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In particular, visitors don't care about the definition of “lifehack” or about the scope of the site. This isn't to say that you can completely forget about them when defining the scope. In particular, it implies that the scope must not exclude answers for not being “lifehacks”. One thing we do have a consensus on is that the valid questions on this site are a subset of the problems of the form “how do I solve this problem in my day-to-day life?” — so that's what we can expect people to be searching for. It is vital that the answers help the people who find them, otherwise we would be making the Internet worse.

Casual users will usually notice the site name, but they'll rarely care about what is really a lifehack. There'll always be new users who think their question should be on-topic even though the consensus among the regulars is that it isn't. Nonetheless the scope must not be too subtle, otherwise it will have to be explained anew for every new user, meaning that very few will stick around. That's why I propose not to make up our own definition of “lifehack”.

In particular, visitors don't care about the definition of “lifehack” or about the scope of the site. This isn't to say that you can completely forget about them when defining the scope. In particular, it implies that the scope must not exclude answers for not being “lifehacks”. One thing we do have a consensus on is that the valid questions on this site are a subset of the problems of the form “how do I solve this problem in my day-to-day life?” — so that's what we can expect people to be searching for. It is vital that the answers help the people who find them, otherwise we would be making the Internet worse.

Casual users will usually notice the site name, but they'll rarely care about what is really a lifehack. There'll always be new users who think their question should be on-topic even though the consensus among the regulars is that it isn't. Nonetheless the scope must not be too subtle, otherwise it will have to be explained anew for every new user, meaning that very few will stick around. That's why I propose not to make up our own definition of “lifehack”.

Barely any is getting closed, which means that they are all considered on-topic by the bulk of the site's regulars. Thus, regardless of all the debates on meta, the actual scope of this site is Everyday life Stack Exchange.

Barely any are getting closed, which means that they are all considered on-topic by the bulk of the site's regulars. Thus, regardless of all the debates on meta, the actual scope of this site is Everyday life Stack Exchange.

One month later…

Looking at the front page, I see mostly two kinds of questions:

• Questions asking about how to do something about household items or everyday tasks — office supplies, keeping warm, cleaning, grooming, cooking, etc.
• Questions asking how to do such things for free or cheap.

Barely any is getting closed, which means that they are all considered on-topic by the bulk of the site's regulars. Thus, regardless of all the debates on meta, the actual scope of this site is Everyday life Stack Exchange.

Questions of the second type are the ones that Trade-off Stack Exchange would want. But I find that they are actually the weakest questions: they're inevitably asking for a free lunch. For Trade-off SE, they are on-topic but low-quality, because they hardly ever bother to compromise on anything: it has to be cheap, but it has to work well. This results in pretty generic answers — not hackish answers, which defeats the purpose that restricting the scope would have.