Area 51: We Come in Peace (propose the next Stack Overflow) | Hacker News Reader

Area 51: We Come in Peace (propose the next Stack Overflow)

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63 pointsmwsherman28 comments

I've proposed an Apple site on Area 51, since iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, etc. questions aren't allowed on Super User, a sister site of Stack Overflow for general computer-related questions. Of course, the site will cover Macs as well.

The proposal process is still in beta, but already the Apple site has gained a bit of traction and is within the top 10% of the sites proposed. While the proposal has enough followers, it still needs at least 5 of both on- and off-topic questions to move to the commitment phase. Questions are considered on- or off-topic if they have at least 20 on- or off-topic votes respectively.

If you are a user of Stack Overflow, or if you just want a place where you can quickly get great answers to your Apple questions, please go to the proposal page and click the "Follow" link, and vote on the sample questions. Thanks.

http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/151/apple?referrer...

Wow, illustrations by Terry Colon! God, I miss suck.com-- one of the brightest spots of the early web days...

Amazing, I knew I recognized that work from somewhere! Thanks for the reminder.

Ha! Remember Filler? http://www.suck.com/filler/archive/

Heather Havrilesky is still writing, now at Salon as well as http://rabbitblog.com/

The idea of building communities of experts on a particular topic is great, however most of the proposed sites look like they could almost belong on one of the existing sites (e.g., Web Applications, Gaming, Electronic Gadgets -- all very tech-oriented). This makes perfect sense, since the most of Area 51's users (at the moment) came from SO/SF/SU. I'm a big fan of SO and would love to see this new venture be successful, I'm just interested to see if/how it will be advertised to those who are not users of the Stack Overflow family of sites.

Agreed, but to address one of the specifics you mention the "Web Applications" proposal seems mostly to be based on how to use web applications ("how do I delete my account on ___?") rather than how to build them.

http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/57/web-application...

I assume they'll just let it go viral. The communities that grow out of the existing user base will have some overlap with slightly less technical people. This, in turn leads to slightly less technical people being exposed to the platform as users and eventually starting communities that feature people slightly less technical than them.

Repeat until cat pictures show up.

O HAI.

Just thought I'd mention that technical people like lolcats too.

The "Total Commitment" part of the Commit phase also makes me think that, when you commit to a site, you're only worth as much as your combined Stack Exchange reputation. This would also seem to make it easier to get a site off the ground if it appeals to the SO/SF/SU crowd. If I refer a few non-tech friends to the Writing proposal, they'll have very little reputation on the other sites.

The general idea is that we're starting with "programmers and.." taking teeny tiny baby steps to obvious overlaps:

- programmer and sysadmin (Server Fault) / computer enthusiasts (Super User)

Now let's broaden it a bit with SE 2.0, and take more baby steps:

- programmer and (musician / car nut / gun enthusiast / videogamer)

That's the core audience for the new sites; it's driven by the anchor site which is an order of magnitude larger than the other sites in the trilogy (and two orders of magnitude larger than any Stack Exchange 1.0 website). But, if we keep taking a series of progressive baby steps...

- musician and (gardener / pilot / GIS expert / contractor)

Eventually, we'll take enough of these baby steps that entirely new non-programmery audiences will form. It's like Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, but with forum topics!

I was thinking the other day, a lot of people would probably use a music-oriented SO-clone. You'd have the casual crowd of 'what are the chords to...,' music theory questions, but most significantly i think you'd get lots of music software/hardware questions. Call it REverb.com or something.

I think all the commenting, tagging, voting, and reputation features of SO are strong enough to appeal to non-geeks too.

Seems overly complicated, I have no idea what's going on when I visit Area 51, I guess this is their strategy for turning away uncommitted users.

Also, how are they going to make money?

Indeed, we are using Area 51 to gauge commitment to a particular Q&A site so it does have a certain amount of hoops to jump through. The last time we tried to let people create Stack Exchange sites without demonstrated commitment, most sites did not have enough users to be viable. Area 51 is, so far, doing a great job of identifying the topics for which there is a devoted audience. We also assume that people who are highly committed to Stack Overflow are far more likely to participate in a new Stack Exchange alms therefore we've really built this system for them, the highly engaged, high reputation Stack Overflow user.

Any thoughts on how this will change as StackExchange grows?

From your earlier writings, it seems like you eventually want to grow beyond the techy Stack Overflow crowd.

What is "highly committed"? - is it scaled by reputation, or is "highly committed" defined at a particular reputation level, question count, or number of answers?

