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Welcome to Software Development on Codidact!

Will you help us build our independent community of developers helping developers? We're small and trying to grow. We welcome questions about all aspects of software development, from design to code to QA and more. Got questions? Got answers? Got code you'd like someone to review? Please join us.

Comments on How will you balance demanding high quality questions with maximising the number of users?

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How will you balance demanding high quality questions with maximising the number of users?

+12
−1

There is a well know trade-off between a site aiming for questions/answers that are of a high quality and useful for people who arrive from Google and a site being nice to new users who often only care about someone doing their homework for them, so they can complete a programme course, with no intention of ever writing software again or learning more than what is needed to pass.

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posted over 4 years ago
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Ringi‭
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+6
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One aspect that helps with having a good balance is to have an enough number of users that help newbies ask good (or at least decent) questions. This is something reachable within rather small communities.

I have seen this being put in practice by Politics.SE where there is a more effort put into helping users rather than simply downvoting and/or closing questions or deleting content:

  • editing lousy questions in good-enough ones whenever possible. It provides quite some satisfaction to see a negative score question becoming a "hot" one after being edited.
  • providing constructive criticism through comments rather than simply downvoting / vote to close.
  • use comments to argue against closing or downvoting a question by providing arguments for this.
  • have a clear and concise (minimal) set of rules like Codidact has.
  • remove content that blatantly goes against "Be nice" policy.

This is clearly possible for Codidact communities.

I think it is important to avoid having "maximizing number of users" as the main goal of any community. It is important that they feel welcomed and in the same time to understand that not every community is a good fit for any user.

posted about 4 years ago
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Alexei‭
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General comments (4 comments)
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Lundin‭ wrote about 4 years ago
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I've repeatedly pushed for giving this kind of feedback in private channels, rather than in public comment fields etc. Humans are much more likely to respond well to critique if given in private. We all have lots of experience from SE; what did not work out there was "public shaming as moderation tool". Well, sure it probably helped quality of content, but it also created tons of needless drama and gave the site(s) a nasty rep.

Skipping 1 deleted comment.

Monica Cellio‭ wrote about 4 years ago
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And a key difference is that we're young and small, while SO isn't. People on SO resist investing time to help people because there's so much; it probably feels like bailing out the ocean with a thimble. We can get off on the right foot and grow organically, helping people along the way.

msh210‭ wrote about 4 years ago
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"One aspect that helps with having a good balance is to have an enough number of users that help newbies ask good (or at least decent) questions. This is something reachable within rather small communities." Yes, but only in small communities. Once we grow, he newbies will overwhelm such efforts.

President James K. Polk‭ wrote about 4 years ago
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It's best to go in with realistic expectations. On stackoverflow a significant percentage of questions are from users who are not at all interested in the site's vision or rules, and will create a new account for each question they ask. stackoverflow and politics SE are so different I doubt the lessons from the latter have much relevance for the former or this site. software.codidact will not be immune from these kinds of terrible questions.