Nice wealthy people from nice rich countries are "Expats". People from poor countries are "immigrants". It's an interesting language hack society developed.
It's hard to imagine how it could survive. Even the Startups site (supposedly) didn't meet the StackExchange criteria because it only averaged 4.9 questions/day:<p><a href="http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/6243/startup-business" rel="nofollow">http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/6243/startup-busin...</a><p>StackExchange replaced Q&A sites that were completely backward in their approach (eg. requiring signups to see answers), but StackExchange itself is becoming a little bit backward. Questions that might involve some healthy discussion rather than a straightforward answer get shut down too easily, and they forfeit decent sites (eg. Startups, after 3 years!) just because they didn't meet some arbitrary minimum activity criteria. The data dump download doesn't even work, so now there's just a tonne of information that people contributed which is lost.<p>(edit: data dump download actually does work, but it's still such a waste to discard the momentum, Google indexing, etc.)
I have been both an "expat" and an immigrant (UAE, Qatar, Libya). Here is the difference. As an "expat" I never intended to stay in the country for long. As a young immigrant I went to South Africa settled bought a house had kids and businesses and eventually became a citizen.
I like to read /top/month or /top/year/ of many subreddits. With StackExchange there is only top, and I can't see a way to come back a long time later and see what's new in highly liked questions. Are there any third party sites that cater to this?<p>Relevant because I imagine I'll read the top questions now, and again in a year with many questions coming up both times.
My instincts are that country->country specific forums are more valuable. Americans in Italy, like me, or Australians in Germany, or Canadians in Spain, or whatever. Because a lot of the value in these things is helping navigate the local bureaucracy, culture, and lifestyle for someone who is new to it.
What's up with stackexchange menu bar? It is in unknown to me language (if language at all).<p>But if I view the source code or copy, I get plain English, what the hell?<p>Example: <a href="http://i.imgur.com/Gcyrwpe.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/Gcyrwpe.jpg</a>