As a long time mailing-list and SO answerer (and occasional poster), I'll play the devil's advocate here because I can see two potential issues if the purpose of this community is not given clearer directions:
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Many questions will be cross-posted, often without links, which is infuriating when you spend time to craft a nice answer and find that it was answered somewhere else in parallel. People who put real effort in their answers generally don't appreciate seeing their time wasted (at the very least, they'll quickly grow tired of it and stop contributing).
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Placing all emphasis on "complete newbies", that they feel welcome even when posting clueless questions, is a commendable initiative , but I believe it needs to be complemented by other discussions of higher quality, otherwise experienced users probably won't join or won't stick around [**]. Without their contributions, the site would risk becoming a Rstudio help-desk rather than a real community. I don't think that would be very sustainable, unless Rstudio staff are prepared to be the main contributors.
My broader point is that a thriving community needs a core of highly-knowledgeable and motivated contributors, and I have not seen much effort to draw them in. On the contrary, in fact, a lot of the emphasis on newbies will sound discouraging to them: why would you join (yet another online experiment) if
- the guidelines are very critical of other sites where you've been positively contributing for many years
- it appears that the focus is placed on basic questions, not interesting ones
- the community is hosted by a company, Rstudio, partly as a replacement of their previous forums for Q&As and customer requests: they have staff paid to answer such questions, why would you do it for them, for free?
- you've already invested considerable time on previous forums (SO, mailing lists, github issues, pull requests, ...). What's the incentive to start over on this new platform, with no clear directions, no recognition of your past efforts, and no clear message that it will have interesting content for you (a seasoned R user), to make it rewarding and worth your time?
I have asked "newbie" questions on other, unrelated StackExchange sites, and the reaction has often been very disappointing and unproductive. I know how unpleasant the experience can be from that perspective.
[**] for instance, I was a very active member of the original ggplot2 mailing list; I unsubscribed a few years ago partly because interesting questions had shifted to SO. In fact, I have gradually lost motivation to engage in ggplot2 discussions on SO since its developers shifted it to maintenance-only mode. The interesting technical contributions and philosophical discussions have been scattered into individual, disconnected efforts from largely independent developers.
The range of motivations to contribute good answers is hard to pin down, but I believe the prospect of a "warm community" is not a motivation by itself; I would even argue that it's double-sided because it fosters unproductive repetition, rather than conciseness.