If I may preface this with a little observation, I've noticed that when one bioinformatic community talks about another, the Biostars folk are consistently respectful and positive in the face of sometimes quite harsh criticism. Perhaps one needs an easy-going mindset to read/answer 10 boring questions before they come across 1 that makes them stop and think. Regardless, I hope that continues :)
So it appears that for all the reasons predicted on the other thread, the Bioinformatics SE isn't picking up the sort of steam that is perhaps desired: https://bioinformatics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/40/is-there-a-large-enough-community-to-sustain-this-site
Now I think actually this is a bit of a shame, because any amount of effort spent making bioinformatics more of a community thing is effort well spent. A lot of the headaches in bioinformatics are dealing with decisions isolated people made, be it a weird analysis, non-intuitive tooling, data formats that don't store what other people want, etc. Less isolation is always a good thing.
But as it appears that isn't going to go through, perhaps now would be a good time for us to listen to the fair criticism that was received about Biostars and, essentially, make a prioritised list of ways Biostars could be better. Perhaps this whole SE affair will have a happy ending, if it promotes changes in the Biostars network that ultimately grows the community.
The biggest criticism I've heard of Biostars so far is the low quality questions/answers. Personally, I don't see low quality answers (which probably means I'm the one providing them...!), but I do see low-quality questions. Of course. When most people get started in the field because data.fastq was e-mailed to them by a collaborator, this is not unexpected. Perhaps the solution is to have an "advanced question" type, so one can filter on only the advanced questions (that need a certain amount of rep to ask)? I don't know. All I'm saying is, now would be a good time to think about how Biostars can fill the void that is clearly there if people want a SE so much. The end-goal would be to go to SE after the decision to close has been made, with a "we heard you and we changed - try us out now."
Otherwise... I'm worried that there will be some resentment to Biostars. I'm already starting to see it actually. The typical "our community would be much better if only yours didn't exist!" stuff. Downvote logic.
I also find that there are poorly written questions on Biostars but do you think that, on other sites, people are only asking well formulated questions ? If not, how do these other sites deal with bad questions ? Maybe we're getting more low quality questions because we're more welcoming to newcomers and are willing to put some effort into understanding these questions.
I think you've hit the nail on the head. At least on the bioinfo.SE site the "broad" questions get a lot of downvotes and then the comment section starts immediately looking like that often seen here. I've found that amusing.
There is no low-quality content at least on the first page right now, otherwise I had closed it already ;P
Beware: there is no good metric for low or high quality of content, I know of, and reports are mostly episodical, the same might be true for the 'hostility' argument against SE. We should not get drawn into this 'alternative facts' kind of thing.
FYI, bioinformatics.SE is going into public beta in a week.
Correction, it's public as of a couple hours ago.
Yeah :) In my defence, the SE guy said the minimum number of questions is 150 in the first three weeks, and it's been 3 weeks and there's 147 questions, so it's just scraping through - however i'm sure traffic will pick up now it's in public beta. The next month will be the deciding month I think. Meritocracy ftw!
Says one more day of private beta when I checked now. So perhaps sooner than a week.
Well, "sometime this week" according to the SE folks.
Oh that's great! :D