[amirmc]

"Casey says that hobbyists of all stripes are constantly asking the company to branch out into other domains. The couple refuses to do that, in part because they don't have the resources (Ravelry makes enough money for them to live on, but not enough to hire a second full-time software engineer), but also because they believe that cloning Ravelry wouldn't work. Instead, they say, each pastime should have a social site that's built carefully to meet the needs of that group, and it should be built by people who are active participants in that group"

I found this really interesting since StackExchange took the opposite view and raised a ton of cash. OK, it's not quite a social network but they did take something that was wildly successful in one domain (Q&A for programmers) and try to apply the format to other areas. I'm inclined to think that Ravelry's approach could be applied to other areas (e.g cooking) but it's their choice.

[JonnieCache]

>I found this really interesting since StackExchange took the opposite view and raised a ton of cash.

I think it's good that there are some successful people out there who are questioning the dogma that ambition is the superlative human trait, that it is somehow wrong to not grow everything as much as possible, or that this should be an end in itself. Good luck to them.

[lemming]

This. I love Ravelry (only conceptually, I don't actually use it) because they provide a wonderfully human element to the usual tech success story. They basically built something they love for the love of doing it, and I find that much more inspiring than any amount of VC or traction.

[lambda]

Stack Exchange has worked in a few other areas (math, for instance), but on the whole, I feel like most of the sites are nowhere close to the level of expertise and penetration into the community for a given topic as Stack Overflow. Stack Overflow is one of the best programming Q&A sites; most programmers these days will come across it doing Google searches for questions they have, there are a lot of very knowledgable people there, and so on. I feel like a lot of the Stack Exchanges don't have anything like that level or penetration; they are not well established in their communities, instead they are places for programmers and sysadmins who are familiar with Stack Overflow to talk about topics they are interested in, without actually attracting the expert community that makes some of the sites work so well.

Part of the problem, I think, is that some topics are just much more suited to objective questions and answers than others. In programming, math, system administration, and so on, there are enough objectively right or wrong answers to keep subjective discussion from overwhelming the site. In other topics, what people really want is subjective discussion, polls, and so on, which just don't fit the Stack Exchange model well.

I wouldn't quite say that Stack Exchange has been successful in its expansion. It's had a few successes in other domains, and limited success in a few more, but there are a lot of communities that are really struggling to find their footing.

[gus_massa]

Joel wrote about this a few years ago (2000, before the creation of StackOverflow):

  If you're going into a market with no existing
  competition, lock-in, and network effects, you better
  use the Amazon model, or you're going the way of
  Wordsworth.com, which started two years before Amazon,
  and nobody's ever heard of them. Or even worse, you're
  going to be a ghost site like MSN Auctions with
  virtually no chance of ever overcoming ebay.

Extracted from: "Strategy Letter I: Ben and Jerry's vs. Amazon": http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000056.html

[ma2rten]

Has StackExchange they been successful yet beyond technology?

[ljlolel]

Math Overflow is very popular