Computer Science Stack Exchange site is now up in public beta

Going to rephrase a different comment I made earlier:<p>All of these stack exchanges seem to be trying to solve the same kinds of noise issues that Reddit's subreddits solve, except Reddit does a much better job. No question in my mind.<p>Thoughts:<p>- Having to open a new account on each site (linked to one big virtual account) is messy. I get why they may not want reputation/badges to carry-over from site to site. Personally I believe doing so causes even more fragmentation and makes the barrier to entry too painful if you have to repeat it across several sites (I'd prefer to see a better mix of carrying over some stuff while starting over with others), but the fragmentation of the login/account itself is what really bothers me.<p>- On Reddit, anyone can open a subreddit about anything. On Stack Exchange, new sites have to be proposed on Area51 before they are beta tested and released. All of this effort so... what? They don't have sites that nobody visits? Would anybody notice sites that nobody visits? On Reddit, popular subreddits emerge organically. Unknown subreddits are basically invisible. It all just works. Stack Exchange should be more of a metareddit (.com). Stack Exchange even has a great page for featuring their sites by size and category: <a href="http://stackexchange.com/sites" rel="nofollow">http://stackexchange.com/sites</a><p>- On Stack Exchange, if I regularly frequent multiple sites, I need to visit them separately. This results in several tabs that I flip between when I'm in the mood for answering questions. On Reddit, all of my subreddits just feed through my front page, or I can input a custom URL which lets me view only a subset of my subreddits. I would love to do this with Stack Exchange.

I feel there is almost an oversaturation of stackexchanges now. I often have questions that could fit into a ton of different sub-exchanges, yet when I post it on one I am usually ridiculed into posting it onto another. SO is one of my favorite sites on the internet, but it needs to be clearer as to what sites should be used for what.

How is it different from <a href="http://cstheory.stackexchange.com" rel="nofollow">http://cstheory.stackexchange.com</a> ?<p>Update: And I answered my own question: <a href="http://meta.cs.stackexchange.com/questions/78/how-to-make-our-cs-community-very-different-from-the-cstheory" rel="nofollow">http://meta.cs.stackexchange.com/questions/78/how-to-make-ou...</a>

Wouldn't it be simpler for Stack Exchange to have a single website for all subjects and just use tags for classification?

For anyone who is confused about the purpose of this site (in contrast to cstheory, for example), the distinction is that this is for non-research level computer science questions, whereas cstheory tends to frown on such questions.

Interesting to see the first question tagged by the author with the qualifying line (This is not homework.)... Does that really matter on this particular stack exchange? I realize the disparity in the goal and action of someone on stackoverflow asking for an implementation of an entire homework question rather than a specific question on a single part they're having difficulty with, but in this case I would think on this particular exchange, "homeworky" questions would have to be tollerable..

Science is normally taken to be the study of nature. By that definition, "Computing Science" is a misnomer. Sure, it's a misnomer with a long history, but isn't the point of all the hand-wringing (beta status, area 51, ...) to try to get things right?

Does anyone else find that SO is great cor answering beginner level questions, but completely inaccurate beyond that?