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Comment by flipchart | Hacker News Reader

  > How am I supposed to know that I shouldn't be posting to SuperUser or Serverfault if it happens to be a home networking issue?

The help pages[1][2] explain what is acceptable to ask on the sites

  [1] http://superuser.com/help/on-topic
  [2] http://serverfault.com/help/on-topic

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But that's the point - there are so many sites with tiny bits of overlap that a user now has to navigate conflicting help pages.

A Linux question -

SuperUser?

Ask Ubuntu?

Unix and Linux?

(Server Fault)? (Stack Overflow?)

While we expect programmers to RTFM the rest of the SE network is aimed at not so technical people.

I do agree with you about the overlap. I've had the same issues in the past, but to be honest I think it's just a matter of getting to know the different sites and achieving an intuitive feel for where questions should go. It may not be perfect, and you may get blow-back if you post in the wrong site, but then learn from that and move on. As programmers, we should be used to failing when we try something, but we don't give up and abandon what we're doing: we try again until we succeed. And if that comes off a bit stoic (for programmers, and non-programmers alike) then I think that the person may need to readjust their ideas of what SO/SE is. It's a collection of random strangers who have been interacting for a period of time and built up certain social conventions which they start to expect people to conform to. Just as in real life you don't go up to a group of people and expect them to be perfectly willing to accept you no matter how you behave (good or bad). Yes, the separation is bad. Yes in the SO/SE case, it could maybe be improved, but generally there is always going to be overlap. With the advent of area51 it seems people really want to specialize the SE sites, which makes the problem worse: but that is what the community seems to want. I think that in order to fully solve the problem, there should only be one SE site, and everything could be separated appropriately by tags

> built up certain social conventions

What?! There are no "built up social conventions" on SO, those were destroyed early on. There is only a toxic culture formed by the fiat of the great hypocrite Jeff Atwood, whose mouth championed "the community" while his jackboots curbstomped anything the community did that wasn't simple or mediocre enough for him to appreciate.

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