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Q&A

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 to grow all of our communities?

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How to grow all of our communities?

+12
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As most have noticed, there's been a discussion raised on all the community metas about how to grow that particular community. It's a good question and I do believe they should be answered on community basis.

However, there are some common universal issues with all Codidact communities that I think should be addressed here at meta.codidact. Please post an answer if you have ideas or want to raise discussion about how to increase activity concerning all our communities.

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1 comment thread

Duplicate? (2 comments)
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When Outdoors/Photography started there was a bunch of activity and upvoting and I asked a bunch of questions. However, my participation dropped about 8 months ago for several different reasons,

  1. Lack of expertise.

    In either case, there is no reason to ask here when I could ask on another site where the experts know what a lithophane/Ursack is.

  2. Lack of voting

    • For example on Cooking, most of the questions with one upvote were upvoted by me.
    • It is not worth it to take the time to write a self answered Q&A and get a single upvote. This has happened to me on both Photography and Outdoors.
    • There are however lots of downvotes happening and when the front page is filled with downvoted questions then that tends to discourage other people from asking. This question has a lot of research but seems to suffer from English as a second language

    Voting is how we pay people in a sense and right now there aren't enough people upvoting content.

  3. Rudeness

    • There seems to be a loud minority that thinks the problem with SE/SO was that they were not rude enough to the new users who asked poor questions. This shows when users leave comments attempting to shame new users into not posting or doing lots of research before posting. It's trying to create a reputation for harshness in an attempt to get high-quality questions that didn't work for SO and I doubt it would work here.
    • SO/SE had high expectations for moderators, here there is at least one moderator who keeps making rude comments on sites where they are not a moderator.

I can deal with the lack of expertise and voting somewhat but the rudeness is a bright red line where if it is a choice between dealing with the rude comments and not asking, I will find the answer elsewhere every single time.

Right now Codidact is not working as a place to ask questions and until that is fixed I don't see site promotion being successful.

As far as what I would like to see Codidact do to fix these problems,

  • Moderators represent Codidact and as such there should be a much lower tolerance for rudeness from a moderator than a regular user.

  • Culture building towards helping new users instead of slamming the door in their face.

I have two Socratic badges on Outdoors.SE and have asked more questions on Outdoors.SE/CD than any other user, but right now due to the above problems the juice is not worth the squeeze. I can think of questions to ask, but am unable to convince myself that it would be worth the effort write them out.

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2 comment threads

This seems community-specific (10 comments)
Moderator rudeness on sites that they don't moderate (1 comment)
This seems community-specific
Lundin‭ wrote over 2 years ago

You wrote a very similar post on Outdoors meta. All of this seems related to that one specific community. Network-wide, the amount of expertise is incredibly varied from community to community. Lack of voting I would imagine is directly related to site activity overall, or perhaps unclear scope. As for rudeness, that seems to be some personal conflict and it's fairly subjective what people consider rude. We have the "be nice" code of conduct, which is intentionally vague or rather refers to common decency. In general I'd probably boil it down to: don't speak to someone at the site in a way that would be considered rude if you spoke to them like that in person. Overall I think that Codidact is a friendlier place than for example SO and SO meta.

Lundin‭ wrote over 2 years ago

Btw regarding expertise, someone could be a hardcore survivalist expert and not knowing what an "ursack" is. Everyone doesn't live in USA - the fauna is very different across the globe. Sure, if they don't know what it is, they should probably refrain from commenting or answering, but on the other hand there is no tag in said question indicating locale. Speaking of rudeness, implicitly assuming that every question is about USA and that no other country in the world exists is kind of rude, you know...

Charlie Brumbaugh‭ wrote over 2 years ago

@Lundin For me this applies to why I stopped asking on Photography, Cooking, and Outdoors so better here than than copying the same post 3 times.

If it friendlier here, then there wouldn't be users getting suspended on Se and deciding that instead of changing their behavior, they decided to come here as a direct result of the suspension.

Lundin‭ wrote over 2 years ago

Charlie Brumbaugh‭ Accusations like that with no proof or context offered aren't very friendly either. Sure, we shouldn't name & shame nor start any lynch mobs on meta... but perhaps the root of this supposed rudeness problem is that you feel that there's no good way for moderators to escalate such issues. On SE there is the option to poke a CM and then "Big Brother" will settle things. We had this ambitious project of creating an Arbitration & Review Panel , I think it was a great idea but it was put on hold. Having a panel like that would also unload unnecessary stress from the admin team.

Charlie Brumbaugh‭ wrote over 2 years ago

@Lundin I can prove it with links but a part of the SO code was not to name specific users in meta posts, so I am refraining.

Olin Lathrop‭ wrote over 2 years ago

Charlie, you keep going on about this, but your idea of rudeness is apparently quite different from the norm. It seems you don't ever want to say anything negative about anyone. That's neither realistic nor useful. Some people do need to be told that what they are doing is wrong. And, a user simply suggesting that explaining "ursack" or "lithophane" when those are central to the question is not rude at all. It's actually a good suggestion, but one you can simply ignore if you don't agree with.

Olin Lathrop‭ wrote over 2 years ago

Asking about something quite niche, like ursack or lithophane without at least a simple sentence explaining them can be seen as arrogant (and thererfore rude) to casual visitors. Someone that doesn't know what these things are already will probably not answer the question, but they will also be alienated and may never come back. It kindof says "If you're so stupid that you don't even know what an ursack is, then this site isn't for you. Run along now and stop interrupting the grownups.". That's not the message we want casual visitors to get. Since the solution is just a single sentence describing the obscure thing, with maybe a link, it's something any post author should at least consider. Suggestions to add such information are certainly not rude, and should not be deleted.

Canina‭ wrote over 2 years ago

Charlie Brumbaugh‭ I actually find myself agreeing with Olin Lathrop‭ here. Consider the initial revision of this question over on Judaism, which was just plain confusing for someone who is not already familiar with Judaism. A simple edit later, the question is now much more accessible to a general audience. Without a prompt for that edit, there's a good chance it never would have been made. While I agree that something like "what's an ursack?" in isolation might not be the best possible way to make such a request for clarification, even that alone still points to a potential issue with a question that should at least be considered on its merits.

samcarter‭ wrote over 2 years ago · edited over 2 years ago

Asking to explain a specific term is not necessarily a sign of lacking expertise. Many (most?) users are not native speakers, they simply might know the stuff under a different name -- that's even more true if the term is just a brand name.

Charlie Brumbaugh‭ wrote over 2 years ago

@Canina I barely understand any of the terms on the Judaism site and those I do need some mental translating, that doesn't give me a right to demand that the askers there explain their terms. If I don't understand something I can either ask a question or Google it.

To put it another way, would "What is an Ursack" be fine as a standalone question or would people be complaining that the OP didn't do enough research?