What are we trying to build?

I don’t think we want to start with clones of 170 SE communities. I do think we want to start with some existing SE communities, ones that actively want to try an alternative to SE with an eye toward moving. Over time we should expect both more migrations of existing communities and proposals for new communities, which we’ll have to figure out how to handle at some point.

I’d like to see us start out with just a handful of communities from SE, ones that are willing to be beta testers and help us shape our platform. Those communities are likely looking at alternatives too, like BioStars and question2answer (what Physics Overflow uses), so we need to have a better value proposition.

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This strikes a chord with me. My primary SE experience is in a relatively small community - Mi Yodeya. There, community really is an important aspect of what we’ve built. We’ve built friendships and projects together in the course of learning together. As you said, this aspect is an afterthought on SE, partly because SE is primarily optimized for SO, which is too massive to exist as a single community.

The site is optimized to invite questions and answers, specifically, with back-and-forth discussion half-heartedly enabled in comments, actively discouraged by policy, and pushed to a separate but linked chat platform. Now, I think that the clear emphasis on the primary content being on-topic and in conformance with the defined Q&A format is the core idea that makes SE distinct and valuable, and I’m not sure any platform could be valuable to me in the same way without something like that core feature. But on the other hand, I feel that the community we’ve built using the Q&A-optimized platform that SE offers could be even stronger on a platform that also optimizes for community-building, per se.

So, I would suggest that including socializing and free discussion as first-class features somehow could be an important differentiator from SE, particularly with respect to smaller communities around relatively niche subjects. This could include fully-integrated chatrooms, a chatroom automatically created and linked to each primary post, and/or a section of the site set up for free-form discussion and community-building, outside the strict Q&A format.

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Wow - that reply made my heart sing!!!

This is exactly the kind of conversation we need. I completely resonate with this. Even in this tiny thread ive got 20 ideas racing for how we can solve these challenges and im sure im not the only one!

@Marco13 Can we do something to try and facilitate some more directed discussion around these points that might lead directly into some vision/purpose statements?

I still think its pretty foggy on what we are trying to do at Codidacts core.

But this is how great thing are made. A feeling that something is missing or can be made better.

By the community, for the community.

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@cellio maybe you could compile a list of the most active existing communities that we would possibly want to seed/setup?

Almost like a sales list of people we could approach when we get get a bit further down the line with this?

We’ve started to discuss seeding in MVP: Data import. That discussion is primarily about the how. The who warrants a separate discussion.

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Thanks @mattjbrent, that’s an interesting perspective.

I do not agree with it. I don’t think the world needs another discussion platform. If you want discussion, what’s wrong with Reddit? And human-ness is more of a thing that happens (and must be let happen) than a goal: if you want a hug, get off your computer.

What drove me to Stack Exchange (initially Stack Overflow) in the first place was in part the lack of discussion. (There’s chat but it stays out of the way.) It was all about building a place where you can find answers right below the question, and not on page 27 of a thread in a message that’s incomprehensible out of context. Being part of a community came later — it started when I joined a beta site where I was one of the top users and got involved in curation.

But I don’t think our points of view are incompatible! It’s perfectly fine if discussion exists. As long as the answers can be found below the question, as long as I can ignore the discussions, I’m happy. A vast majority of Wikipedia visitors don’t look at talk pages. A vast majority of Stack Exchange visitors don’t look at chat and don’t pay much attention to comments.

Who we want to be using our product(s)

Everyone who can read. Eventually. (Catering to illiterate people here is beyond my imagination horizon.)

Why they will want to use our product(s)

To find knowledge that they can’t find elsewhere. And more for a small minority, but for the vast majority, it’s the knowledge.

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Discussion: enabled but non-invasive. Comments should be collapsible, arguably threaded, or on a separate “panel” in the page (I don’t know the right terminology, but I mean something like those in-page “tabs” that change the view without forcing a full reload). By default they’re out of the way but you can easily see that they exist and can easily view them.

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We’ve been discussing comments at MVP Proposal: Requests for Clarifications and Feedback

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We’re all here because we’re dissatisfied with Stack Exchange. But are we all dissatisfied about the same things?

Excellent question. Reflection on this is important for the other excellent question @gilles raised about why other extant QA software won’t do; and when formulating an MVP.

Objections to SE/SO/etc could fall into several buckets, such as (with examples, not necessarily my views):

  • governance - “I don’t like those in charge, and what they’re doing”
  • social - “I don’t like prevailing social norms w.r.t. to new users / poor questions / etc”
  • procedural - “I don’t like how one moderator can decide on things / I don’t like the process for complaints being handled”
  • mechanical - “I think questions should get multiple chances at the reopen queue / I think anonymous votes should have some weight or give/take rep”
  • technical - “I think the API should be more open to make automated tasks (eg spam hunting) easier / I think the stack software should be open source so we can run our own $TOPIC community”

Many of these are interlinked or overlapping; and some we will want to modify more than others.

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To me, what keeps me coming back to SE is its signal to noise ratio. I love learning things, and SE is a wonderful platform for all sorts of people to share information. I dislike other places cough reddit cough because of how unfocused, opinionated, and flat out useless most of their content is. I’m not in SE for the community, despite how pleasant it is. I’m there because people talk about things that matter, and get to the point.

