The SE About page should be less Stack Overflow-focused: "The world’s largest programming community is growing"

Question

As of April 9, 2023 https://stackexchange.com/about shows the following text

The world’s largest programming community is growing

There is no doubt that programming is the specific topic of the first site, Stack Overflow, and from which the company takes its current name (for advertising / marketing purposes), but "largest programming community" doesn't match Stack Exchange.

From the https://stackexchange.com/tour

Stack Exchange is a network of 180 communities that are created and run by experts and enthusiasts like you who are passionate about a specific topic. We build libraries of high-quality questions and answers, focused on each community's area of expertise.

According to Wikipedia

Stack Exchange is a network of question-and-answer (Q&A) websites on topics in diverse fields, each site covering a specific topic, where questions, answers, and users are subject to a reputation award process.

I know the tour and Wikipedia have different purposes. The text in the About page might be the "elevator pitch," "tagline," "motto," or another text that advertising experts recommended as the first statement in a page like this.

I'm not good at writing in English, or copywriting in my mother tongue either, so please excuse me that I don't provide a better suggestion than the Wikipedia quote, and report this as a bug instead of a feature request.

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The title might have sense in 2015, as the first statement of the following paragraph at that time said (source)

Stack Exchange is the largest network of websites for software developers including Stack Overflow, the pre-eminent destination site for programmers to find, ask, and answer their questions.

but nowadays the first statement of the following paragraph says:

Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange network help people find the answers they need, when they need them.

Even the rest of the paragraph doesn't mention programmers or developers.

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I found another description that might be interesting. From Ask technical questions on Stack Exchange | Google Cloud

Stack Exchange is a large community of fellow enthusiasts, motivated by the desire for Stack Exchange reputation, who are likely to provide a great answer.

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I found this while contuining my adventure down the rabbit hole.

Related

• About pages should be about the specific StackExchange site
• I love you guys... but what's this about?
• The whole SE is now a programming community?
• Some questions regarding SE network statistics on about page

Answer 1

I think this is an excellent idea.

Despite the validity of Glorfindel's counter(?)-argument(s), I think an edit would make sense.

I'm not a programmer. I program at times, but I signed up when I started to get interested in the video gaming SE site, and my activity on SO and Super User is relatively nonexistent. I also signed up through Arqade (I think), or another non-programmers sister site, as I'm sure many (even though it could be relatively few) users do.

I also believe that the fact that not many stumble upon the SE About page is a weak argument against changing it, especially on a platform that promotes improving anything that is of low quality.

Finally, if we want to take ourselves seriously as a platform offering information about more than the spectrum of digital arts, this request should be taken into serious consideration.

Answer 2

I distinctly remember (and can't find) an old interview or blog post that basically talked about how the network was basically built around developers and the other sites were interests they had.

SE has much broader reach and discoverability from those days.

I do believe there was an initiative at the start of Prasanth's tenure as CEO to include knowledge workers in general, but I'm not entirely sure what happened to it.

While SE being a developer/knowledge worker/techie community primarily is true to an extent - sometimes some old ways ought to go. SE's a platform that works very well, and we've a ton of users who are not developers, or technical folks who have thrived here. Some folks are even moderators.

And potentially it may not be true - are we bigger than GitHub? We are however, through the efforts of our community an influential (enough that people keep complaining :D) and useful, high quality source of information. Posts are peer reviewed and in a healthy community curated and maintained. We're the leading Q&A site on the Internet as much as anything else.

As such, I feel like this needs a rethink.

Answer 3

Actually, there is more truth in this statement than you (probably) realize. The influence of Stack Overflow is so big that a large part of many (if not all) communities (say, Cooking Stack Exchange) isn't formed by experts on cooking (chefs, home bakers) but rather programmers who are also an expert (or at least enthusiast) in cooking. Conversely, that specific topic may have a Q&A site which is way more popular than the Stack Exchange site and have a more 'typical' user base.

So in that sense, it's really a programming community (but interested in many different topics) with the welcome addition of other valuable members :)