yeah surprised me2

shog9 nice/useful perspective here

@vzn thanks

@shog9 liked the specific ref to search engines & its strong symbiotic relationship to stackexchange & its biz model. rarely see moderators think about it or mention it.

notably, cs.se is doing very well as far as question/answer volume/activity compared to cstheory.se, & is nearing the milestone of exceeding cstheory.se total question count, even though founded years later.

@vzn it's easy to forget, since those readers tend to be the silent majority. But realistically, when you're writing an answer those readers are your primary audience - at least, if you want them to be. Answers that keep this in mind have amazing reach and staying power.

yeah. yrs ago in cyberspace world they used to be called "lurkers".

its like the iceberg. a small top part is visible, a large bottom part invisible.

yup

we "hard-core" participants forget sometimes that participants in the sites [eg writing/posting/asking/answering] are actually prob in the minority of viewers.

so, mods dont have to think about "seo" much, but stackexchange mgt does.

generally, the goals overlap. but as you point out, cstheory is a se site example where its more of a stretch.

@vzn I don't get too worked up about it - in general, we try to do what's right for the folks writing and reading and the rest takes care of itself (obviously there are edge-cases where you have to be mindful, but that's generally outside of my wheelhouse). The important thing to keep in mind is, for every person who asks a question, there are dozens - quite possibly hundreds or even thousands - of people with the same question who would prefer to find the answer themselves...

And one way they'll do so is by searching.

agreed, that is quite true for stackoverflow. now other sites are getting more into what was named yrs ago [in wired mag etc] "the long tail"

yup

cstheory is a very niche audience as you point out in your post.

a tricky balancing act.

there are not likely hundreds of thousands of cstheory researchers, alas.

@vzn it is. But even there, over half of their traffic comes in from Google. Which just goes to show how important that "long tail" is - true, there probably aren't that many researchers out there using Google for their day-to-day work, but that says nothing about the folks who'll be tomorrow's researchers.

yes, cstheory is a real amazing accomplishment so far.

it is largely based on the mathoverflow model.

which is a good model for such things

yep. very high profile in math community.

math.se is amazing too how it has taken off. really phenomenal traffic now.

inclusive, but specialized and... unapologetically protective.

yep. parallels there.

have you heard of that simons institute profile on mathoverflow

nope

the global math commons klarreich/simons foundation

old but great article. maybe pass that up your mgt chain if they havent seen it!

huge feather in the cap of stackexchange.

@vzn ah, cool. Thanks

also the way that mathoverflow rejoined the stackexchange network, that is an interesting recent development.

would be interested to learn more how that happened, background/context etc, havent seen too much on that topic. maybe in meta somewhere.

yw

hope that a similar glowing profile might be written of cstheory.se someday.

know the brief nomination window is closed already. decided to nominate my favorite fantasy team for the record on k's post.

which is still linked on the front page.

Who would you like to become the new moderators?

he just deleted my comment on the post, and deleted my suggestions, virtually immediately after I wrote them. huh!

whats up with that? who do I complain to about that anyway? old habits die hard I guess.

and then locking down the whole post unilaterally....

calling it "abuse"!

seems, uhm, kind of heavyhanded to me....

hmmm... how many posts/comments of mine has he's deleted without trace over 2yrs anyway? wonder if there is a record of that anywhere....