Super User and Server Fault are Doomed

Question

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How do we grow the Server Fault and Super User communities?

And I'm not sure we can do anything about it.

At any given point in time, if you look at the home page of Stack Overflow, you'll see at least 4 or 5 questions that "belong" on Super User or Server Fault. Well, "belong" is a bit subjective, and I'm sure you can convince yourself that configuring SuPHP for Apache 2.0 is programming related. And there's a pretty strong incentive to do so:

Namely, if you ask your question on Stack Overflow, you will get an answer. Even dumb questions, even questions that belong on SU or SF: On SO they all get answers, and fast. On SF and SU, maybe they will, maybe they won't. But on SO, the results will be pretty well solidified within the hour; even if you get bumped to SU or SF, at least you'll know. However, if you ask on SU and SF, it takes a day or two or three before you get to the same state, with your first response rolling in at around 8 hours later. So, the intelligent solution is to ask on SO first, and if people complain, ask on SU or SF.

The problem is that the participation rates in SU and SF are abysmal compared to SO. The crappy engineer will simply say: "People need to start using Super User and Server Fault, and this will all be fixed." Of course, identifying a solution that is contingent on other people altering their behavior with no incentive to do so is wishful thinking at best.

But as pointed out a dozen or so times on this forum: people don't want to check all three sites separately. And they have proposed several solutions to try to unify the sites, or at least provide an agregated view for that user. The unstated implication that seems to get ignored is "Checking all thee sites is hard, I will not do it unless the interface is simplified."

Paradoxially, Jeff Atwood has offically stated that he has no intention of fixing this problem. In a blog post last year, he compared the individual sites to individual members of the League of Justice. Batman and Superman and need to be separate heroes, even though they fight for the same team, he argues.

However, to extend the metaphor, when people call the League of Justice, they now always call Superman. So much so, in fact, that Batman and Wonder Woman have stopped carrying their cell phones and only check their voicemail once a week. Now, no one even tries calling Batman because they know he takes longer to respond. And besides, Superman can probably help instead.

Rather than proposing yet another solution, I'm proposing that we at least acknowledge that there is a problem. Once we get past this first step, we can start looking at solutions.

Answer 1

I don't know if you realize this, but you're asking for us to ruin Stack Overflow. Sure, let's allow any question to be asked on Stack Overflow -- there is a huge community there of smart programmers who know stuff about almost any topic, and they'll answer anything, right?

We know what lies at the end of that road: Yahoo Answer Fail.

Even dumb questions, even questions that belong on SU or SF: On SO they all get answers, and fast. On SF and SU, maybe they will, maybe they won't. But on SO, the results will be pretty well solidified within the hour; even if you get bumped to SU or SF, at least you'll know. However, if you ask on SU and SF, it takes a day or two or three before you get to the same state, with your first response rolling in at around 8 hours later. So, the intelligent solution is to ask on SO first, and if people complain, ask on SU or SF.

Totally [by-design].

Those questions and answers will get migrated -- so if you want that reputation attached to it, follow it to the target site. Heck, even if all you want to do is see the answers you have to follow it to the target site. This is actually OK, it's a legitimate way to learn about the other sites in the trilogy.

identifying a solution that is contigenent on other people altering their behavior with no incentive to do so

Sure there's incentive -- rep denial / migration and, in egregious cases (have yet to see this, though), banning of accounts.

But as pointed out a dozen or so times on this forum: people don't want to check all three sites separately. And they have proposed several solutions to try to unify the sites, or at least provide an agregated view for that user. The unstated implication that seems to get ignored is "Checking all thee sites is hard, I will not do it unless the interface is simplified."

Remember when the community was wondering, gosh, what could Jeff and Joel possibly do with a lot of venture capital money?

Well, TRY TO WONDER HARDER(tm). Seriously, it's like you're not even trying.

Answer 2

I notice in general that people who come and say "Super User is doomed", "Super User is good for nothing", "Super User is a mess",... are usually people who spent 3 hours on it max.

Because anyone spending more time would know that most of questions on Super User get answers, at least the ones which are possible to solve. Even though the amount of questions asked is lower than SO, there is still a lot asked every day, and the counter of unanswered questions stays very much the same. I think there are like 20 questions per day, added to it, as opposed to the hundreds new questions.

In my opinion, you may take longer to get your answer on Super User... but at least you get one. On SO, if nobody cared to answer you in the following 15 minutes, then it's practically over, your question joins the bottomless pit of unanswered questions, and only a few courageous ones, tracking your tags, or checking unanswered ones from time to time, may answer you.

