10

First (and possibly last) impressions:

  • the scope is unclear, hence a lot of questions down voted and put on hold - possibly due to people like me, those who just have a curiosity of this type of technology or perhaps even, amateurs.

  • Who is the audience - from initial impressions, it seems to be fairly strictly those who are long time hobbyists or professionals in this field. Not enthusiasts.

What exactly is the scope? Who is the intended audience?

(In my case, my team were looking at IoT as an option for one of our projects - but have decided to focus on some other alternative methods, I suggested the site and SE/SO in general as a research resource, but the other research-group members quite clearly declined).

0

1 Answer 1

6

At only a couple of days in, I think this is only to be expected - particularly where the primary subject is still emerging technology, and the users are still finding their way around a new site. Its important to try and include everyone who is enthusisastic about the subject, but its also important to start thinking about the scope and expected quality of the questions.

Already, we've seen questions closed here which got closed straight away on Electronic Engineering for being too obvious/vague. The questions as asked in the proposal phase are too simplified to survive as real questions too - this may have confused people who hollowed the site but are not regular Stack Exahcnge users.

In the private beta phase particularly, we should be expecting down votes and closes. Of the 290 current users, only 19 have been particularly active, and some questions seem to have been answered (particularly) in the hope of gaining some easy rep.

The particular challenge with 'enthusiast' questions is that often they read as someone asking for free consultancy. I think this is more common on the electronics, arduino type sites than the software specific ones because its harder to ask an off-the-cuff question about a complex software problem (and in software, the solution is write once, re-use often). In electronics, its easy to ask for free consultancy without even noticing it (even with experience).

To pick on a specific borderline question (from a user I hope won't be upset by the attention), this is asking for a distilation of 5 years experience and is only suitable as a general-purpose backstop Q/A. The first answer is quite limited (but not really wrong), and is probably a side effect of the question being too abstract. Clearly a few non-experts liked this question, so I made a quick comment hoping the answer might get improved (then later found time to write an answer of my own).

You must log in to answer this question.