Quora seems to be more of a social platform than a knowledge-sharing one. You have to dig through a lot of stuff you don't care about to find the information you're looking for. We don't want to do that.

Another answer talked about some of the ways we are not a clone of SE. In addition to those important distinctions, our platform is different and our goals are different. For more about goals see The Codidact Vision. As for the platform itself, we've learned a lot in years of experience on SE and other platforms, and we're applying what we've learned. In fact, some of the things we've already done are now being done or requested on SE; in some ways, SE is cloning Codidact, but without the community partnership that we have here.

Here are some of the things that distinguish the Codidact platform, things that I think make a real difference to people using it:

• Lots of configuration options. One size does not fit all, and each community should be able to make the changes that make sense for them, whether that's changing the reputation granted for a particular post type, adding a durable notice about the community, customizing the help, or (with discussion and code review) adding community-specific tools like the Code Golf leaderboard.

• Abilities are granted based on your activity, not based on your reputation that might have come from one hot post. People who are good at editing get the edit ability even if they aren't experts who write lots of top-notch answers.

• Categories allow communities to support different types of content alongside Q&A -- resources, blogs, recipes, code review, sandboxes, etc, without having to kludge things with tags or magic meta posts.

• Other post types (and the ability to add more) support different modes of content. We added articles early on to support papers, blog posts, resources, etc. We also added a wiki post type -- like an article, but almost anyone can edit and it doesn't have voting.

• Posts are scored not by "up minus down" but by a weighted system that takes controversy into account. +10/-5 and +5/-0 do not convey the same level of community support, but on other platforms both are treated equally.

• Threaded comments support the conversations that sometimes need to happen while not getting in the way of people just looking for an answer. Now that comments don't have to push content farther down on the page, we've been able to support more markdown in them, like code blocks -- useful for debugging on our software communities.

Does the design look like SE? Yes, in a lot of ways. Part of that is that there are only so many ways to lay out a list of questions and answers, and part of it is that we haven't yet tackled some of our ideas for design improvements. We're actively making improvements to the platform; we're not done yet. In some cases we have ideas but no one with time to work on them; in other cases we know we want to do something but that's as well-defined as it's gotten; in some cases we don't yet know of a need or idea until somebody raises it (which we encourage people to do). Personally, I'm looking forward to having filters on the question list like in this design proposal, so you could save your favorite filters instead of having to build them using search each time you want them. I'm also looking forward to useful reactions like "out of date", which can convey certain specific information better than votes or comments alone.

And what about Quora? I don't think their goals have much in common with ours, so I wouldn't expect something that works well on Quora to work well on Codidact. And that's ok; Quora and Stack Exchange and Codidact can all exist alongside each other, serving different needs.

posted over 2 years ago

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Monica Cellio‭ staff

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