<soap box>Lots of things are intellectually stimulating if the commenters treat each other with respect and courtesy.
If the commenters aren't civil, almost no topic is going to work. You can have lots of flame wars and trash talk about OOP vs FP -- heck, we've done it many times. Same goes for relational databases verus column-oriented databases, or Erlang innards vs. the JVM.
It's not the topics, it's the behavior of the commenters that make or break a site.
As a hacker and somebody who is interested in just about anything, I'd like broader topics and stricter commenting behavior, although I understand you can get to the same point with a limited topic list -- it's just real boring. Bascially what you're saying is "let's limit discussion to things that are so technical as to not emotionally involve but just a very small subset of the readers" That's great, but success in this case means the site is bland and stale.
At some point, I think about 1.5 years ago, we had a discussion on here about the reason for other topics. Fact is, after so many startup articles, they all start to look alike. I don't know about other readers, but I'd like a reason to come back every day. The "nuances of database scaling" is wonderful, overdone, and we all wish we could have those problems. 3-D printing? Economics of drug legalization (not the policy)? Working a startup in a down economy? Effects of the Innovator's Dilemma on military power? Comparison of various country's economies and the impact on trade? These are all startup topics: they're exploring problems and issues where startups can get involved.</soap box>
EDIT: I'll add another statement: the best startups are those that emotionally-involved founders come at a unique and interestesting problem from radically different worldviews using technology to make people's lives easier. That means that discussing unique and interesting problems that emotionally charge and divide us is the best way to form groups to begin to solve those problems.
Comments
<soap box>Lots of things are intellectually stimulating if the commenters treat each other with respect and courtesy.
If the commenters aren't civil, almost no topic is going to work. You can have lots of flame wars and trash talk about OOP vs FP -- heck, we've done it many times. Same goes for relational databases verus column-oriented databases, or Erlang innards vs. the JVM.
It's not the topics, it's the behavior of the commenters that make or break a site.
As a hacker and somebody who is interested in just about anything, I'd like broader topics and stricter commenting behavior, although I understand you can get to the same point with a limited topic list -- it's just real boring. Bascially what you're saying is "let's limit discussion to things that are so technical as to not emotionally involve but just a very small subset of the readers" That's great, but success in this case means the site is bland and stale.
At some point, I think about 1.5 years ago, we had a discussion on here about the reason for other topics. Fact is, after so many startup articles, they all start to look alike. I don't know about other readers, but I'd like a reason to come back every day. The "nuances of database scaling" is wonderful, overdone, and we all wish we could have those problems. 3-D printing? Economics of drug legalization (not the policy)? Working a startup in a down economy? Effects of the Innovator's Dilemma on military power? Comparison of various country's economies and the impact on trade? These are all startup topics: they're exploring problems and issues where startups can get involved.</soap box>
EDIT: I'll add another statement: the best startups are those that emotionally-involved founders come at a unique and interestesting problem from radically different worldviews using technology to make people's lives easier. That means that discussing unique and interesting problems that emotionally charge and divide us is the best way to form groups to begin to solve those problems.