Have you given any thought to the names of the categories here?

I’m not sure what you’re asking here and I did read the details, for once. Maybe, you’re over-analyzing? General is general – it has a description and Social has less relaxed guidelines.

I wrote about this when we rolled out the changes, here’s the blog post. The gist of it is:

General: The focus is to help people get the answers they need.

Social: Express your opinions and flex your sense of humor. Social works best when you’re wanting to learn about people.

@Simone_De_Beauvoir You may be right. @richardhenry Ok.

I wish we had a better name for the General Section. It feels a tad generic, but I really don’t know what else we’d call it.

@augustlan How about Knowledge or Information? (too dull? I’m drinking some beer, maybe my choices will be better in a few hours) ;)

How about Dry (General) and Juicy (Social)?

@augustlan et al: that was my point.

:-)

@jonsblond That’s a good start. Keep your thinking cap on while you’re drinking!

I was going to post on this VERY topic before I found this thread (I may repost it, in fact).

In my opinion, category headings should be immediately understandable (or as close to as possible). This is most important considering the goal is to have new members come in and contribute, rather than interrupt, to the forum – at least partially. So as a newbie, I’m going to want to post ANY question to the “General” category, whereas anything dealing with more personal topics or “superficial” pop culture topics (e.g., “What really is up with Paris Hilton) would be in the “Social” category.

I had an experience where I had a question transferred from the General to Social category because the moderator determined that there were too many posts that were off-topic. Although there were several posts that dealt with peripheral issues associated with the question, I didn’t think that they were off-topic because they were productive to the general topic of the discussion. Additionally, it assumes that a question that deals with a complex social issue can have one causal answer. I was a little ticked. This was after I had read the descriptions of the categories, and felt like I had it pretty well down.

Further, assumptions about where I should post affected the type of person I assumed would read and respond to the question. I didn’t think I would get the considered responses I was hoping for in Social. And, in general, I would look at the General category rather than Social because I thought that’s where the more interesting questions would be. To be honest, there is a value assessment placed on the word Social. And when it is paired with General, you don’t really get how the two categories contrast against each other. I don’t really think of events as either “general” or “social.” I think of them as “business” or “social,” though.

I would LOVE to see the categories split into “Specific” and “General” – or “Narrow” and “Broad” (although that seems a little negative also). If “Social” was meant to sort of bring in the facebook crowd, keep it, but maybe it should just consolidate all the questions from the other rooms plus anything else people want to throw in there.

I think the most important part of a site like this is that it should as much as possible teach the user the rules as invisibly as possible. Right now, I think the categories require an extra step of analysis that produces vague result, and is unnecessary.