People need to feel welcome to make contributions. No one wants to get out of their comfort zone if it will only hurt them, so being nice is what allows good content to exist in the first place.

SE has that. Or at least it’s community has it. Lately the company doesnt seem to care much.

Of the objections @bertieb listed, I identify with all of them save procedural, but primarily with governance. Additionally, I’m not sure where animated ads and illegal relicensing would fall under, but thats on my list too.

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I identify with all except ‘technical’ ^^

That would fall under governance. Btw, on Discord, we seem to have reached an agreement in that: (i) We won’t run ads at all[1] [2] [3] [4] [5], and (ii) unjust/illegal relicensing is an extremely easy problem to avoid [6][7].

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Discussion and the like

I think it should be possible to have meta content for every item (but not required), and hidden by default so it does not clutter the main content.

Meta content of different kinds:

  • Read-only (votes, views, info from profile page, close status, revision history, etc.),

  • Threaded discussion of the content (similar to comments)

  • Seeking consensus on changing/building content (and/or formalised voting on decisions about it)

  • Off topic

  • Say hello to user (subject to blocking)

  • “See also” (like the hot network list)

There could be views that collect the same kind of meta content, say all current/open discussions for tag wikis.


The site

The slogan for the site could be: The place for professionals and learners alike

The site could have several corners that are qualitatively very different, not based on the same model (as Stack Exchange mostly is). I am thinking mostly of Stack Overflow here, but it could probably also apply to other facts-based sites (mathematics, English, physics, etc.)

I think the differentiation should be that we will (also) have a corner that is designed for learning, especially for beginners. One of the artefacts from that corner should be a set of FAQs (e.g. in Usenet style) that both serves that very purpose and also serves as a very quick and efficient introduction to a beginner (or new to it) in a field.

There is a huge untapped market here and the expectation (whether justified or not) of a place for beginners creates a lot of tension on Stack Overflow and also creates the image of Stack Overflow as a “toxic” place (unfair or not). A lot of contributors have a wish of teaching others as their motivation for contribution, including Jon Skeet.

The artefact from the normal Q&A is curated questions/answers, maintained/kept up to date and of publication quality (on the level of Wikipedia or better)

The site should not be free for all: The barrier for participation should be the willingness to put in an effort (those with the minimum-effort attitude are not welcome).

Possible corners (only the first two for MVP):

  • Knowledge repository

    Q&A as we know it

  • Human search engine / learning

    • Especially for beginners seeking advice, pointers to resources,
      drafting a real question that can be put in the Q&A corner, homework help, etc.

    • Content hidden from search engines

    • A safe place, without voting

    • An artefact could be FAQs, in the style of Usenet’s (before AOL destroyed it)

  • Chat

    For very quick interaction (meta type stuff is covered elsewhere)

  • Blog-type content

    Longer

  • Shooting the breeze

  • Meta place

    Governance, feeds from the different sources, voting on big issues, moderator elections

  • Professional services market (yes, controversial)

    Support for micropayments.

  • User pages

    Including support for structured content (for instance, Trello-like)

(Meta: OK, I had to stop myself before it became too long. Take it as a set of ideas, rather than a well-developed whole.)

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This intrigues me.

I’ve been mulling over something like this for quite a while - for those who know me best - and it’s kinda tough to really get a bead on what the “next” site would be.

So what will follow from me is an attempt at what I think I want to see in a future Q&A-oriented technical site.

Mission

We wish to become a reliable source of answers to complex questions across subject matters.

Justifications

  • Reliability implies curation. Curation is vital. Being able to clean up the faff and get rid of the noise is just as important as having experts actually answering in the first place.
  • Complex questions are important to codify early on, since the “easy” stuff is already easy enough to find. A new Q&A community’s value-add doesn’t come in with answering what’s already been solved; it’s all about tackling the harder stuff.
  • Cross-subject implies that the Q&A platform will eventually not be limited to technical sites, but to all manner of sites. This is an attempt to bridge the gap for those sites looking for community.

In my head, everything else becomes part of “the how”. I’m sure there are some other MVP posts I can read up on and comment to the effect of to cover that aspect.

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The question of “what are we trying to build” is tightly coupled with “who are we trying to build it for.” And with that, what are the people that we are trying to build it for wanting to use it for?

Some reoccurring comments elseweb about SO have been have been that “the most interesting questions are closed” and that the reason that they ask questions is to get the opinions of experts that are in that community (many of these see their questions and the answers that they get as part of a chat or discussion type environment where they are lost to time rather than part of a larger repository of knowledge).

Many of the questions are blog post seeds (this gets into long form blog ownership questions - which can go down another rabbit hole of design and requirements).

As I see it, there are three different main audiences. There is the curated material, the opinion browsing, and the ephemeral “need help with this.” Part of the challenge is that SO has had is that all of these are lumped into one Q&A engine and the friction of different people, as part of different audiences, work to maintain the site in different and sometimes contradictory ways.

