Are we creating too many different Stack Exchange sites? [duplicate]

Question

I was just thinking that maybe if we have more Stack Exchange websites then each person would be a member of more different sites on average. Since the time a person can spend online on average is limited it means he will be spending less time on each website. But would this affect the quality of these websites? I'm not talking only about the quality answers given but also the number of answers given, the promptness. Won't these things go down?

I think that the rate of questions won't go down much because you need to know what you need to know. However, the average time a person spends browsing through these websites (and chances upon a question he can answer) would decrease. So are we creating too many different Stack Exchange sites?

Answer 1

I think the stack has fragmented too far.

I like giving help for a wide variety of topics. My ideal site would include content from Stack Overflow, Super User, Server Fault, Unix & Linux, and Programmers.

While I could browse all five sites, I have way lower reputation on most of them than Stack Overflow, and thus miss some of the handier privileges -- most notably the Edit privilege, but vote-to-close is a close second -- and thus I feel less "welcome" on those other sites and visit less frequently. Hence, the points stay lower on those other sites.

A while ago, I slapped together what I wanted our "close as offtopic -> migrate" dialog box to look like:

Many questions are asked on one fragment that would be better served on one of the different fragments, but the silly little list of five is definitely too short -- I know I flag several posts a day for moderator attention just for migration elsewhere on the stack. But all the work of migrating questions among different silos in the stack seems like vastly wasted energy -- when individuals can pick the list of tags they like and dislike, we could remove all the hassle of close->migrate or flag->migrate and bring questions the larger visibility of the combined group. Also, I wouldn't feel nearly as unwelcome when walking slightly out of my usual SO-territory.

Answer 2

Your argument would stand if the number of people on SE sites were fixed. It isn't. By providing a wider range of topics you bring in a wider range of people. My wife wouldn't read SO but she might read the cooking SE site, for example.

To target your second point, sure, if I start following two more SE sites, given a fixed amount of time to spend on the Internet, my time per site will go down, but I don't understand how this would necessarily lead to a decrease in answer quality. It could result in a decrease in the absolute numbers of answers I can give, but what does that really matter? There are loads of people giving excellent answers.

Promptness isn't really an issue. Whether you get your answer in two minutes or two hours shouldn't make a difference. If you need an answer NOW NOW NOW then you should probably be calling a helpdesk or maybe asking somewhere on IRC. Correct answers are the main point behind SE/SO, not how quickly they come.

Answer 3

I prefer splitting up the sites. It allows me to focus on a specific group of questions for which I have knowledge, allowing my time investment to be used more effectively to answer questions rather than sifting through so much noise. Sure, you can use the Stack Exchange tag sets for this, but that precludes people knowing how to use tags. People seem to grok being able to choose which SE site to post on better than they grok how to use tags effectively.

In addition, when I want to know the answer to a question, I feel as if I'm more likely to get an answer from people who care about the category of questions and know a lot about it on a Stack Exchange site that is less-general. On larger SE sites, it's easier for your question to either get lost in the sea of other questions or to be answered by a lot of people giving suggestions who may not be intimately familiar with the subject.

Answer 4

We have to take into account, though, what CanSpice said. The number of users isn't remaining constant, so users, like some of us on this question, who are well-versed in multiple Stack Exchange sites, aren't who these sites are for: Drupal (as an example) is a huge platform on its own, and I could easily see mutliple tags within a Drupal Stack Exchange site, because of how diverse the site is. We can't be narrow-minded and think that just because these things are related to computers that they must be grouped together.

The separation will attract experts/enthusiasts in that particular domain. Most of us are only experts in one or two domains, and enthusiasts (that might be able to offer answers) in the others, so the fact that Stack Exchange sites Ask Ubuntu and Unix and Linux isn't a big deal for a Linux guru, he could simply watch them both if he wanted to help someone.

But I could see how it would be intimidating for someone new to Linux running Ubuntu to figure out where to ask their question, but then again that's why sites have FAQs. I would give the advice of asking for what exactly you're having the problem with: For example, I would post to the Drupal or WordPress sites if I were having a problem with those, and not worry about (at least not right away) the fact I'm running it on Ubuntu and if I should ask it on Ask Ubuntu. Chances are that there are others on Drupal SE with a similar setup who could offer help, and if not -- well, that's what bounties are for :-)