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Comment by dgritsko | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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!

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.

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.

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