If working at recreating the SO model is the approach, it may be necessary to concentrate on while and, well, frankly discourage the other two somehow. SO tried to do this by making the Q&A engine itself hostile to those other uses, and that may be part of the interpretation that SO the community is hostile to them.

Another interesting site out there is everything2.com and its still active sister sites, perlmonks.com. Both of these exhibit very long lasting communities (E2 has its origins in '98 and perlmonks in '99). While perlmonks has a very narrow focus (perl) it does have its Q&A approach as seen in Categorized Questions and Answers.

There are many discussion sites. There are quite a few sites that do Q&A to one degree or another. There are different models for new users (MetaFilter has a one time $5 charge, https://lobste.rs does a “you have to get an invite from someone”). There are scores of nearly forgotten discourse sites that attempted to do Q&A. I recall a period of time when people kept trying to make the old Not Programming Related site (one such launch attempt can be seen at HN - Not Constructive, a place for the discussions not allowed on Stack Overflow)

I would like to see something different - a different way to capture and retain knowledge than what SO (or Reddit or Quora) present.

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Loving the discussion and opinions im reading on here.

My personal summary of what i’ve read so far.

First and foremost, one of the most useful parts of a Q&A forum is getting to an answer (or useful related information) quickly.

There is a recurring theme of ‘areas’. Experienced professionals have a different requirement than someone who just graduated. Some people don’t want overt dynamic interaction between users, some do Theres a desire from a lot of existing SE users that enjoy the education aspect of SE and teaching others.

This idea that there could be different sections to an answer. Where a view or UI could be toggleable (customizable view depending on what you want to see) Where Q&A really becomes its own sub-topic thread that could host a chat, post comments Q&A etc. If we store meta info on various parts of this it would be quite feasible to make this view customization quite powerful. IE only show me the most upvoted comments. Only show answers that are accepted. This could be stored on a users profile and use a query-like syntax as consumable REST endpoints.

A way to organize information that makes it easy to digest a topic, sub-topic or sub-sub-topic. A possible way to flag content with certain descriptions that could allow users to toggle various content.

Opinion-based questions can still be a legitimate question - although does require careful moderation. Using content flags would allow a user to only view non-opinionated questions.

Allow a consensus of upvotes to count towards an ‘answer’ just because the person asking the question hasnt accepted it doesnt mean its not the accepted answer.

I still believe chat or comments can be an integral part of the question/answer without being frowned upon. I still find lots of pertinent information in comments that are sometimes more valuable to me than the answer itself. (often browser support or some related information/link)

More open moderation. Moderation will be one of the most important aspect of Codidact. Strong moderation tools will help keep the site organized, help keep experienced users coming back and help new users make a valid impact and contribution. moderation should enable all users to contribute rather than placing strong restrictions and reasonably large burdens on new users, moderation enables a new user to interact and get involved without compromising quality of the content.

We need to think about how we bring value to new users. How we improve interaction within the community with new users without compromising the quality of questions and answers. Often newer people will need to ‘talk’ more as opposed to an experienced user.

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Seems like a perfect summary to me. I want to add a thought that maybe there is a way to have discussions about posts without cluttering a comment section - maybe make the comments expandable so there is more freedom to have a discussion in the comments. While I agree that comments are just to add thoughts to a post, I think interesting discussions can take place in them that shouldn’t be censored.

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My take: Ask questions, get answers - you have a voice here.

It requires some context - but chances are, if you’re here, you understand it.

As we gain more visibility, there have been quite a few suggestions to deviate from the SE model in significant ways, which are definitely not without merit. But the truth is, that is not the objective I was aiming for when joining this particular project, personally - and being with the team from day one, I can say it wasn’t/isn’t the objective of the majority, if not all of the core contributors.

In other words: Building something that differs significantly from the Q&A model as we came to know from SE is not what I personally believe in, and is not what I signed up for.

Fellow @MakotoTheKnight said in a post from another thread:

And in fact, I disagree. The reason none of the previous software implementations succeeded in replacing Stack Exchange is definitely not that they tried to mimic it. On the contrary, it’s probably because they didn’t do it well enough (and not just on a technical level).

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This resonates with me. My goal in coming here was to help stand up something very much like SE’s MVP, quickly, and then iterate on improving it. So yes, we would end up changing some things that we want to change, after careful discussion and study, but we’d start with something that basically works, get that up and running and used by some communities that want to move, and then do further development informed by (and in collaboration with) those communities.

I want Codidact to be awesome, including in ways that differentiate it from SE. We have the chance to fix things. But we have to agree on what those things (and their fixes) are, and then we have to do it, and if it takes a year or more to get there, we run the risk of being irrelevant when we do. Right now each dissatisfied community will do its own thing; what can we offer to help us all work together instead?

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But if we build it, will they come? I don’t think “like Stack Exchange but with free governance” will win enough people over on its own. We need to have some concrete, direct value to offer as well.

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I think “doesn’t treat volunteers like garbage” is already a fairly strong selling point, at least on some communities, but that might not be enough. On the other hand, the mod-resignation posts and ensuing meta discussions point to a few communities that might be disgruntled enough to move to anything that’s easy.

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