Software Recommendation is live tomorrow! What makes us different in our quality standards?

Question

In an ideal world, there should be one SE site for each kind of question. Now, in the practice we are overlapping with at least 2 other sites (3 if we count SF) and that soon that number will grow one more when Software Recommendation go into public beta. So, SR has their standards for what kind of questions they want and accept. This leads me to another question: what are the software recommendation we want and accept? What are our standards?

As pointed out in my previous discussion Just lets drop the software recommendation mess I pointed out that the existing guide is unhelpful and contradictory as it doesn't define clearly the must and must not OP should follow of a software recommendation question.

So, basically, what rules/policies prevents me from asking a question in Software Recommendation that I could ask here?

Answer 1

In short: We could experiment but I'd much rather wait and see where SR lands.

Everything we've tried before here is a result of best guesses and best wishes. You call it confusing conflicting and yeah, I'd agree. It's hard for meta-lore to override and replace older lore. You can search for "recommendations" and find ten different "rules".

But doing the same thing and hoping that makes more sense is literally insane. New guidance might work or it might just fall on deaf ears like before. We'll be here in another 18 months with yet even more confusion.

We can afford to be lazy about this. If SR works, we can look at how they do it and think about porting over their format. It's possible they won't get it right first time around or that they need a technical alteration to make it work. Great! The less we do before that, the less confusion we introduce here.

On a personal level, I'm also looking to see how they deal with long-known issues. In my mind they're problems that really underpin the viability of SR but we'll see. And even if SR doesn't work, I'm sure there'll be a post mortem which will again help us work out where we stand.