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Comment by bravura | Hacker News Reader

Which is just slightly shy of the 360 that are "committed" to the statistical analysis Area 51 site: http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/33/statistical-ana...

and is far more than 69 for AI (http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/6607/artificial-in...), 40 for ML (http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/7607/machine-learn...), 16 for NLP (http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/2761/natural-langu...), 5 for data mining (http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/4229/data-mining).

(The original blog author means Area 51, not StackOverflow per se.)

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And this is the crux of the biscuit.

A large measure of StackOverflow's success-- perhaps the most significant factor-- was the immediate traction that came from readers of Joel and Jeff's blogs. SO had a ready-made audience, due to the notability of its sponsors.

It's not at all clear to me that this is scalable via the Area51 model.

Clearly, it takes more than 360 people to make a site successful. The question is: who is in the best position to attract the attention of the prospective users quickly and effectively? Time will tell, I suppose.

I think you are mixing up the fact that IT has a large userbase, while ML, NLP, etc; are more niche (relatively speaking). 360 users IS immediate traction for this area.

> Clearly, it takes more than 360 people to make a site successful.

Successful for it's founders, yes. But for me, the reader, I'm quite happy to have only the few thousand most-active researchers and professors and their students of Machine Learning, NLP, etc; post on metaoptimize.com. Otherwise, I might as well go to Yahoo Answers for generic, watered-down responses.

Yeah, I dunno if this area is pretty going to be successful for the SO guys, it makes a lot more sense for the community to run their own not for profit system.

One of the problems with the area51 process is that most of the people participating are from the current SO sites, meaning that it is always going to be very biased towards tech based setups without looking at what could also be mainstream successful.

The question is: who is in the best position to attract the attention of the prospective users quickly and effectively?

I'm willing to bet bravura at this point. Simply because he has the traction way way before the Stackexchange versions launch plus he has all the communities together. All it needs is a little momentum and Area 51 sites will struggle to catch it.

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