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?
2 Answers
Surprisingly I couldn't find anything in the faq 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
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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.
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?