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Comments on Why prefer Codidact to Stack Exchange?
Parent
Why prefer Codidact to Stack Exchange?
As I explained in this post and some community staff confirmed, Codidact is almost a miniature version of SE. In fact, I see no radical difference between them.
As we know, almost all (in my opinion, all without exception) people coming to Codidact are already familiar with SE. So, why should we expect that they prefer to contribute to this community, rather than SE? Only because of some meta issues?
I know that the main motivation for creating Codidact was some controversy about some meta issues. But, please note that many people, who are interested in contributing to a Q&A community, do not care about meta subjects like "Code of Conduct", "Copyright Licenses", firing some community staff etc.
Even, almost all Codidact community staff are still serious active SE users, and I think almost all user protestors against some SE policies will continue their contributions to SE even if they face more unpleasant policies. Why? Because the main important thing to almost all contributors is "asking and answering."
In my opinion, if we want active communities, we need many people to contribute regularly, especially for some communities like a math community.
Updated
There are some some points in the answers, which need to be responded to (Since a math community is about to launch, I use this community as an example to clarify what I mean):
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I agree with the fact that Codidact is a non-profit, community-focused, and open-source platform, which distinguishes Codidact from Stack Exchange. However, such characteristics cannot motivate enough people to contribute to such a community regularly. I, as a typical math enthusiast willing to contribute to a math Q&A community, prefer to spend my time and energy in a community in which I can be sure that there are enough math experts to communicate with them. Why has Math Stack Exchange become successful? Because at the time of its beginning many people needed a math Q&A community and there was no serious rival, so people had to join Math.SE and developed it. But, now there exists a terribly successful community, Math.SE, so that I think almost all career math experts (including teachers, students, and researchers) prefer to devote their little free time to contributing to a developed community, rather than an embryonic one; one can only hope that a few idle math experts contribute occasionally to such a new community.
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Some people believe that they can always have an alive small community and do not need to attract individual people. I think such a claim is not true for any Q&A community; it may be true for some people willing to discuss some topics with each other, but the story of a Q&A community is different. Mathematics has terribly many independent branches. So, if we want to have an active math community we need many people, and a small community is not enough for such a subject. The point is, that when people see that their questions are not answered (properly), they become discouraged from asking in such a community.
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I agree that many people opposing SE policies and rules; I personally have many problems with them. But, such people still continue their contributions because the most important factor of a successful Q&A community is its population, especially for some communities like a math community. People like good policies, rules, and norms, but their needs, namely asking and answering, are their priorities, which would not be satisfied in a small community.
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I agree that casual users do not care about meta issues. But, the point is that active meta users will come from such casual users; if not enough casual users are not interested in continuing their contributions to a community, we cannot have enough active meta users to develop the community. Each community first needs to attract casual users and then it expects to be developed by serious users.
There are several differences in the philosophy of Codidact vs. Stack Exchange that may contribute to people preferring …
3y ago
> please note that many people, who are interested in contributing to a Q&A community, do not care meta subjects like "C …
3y ago
> As I explained in this post and some community staff confirmed, Codidact is almost a miniature of SE. In fact, I see n …
3y ago
I appreciate your passion! It resonates very strongly with me, as someone who wears his heart on his sleeve. One thing I …
3y ago
Superior technology The site software supports more post types than just Q&A, and multiple Q&A sections with separat …
12d ago
Since this is obviously open to individual answers, I will give my reason. The structure of SE leads to it being much m …
13d ago
Post
There are several differences in the philosophy of Codidact vs. Stack Exchange that may contribute to people preferring CD over SE.
For-profit vs non-profit
Stack Exchange is a for-profit company. With that in mind, they have to worry about making a profit and monetizing their products; there's always that driving factor of the money driving what they do.
Codidact, on the other, is a non-profit venture, funded by donations and out of pocket expenses by the creators. (There's currently no actual organization that can accept donations, but we're working on setting up a non-profit or something similar.)
Community focus vs knowledge base
Stack's stated goal is to be a repository of information, which leads to strict policies reducing clutter.
Codidact's ultimate goal is to serve the communities it hosts. This means that each community can set its own goals and visions, including how strict they want to be with comments etc. Being a repository of information is a secondary goal.
Open-source vs closed-source
Codidact is entirely open-source; this means that anyone can access the codebase and use it, for free, allowing anyone to set up their own Q&A instance however they want. Stack, on the other hand, is closed-source (excluding the data explorer), and people have to pay to set up a Q&A instance.
Ultimately, most of the differences between Codidact and Stack come from Codidact explicitly focusing on serving the community's needs. This is where features such as Categories come from, and the upcoming Abilities change; both serve to address longstanding problems that arose with the Stack software. We can also include community-specific features for communities that need them, a la the Sefaria linker at Judaism Codidact.
There's the Codidact Arbitration & Review Panel, which will act as a supervisor and make sure that both moderators and staff members have a proper way to deal with conflicts that arise between them.
Yes, Stack is a much more advanced project, with over ten years in the game vs Codidact's year or so in development, and it shows. But I believe that Codidact has the ability to set itself apart as a viable alternative to Stack, and serve alongside Stack to meet the needs of various communities.
Some communities will prefer Codidact, others Stack, some neither; and that's fine. Different communities have different needs.
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