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Comments on How should we approach a programming site or sites?
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How should we approach a programming site or sites?
We have a suggestion for a site for professional coding, and software engineering and computer science also have some interest, and there are overlapping suggestions for cloud technologies and single-board microcontrollers. It seems likely that participants here have interests in other related areas too. How shall we approach this cluster of topics? Do we want one big tent -- a single programming site? Do we want a big tent and some specialized spin-offs -- what seems to have happened on SE? Do we want to plan for more focused communities from the start -- and, if so, what would they be?
I was an infrequent participant on SO; I have around 1200 rep after many years of passive, occasional posts. I don't have the right experience there to say with any certainty what worked well and what didn't. It appears to me that SO doesn't really have a community; it's too big for that. It might have sub-communities; I don't know how strong they are and how much they interact. And it might have had a community when it started; they're 11 years in now and things have changed. We'll be starting small; we are not operating at SO scale (yet). An advantage of a single site (or small number of clearly-differentiated sites) is that people know where to go; Balkanization where there are two-dozen different sites depending on which libraries or languages or tools you're using probably does not serve the programming community either.
I think a core diffentiator for Codidact is that we're putting community first from the beginning. We want to do what's best for the people participating here, whether that's one site or a handful or many (or one site and later spin-offs). We also have some tools they don't have over on SE, including categories and integrated blogs or wikis. And we're actively working on an open-source platform, so if it turns out there's something we need and don't have, we don't have to wait 6-8 years for somebody to consider the feature request.
It seems clear to me that there is interest in a place for questions about programming -- code, tools, design, and maybe processes. How shall we address that interest? What shall we build?
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We resolved this by creating Software Development with broad scope. There's even a Code Review category. If the community grows to a size that's hard to manage and subsets want to spin off later, we can do that.
I've had some thoughts about this, which I'll try to coalesce into something resembling an answer. > Codidact is grow …
4y ago
Based on all the feedback here (and also on the related site proposals), I put forth this proposal: Create a single S …
4y ago
I don't know enough to have a full answer, but one differentiation that I think makes sense is for embedded systems prog …
4y ago
I want to offer a more community- and not topic-orientated answer to this question. Basically, you could rephrase the qu …
4y ago
Three problem is that a single supersite is a mess that is difficult to build anything other than a "codidact community" …
4y ago
I don't know about eventually, but while codidact is still getting started, it's better to not splinter communities. …
1y ago
Coming at this from a totally different perspective here. I think all of the above mention many great points but I can't …
4y ago
Lessons learnt from the past I've been at SO pretty much from the start. It is true that SO has sub-communities in a …
4y ago
This is less than a proposal: merely an idea. That's because I've not used SO much and don't know what works and what do …
4y ago
To answer the original question of how to approach programmer sites, I think a number of important features should be co …
4y ago
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Based on all the feedback here (and also on the related site proposals), I put forth this proposal:
Create a single Software Development site, planning from the start for spinoffs. Here's how I see that working:
First, I said "software development", not "programming", because we're not an SO clone and don't need to do exactly what they did (as pointed out here). I'm proposing a broad scope -- code questions, software design, architecture, process, tools, the works. In time that will get large and subcommunities with more-specific interests (like web development or C++ or machine learning) might feel lost in the larger community. That's an issue at SO, and "afterthought" specialized sites face challenges because their topics are also still on-topic on SO. We need a better strategy for subcommunities that want to get a place of their own. But id doesn't seem like there's a lot of interest in creating a bunch of small, specialized sites from the beginning and running the risk of falling below critical mass.
If the emerging subcommunity is forming around specific tags, that's relatively tractable, especially with tag hierarchies. Some here have suggested dividing up programming sites by languages or tech stacks; those would have tagging that's clear in 95% of the cases. (A question asking about differences between included-language-A and excluded-language-B would be an exception.) In this tags-based approach, the community would put together a spinoff proposal that lists the tags to move, and if there's consensus we could proceed.
We could then create a (temporary) category for the proto-site in which to collect the candidate emigrees, so people could sanity-check the questions that would be moving there. This allows some tuning -- we could start by moving everything with tags X, Y, and Z there, but when people say "no that particular question belongs on the original site", we could move it back. When the community is happy, we could then pick up that category and move it to a new site. While it's all getting sorted out, those questions are still on the general site and findable by search there, so this isn't too disruptive. (The last thing we want is to be bouncing questions back and forth between different sites while sorting this out.)
This approach lets us start with one general site while supporting specialized communities as they emerge. I don't think any of us can accurately say what specialized programming communities will exist in a year, so let's focus on a framework that lets them develop naturally while also having a home for the many other questions that aren't specific to a tech stack or language.
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