I ask this from the perspective of someone asking a question. And this is somewhat inspired by a question that I asked earlier today on Stack Overflow. This is based on my observations today of the question I asked and how quickly it moved down the chain.,
When I come on a couple times a day to see if I can lend my knowledge to answer a question, I will typically look over, at most, the first two or three pages of questions. Assuming that a person has their settings at 50 questions per page, a question remains on each page for about 10 minutes. I would guess that this is probably a good mid-range guess for others as well. Some will view more, some less.
But going by my estimate I have about 30 minutes in which I might get an answer before it drifts off into a nether region where the only people who will ever see it are those who might be asking a similar question and have it pop up in the list to the right, or that small group of people who will do a tag search to see if they can answer questions on a specific discipline.
Either way, if I haven't gotten an answer in 30 minutes (you know, while I'm waiting for my pizza to be delivered...), the odds of getting an answer would seem to drop off dramatically. Thankfully, for my question this time I got a couple great answers, but that hasn't always been the case.
Would Stack Overflow benefit from being broken out into smaller exchanges that are more focused around specific disciplines?
- sql.stackoverflow.com
- dotnet.stackoverflow.com
- java.stackoverflow.com
- etc.