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.

   • Users not knowing what a lithophane is and not wanting to click the link and find out.
   • Not knowing what an Ursack is and complaining that as the OP should have known that said users would not know what it is.

   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.

posted about 3 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

3y ago

Charlie Brumbaugh‭

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