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Comments on What's more important for codidact - quality or helping questions get answered?
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What's more important for codidact - quality or helping questions get answered?
When I read through https://codidact.org/ I get the impression that the focus is on helping people get their questions answered. There are obviously other benefits, like providing a platform for people who want to share their knowledge, but the message that stands out to me most is:
This is a place where you can get your question answered.
If anyone disagrees with this, I can try to edit the question to provide examples/quotes, but I feel like it's kind of obvious so I'll keep it brief for now.
However, in my interactions with some regulars on here, sometimes I've gotten a different impression. Often, they assert that content quality is paramount, and seem very concerned about keeping the hapless newbies from posting stuff that isn't good enough for the site. The same people don't seem too concerned about trying to help the most people who come to the site - there seems to be an elitist sentiment of "if their content isn't good enough they can stay out". A lot of voting, moderation, discussion and feedback is currently dominated by this attitude, which I think is very confusing for new users. It's not clear what the site is about. Is it a populist site that tries to help everyone who asks, or is it an elitist site that maintains high standards?
I intend this post as feedback on either the text on https://codidact.org/ being misleading, or the culture being out of alignment with the site's vision. Notably, the word "quality" doesn't even appear on that page. Moreover, it mentions things like "community-focused" and "non-hostile" which seem to me at odds with elitism.
Of course the two things are highly related, but ultimately one must be the first principle. For example, if quality is most important, it is reasonable to close or delete poorly-written questions even if it means the asker might be denied help and other users are prevented from helping them. If answering questions is most important, there is an argument for helping the asker first, cleaning up the question later.
I don't think this is a philosophical question. I'll assert that the two biggest types of user on QA sites are:
- People who want to create quality content - they want to see the site grow and evolve into a compendium of high quality knowledge, where only the best-written questions get asked and answered
- People who want to create a helpful community - they want to see the site become a resource where you can go and ask your own questions, even if they're not the best written
I think currently the "marketing" is aiming mostly towards the "helpful community" group, but the actual site culture seems to be more like the "quality content" group. This is counter-productive to growing the site. Suppose the "marketing" works and you attract the "helpful community" people, and they immediately discover a dominant "quality content" culture - they will probably feel frustrated and not want to participate as much. Meanwhile, if you want the "quality content" group, you will keep getting confused "helpful community" people who wander in and annoy the regulars with bad questions and create more work for moderators. The site presentation should not be encouraging them.
And yes, I do see that these are not mutually exclusive. Some people would be happy with either type of site. My question here is about those people who want only one or the other - I believe such people are quite numerous.
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Post
Codidact started as an attempt to make something better/different than SE. When it was started, pretty much everyone involved shared a consensus about what it should not be:
- Not run by a private company for profit where the agenda suddenly changes at a whim, depending on which buzzword is fashionable for the moment.
- Not a place where representatives from a private company keep saying one thing and then doing something else.
- Not something with closed source where the features to develop next were chosen by a selected few.
And so on. With everyone perfectly in agreement about what the site should not be, it is easy to make the assumption that everyone will also be in agreement about what the site should be. I remember the early forum we had set up, wildly brain-storming about literally everything. The ambitions were high, but also all over the place.
At that point, everyone gathers up their own personal but diverse experiences from SE and assumes that the site would be exactly as they personally envisioned it. Including often-contradictory opinions like:
| Problem | Solution |
|---|---|
| SE is rude/unwelcoming/elitist. | We should make something more welcoming and friendly. |
| SE is drowning in low quality content. | We should make something of higher quality here, in order to attract the subject matter experts and to increase search engine rankings. |
| SE is narrow-minded about what topics to discuss. | We should make something with broader scope and tolerance to more subjective topics. |
| SE is drowning in beginner-level FAQ repeated over and over again. | The so-called "canonical duplicates" are of diverse quality and we could do better. |
Personally, I've probably been pushing for all of these at some point, but they admittedly risk clashing with each other in several ways. Another user might have one single thing they consider the most important of all and are pushing for that one, which isn't necessarily the same thing as yet another user. The end result will be a mix—a community consensus of what every user participating thinks is important. Individual users may have to compromise, but that is how the world works whenever dealing with humans co-existing in groups.
So I think what Codidact boils down to is community-driven. Not all sites under the Codidact umbrella need to have the same emphasis of what's important for that particular community.
For example, something like a Code Golf community probably needs to have a very strict scope/format/rules and with emphasis on quality. Whereas something like a Philosophy site would probably benefit from being more tolerant to broad and subjective topics.
So the way to go is probably to raise a local discussion per community over what the preferences and scope should be locally. And it's a never-ending discussion, as new users join and should have their say.
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