Post History

### Never Too Late

Due to, shall we say, recent AI-related hallucinations, pretty much everything that was possible PR-wise in 2019 is possible for this site again. People are leaving Stack Overflow and this is arguably the best existing alternative. Opportunity has knocked again, but in a sense it really never stopped knocking. **So let's not have regrets, but instead seize the day**.

### Getting Noticed

There's plenty written out there about how Stack Overflow's initial SEO was so successful. I'm sure some rules have changed, but many others have not. I don't know a lot about that stuff. I'll leave the technical aspects to staff.

But what I *am* sure about is that a site like this *needs* to pop up in web searches to grow. Individual networking just isn't efficient enough. **But if people start seeing** that this weird "cod I'd act" site has answers for the fundamental, practical things, and puts **comprehensive, organized, well explained answers** at the top, and *doesn't* explain the same easy thing multiple times while ignoring the central cause of confusion... that's what will pull them in.

If you build it, they will come.

### Just Write It Anyway

So, *building*.

I'm going to propose something a bit different from previous answers: I seriously think that getting the ball rolling needs to **start with the experts, with self-answered questions**.

You know *that* question, the one you're *sick* of hearing on all sorts of forums, the one where you're dissatisfied with the available duplicates/references you have or just can't find one version to elevate above the others? The one that plagues clueless neophytes who seemingly never have a proper idea of how to express the problem, despite how simple it is? The one where if you try to search for it, you keep finding irrelevant questions that use the same keywords? The one every "serious" developer needs to understand in order to have a smooth workflow?

Yeah. That one. **Write it.** And answer it.

**You're the one qualified to do it**. You're the one who's seen the question so often that you know every which way that people get confused, and have seen what works to alleviate that confusion.  You're the one who's most invested - emotionally and from a practical perspective - in having the best possible version of it published, so everyone else can get the best possible explanation and ~~see how smart you are~~ not have to worry about where to refer people *next* time.

And right here is where you want it to exist. Right?

Don't worry about whether it's covered by the documentation. **Documentation answers the wrong questions**. For how-to questions, it's often only useful to people who have mostly guessed the answer already. It tells people *what X does*, when they want to know *what does X*.

Don't worry about whether it's covered by Stack Overflow, or technical forums, or any of those awful "tutorial" sites. **Their questions are poorly organized**; they don't factor the problem space neatly. When the question *is* good (and popular), it has dozens of redundant answers, making it harder to find the few good new ideas. We have the advantage of starting fresh, and the benefit of hindsight.

Nobody can keep the Internet DRY. But by leaving a clear target ahead of time, you will help keep the future, bustling Codidact DRY - and bustling, because the people you haven't met yet will appreciate that environment. And in the mean time, you'll be attracting people to the site by **building something of value**.

### Intrinsic motivation

The best volunteer work comes from enthusiasts - the people who want to put in the work because they get fuzzy feelings from **the result of the work**, who *don't need* an automated system to increase a number associated with their name.

What I suspect helps to some extent is to make a bit of a competition out of it. I think this counts as an application of game theory. Pick something you're an expert in, and start writing. Nobody can stop you from writing, because you're producing quality, on-topic content. But if you're the only one doing it, the site gets dominated by your pet topic. 

And other people don't want that. Right? So what can they do? Well, I suppose they could complain on Meta, but I'd like to think a more productive and natural response is to **compete with you**, and write *other* Q&A about *their* pet topics. Or if they like your topic, maybe they pick something else just for variety. Point is, fixing the problem involves doing **more useful, high-quality-library-building** work.