I think you are mixing up the fact that IT has a large userbase, while ML, NLP, etc; are more niche (relatively speaking). 360 users IS immediate traction for this area.
> Clearly, it takes more than 360 people to make a site successful.
Successful for it's founders, yes. But for me, the reader, I'm quite happy to have only the few thousand most-active researchers and professors and their students of Machine Learning, NLP, etc; post on metaoptimize.com. Otherwise, I might as well go to Yahoo Answers for generic, watered-down responses.
Yeah, I dunno if this area is pretty going to be successful for the SO guys, it makes a lot more sense for the community to run their own not for profit system.
One of the problems with the area51 process is that most of the people participating are from the current SO sites, meaning that it is always going to be very biased towards tech based setups without looking at what could also be mainstream successful.
> Clearly, it takes more than 360 people to make a site successful.
Successful for it's founders, yes. But for me, the reader, I'm quite happy to have only the few thousand most-active researchers and professors and their students of Machine Learning, NLP, etc; post on metaoptimize.com. Otherwise, I might as well go to Yahoo Answers for generic, watered-down responses.