Welcome to Codidact Meta!
Codidact Meta is the meta-discussion site for the Codidact community network and the Codidact software. Whether you have bug reports or feature requests, support questions or rule discussions that touch the whole network – this is the site for you.
Comments on How granular should network communities be?
Parent
How granular should network communities be?
What are (y)our principles for deciding how granular Codidact network communities should be? The Other Place seems to lean towards more granular communities—one for software development, one for server administration, one for UI design, one for theoretical computer science. For those with experience moderating those communities, has that worked well? I could easily imagine going the opposite route and lumping those all into ‘computers’, with tags to categorize within that. How do we choose?
I'll enumerate some considerations I've thought of here; feel free to edit and add more.
-
More granular communities generate more busywork in the forms of finding the right community in which to submit a question, evaluating questions to determine whether they are on topic for a community, and resubmitting questions when they are found off-topic. Broader communities don't eliminate this work entirely, but they do reduce it.
-
Narrow communities can deter potential users interested in related subdisciplines if narrow communities for those subdisciplines don't exist yet. Broad coverage increases initial user draw, which might be important for reaching critical mass.
-
Communities have a lot of autonomy in determining what is on topic and how they should be moderated. Larger autonomous units need more infrastructure (procedure and/or tools) to function efficiently than smaller ones.
-
More granular communities let users select for the sorts of posts they're interested in. Can't tags serve this purpose just as easily in broader communities?
-
A question may have multiple answers which would be most at-home in two different narrow communities—a question could get good answers from both a software development and a theoretical computer science perspective. In a model where every question has at most one ‘accepted’ answer, this can be resolved by moving the question to whichever community the best answer belongs in. But in a model with an emphasis on collecting a plurality of answers, that's a tradeoff with no good answer. In the broad community model, this is a non-issue, as long as communities are selected to avoid this sort of conflict. (But maybe this isn't possible? Are there always going to be questions that want answers from, e.g., both cooking and Judaism, where the communities are naturally disjoint for most purposes?)
-
More granular communities enable moderators with narrower areas of expertise to make judgment calls on most questions in the community. Broader communities would likely require more moderators per community to get the same expertise coverage. This might not be more moderators overall though, if there are correspondingly fewer communities? I'm not sure this point matters.
-
Users build reputation independently in different communities. The Other Place tracks tag-specific reputation for some privileges; perhaps Codidact could do the same. Or perhaps this doesn't matter either.
-
Are there technical concerns—is the architecture for the Codidact network opinionated on the ideal size of a community?
-
Is it easier to correct mistakes in one direction or the other—i.e., merge a bunch of communities into one, or split off communities from an existing one?
A community with common interests is a part of it too. At Some Other place somebody wanted to combine all the Abrahamic …
3y ago
If you'll allow me to come up with a made-up dystopia community scenario: Suppose you are a professional carpenter w …
3y ago
The main guiding principle should be what fraction of posts a typical user would find interesting, or at least feel are …
3y ago
Post
If you'll allow me to come up with a made-up dystopia community scenario:
Suppose you are a professional carpenter who like to discuss your trade with other professionals. So you start a carpentry site.
The first thing that went wrong was that the site attracted a lot of "do it yourself" amateurs, asking horribly basic questions along the lines of which side of the hammer to hit a nail with. While these questions are technically still about carpentry and tools used by carpenters, they are very uninteresting for the professional and distracts from the questions that professionals find interesting.
Then someone decides to merge the carpentry site into a major "Houses" site. Now you aren't only distracted by on-topic but basic carpentry questions, but by completely different topics as well. Home decoration, architecture, house brokers, plumbing, household electronics, gardening...
Many of these other topics do interest you, since they are somewhat related to your trade. But you aren't really qualified to answer any more in-depth questions in those topics. So you and everyone else settles for answering the easy questions only. At the same time as you write answers to easy gardening questions and having a good time doing so, you notice that the amount of interesting questions below the carpentry tag have for some reasons decreased. Instead the amount of shallow, easy to answer beginner-level questions has increased. That's strange... now where was I... "yes, you must water the flowers on hot days or they die".
Then someone decides to merge "Houses" into the the "Cities" site, which is about everything that happens in a city. Now you have an even broader range of topics: traffic, city planning, night-life, tourism, people asking for directions. The site is now so broad that it's nearly impossible to find any interesting topic at all, for anyone.
All the carpentry experts has fled since long since they hold no interest in 99% of the site contents. The only type of questions remaining in the carpentry tag is them DIY dudes struggling with their hammers, the site get thousand such questions every day and tons of questions, but barely any answers. The quality of the few answers is very poor, because of the lack of domain experts willing to answer or review other answers. You can however post an answer about how to use a hammer on screws and get tons of up-votes in no time.
It is dead easy to post a question on "Cities", almost everything is on-topic. But it is almost impossible to find a question to answer. And then your carpentry questions about screwing got you suspended because the night-life admin with zero domain knowledge of carpentry found them obscene.
Then someone decided to merge the "Cities" community into a larger one yet. The name for this new community is Quora 2.
0 comment threads