I think that’s a overall SE problem. I don’t know anyone else’s motivation for curtailing their involvement. I left because I got fed up with SE ever more favoring new users regardless of quality, at the expense of the resident experts providing the quality answers. I expect I wasn’t the only one.
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Could you, perhaps in a new top-level post if it’s getting tangential here, describe what the need is and what features in a Q&A platform would allow a community to address that need? What is it that SE isn’t giving you that you want? Do you need different kinds of posts, different ways for people to interact with content (like commenting and voting), something else? Can you help us understand the use cases?
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Yes! Let me think about it for a bit. Some of it is in my post over here, but I can expand on that.
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I don’t entirely disagree with you — one of my definite frustrations with AskBot as a platform is that it doesn’t encourage quality and continuous improvement of questions and answers. But I also think that this doesn’t need to be a dichotomy. The site can be more welcoming to new users and support and reward people providing quality answers.
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And I see I replied there, talking about Physics Overflow’s additional post types. Yeah, sounds like a more-focused top-level discussion about this use case is in order.
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I suppose I didn’t really think through how sites are formed on Area51. There we used to propose a topic and somehow agreed upon which questions were on and off topic. And if enough people pledged to participate on the site, it got created as a beta and eventually launched. And later users could vote on meta to change the scope further from the original as defined on A51. (at least this is my impression of the process)
My next question would be… How do we plan to form “sub-sites” here, on the main official instance supported by the Codidact platform developers (if this is what is going to happen)?
Do we pre-make empty sites with pre-defined topics from the start, or do we let the users propose their own sites and topic definitions like on A51? Or maybe there is no need to contain sub-sites as different sections, but only have tags to define to which topic a question is relevant, and let any users subscribed to a topic (same as being registered to a SE sub-site) to see these questions on their “all sites I have accounts on” feed page? In this scenario there is basically just one site and the definition of sub-sites does not exist, instead there are big bold topic-tags. I can see it working out but I’m just not used to it from my SE experience yet.
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I think our model is: organized groups of users will propose sites (what you’re calling sub-sites, I guess; I mean network sites), and through a mechanism yet to be determined, the instance admins and those groups of users will define the initial setup and create the site. The community can then refine further as needs change.
We expect that our first groups of users will be communities coming from SE seeking to build successor sites here. Some of them might say “same as SE”; some might take the opportunity to rework things. That’s up to them.
We’re not going to create empty sites. We’ll create sites in response to requests for sites from people who want to invest in those sites.
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Considering the number of questions that are closed on SE, yes, in real life, this is actually difficult. It shouldn’t be, but it is. I see this in my daily life in my office and with my children. Communication, in English by native English speakers, is difficult because people don’t pay enough attention to what they’re saying/writing.
Yes, it is incumbent upon the new member to fit in to the local norm, however, far too many people expect the norm to adjust to their own personal preference.
Sadly, sense isn’t all that common any more and courtesy seems to have largely gone out the window.
Based on what I’ve read in this forum so far, all of your common sense expectations are well met, however, you and I both know that as this site grows larger,
will become a larger ratio of people who visit. Sadly, they’ll be the ones who declare “Codidact is nothing but an unwelcoming bunch of elitist snobs”, even though they have failed the “common sense and courtesy” test, not us.
Just to be clear, I agree with all your points, I just wanted to clarify that, unfortunately, they are not all that obvious to everyone any more.
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Somewhere around 20% of questions get closed, so getting it right is still 4 times more common than getting it wrong.
Yes, unfortunately that is inevitable. The real issue is then how to deal with it. This is where SE failed. Instead of recognizing the noise was coming from a horde of loud morons, and realizing these are exactly the people you don’t want on the site, they instead decided to pander to the morons with ever stricter “be nice” policies, more lax rules, and even punishing the long-time users when they tried to keep the site clean. This was exactly why I left over a year ago, before the more recent “troubles”.
Maybe SE went down this route for profit reasons. After all, a click from a moron is the same revenue as a click from someone else, and the moron numbers became overwhelming. But, this is a short-sighted bean-counter view. The horde of morons will produce lots of clicks for a while. Eventually site quality degrades, experts get fed up and leave, the morons no longer get the answers they want, they stop coming, and the site collapses. I wrote about this nearly 7 years ago at https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/173497/every-close-has-its-thorn-replace-close-with-on-hold-for-the-first-five-d/181250#181250. It’s interesting to see the comments by Shog9 and Jeff Atwood.
Since then, SE has gone down the wrong path. I think the treatment of Monica was another symptom of the overall problem. SE will eventually die because of this, and Codadict will be several nails in the coffin. I hope we don’t make the same mistakes when our time comes.
I’m basically agreeing with most of what you said. I think it’s important to analyze the why, not just think about the what.
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This is where too many companies, now seemingly including SE, have made huge mistakes. A click from a moron is no better than paid clicks from people who are literally paid to “go to xyz site and click a, b, c; then get yourself a new IP via whatever… and do it again and again…” I have seen the result of that (“We’ll get you 10,000 users a day!” - no you won’t, you’ll get me 10,000 clicks that pretend to be users).
So the end result is that a click could be worth $0.0000001 (nothing) or $100.00 - it all depends on meaning and context. Any company that magically thinks "1,000,000 clicks (page views, whatever metric short of actual sales) = $100,000 revenue " therefore “100,000,000 clicks = $10,000,000 revenue” is fooling themselves. I am amazed (but only slightly) that companies continue to make this mistake.
