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 can we grow this community?
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How can we grow this community?
Codidact's communities have a lot of great content that is helping people on the Internet. Our communities are small, though, and sustainable communities depend on having lots of active, engaged participants. The folks already here are doing good work; our challenge is to find more people like you so we can help this community grow.
This calls for a two-pronged approach: reaching more people who would be interested if only they knew about us, and making sure that visitors get a good first impression. I'm here to ask for your help with both.
Reaching more people
The pool of people interested in software development is huge. (I don't think I need to belabor that point.) My question to you is: where do we find the right people for this community? How do we make ourselves attractive to them, among all the other sites vying for their attention? You're the experts on this topic, not us. Where would it be most fruitful to promote Codidact? How should we appeal to them to draw them in?
Please don't give general answers like "CS departments" or "GitHub". We need your expert input to decide where, specifically, we should be looking. We are now able to pay for some advertising -- where should we direct it, and what message would best reach that audience? Can you help us sell your community?
Finally, some types of promotion are best done peer to peer. You are the experts in your topic; messages from you on subreddits or professional forums or the like will be much more credible than messages from Codidact staff. For these types of settings, we need your help to get the word out. If you know of a suitable place and can volunteer to spread the word there, please leave an answer about it so we all know about it (and know not to also post there).
Making a good first impression
Pretend for a moment that you don't know anything about Codidact. Visit this community in incognito mode. What's your reaction? If it's negative, what can we do about it? Some known deterrents from across the network:
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Latest activity is not recent. This tells people the community isn't active. Anecdotally, we have lots of people ready to answer good questions, and on some communities, not enough good questions for them to answer. Can you help with that?
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Latest questions are unanswered. This tells people it might not be worth asking here. Why are our unanswered questions unanswered? Are they poor questions in some regard? Unclear, too basic, too esoteric, just not interesting? Can they be fixed? Should they be hidden?[1]
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Latest questions have poor scores. This tells people that either there's lots of low-quality material here or the voters are overly picky. If it's a quality problem, same questions as the previous bullet. If good content is getting downvoted, or not getting upvoted, can you help us understand why?
These are issues we've seen or heard about from across the network, but each community is different. What do you see here? What might be turning people away, and what could we do about it?
Are there things about the platform itself, as opposed to content, that discourage people we're trying to attract? If there's something we can customize to better serve this community, please let us know. If there are other changes in presentation or behavior that you think would encourage visitors to stick around, what are they?
Conversely, what is this community doing well? What draws newcomers in? I don't just mean the reverse of those bullets. What do we need to keep doing, and what might be worth highlighting when promoting this community?
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Should the question list not show some questions to anonymous visitors? What should the criteria be? ↩︎
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2y ago
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Post
After a few years of casually using stack-exchange sites and wandering around on coda-dict, I feel there are mainly three components to the quality of the content on each of these sites:
- the knowledge base
- the community
- the game
The Knowledge Base
I think most answers to this question focus on this aspect of the site. It is also an important aspect, especially if communities end up building (parts of) their knowledge base using sites like this (I think Tex - LaTeX Stack Exchange is a nice example of this).
On top of the other propositions that have been made here, I would like to propose to just ignore questions from "other sites" when looking for an answer. I believe most developers rely on a search engine and the internet to get a quick answer to their questions. Most obvious answers should be in the official documentation and can be found there. In this case, there would be no real need to ask a question. Otherwise, you would probably end up on stackoverflow where your question already has an answer. Instead of just clicking the link and reading through the available answers, I think it might not be a bad idea to ignore these links and just formulate your question on codidact. Afterwards, you can still collect your answer from other sides and move on, but at least the knowledge base on this platform will get a chance to grow.
The Community
This is one of the aspects that I personally have little experience with. I am more of a casual user that has occasionally helped with cleaning up review queues (on stackecxhange). However, this is also seems an important part for people on these sites. If I understood things correctly, the community building has been outsourced to discord. Discord might indeed be a better place to build a community, but it prove to be a barrier to enter the community. I personally do not really care for this aspect, but I do feel like I might be missing parts of the experience by not joining discord. Some sort of Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO), if you will.
From my perspective, there seem to be two issues with the current implementation of the discord solution:
- I remember reading about discord somewhere, but at this point I can't remember where I read this and how to join. If the idea is to organise the community via discord, it might be useful to have a more accessible/prominent link to join the community. Ideally, there would be some kind of discord integration on the site so that you don't have to leave the site to check what's happening on discord.
- I can't remember what the purpose of discord is supposed to be. Maybe it would be good to clearly specify what is happening on discord. On one side, this should reduce the FOMO if discord is just providing non-essential extras to the experience on this platform. On the other side, it allows users to make a more informed decision about whether it is worth setting up discord for these extras.
The Game
One part of the stackexchange network that seems to be less present here, is the gamification of Q&A. There is still the reputation that can be gained by asking and answering questions. However, there are no badges or other "perks" that can be earned by contributing to codadict. For people who do not care that much about the community aspect, like myself, this removes a lot of incentive to be really active.
By gamifying the experience on the site, the bootstrap might be a more enjoyable experience. After all, as long as there are no questions to answer, users could "level up" by voting on existing questions, revisiting older questions, doing moderation tasks. This might keep people active on the platform until there are more questions to answer again while keeping them active.
Design
Apart from content, there is of course also the appearance of things. I must admit that I personally do not like the design of the site:
- the content is not centred horizontally (especially annoying when scrolling down this question),
- colours are too harsh for my liking,
- no dark mode,
- too much visual noise around questions,
- reading a comment thread opens a new page,
- questions are not visible when writing an answer,
- ...
Content should of course be the focus point of a Q&A site, but I am afraid that the first impression (for many) is mostly dictated by the appearance and user experience on the site. Maybe it would be good to allocate some (more) resources into setting up a solid design.
PS: I am aware that someone put time and effort in designing the site as it is now and I appreciate the effort, but it just does not tick my boxes.
3 comment threads