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Comment by reemrevnivek | Hacker News Reader

See also the blog.stackoverflow.com side of the partnership here:

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/08/facebook-stackoverflow...

Basically, it's a siloed version of stackoverflow.com containing only the tags relevant to Facebook. They're thinking about creating mini-sites for other major subdomains (see also http://meta.webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/913/is-this-...).

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Hate the idea. SO's search is decent. This is just the kind of fragmentation that I already don't like about programmers., unix. etc.. You can easily filter your lists by tags, you can easily search by tag.

Where's the benefit?

Facebook will likely benefit a lot more.. They had a crappy forum, and they can let the rest of the folks actually do their support work I think :)

Well, come to think of it, I think google's support forums suck even more. You can post a problem on google support forums, and pray and hope for an answer from their developers.

Purportedly, this works better than filtering by tags.

I'm not sure that this level of filtering is quite necessary, but I think that the community fragmentation is useful: People go to each site (SO, SE, SU, Programmers, etc) with a specific purpose, and the topics on each site are broken up by tags. Trying to filter both purpose and topic on one site would be problematic.

(Also, the Unix/AskUbuntu/SuperUser debacle is a special case, IMO)

The benefit is SO gets more traffic and users. Facebook benefits by off loading the management of their messy forums and rely on free crowd sourced moderation.

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