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Yes, many potential duplicates of this:

What to do with cross-site duplicates?
Can I ask the same question on more than one Stack Exchange site?

My suggestion differs. It is to let users choose which sites should their question appear on (and rather then having to copy-paste it to another site).

Yes, I read all the arguments that a question belongs on one site and is off-topic on all others. But this highly upvoted question: When will Stack Overflow become irrelevant? and its answers make it clear that this is not exactly the case. Even if we assume that sites are completely non-overlapping in their topics, they are overlapping in terms of people who can answer questions.

I can answer questions on programming. So I should look in both programmers.stackexchange.com and stackoverflow. And if I were a game developer I would need to look at a third site. Well, I don't - I only browse stackoverflow. So my potentially useful answers will not be seen on programmers.stackexchange.com. You may say that this is a choice of every user, but I want to answer programming questions. Why should I look into 3 sites?

You see, this is all from the answerer point of view. But these are the people that drive the sites.

The idea is for the question posters to choose which sites their question they want to appear on. If I have a question about my ubuntu, right now I have no idea whether I have to ask it on linux, unix or ask ubuntu. Or super user, or server fault. I have to read all 5 sites' descriptions. And that's not very asker-friendly. You can even suggest sites that are a possible match (like suggesting duplicates).

I think there is an overdiversification of topics. This is not necessarily bad per se, but it might need some extra features (like the one suggested) for a greater benefit.

(Note that I don't tag feature-request, because I didn't define the feature details. It might be showing questions on multiple sites but having the question actually reside on only one (in terms of UI), or having the question synchronized between multiple sites)

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marked as duplicate by status-declined, Nick Craver Mar 22 '11 at 18:14


Just to check - how many of the top 100 Stackoverflow users are active on programmers.stackexchange.com ? –  Bozho Mar 22 '11 at 18:15
This isn't an exact duplicate of the question marked as "Possible Duplicate". He is suggesting showing selected questions across multiple sites, while it resides on one of them. This is not the same as cross-posting, and I think it would be a useful feature. –  Faheem Mitha Dec 12 '11 at 23:08

1 Answer 1

For those of us that actually visit multiple site, it would be really annoying to see the same questions everywhere.

If someone cannot exactly decide the perfect place for a question, perhaps the question isn't well formulated? Otherwise make a best guess and choose one site.

The world isn't perfect!

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the point is that not many of these questions will exist. But there are also not too few of them. –  Bozho Mar 22 '11 at 18:15
These special cross-questions could be put in their own special "ghetto", so people can't see them unless they want to. –  Faheem Mitha Dec 12 '11 at 23:09

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