Stack Overflow's "Food and Cooking" site is in public beta | Hacker News Reader

Stack Overflow's "Food and Cooking" site is in public beta

cooking.stackexchange.com

33 pointsmwsherman22 comments

Could we please have less Stack Overflow submissions? That is unless you actually have something new to show us. This site is no different than the Gaming site that was submitted to HN about a dozen times last week. They look the same. They function the same. Like the Gaming site, the Food and Cooking site is lonely and branded poorly. Nothing about the UI says food --- except bland.

Joel Spolsky has blogged about the process for launching these sites, and there is a sort of trial period to see whether it will fly or be closed. He has also said that each site will have its own logo, branding, etc. Maybe this one hasn't gotten it yet because it hasn't proved itself to be viable yet? It does say "beta."

I'm not saying this is a unique submission, but the UI may not be final.

The sites share the UI only during the public beta phase. Later in the beta, if a site survives, it will get its own look and feel and domain name.

The goal is to be vertical (each brand stands on its own) rather than horizontal (each is an extension of the StackExchange brand).

I have to agree here. It seems like every other day there's a new Stack Overflow subdomain or copycat site. Is this really "news"?

On another note... when you have a different SO site for every topic under the sun, isn't there some worry about brand dilution?

It's a classic programmer fallacy to think "Ah, I have some technology, let's change the logos and roll out the same code for 101 different sites!" without investing serious time into branding or community building.

It feels like a firehose of users - mostly from the developer community - is being aimed at cookie cutter sites and a lot of wishing for the best is going on behind the scenes.

They're at least trying to address this issue by requiring substantial commitment up front before building out a site: http://area51.stackexchange.com/ . Whether the thresholds they've chosen will work remains to be seen but they at least know about the issue.

Substantial commitment is not necessary in practice. Joining the private beta of gaming.stackexchange.com required me to commit, but the site turned out to have a high XBox 360 and (surprisingly) Dwarf Fortress to everything else ratio and I have not returned with any enthusiasm.

I've outgrown games perhaps, but committing didn't require anything. Maybe if it had cost me 1000 Stack Overflow reputation points I would have thought twice about signing up? If it did cost that much, it would be a high barrier to entry for non-programmer-non-stackoverflowers and the site would get less people committing (resulting in the "ghost town" effect).

You're right. I just don't think that's a healthy way to build a community. It reminds me of those high end "planned communities" in places like Florida, Dubai, and around the Med. You get interest and deposits, build a "perfect" environment, and people come in and enjoy their holiday homes without really forming a "community."

Most good communities, online or off, build organically and over time. See HN, Reddit, MetaFilter, Digg, or even Stack Overflow itself (in its original form). Getting hundreds of users to "commit" to forming a community on day one is a recipe for disaster and will end up in a place people dip in and out of rather than truly care for.

I am curious about how many NON-programmers are using these StackExchange sites. Are they attracting new users or just the subset of StackOverflow users that also like X (cooking, gaming, etc)?

The end goal is probably to get into google results. There may be an advantage against something like Yahoo Answers by having a committed community for a particular topic and drawing experts to that community (haven't seen much expertise on Yahoo Answers beyond what you could find with basic google skills).

The beta (Area 51) idea is that some subset of programmers will be gamers/cooks/photographers. They form the "seed" group, since they know the SO model but also have these less-techie interests.

Then we hope that they'll tell two friends, and so on. That's the experiment.

There's already a Stack Exchange-based site for this: Recipe Labs. http://ask.recipelabs.com/

I'm partial to it because it has a cheeky alternate URL: http://steakoverflow.com/

How do they market these sites? I'm sure the idea is that SEO will kick in as their content gets deeper, but I don't see how they'll get any content at all without promotion by people as prominent in the Gaming/Foodie/etc. communities as Joel and Jeff are in the software engineering world.

There was a comment by Spolsky a few days back (can't seem to find it now). Anyway, he said they basically start out with a secret beta for one week of a few hundred members who bootstrap the site by adding lots of useful content. After that, a public beta takes place for several weeks during which they evaluate how fast the site is growing and the general public's reactions to it are observed. At the end of the public beta, if they believe the site has gained enough traction to keep itself alive, they'll make it permanent. If not, they shut it down.

While I understand Stack Exchange's slightly locked-down approach from a business costs perspective, I sometimes wonder if it stifles the organic growth of their solution.

I think their belief is that the organic growth that will take place during the public beta will be much greater if the sites are first seeded with lots of content by a small group of dedicated users.

If it were my product, I would have made it possible for anyone to create a StackExchange site instantly. I am of the opinion that their current proposal/ vetting model is yet another misstep. The first misstep was the high pricing model of StackExchange before it went free.

I'm a big fan of StackOverflow and Joel, but the way they're going now, I'm not sure they can make lightning strike more than once.

I'm very sceptical whether the site will appeal to foodies.

SO is a great place, and a completely amazing resource - but people who code are generally quite unique in their ability to rise through the ranks of pedantry. The ability to see things logically, and keep things on topic is essential for software development .. but I don't think it's wise to translate these requirements to a food site.

I think debates over 'is this a question' and 'shouldn't this be closed' and 'move it to community wiki' are all ridiculous. I believe cookery is very much an art - not a science. There's aren't correct single answers for a lot of things - because different things work for different people.

I honestly think putting a bunch of coders in charge is a huge mistake.

Agreed. If SO can be satisfied with targeting the niche of "coders in any given category" rather than the entire "foodies" category, then they're on the right track.

Would love to ask you a few questions about that in private but there's no contact info on your profile. Mind a few questions? If not, please email me: david@thentic.com

I eagerly await the public beta of Stack Overflow's "What Should I Start a Stack Overflow Clone Site About?" site. Seriously, this is getting silly. Some forms of knowledge are not best organized in a sprawling question-and-answer format.

I've already witnessed the classic 'is it a question' debate. Brilliant.

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