Programmers Stack Exchange now out of beta and with a fresh redesign | Hacker News Reader

Programmers Stack Exchange now out of beta and with a fresh redesign

meta.programmers.stackexchange.com

17 pointschrisaycock9 comments

I'm really not a big fan of the direction that they are taking stackexchange. Looking over a list of the avaiable sites you have:

Linux and Unix, System Administration, Power Users, Ubuntu, Programming, Software Engineering/Development, IT Security, and Webmasters

There is so much overlap here that is is ridiculous. From my point of view it feels like they are fragmenting the answers, questions, and participants to the point where individual sites can't survive long term.

I get the impression they are taking the same approach as Reddit, in which there are many smaller sub-communities. That gives an individual site a cozier feeling than just one massive all-in webpage. (That said, each of the major SO tags is like a community unto itself.)

It doesn't work for this kind of site. Why? It's an answer-based website. You want more exposure for your answer, so you want to put it in a populated area. Reddit is a link submission site, so it doesn't really matter who looks at the links that are being submitted. It's a terrible idea, and one of the reasons I really dislike Stack Exchange.

"I have a question but I see it could fit equally within 3 different sub-communities. Which one do I pick? Obviously the one with more people in it." - Me.

Yes, they are actively destroying the network effect (more people = more useful) in this way. I hope they'll stop this before it's too late.

What is the main difference between this Stack Exchange and the main Stack Overflow which is self described as a "collaboratively edited question and answer site for programmers"?

The way I saw it put was that SO was more about low level technical programming details, and the new Programmers SE site was for subjective discussions about programming in general. Somebody said something like "SO is for when you're in front of the keyboard, and Programmers SE is for when you're in front of the whiteboard." Something like that...

Right, SO is for code while programmers.SE is for everything else. Another way to look at it is the tags.

Stack Overflow -- all about programming:

http://stackoverflow.com/tags

Programmers Stack Exchange -- career development and project management:

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/tags

Programmers.SE is the soft questions relating to programming life and career, basically. It's much more relaxed about discussiony questions than SO.

I participate there regularly.

Here's what the announcement is actually about (I didn't see an obvious link to it): http://programmers.stackexchange.com/

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