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Growing software.codidact
I've been thinking about how the community might bring more contributors to software.codidact. One of the ways is to simply pitch codidact in questions, answers, and comments in stackoverflow. I'm not sure if that is explicitly forbidden there, or frowned upon. Is making explicit pitches for software.codidact on stackoverflow a good idea?
The underlying premise is that this community wants to grow this site more rapidly. The alternative is what I'll call natural growth, where people find codidact by themselves. Obviously there needs to be a balance of people who only ask questions and knowledgable people willing to answer them, and I think natural growth is likely more likely to provide that balance. Do we want to grow software.codidact more rapidly than natural growth provides? If yes, what are some other ideas for growing the site?
Obviously these questions can apply to all the codidact sites, but I'm personally most interested in software.codidact.
2 answers
We can't go and shamelessly promote Codidact in SO comments etc just for the sake of it - that's regarded as spamming and might get you banned, plus it will give Codidact a nasty rep. Similarly, SE and many other sites frown upon using "signatures" in your posts.
What you can do - and what I've been doing myself - is to refer to Codidact posts as a link to an on-topic source, resource or duplicate. I've been writing some self-answered Q&A here to get the site going and I refer to those posts from my SO activity.
This requires some good "canonical dupe"/FAQ-like technical content here on this site though, preferably better than the present "canonical dupe" on SO. Which might sound intimidating at first - how do we make something better than SO posts that have been up-voted and peer reviewed by hundreds of users? But it's actually not that hard, given that you know the topic.
To take a practical example, the #1 all-time most common C programming FAQ has this canonical dupe on SO: Why are these constructs using pre and post-increment undefined behavior?
The question is good with lots of examples, but the each individual answer is actually not that good at all. They are individually incomplete and lack detail - in order to truly understand the problem, you have to go through multiple answers, each containing various pieces of the puzzle that makes a complete answer. And the 500+ top-voted answers is basically just "this is undefined behavior, don't worry your pretty head about it". It's actually quite bad, likely it gets massively up-voted because people always refer to the above link out of habit.
So I made a more complete self-answered Q&A here on Codidact:
Why can't we mix increment operators like i++ with other operators?
This goes into all the dirty details of why the code doesn't work, explains the various rules and terms of the language, mentions common misconceptions etc. I personally believe that it holds higher technical quality than the SO post, since it is a single answer containing everything that's scattered over multiple answers in the SO post. It's also up to date, some answers on the SO post became slightly outdated in 2011 when there was a major language revision.
If we can keep referring to higher technical content on Codidact than on SO, then we will win over domain experts from there. Who in turn can make more high quality posts: it becomes a "positive circle".
Speaking personally (not as a Codidact admin):
One low-key way to promote this community there is to cite it in answers. If you see a question there that you want to answer, see if it's here too. Maybe there's already an answer here, or maybe you want to write an answer. You can then write an answer on SO that quotes and links to the Codidact answer, same as you would if you were quoting from documentation or a tech blog or anywhere else. Don't be a spammer, but do cite when it's legitimate.
Many years ago, Joel blogged about using this same approach to promote SO (then new) in other parts of the net. I don't know how much Joel's precedents matter at SO today, but it's where I got this idea.
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