Are we trying to make a more friendly/welcoming site?

As long as the question is removed (temporarily) from the main site. How to save it from there on will be a matter for the OP and veteran users who genuinely want to help. If you give a trusted veteran user the privilege to simply remove a bad question from the site (similar to SO’s “dupe hammer” but expanded), then they just need to click once to make it go away, minimum friction.

As for who to give such privileges and how to “moderate the moderators” or means for the OP to question why their question was removed - that does of course need to be fleshed out in detail too, but that’s another story.

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Another question I guess is, “Having edited, how and by whom is it reopened?”

SE too say (on their blog) that they “are making fundamental changes to how our close question system works” at the moment which might be something along these lines.

This is EXACTLY what I’m trying to say. Only focusing on “not tolerating rudeness” is treating the symptom and not the cause.

It seems like many here think I’m advocating rudeness, which is not the case. But very often rudeness is an emotional response to something.

Well, I guess the success of that will depend a lot on how it’s handled. Would you delete a comment like “that’s wrong because of (problem)”? I think many people would be extremely annoyed with such moderation.

In general, I see a risk that many people would feel that the environment is hostile if they feel that they constantly have to focus more on how they say things rather than what they want to say. And I think this will be especially alienating to people who are not very good at English.

Note that I agree that “How do you account for (problem)?” in general (but not necessarily always) is preferable to "that’s wrong because of (problem)”. However, I do not believe that the difference is so big that it motivates any action. And I think this especially goes for answers. It’s ok to make mistakes when you answer, but you’re supposed to know what you’re talking about. It’s not ok to basically just guess and then hope that someone else helps you to make the answer good. Pointing out flaws in answers is very important, and as long as there’s no personal attacks like “that’s wrong you idiot” I don’t see any real problem.

I have a very serious question about this. Because as far as I have understood it, one of the main goals with Codidact is to keep it community driven forever, and not allow some company decide a COC that goes against the community’s will. Let’s then assume that a majority of the community actually wants to allow rudeness. How will you handle that?

I think that’s an extremely important question, and it can be formulated a bit wider: Are there any decisions that the community should not have any influence over? If so, which?

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We have this really general/baseline Code of Conduct. We’ll require it to be accepted by anything hosted by us. Hence we won’t host communities, who are not interested in following it. We will try, however, to help these sites to migrate to a self-hosted instance, where our CoC does not apply.

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Ok, and that baseline CoC is not subject to debate by the community? You @ArtOfCode and @cellio have the final word in this?

Please note that I’m not trying to imply something like “haha, then you are not as democratic as you claim”. I’m just curious and I do understand that compromises may have to be made.

One possibility is just to do as SE with a re-open review queue. Or if some veteran helped the poster out in person, it would make sense that said veteran could re-open the question. These are details that can be fleshed out in a separate discussion once the core close/re-open mechanics are established.

It seems to me there’s leeway in how to interpret the CoC – especially “Rudeness” – leeway for specific communities/moderators.

For example, IMO, “What have you tried already?” and “The problem with this post is X” are not especially rude (though they could possibly also be rephrased to be a little more welcoming, if you were willing and skilful).

Conversely I’d think that a comment like “Stop posting crap!” is probably/decidedly rude (as well as not “constructive”), even if it is ostensibly about the content not the person.

But as I said I think that (kind of decision-making) is a site/community/moderation issue, not a software/governance issue.

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Ok, so if the Codidact community theoretically would like to have a basline CoC that explicitly said “Rudeness and personal attacks are allowed”, then it would be implemented?

I want to emphasize that I hope it will never happen.

That was my input back when the “welcome wagon” was launched. Often the first rude person is the one asking the question. For example, posting a copy/paste of your homework and accept someone to do it for you free of charge, is incredible rude behavior. People usually don’t post rude comments to questions out of the blue, there’s always a trigger.

And then there’s also the case of the poster of the question acting with good intent and genuinely believe that they asked a good question, then receive backlash in the form of rudeness, by someone who had already answered that very FAQ 3 times earlier that day. In these situations, the question should just be removed, the OP should be given constructive criticism in private and then they are very likely to improve after that. Less so if someone just posts a LMGTFY comment.

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IMO the Robustness principle for interop …

In computing, the robustness principle is a design guideline for software:

Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others (often reworded as “Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept”).

The principle is also known as Postel’s law , after Jon Postel, who wrote in an early specification of TCP

TCP implementations should follow a general principle of robustness: be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.

… suggests that it may be unwise to reply with rudeness even to a question which you perceive as rude.

The first time I heard “Be nice” wasn’t from SE, rather it was Patrick Swayze’s instructions to the bouncers in Road House (NSW).

All you have to do is follow three simple rules.

One: Never underestimate your opponent. Expect the unexpected.

