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by alttag 2436 days ago
My biggest complain about SO is that with the expansion into other fields that questions that used to be welcome on SO (or get more visibility because of being on SO) are being shunted to SuperUser or ServerFault or other sites under the StackExchange umbrella. [1] I think the drive to keep SO purely about "programming" runs into issues similar to the "No True Scotsman" fallacy [2]. As a developer, sometimes I need answers about Amazon Web Services, Azure, Docker, or the Linux command line, as a consequence of programming, but those sorts of questions are, more modernly, marked off-topic for SO.

1: https://stackexchange.com/sites 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
2 comments
astrodust 2436 days ago
Yeah, one of the biggest problems with Stack Overflow is it has a fairly narrow definition of what's on-topic and really awful tools for shifting things to better forums.

Quora, by way of example, does not have the fragmentation issue Stack Exchange with its myriad of sites has.

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dessant 2436 days ago
This is definitely something that could be solved with Stack Exchange moderation tools. Questions could be moved to the appropiate site, the same way you'd move issues between GitHub repositories.
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Arnavion 2436 days ago
>Questions could be moved to the appropiate site, the same way you'd move issues between GitHub repositories.

That is already a thing the sites do.

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ciupicri 2436 days ago
Not quite. It's impossible to move a question from Stack Overflow to Server Fault or Super User right now, you can only say that it might belong there.
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Arnavion 2436 days ago
Do you specifically mean "right now" ? As in it has been disabled at the current moment? Because there are plenty of questions that have been moved around from one site to another in the past.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Aserverfault.com+%22migrated...

Edit: Eg here's one from June this year: https://serverfault.com/questions/971652/windows-how-to-kill...

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dessant 2436 days ago
That's great! I thought their issue was that questions are marked off-topic without further handling, requiring users to ask again on a different site.
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alttag 2436 days ago
Does this break links and lead to link rot? Other StackExchange sites don't seem to have the page rank of StackOverflow. It also makes it harder to restrict searches to a particular site when questions are spread across multiple sites inconsistently depending on what year they were asked.
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