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I'm a beginner in Stack Exchange. I came from Reddit, and there we have groups to related topics so we can post questions in those specific groups. Does Stack Exchange work similarly or not?

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    Does Why do we tag questions? which contains Tags are used to organize content on web sites. They allow ad-hoc groupings of possibly-related information, typically generated by an online community. help? Commented Apr 26 at 13:34
  • To clarify, the communities on Reddit are not called "groups"; they're called subreddits, or simply communities. (SE network sites are sorta similar to subreddits in that they're separate, distinct sites with potential overlap, though there are obviously many other differences such as SE sites only being created by the company, moderators being elected by the community, etc.)
    – V2Blast
    Commented Apr 27 at 20:51

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Surprisingly I couldn't find anything in the about this.

Stack Exchange is divided into (currently) 182 Q&A communities (the number on that page should be updated), commonly referred to as "sites". Here is a list of them. I guess they are similar to subreddits, but obviously we have a lot fewer of them. There may be some overlap between sites but unlike subreddits, it's usually minimal.

Each site has a corresponding meta site for discussion about/support for/etc. the site; the one you're on now is about the entire network, so you've come to the right place with your question.

Questions on a site are further organized by tags, and especially on larger sites like Stack Overflow, subcommunities may form around the largest of those tags (usually programming languages).

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  • Could maybe more being said how subcommunities form around tags on big sites? It seems to be a very loose association with no dedicated place to meet except maybe for chat. Meta is for the whole site. Collectives maybe were centered around a subset of tags. Commented Apr 26 at 15:57
  • Trouble is, I have zero experience with Collectives ...
    – Glorfindel Mod
    Commented Apr 26 at 15:59
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Rather than having discussions across different subreddits, practically we run as separate, pseudo-independent sites. Sometimes we have overlaps in topicality - consider our general computing site Super User where I'm a moderator, Unix and Linux and Ask Ubuntu have topics that nest, and sometimes we overlap with Server Fault. A good way to get an idea of what sites we offer is to take a look at our site list, and if you find a topic that catches your attention that a site covers, go take a look at existing posts there, and the help to see if it's a good fit. We have a broad array of sites that cover both technical and non-technical topics.

I'd note that there's a common culture - for example, we're not a discussion board (mostly - there's an experiment with one at stack overflow), we're mostly about focused, practical questions and clear, self-contained answers, but also occasional quirks with specific sites according to their needs. It's worth spending a little while looking around to understand how things work for best results.

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