Two: Take it outside. Never start anything inside the bar unless it’s absolutely necessary.

And Three: Be nice.

If somebody gets in your face and calls you a _____, I want you to be nice.

Ask him to walk, be nice.

If he won’t walk, walk him. But be nice.

If you can’t walk him, one of the others will help you. And you’ll both be nice.

I want you to remember that it’s a job. It’s nothing personal.

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At the risk of repeating something which has now been said several times: there is never “a reason to become rude”. People don’t just unavoidably “end up rude” when they are provoked by annoying behaviour. Choosing to be rude is an entirely voluntary response, and trying to shift any blame for it onto the other party (no matter how irritating or wrong they are) is a failure to take responsibility for one’s own actions. It’s the exact same reasoning used by domestic violence perpetrators who say “I’m not a violent person, I only hit her when she keeps driving me up the wall”.

This is not to say that addressing the annoying behaviour that you claim causes rudeness isn’t a good and important thing to do. But the primary aim of doing so is to maintain site quality, not to keep people’s rudeness “dormant”. It is the rude people’s own responsibility to do that.

Anyway, the discussion here is mostly going in circles now, so I’ve said enough. I’m glad that the leaders and organisers of Codidact have made it clear what their stance is, and I hope this prevails in the new communities they are going to build.

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It doesn’t matter! Nobody is arguing that it is ok to be rude, but making such a rule won’t change the fact that people will end up rude when triggered. Just like people will keep posting homework dumps even if you wave a link telling them that’s not ok. It’s like saying “war is bad and unacceptable” and thinking that just saying so will fix all wars in the world.

If you put up a sign saying “no smoking allowed” and still someone stops by next to the sign for a smoke, it does no good saying “Aha, see here, we told you that smoking isn’t allowed here!”. It does no good to ban the smoker from the premises either, because you are still only treating symptoms. The next day someone else will show up and start smoking in that same spot instead. The permanent solution is to deal with the root cause: stop selling cigarettes.

Or in case of Q&A, stop designing systems that cause maximum friction between users.

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The first step is gentle guidance. Most people want to be civil and some people will trip over cultural or language norms – that’s to be expected! We don’t smack people for it but we also don’t ignore it. We teach. We guide.

Nobody participating in good faith should have to worry about being smacked for stumbling over language. And yes, we do need people to raise issues with answers. A functioning community has (in my experience) enough people of good will, and emergent leaders, to make this happen pretty organically. Before you counter with SO: SO isn’t a community; it’s a bunch of content, a bunch of casual users, and a bunch of sub-communities that don’t necessarily interact much. I think its size and volume works against community-building. (I don’t really want to add an analysis of SO to this already-long-and-meandering thread, but I anticipate the argument so I’m trying to counter it up front.)

If the majority of a community on our platform wants to allow patterns of behavior that the people overseeing the instance object to, and discussions with the community aren’t productive (“but being 4chan-ish is core to us!”), then we should help that community emigrate to a more suitable host. It’s fine for a community to say “hey, codidact.com isn’t really working for us any more; we’re going to take the software and do our own thing”. It’s an open-source platform for a reason; you can take not just the content (like on SE) but the software too.

That said, we’re going to work closely with our communities to try to make sure everyone’s as happy as possible and we’re meeting people’s needs as well as we can. One of the benefits of a Codidact instance over everyone setting up their own sites with a variety of software platforms is that we all get to benefit from the common elements, the network.

And these two threads – you can go elsewhere, and the network is beneficial – act as checks on each other. The whole network suffers if we allow, say, a neo-Nazi community to thrive here. The whole network also suffers if there isn’t a whole network because communities scattered. So the network will have core expectations about behavior, and if those core expectations aren’t reasonable then the community won’t support the network. Those core expectations are pretty minimal, but they do exist. They have to.

The baseline CoC that we have is the result of extensive community discussion. More broadly, we do have to establish governance and that is going to have a bootstrapping problem; we’ll end up with an elected board of trustees that’s responsible for upholding our core principles, but on the way to that we need our project leaders to be able to make decisions that move us along the path to that outcome. So, yes, Marc, Art, and I, backed by community consensus, established this CoC. There will probably be tweaks along the way, but its core is pretty much set. It’s aligned with Codidact’s core principles, and ultimately Codidact’s board will be guided by and apply it.

Won’t happen, because the people here doing the work don’t agree with that. A group of people (from here or elsewhere) could, of course, fork the code and set up their own instance (with their own name) with whatever policies they want. It would be powered by the Codidact code but not backed by the Codidact organization.

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OK, so everybody’s really getting into the discussion here, and in a way everybody’s really wrong. The thread question is
Are we trying to make a more friendly/welcoming site?

To which the answer is a clear no. Because we are not making a site. We’re making
a platform to host several sites for distinct communities, each of which will have to work out these questions among themselves.

