I think the unique features of SE would benefit competitive programmers who are interested in asking and answering objective questions about solving competitive programming problems. However, it will be difficult to overcome the inertia of the existing CP sites, and get people to dedicate their time to a CP.SE site.
The existing sites all have problems:
- Despite its history of expert participation, Quora CP has too many subjective questions, silly questions, and debate questions. Quora doesn't have strong question quality standards, which makes it difficult to build a professional community.
- Stack Overflow is better than any other site for focused, code-oriented questions. But competitive programmers have to be constantly alert about how they ask their question details there, since there's a cultural bias against CP on Stack Overflow. (Some high-rep users consider it frivolous and wasteful).
- Programming Puzzles & Code Golf and Puzzling both prefer to run their own contests. They don't really want to discuss other people's contests, and that would be the main purpose of a CP.SE site.
- Code Review isn't a bad option. It is even now being used to discuss CP solutions. But competitive programmers will always be just a sub-community here. It's not the main focus of the site, so it's not the best place to build a unique competitive programming community. However, it may be a place to start building a code-oriented CP community that could later move to CP.SE.
- Online judges can set up their own communities (e.g., Topcoder Forums). But they don't have the benefits of the SE software. And those communities are fragmented, since each community tends to attract only programmers who use a particular online judge.
I think CP.SE would do best by focusing on how to solve specific competitive programming problems. It would be like a specialized Stack Overflow, where all of the coding questions related to programming puzzles rather than real-world code. Discussing algorithms could also be on-topic as long as they were algorithms that tend to come up in programming contests. (We have CS.SE for general discussion of algorithms). CP.SE definitely shouldn't allow general CP questions like "How do I improve my skills." Quora has those covered.
So my prediction is that the success of CP.SE will be based on people's willingness to ask and answer detailed questions about solving competitive programming problems.
Here's a blog post that I wrote with a more in-depth discussion of this topic: Do We Need a Stack Exchange Site for Competitive Programmers?
