You switch back and forth between SO and SE in your post, in a way that makes it a bit unclear what your understanding is. As noted, Codidact is analogous to the entire Stack Exchange network; Stack Overflow is roughly comparable to just software.codidact.com. You may notice one important difference already: for Stack Exchange, Stack Overflow came first, and still represents the large majority of the entire network by itself. The idea of using the Q&A format for other topics came as an afterthought for them. But for us, the assumption is built right in, taking the lesson they learned.

I understand that Codidact is an organization that has created open-source software for Q&A sites, while SE is a for-profit organization. However, from an end-user perspective, this is largely irrelevant.

I agree that this is irrelevant for someone that is simply trying to solve a problem and hopes that getting the answer to a question will help solve the problem. But that isn't why either Codidact or Stack Exchange exist. The basic idea behind a Q&A site is that you can help to build something that's useful for everyone — and, of course, also use it. A base of good questions makes it more likely that your answer has already been written, and you can get it without needing to wait, just by searching. And a new good question can attract good answers, which make that search more likely to succeed for the next person.

And the difference made by having the non-profit Codidact Foundation means the world to a community that's here to build something. Building something that belongs to someone else, a for-profit company that sells ads (and now tries all kinds of AI-powered experiments) while you get nothing but disrespect (for example, in the form of UI changes that nobody asked for and all the regulars hate, which are designed to increase "engagement" at the expense of quality), feels awful.

I can say that I already feel accused. The first message I received from the system didn't take long to remind me of my limitations and what I need to do to remove them. I had the impression that I had just signed up for a job, not for an account on a Q&A site.

I don't know what message you received, but signing up for a Q&A site does involve some responsibility. This is not a place where you can just find someone to volunteer to help fix a problem. We need your question to be something useful to us. (And, of course, we need to keep out spammers, vandals and other forms of abusers. "Trust, but verify", you know.)

What does Codidact do differently for new users compared to SO, besides allowing them to gain negative reputation?

Most importantly, of course, Codidact (including the Software site) allows new users to gain positive reputation, just like Stack Exchange (including Stack Overflow). Focusing on the negative is a self-fulfilling prophecy; you'll have a much better time by trying to understand what we're trying to accomplish here.

But really, the differences "for new users" include all the general differences. You might especially be interested in this perspective from a new Codidact user, though.

We're community focused and our staff and moderators are also just ordinary community members in a sense, who are just as happy to socialize. Instead of building our own chat, we use Discord, as also linked on the sidebar. We don't, in my opinion, have the same culture of not explaining downvotes or close votes, because we're still small enough that we can take that time to relate to people one on one and hope they'll be interested in adapting. This also means that you can get prompt, courteous attention from management. You can even get yourself involved in the development of the open-source site software, if that's your thing.

We don't believe in hiding information, so you can see separate up- and downvote totals on posts right from the beginning, and without having to click to reveal them. And aside from the voting, we allow for community-specific "reactions" on posts that allow experts to call out and sign their name to important critique of answers.

We try to pay attention to details that are focused on what will help people to write good Q&A, instead of the things that will drive "engagement". So, for example, when you ask a question, the "title" field comes after the "body" field — because writing out the main text of the question helps you figure out a good title for it, much more than the other way around. And we let you choose a license for your posts and put that into the form as well — so that you're always reminded that you're contributing to a "creative commons", and so that you always get to choose the terms of that contribution (within the selection that allows us to function).

We deliberately simplified the "privilege" structure, and try to make it tied more to your demonstrated abilities and trust, instead of a single "reputation" number that just plain doesn't work. When you're new you won't have to think about all the Q&A you'll have to do in order to get anywhere, and you won't find yourself in an "elite" status because your question went viral. Instead, the idea is that you get expanded trust for editing specifically by making good edits, more rights for cleaning up questions specifically by casting helpful flags, etc. The existing system is primitive, but we're hoping to improve it.

Oh, and we offer more sophisticated page formatting — that's a personal fav. Not just for posts, but for comments: we hide them better by default (so you can see answers and scroll between them more directly), and we don't vote on them (because that turns out to be distracting and not all that useful in the end, and ends up discouraging actual fixes to answers), but we allow more text per comment and fuller formatting (so that people can communicate more clearly with them).

posted 12 months ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

12mo ago

Karl Knechtel‭

3154 reputation 42 71 391 103