Post History

I don't know about *eventually*, but while codidact is still getting started, it's better to not splinter communities.

Critical mass is make or break for communities. Getting to that critical mass is the most vital objective by far, early on. Reaching critical mass for one community is obviously easier than reaching it for 5 communities at once, that cannibalize engagement between each other. This does not apply to completely orthogonal communities though - software vs. Christianity has a lot less cannibalization than "professional" software vs... I guess amateur software? It will be the same people going to both anyhow.

Note, it's critical mass of questions too, not just users. So even if every user codidact diligently frequents all sections, their energy is still split between many sites. It's better to lump things together as much as possible. Ideally, communities should only be split if both daughter communities will still have critical mass.

This was one of the mistakes of SX. Instead of starting general and splitting off popular generic tags as needed, which would result in exponential growth, they insist that new communities be started in Area 51 from scratch, meaning that the critical mass problem must be solved again and again.

I've been active on SO, programmers, code review and a few other related sites. I feel like the boundary was always kind of thin. Based what I've seen, the most parsimonious explanation for why some of these offshoots exist was a combination of elitism, users being annoyed that not every question caters to them, and creating rules for the sake of rules on the older and more general sections. A lot of these offshoots could have just been tag that people can hide or favorite as they like. I suppose it does allow you to sequester moderation scope of users a bit, which is harder with tags. But then what is the value of locking a programmers out of moderating SO?

But this is really a discussion for the future. Right now the few programming sections are floundering. User count and activity are precious, and splitting sections would halve them or worse. For now it should definitely be handled by tags.