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Proposal: Emacs
I see that @JoelSpolsky (founder of StackExchange) just committed to the Emacs.se proposal.
A few years ago @JoelSpolsky wrote a blog post called Merging Season in which he specifically argued that proposals for new sites should be rejected if they meet the following conditions:
- Almost all X questions are on-topic for site Y
- If Y already exists, it already has a tag for X, and nobody is complaining
- You’re not creating such a big group that you don’t have enough experts to answer all possible questions
- There’s a high probability that users of site Y would enjoy seeing the occasional question about X
emacs questions are on-topic for StackOverflow, StackOverflow already exists and already has a tag for emacs, this is a smaller group than StackOverflow and many of StackOverflow's users are also emacs users and enjoy seeing the emacs questions (even if they aren't expert enough to answer them themselves.)
So the one thing that makes this proposal viable (according to the original blog post) is if the current StackOverflow emacs tag users are complaining. Are they? What are they complaining about? In this case, wouldn't it be better to fix the problem that users are complaining about than start a new site about a niche topic? Or is Joel now in favor of lots of tiny sites? If so, what changed?