Once that stands and communities populate the system, people aren’t really in a position to go to another community and tell them “you have to be more/less harsh” (inside the “no abuse” framework of course).


The divide in opinions here between “harsh quality” vs “enabling friendliness”, do you guys see what that is? It’s 2 different communities. Just make an “SO Friendliness” and an “SO Quality”.

They’ll probably complement each other tremendously. If an SO Quality guy can tell a new user “That’s not up to our standard here, you should go over to SO Friendliness first to learn”, is that not a win-win?
SOQ keeps their quality, SOF won’t lose that person they’re concerned about.


Either way, that’s all stuff about creating a community. If that’s what you want to do right now, it’ll probably be fine if you start a post here “Hey I want to start a community for XYZ”, and then that can take shape, and people an also decide to take part in that or not.

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Please take those discussions to Codidact Meta, which is for questions about our instance rather than the software platform. I realize there’s been a lot of instance discussion here on the forum, much of which was started before we stood up the meta site recently. Now that we have meta, please use it. Thanks.

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SO friendliness and quality are not mutually exclusive, they are only aspects of what goes to make a good site. Hopefully we would not have such odd divisions on the network.

You won’t get any friendliness if you have no quality. In fact you are likely just to not get much of an answer at all or you might get a wrong one (reddit model). If you have no friendliness you won’t have any content, because people won’t want to post there, and such a “quality” site would probably violate guidelines of Codidact anyway. SO suffers because it’s not optimized to avoid hurting pride in its curation process. This creates a perception of rudeness, thus stopping good users from contributing early on. The first part to address this is avoiding instances where the possibility of such conflict could arise (hiding “bad” information from new/users, more prepackaged feedback, removing the need for direct curator to user conversation in the first place etc…). The second is making sure that when actual human interactions do happen they are amicable. Discouraging people from using blunt or snarky language is only part of the equation, not the solution. Individual curator friendliness is the last line in defense of creating the perception of a “less rude” QA platform. None of this involves ruining curation or degrading quality (in fact just the opposite).

And contrary to what contributors might want to believe, this feeling that SO is “rude” is the number one reason people don’t contribute or don’t use it. If you go on any other platform and start asking about SO, people have a very different perspective compared to meta curators, even the experts. You don’t need StackExchange polling to see that. This “rudeness” has a very real effect on the quality of curation and the stress put on curators, contributors and newcomers. This network can do better than SO.

Friendliness and quality are simply not a dichotomy, the resolution here is not some hostile two state solution between communities on the same network, it’s better tooling and empathy network wide. There’s no point of trying to start software QA on codidact if you just end up with the worst of two worlds situation.

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You imply that I said that. Wrong.
You imply I suggested a quality community where the slightest show of friendliness will be punished - and vice versa. Wrong.
You imply I described a “hostile” situation. Wrong.

On the contrary, I described a harmonious win-win situation where the 2 communities would complete each other like Yin and Yang. The negative extremist viewpoint where people hate each other, that came from you, not me.


However, if you followed this hole thread here and others, you can see that there are very clearly 2 camps: One favouring quality over the appearance of friendliness, and the other one… well, in short, not that.

You can easily see that your idea is not practical if you think about actually putting it into practice:

Would you really let go of your friendliness if the community decided that way?
I presume not.

Then who are you to tell a quality-over-friendliness guy they can’t start a community with those ideals? Do you seriously want to force people to go with your ideals?

You may not have explicitly said that, but you most definitely did imply that. You might not have meant to imply that, but you definitely did.

I can’t see where Cazadorro has implied that.

Whether Cazadorro considers the solution you suggest as hostile is Cazadorro’s value judgement. You can say that you disagree with that judgement, but you can’t call that judgement wrong, exactly because it is a judgement, not a matter of fact.

I for one cannot see that. Rather, the two types of people I see are: Those who think quality can only be achieved by allowing a certain amount of unfriendliness, and those who think quality can be achieved while staying friendly.

In particular I don’t remember having seen a single post that advocated for lowering the importance of quality.

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I did not. Burden of proof lies with you if you want to make that statement.



I interpreted “hostile two state solution” as “two communities that are hostile to each other”, and then it’s a description of the relationship between those 2 communities. That can - to a reasonable degree - clearly be described as hostile or not. For example, The Outdoors and Mi Yodeya are not hostile to each other.

If you both really mean “having 2 communities is hostile”, then Cazadorro may take this as an apology for my misinterpretation. In the same breath, I don’t agree, at all, that having 2 communities is hostile.


So… what you’re saying is you see 2 camps?
One that cares more about quality than friendliness?
And one that has the goal of increasing friendliness (obviously while trying not to lose too much in other areas)?
Sounds vaguely familiar… :smiley: