What is the point of having different sites for each service in the same or similar domain?

Question

I am talking about the cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies.

We have pending proposals

1. Blockchain Technology - commitment phase with 51% commitment.

   for discussing about Blockchain technology in all its aspects, not focusing on one specific implementation, abstracting more to achieve better comprehension

2. Neo Blockchain - Failed in private beta.

   for developers, educators, and users of the next-generation blockchain, NEO.

3. Veriblock - Deleted

   for anyone interested in VeriBlock tokens, blockchain security, or new altchain security techologies.

4. Ioncoin - Deleted

   for newcomers; enthusiasts; experts; developers; mathematicians; cryptographers; professors; students; administrators; engineers Blockchain can be used everywhere, we use it in combination with gaming. We focus on blockchain technology

5. Decred - commitment phase with 22% commitment.

   Proposed Q&A site for developers and users of Decred: an open, decentralized, self-funding, stakeholder-driven, autonomous digital currency using blockchain technology

The sites launched

1. Ethereum - Graduated

   for Ethereum, the crypto value and blockchain-based consensus network.

2. Monero Public beta

   for developers and users of the secure, private and untraceable cryptocurrency Monero

3. Bitcoin Public beta

   for Bitcoin crypto-currency enthusiasts.

4. iota Public Beta

   for Iota, the open-source cryptocurrency for IoT that does not use a blockchain.

5. Stellar Public Beta

   Beta Q&A site for developers and users of Stellar and the Stellar Distributed Exchange.

The question

We have these many sites and proposals and most of them are in the commit phase. Only a slight modification on an existing site is required to make others on-topic for it.

If all of these sites are merged together, the resulting site will be very helpful for future visitors and other participants too.

Update

A new proposal

bitunicom

for technology discussion about blockchain and dapps

Answer 1

{reposted from a deleted Area51 Discussion}

I have been trying to understand why Stack Exchange has opted to have several different Cryptocurrency sites instead of a single site for a long time. In December of 2015 a question was asked on MSE about making a single cryptocurrency site to rule them all:

Stack Exchange website for cryptocurrencies in general

In an answer there, I posted a quote from a comment from Murch (one of the Bitcoin mods) on a related question here on A51:

To get back to you guys about my above suggestions. I had talked with SE staff about potentially changing the name of bitcoin.se already a while ago but encountered staunch opposition. I was told that name changes had been tried before and the sites in previous attempts lost great amounts of traffic and users, all but destroying the sites. It seems that a name change will be unlikely, but you are still welcome to ask questions about Ethereum there, until you get your own site.

So, it seems that the site that should have been "Cryptocurrencies" (or perhaps "Cryptocurrencies & Blockchain"?) was named "Bitcoin" because that was the first technology in the pack and - from the beginning - they accepted questions about others... and, in fact, still do:

What topics can I ask about here?

• a cryptocurrency or technology derived directly from Bitcoin such as Namecoin or Litecoin
• distributed cryptocurrencies not derived directly from Bitcoin such as Ripple, Ethereum or NXT

Because there has been a general disinclination to rename sites for branding/traffic purposes (though they have since renamed at least two sites including Cognitive Sciences) it seems that Bitcoin kept the name despite a broadening of the scope and the world of cryptocurrencies to dozens of similar or related technologies.

Now that there are several different sites, I think that it may be too late to go back... I don't know... There are a couple of options that I can think of but I don't know what's actually possible:

1. Stop making new sites, rename "Bitcoin" to a more general site name as requested by Murch years ago and close all future site suggestions as duplicates of that. Leave existing sites alone.
2. Stop making new sites, rename "Bitcoin" to a more general site name and merge all of the other sites into it (with much stamping of feet and gnashing of teeth).
3. Keep going as it is, slowly doing with cryptocurrencies what Stack Exchange has refused to do with programming languages on Stack Overflow for years - separate site scope by technology.

There may be other options.

Option 1 would probably be the easiest because it doesn't require that avid users of sites that already have been established move to another site - even if all of the content they'd created already was moved. It'd be easiest on the staff, too, as they wouldn't have to figure out how to migrate stuff, merge accounts, reputation, allocating diamonds, etc.

