How can we make Codidact more friendly for askers?

That's the wrong question. We aren't unfriendly to askers. The real question is:

What can we do to encourage people to ask questions here?

There are two necessary conditions to have a site that gets a good volume of questions:

1. Good answers need to be forthcoming quickly.
2. People need to know about the site to ask in the first place.

Our sites were started by the small active core on existing Q&A sites elsewhere. We generally do OK at #1.

We suck at #2.

The core group of each site needs to do some work to get the word out. Some ways individuals can do this:

1. Stop answering Elsewhere where you were recognized as one of the experts, and put a note on your profile pointing to here. Some followers will notice you aren't answering anymore, and check your profile. Others will bump into some good answers of yours, and might be curious who this person is that wrote all those good answers.
2. Personally invite people you know that are experts in the subject matter to come here, and then do #1 above, like you did.
3. Whenever you interact with others in the subject domain of a site, mention Codidact when possible and not inappropriate. This is harder with Covid, but tradeshows and other subject domain gatherings are a good place to do this.

   This is an area where the Codidact organization should help once it is up and running enough to accept donations and actually have a little money to spend. Printing up "business cards" for each site would be useful. These would then be distributed to the few top rep people on each site, who then hand them out in situations as mentioned above. Others could get them too when requested, like before heading off to a tradeshow or teaching a class.

   Basically, some marketing money should be allocated to each site. I wouldn't make it a requirement, but the core group of each site should at least be asked to contribute once the mechanisms are in place.

However, probably by far the most significant way the inquisitive masses find out about us is when we pop up as a hit to a question posed to a search engine. One thing significantly holding us back here is all the duplicate content we scraped from SE. Recent tests have shown that this duplicate content is seriously hurting us. It has effectively black-listed the Writing, Outdoors, and Scientific Speculation sites, and seems to be having some negative impact on all the sites. Until this is fixed, any other effort to get more users on those sites is pretty much pointless.

Then there is the simple issue of critical mass. It takes lots of good answers to attract more questions. We have to realize this is a slow process initially.

posted almost 4 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

Olin Lathrop‭

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