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On some sites it’s more like 50%. We all need to be careful not to over-generalize from our own limited experience.
This conversation seems to be taking a philosophical tangent. I’m not sure how productive it is to continue. Yes, some users are good at asking and some are bad at it. Yes, some users are lazy and some are diligent. Yes, some users are (insert adjective here). We shouldn’t bake in too many assumptions about “what users are like”.
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That’s an impressively prophetic post, Olin 
.
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I’d venture to say that post could be used as the Codidactist Manifesto!
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Oh, I hope not. I absolutely don’t agree. Being rude — and saying “RTFM” and calling people “morons” or “stupid” is rude — is not correlated with quality. It’s possible to be welcoming and friendly and still focus on the needs of the expert community.
Saying something sardonic to a user who has trouble formulating a question may feel satisfying, and, sure, you may drive that person away, but you’re also driving away positive contributors. A culture of negativity invites people to be nasty to anything they don’t like, and it goes from complaining that someone is too lazy to capitalize, to snarking their mistakes made as not-native English speakers, to being mean because JavaScript isn’t a Real Programming Language, to worse.
The end picture of “everyone nice but clueless” isn’t the only possible negative outcome: another is a clique of angry people shouting into the void — and soon you don’t have the experts there either.
We don’t want to be Yahoo Answers, but we also shouldn’t be Slashdot.
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I’m absolutely with you, mattdm, as far as respect and rudeness is concerned! I was speaking of the accuracy of Olin’s predictions of SE’s rise and fall.
(Nice to see you here, @Olin, btw! We’ve been wondering what you’ve been doing with yourself…)
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I agree 100%. If having a reputation for unfriendliness meant better quality questions, then SO should have really high quality questions. Instead it has a constant stream of low quality questions plus a reputation for unfriendliness.
For an example of SO reputation see here,
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/d6c0gy/why_i_stopped_posting_to_stackoverflow/
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You’re not following what was really said. Nobody is suggesting telling individual users they are morons. It’s a handy label for classes of user behavior here when talking about site mechanics.
As for bluntness like RTFM, that depends on context and the particular site topic. RTFM has become a common engineering term. It’s not really out of line anymore when engineers talk face to face, at least in certain disciplines. Of course in other contexts it could be rather offensive. The context and topic need to be kept in mind.
For example, I wouldn’t consider RTFM an appropriate response, even if it is exactly the correct advice, if someone asked on the photography site how to set the shutter speed on a Nikon XXyy. But the RTFM response is a lot more acceptable to someone that asks on the electrical engineering site how much current the RB0 pin can sink in output mode.
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The challenge will be making sure that the people who want to participate in those sites, with the scope that is desired, help maintain it.
This is part of the tragedy of Programmers.SE. The initial Not Programming Related days and the fun questions and answers that no one wanted to moderate or curate. What should I name my cat? and patron saints where topics of questions.
People clearly wanted that site - but no one wanted to moderate it in any serious way.
I strongly suggest people consider the lessons of Yannis’s answer in How can I encourage Stack Overflow to rein in the ‘subjective’ vigilantes?
If a site is to be fun, then make it a site for fun with people who are going to moderate it as fun to attract people who want fun. If a site is to be about software development, then moderate it as a site to be for software development for people who want to attract software developers.
This applies to other sites too. The Trouble With Popularity is a thing that impacts Stack Exchange, Slack channels (I’ve seen some devolve into endless posting of .gifs until HR stops by and has it deleted).
The criteria for “should a site exist” is not “are there people willing to post content for it” but rather “are there people willing to moderate it with a particular charter”.
One of the things that SE got kind of right is branding. If the brand allows for requests for people who want something, then you’ll have something closer to Reddit. This isn’t bad - Reddit has a lot of activity and is able to keep its lights on. It also means that you’ve got all of those dark corners of Reddit where you’ve got people who want that, but you’ve got people you don’t want associated with the brand.
At the end of the day, the scope of a site is what the people who moderate it and curate it make it to be.
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Firstly, the ‘handy label’ is still a rude label. Secondly, I’m not sure that calling whole classes of users ‘morons’ is better than telling individual users that. Thirdly, arguably, thinking of a user as a moron does equate to calling them that, even if you don’t say it to their face.
I notice as I read thru that ‘manifesto’ that there are constant directives for other people to think carefully in order to understand your point and a fairly obvious spelling error (disillusioned). And you also bring up laziness, arrogance and stupidity.
Where do you stand on hypocrisy?
Trying to get back on topic - we are about educating the ignorant - and yes, some are more ignorant than others. But I disagree on kicking those who are ignorant of the rules to the curb while we engage with those who are ignorant of the topic in which they seek help. For a successful codidact transaction we should educate them in the rules and how to follow them, so they can then learn what they need to know about their subject. It’s the same thing. Treat a “bad” question as two questions. One as for help in how to ask a question and one (once it has been upgraded) as the actual subject based question.
Similarly, we should give help and assistance to those subject matter experts who may not be as expert in communicating their expertise in a manner that behooves the successful codidact transaction mentioned above. Answers that don’t meet the quality standard we implement - whether that is some variant of ‘be nice’ or ‘be firm but fair’ or ‘be strict but not rude’ - should be taken as a request for information as to how to answer a question appropriately.
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There’s multiple language SE sites. I worry they won’t survive on their own—too few participants. But I’m not sure if it’s a good idea to merge them into a single language site too. We’ll see, I guess.
I just now asked a related question on Area 51: Would a general Languages.SE site be feasible?