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? ↩︎
Increase exposure One way of increasing our exposure is to use Codidact as a source when answering on other forums. A …
2y ago
By having decent source code formatting that isn't completely inferior to other sites like Stack Overflow. We might want …
2y ago
In light of another fiesta on a "competitor site", I poked my head in here again. Here's my twocents. When a ship sta …
1y ago
Search engine optimization? I thought this goes without saying, but apparently we aren't doing too well there for so …
1y ago
I just submitted a proposal to DuckDuckGo here for a new "bang" for their search syntax. If approved: `!coddsw search …
1y ago
Just my two cents: 1. I found this community because of someone's username on Stack Overflow. That's probably a good …
2y ago
As a (for now at least) casual user, I can report that a bad first impression is that there are way too many "500 server …
3y ago
Never Too Late Due to, shall we say, recent AI-related hallucinations, pretty much everything that was possible PR-wi …
1y ago
After a few years of casually using stack-exchange sites and wandering around on coda-dict, I feel there are mainly thre …
1y ago
S.E.O. - Stack Overflow has fantastic SEO, and this is a self-feeding cycle. Currently codidact isn't adding json-ld o …
11mo ago
I realize this might not be feasible, because course all of that hinges on the possibility to get some acceptable data o …
1y ago
Broaden the scope (slightly) I noticed https://software.codidact.com/posts/292660 was closed due to being off-topic. …
1mo ago
Not having a single sign on option greatly increased the friction in adopting the site for me. This was further compo …
3y ago
A note on first impressions: I really like that popup windows like when you click "react" are closed by clicking "re …
2y ago
This may be a minor thing to some but it's a huge annoyance / barrier to me - we need to change our scoring system to be …
2y ago
Emphasize and expand content that competitors fail at or deliberately exclude. This section of What type of questions …
9mo ago
My recommendation: Follow the good parts of StackExchange, & learn from the rest. This is long, I apologize, but I ho …
4mo ago
Give software.codidact.com its own domain Stack Overflow is by far the largest community on Stack Exchange and likely …
1y ago
Post
My recommendation: Follow the good parts of StackExchange, & learn from the rest.
This is long, I apologize, but I hope someone finds my treatise valuable.[1]
Items done right (to be duplicated)
There are, a number of things they did, and to some degree, still do very well. A few of the top seem to be:
- Questions can be asked by anyone and answered by anyone
- Questions and answers can both be edited by those with enough reputation
- Reputation is gained by users showing that an answer or question helped them
- The look and feel of gaining new rep (and the gamification of all of it) is done well and is successfully motivational for many
Items that could be avoided or improved
StackExchange, while a great improvement is not the end all be all of QA... (and not just because they recently announced an agreement to giveaway all contributor content to OpenAI).
The system they created was ground breaking but has some flaws. It is NOT a perfect system.
Summary of main problems
- SO/SE is hostile to question contributors
- Their system lends itself to inbreeding
Elaboration
Hostility
The guarding of the specifics of how questions are asked... and rejecting/downvoting them if asked poorly, or if there is some belief that they are (or even if they are) duplicates makes for a generally hostile environment.
Example
Imagine, you are a new user, particularly one who is a non-native English speaker.
- You are not even sure how a question is meant to be asked in English.
- You do your best to search and don't find anything.
- You ask the question as best you can.
- Within minutes, you get downvoted and get a few messages telling you you did it wrong.
- In fact, you're told the question was a duplicate of a different question that doesn't seem to have answers for your question.
- You now dumped a bunch of time into this very popular site, yet you aren't much closer to getting help.
Alternative
Instead of criticizing the question as bad, link it to the one you think is an answer. Then tell the OP you think the other question has answers for them, but if they don't find them there then please clarify...
Lesson
There really is no bad question... because a question is just a grouping of words that someone might type in a search engine... the closer the 'bad' question is to something someone else might type, the closer they both are to an answer to their 'bad' question. (NOTE: bad answers on the other hand... technically bad answers)
Recommendations
- Don't allow down voting on questions... a low upvote score is plenty enough from making people think it's the best way to word the question...
- Don't close questions... a question that is worded badly will have less answers... this is a self solving 'problem' in the area of popularity of a question and the subsequent answers
- DO link questions to similar or same questions... in this way it is very easy for someone with a similar or same, but differently worded, question to get their answers... ANSWERS are the treasure in these sites, questions are just a way to get to them... so if you have 50 similar questions pointing to the same gloriously worded answer, then people are just more likely to find the ANSWER they need.
Inbreeding
If I have a question on SO that is a really well thought out wording and has a lot of good answers, I'm going to see anything similar as a duplicate and want to shut that 'duplicate' down to get more people funneled to the 'best' version of the question. This is a version of 'when you have a hammer all problems look like a nail'.
However, if I'm asking through a search engine, am I likely to ask a question in a very well worded question format? In fact, who cares how I ask? If I have the right technical parts to the question to get me to an answer, that's all I need.
There is a darker side to inbreeding, which I suspect happens on SO and SE in general, but have no proof of. But it's something I ask myself in all situations, because typically if there's nothing preventing it someone will do it.
Scenario
A user who has the privileges can shut down related questions and then can add those details to their original question... making for motivation to shut down not even duplicates but just similar questions.
But here's what that gets us:
- One persons perspective on the technical topic... their wording and inherent opinion ... this does NOT help those who wouldn't word the question that way or who have different inherent/underlying opinions
- Less variety of answers as well as questions for search engines to pick up...
Good Luck!
I'll help where I can... I may bring my few questions over from SO.
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And I hope you SE/SO diehards, if you are not willing to have open minds, down vote me to death. Then get fed up and go back to SE/SO, which is where you belong. ↩︎
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