So seriously, I hardly see how SU is more "doomed" than SO.

Bottom line, if you can't care enough to switch site for one dedicated to your problem, why people should care enough to answer you?

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Of course the above about SU applies very probably to SF, with the difference that SF is dedicated to a more restricted range than SU, and as such welcomes more sophisticated questions probably, with more complete answers. Although, I don't use SF a lot, so I could be mistaken, this is only my view on it.

Answer 3

As a contributor to Serverfault, I see a lot of hard work by a core group of people to answer peoples questions, and i'm pretty sure the response time is a lot less than 8 hours, but I agree, there are problems. The primary of which is that there aren't enough experts at the moment, Serverfault and superuser don't have the same community of users both asking questions and answering them, there are a hell of a lot of people who come to SF and SU just to get an answer to their specific problem, without contributing back to the sites. There needs to be more emphasis on getting these using engaged and giving back to the community.

Another reason for the slow take up of these sites, is that it often feels like SF and SU are the poor cousins of SO, everything is focussed around SO. It's often like, hey look out our shiny site we built for programmers, oh and there's some other sites over there as well. Yes I know this all started out as a programming venture, and Joel and Jeff are programmers, but that needs to change if we want the sites to be as successful as SO. We need to get more publicity for the these sites, nearly every programer I know has heard of SO, but I meet so many sysadmins who I tell about SF, and they have never heard of it, but think it's a great idea. Jeff and Joel, we know your not sysadmins, you don't know the sysadmin community, so why not find someone who does and bring them on as a consultant or something.

I don't think SF and SU are doomed, they are providing valuable information to users, who often, especially in the case of SF, have no where else to look for these answers, and the quality of the answers are excellent (check out the subnetting question), but to get these sites to the level of SO needs work, and commitment, both from the team and the community, and I for one am happy to do this, because I believe the SF really could be the SO of the admin world.

To put it in terms of the League of Justice, everyone knows about Superman, his shiny cape and red underwear give him away, maybe it's time Batman came out of the shadows a bit.

Finally, there are a lot of people, contributing a lot of hard work to SF and SU and I think they need to be acknowledged for this, particularly when we spend time talking about how these sites are not working, there work and time is valuable, these sites do work they could just work better.

Answer 4

Just to counteract the "doom and gloom" nature of this post.

Server Fault traffic
Google Analytics, Oct 09 - Mar 10

http://img691.imageshack.us/img691/1259/serverfaultanalyticstra.png

Super User traffic
Google Analytics, Oct 09 - Mar 10

http://img696.imageshack.us/img696/9987/superuseranalyticstraff.png

So if by "doomed" you mean growing at a more modest rate than Stack Overflow proper, then yes.

While I totally agree that we can always do better here, I think it is unfair, and frankly a bit rude to the users who do frequent SU and SF, to imply that these sites aren't working. They clearly are; they're populated by good questions and good answers on a daily basis.

While they may not be working at the blockbuster level of Stack Overflow, I would argue that STACK OVERFLOW is the (huuuge) outlier there, and not the other way around.

This thing we're doing -- it is a marathon, not a sprint.

Answer 5

I've only asked a few questions on SU, but my experience couldn't be more different. Within minutes they had answers.

Answer 6

I think that the original poster makes a good point. If there are going to be multiple sites, there are going to be people who are interested in questions across the sites. If we're going to be successful at answering people's questions, we have to be better at routing those questions to the people that are likely to be able to answer them. We should be able to allow people to subscribe to interesting tags across the sites, so, for example, when I go to https://stackoverflow.com/unanswered/tagged?tab=mytags, I can see questions tagged stackoverflow.vbscript in the same list as superuser.apple-2 because I have expressed interest in both of those tags.

Answer 7

Like some others who are mostly on SF, I find the focus on SO a bit off-putting.

I think the focus on SO might be one of the reasons there aren't enough sysadmins answering questions on SF. If a new sysadmin shows up on SF and sees it as merely as a side project to SO, they're probably less inclined to contribute.

EDIT: One possible source of expert sysadmins is all the MVPs that are kicking around, but I wonder if the format of SF is a turn-off. I once tried to ask how many people on SF were MVPs, but the question was moved here, so it got no response. (Only a small fraction of the SF posters check meta, so there's no point in asking the question here.)

Answer 8

StackOverflow came first, didn't it? So it's more mature, and has gained a reputation as a good site to ask and answer questions related to programming. ServerFault and SuperUser are not about programming, they have different focus and are less broad than SO.

Speaking for myself, I've learned plenty from all three sites, and it makes sense to have them separate to allow discussion of their respective topics.