Option 2 would be very difficult. Merging the questions from one site into another is not a simple process and that's just a technical issue. Merging the (currently disparate) communities, figuring out who keeps their moderator diamonds and the other stuff mentioned in the previous paragraph are major hurdles to this solution.

Option 3 is the inevitable solution if we just leave things as they are, though... and I'm pretty sure that this isn't a future we want.

My primary concern with having so many sites that do the same thing is that - well... cryptocurrencies may the be future of money... or they may be Pogs. And even if one of them turns out to be the central standard for money in 100 years, many of them will be the LaserDisc to someone else's BluRay or the Zune to everyone else's iPod.

If each of these currencies has its own site, Stack Exchange runs the risk of having to close down many sites in the rise and fall of the cryptocurrency battle of supremacy. When the sites are closed down, the content is lost(ish)... all of the work and time and history is... in some sense, wasted.

To make things more annoying, in at least one case I've seen, the creators of the currency have tried to force a new site by creating multiple Area 51 accounts, presumably thinking that having a site on Stack Exchange will somehow validate their project - some of which are out and out scams. If all (new) site proposals are closed as duplicates of an existing one, this becomes less of a concern.

If there's a single site, the ebb and flow of individual currencies is irrelevant. If Iota dies and is replaced by Omega, the questions for Iota can still have a place and be archived and questions about Omega already have a place without having to go through the Area 51 process...

Yes, the technology is different... but so is Fortran different from Java and Python... but we have them all on Stack Overflow.

Please, let's stop making new Cryptocurrency sites!

Answer 2

Just my two cents.

Consider Stack Overflow, which is quite the oldest. It hosts questions about a ton of different programming languages. An expert on one language may not know much about another language, but the site works well. People can sort or filter questions based on different tags for different languages.

Consider English Language and Usage. Some choose to involve only in grammar, pronunciation etc. while most only on word-requests, idiom-requests, etc.

Perhaps the users who know about a currency might know a little about others as well. If we were to have a unified site for such currencies, and individual tags to help sort and filter them, maybe the site would be very active, instead of a dozen less-active ones which split the audience. Even if some currencies rise and fall, their questions will all have a place to stay.

Again, I don't know anything about those currencies. So I may be blatantly incorrect in assuming this.

Answer 3

I understand the urge to separate cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology in different proposals. There are cryptocurrencies which don't relate on blockchain, and chances are currencies won't be the most spread use of blockchain. But different proposals for different blockchains implementations or for differents cryptocurrencies? I can't see any good reason for that.

Answer 4

I also agree with you I want to add some more points:

New cryptocurrency/programming language

For new languages we only need a new tag and users can start asking questions for this specific programming languages. For cryptocurrencies instead you need to wait for a new stackexchange site, which may, for small cryptocurrencies, never appear or try to find another location to ask your question, where it may be at the wrong place when a new site for this cryptocurreny opens.

If there was a single site for all cryptocurrencies though, you could just ask that questions under a new tag and probably get faster responses due to a greater community.

Also in future having sited for each and every cryptocurrency will get very confusing

General questions

And what about questions regarding cryptocurrencies (or programming) in general? On Stackoverflow we can simply ask those questions by not using language- but topic-specific tags. For cryptocurrencies you would ?probably? have to post them under https://crypto.stackexchange.com using the crypocurreny tag, which is, in my opinion, weird and not well structured, also because there are a lot of different topics regarding cryptocurrencies which currently can't be differentiated because there is only one tag cryptocurreny available.

This will also lead to questions being asked multiple times on different cryptocurrency sites if they are related to their underlying technology.

Answer 5

Actually, there is one — but it looks more a priori theoretical rather than ad hoc practical: https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/111334/cryptoeconomics

What is the real reason why any sites in the Stack Exchange bunch are separated, rather than have all questions pooled together?

• different, separated accounting for the respective users' reputation and privileges.

If expertise in any one topic should correlate to granting responsibility for moderating another topic, then the two belong on the same SE site. Someone who knows conventional set theory notation better than I could probably express that more precisely.
I used pseudotags there, but I don't mean tags strictly — tags being applied descriptively, not prescriptively, to content which is broadly based and considered as being pertinent.

The question is, therefore, not “Should there be only a single cryptocurrency site?” but, rather, ‘Ought cryptocurrency «𝒳 » to have its own site?’