Check out the area51 tag on http://meta.stackoverflow.com for endless in depth discussion of the exact mechanics.

Are you not familiar with Stack Overlow? It was apparent to me immediately that they have created a community process to build Stack Overflows for more narrow topics.

> How are they going to make money?

The successful communities will have millions of visitors a month.

Seems to me that you've been under a rock for the past year or so... if at this point you still don't know what it is... I suggest you look at this page:

http://area51.stackexchange.com/faq

Just created a space for Android.

http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/7418/android

I just can't stop my android development craze and needless to say the official Android support community is on SO and just depends on questions tagged "Android" :(

Hey, awesome proposal. I just voted on the sample questions. They were all good examples IMO.

I am a pissed off new user to Area 51.

I had an idea for a stackexchange site a while ago - but did not take the time to go and make it. Upon seeing this, I thought "hooray, now I can see if it holds any merit!"

So I went to the site. First thing's first: I want to search to see if my idea has been done. There's the search box! My idea is essentially teach people how to learn things (as in, what order to learn what topics and how to learn those subtopics best) in a wiki-tized fashion. So I type 'how to' in the search box and hit enter.

Nothing happens.

So I click the magnifying glass to the left of the box...

Nothing happens.

Unfazed, I decide it must be because I'm not logged in. I trundle to the create account page, login with my OpenID, and see I'm 'User3840'. Best be changing that!

I click on my name and get taken to a profile page where I can click edit. I do so, and fill out the form with my real life information, because I like being a human to the people I meet on the internet. I change my name to 'wcarss', and:

Oops! There was a problem updating your profile: * unusual error updating your profile -- please try again!

So I do. Same error. Okay... So I decide to remain anonymous and just search for my idea again. As a good user, I should make sure there's no duplicates!

Still doesn't work at all.

Okay, so it's buggy. I'm a bit unhappy now but I know what to do: submit a bug report. At the bottom of the page is a friendly link, 'feedback always welcome', so I click it and travel to meta.stackoverflow.com

I make a new account here after registering my OpenID. It seems strange that I now have two separate accounts (User148067 on meta and User3840 on area51) despite having one OpenID associated with both and both running from the same group of people, but hey it's okay.

I go to post feedback, and leave my browser version, os, repro steps, helpful tags, and the urls I had failed search on. Hit 'Post Your Question' - uh oh!

Oops! Your question couldn't be submitted because: * we're sorry, but as a spam prevention mechanism, new users can only post a maximum of one hyperlink. Earn 10 reputation to post more hyperlinks. * users with less than 99 reputation can't create new tags. The tags 'fail issue' are new. Try using existing tags instead.

I'm now infuriated; so I came here to post what's happened so far. I'm going to remove all of my tags because I have /no idea/ what tags already exist, and I'm going to make my url's not clickable. I am forced into being less helpful.

Finally, I've posted something! Now if anyone sees it and responds, I'll know why the site is broken for me. I can't change my name on meta either. As a user that just wanted to participate and to be a good community member, I've been left soured to the entire StackOverflow experience.

Within 4 minutes you received the correct reply:

http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/54264/search-doesnt-...

"how" and "to" are stop words, so they're stripped from your search.

In the tag box on the create new question form it tells you to use the tag "bug":

http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/ask

I have no idea why editing your profile failed, but it works fine for me.

Your accounts were not automatically associated because Area 51 is new and does not auto-associate with the other sites yet.

Actually, that was not the correct reply - but it was a swift reply!

I ended up using 'bug' and 'search' as tags. I've cooled down considerably now - but as a user, that was a terrible set of experiences that left me very frustrated. Even as a computer scientist, it left me asking myself why their product has been released with (what appear to me to be) major flaws.

Edit: after manually associating my account on meta with area51, and trying for a second time on meta to change my profile name, it was successful.

I know they're probably just using the same search all across the system but given the number of proposals you could easily drop the full text search and just do a simple by character one. "How to" would probably be a pretty common search for these proposals.

For whatever reason, search now works. This has been a confounding and annoying experience, but whatever was wrong is not now.

95% of this is because you (apparently?) have javascript disabled, which triggers a slew of anti-spam mechanisms (particularly on the user profile edit). It's also why you weren't getting tag auto-dropdown suggestions.

I just tested with JS disabled and I got the expected "Area 51 works best with JavaScript enabled" <div> in bright red at the top of the page..

I clearly stated in my bug post that I have javascript enabled.

AI, anyone? http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/6607/artificial-in... :-)

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