Should we join forces with TopAnswers?

[gilles]

Thanks for the write-up!

Everything I’m reading here looks compatible with what we’re planning for Codidact.

@JackDouglas

I’m not going to try to defend all the design decisions we have made at TopAnswers

Do you have a list of these decisions somewhere? https://topanswers.xyz/meta doesn’t have a lot of stuff, but presumably you were talking elsewhere before.

@JackDouglas

Clean, focused Q&A is the aim. Answers sorted by some sort of voting mechanism is vital.

Same here. We’ve been debating the details, but nobody’s proposed an alternative to voting (although we’re talking about mechanisms to complement and modify voting).

@JackDouglas

We are trying not to blindly follow anything else SE have done. Familiarity can be really helpful but cloning their every feature will mean bringing many of their problems.

Neither are we. Most of this forum is about “should we do this thing like SE or different?”.

@JackDouglas

Example: we are not convinced that downvoting is necessary

We’re divided as to how downvoting should work, but the idea of doing without downvotes hasn’t gained any traction here. And I do think it’s necessary for an MVP: how else are you going to indicate that something is wrong?

@JackDouglas

Why bother with a separate blog when we can label posts as ‘blog’ and keep them ‘in universe’?

Why bother with labeling a post as blog? Just make it a self-answer.

@JackDouglas

Chat and comments are merged and very integrated into the experience. However this is not a promotion — the opposite is true. SE comments interrupt the flow of clean focused Q&A and that works against the key factor that makes SE good. We’ve taken all comments out of the Q&A flow. We want to make chat better, and community more integrated with Q&A, but we will never downgrade Q&A.

We’ve been going a similar route. I like what I’ve seen so far on TopAnswers, but I wonder how it’ll scale with thousands or millions of users.

Here on Codidact we’ve been talking so far. We haven’t started coding. Do we have any incompatibilities? If not, why would Codidact start coding, rather than join the coding effort on TopAnswers?