed, if only someone could invent some kind of search engine to find all
that information across all those websites..

~~~
redacted
Touché. 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.

------
pkaler
I 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
_I 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.

------
mfukar
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but it's not a minor difference: Linux is a kernel,
Ubuntu is a distribution.

~~~
Robin_Message
BEGIN-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.

~~~
mfukar
Of course there's going to be an overlap, amplified even further because most
(non-technical) people will ignore the difference between the two.

My point was that the two communities' lack of support for the merge is not
really an application of "the narcissism of minor differences": the overlap
exists, but it is not that important, at the moment. Perhaps in time, such a
merge will be justified and users of those two sites might acknowledge that.

I hope this clarifies my first post for you.

------
henry_flower
So, 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.

------
mdda
This 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
Don'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!'

------
viraptor
I'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
The 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>

Questions tagged Ruby AND Javascript

<http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/ruby+javascript>

Questions tagged Ruby OR Javascript:

"<http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/ruby> or javascript" (or rather
[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/ruby%20or%20javasc...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/ruby%20or%20javascript))

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
Well... 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.

------
kapitalx
Once you fork, you can never merge!

~~~
jiaaro
you don't use git, do you? :P

