I know there's been various opinions about why the said sites struggle with activity. I don't believe it has anything to do with "gatekeeping" or high quality standards, nor do I believe it has anything to do with the high amount of imported content from SE either.

The sites were simply started too early and without a sufficient amount of enthusiast users to keep them going. It's not sufficient to have one or two such users to maintain activity, a site needs much more.

Personally I occasionally try to participate on sites that I'm not really that interested in, just to help with activity, but that kind of artificial support "trickling in" from users that are primarily here for other Codidact communities won't work in the long run. There needs to be a core user base of many enthusiasts and ideally a bunch of domain experts among those as well.

Never too late to fix, but then the sites would need to be advertised somewhere where outdoors or photography enthusiasts hang out currently.

I have contributed more content on those sites post pre and post migration than anyone else, and stopped my contributions once it became clear that the rudeness/gatekeeping would not be dealt with. How is that not related to the lack of activity?

Maybe gatekeeping is not the only or even the biggest reason for the low activity, but it must be a contributor. It stands to reason that you have some baseline rate of activity on any site, and the more strict you are with what's allowed, the smaller a subset of that you will get. Perhaps a strict filter might encourage some experts to be more active, because they enjoy the company of other experts. But there are also experts that dislike elitism, who will be discouraged, and of course the non-experts are directly curbed. So it's hard to see how strict content policies won't ultimately reduce activity.

Sites with little or no bar on quality like reddit and early StackOverflow were able to grow very fast and expertise emerged from it as Charlie says. There was always things like voting that allowed users to sort through the "bad" content, but mods rarely outright deleted or censored any of it. In fact, these sites (including SO) tend to lose momentum when moderations tightens.

BTW Charlie, as a personal comment - when I first saw Codidact and was browsing around to see if the site is worth using, I liked your posts on the Great Outdoors and elsewhere. It was actually a big part of why I thought to give the site a try. Sounds like maybe we might be in the minority here on what site culture should be like, but maybe that gives a perspective on what the user acquisition story actually looks like.

Charlie Brumbaugh‭ You are pretty much saying that the sites had one single enthusiast user, which I believe is correct, to the point when one single user stops posting it becomes notable. This only proves my point that the sites were launched prematurely and without proper advertising in relevant channels.

I have contributed more content on those sites post pre and post migration than anyone else

Not true. I have contributed more on the Photography site than you or anyone else, as judged by all the other users. I just checked, and my rep is 961 versus your 557. Everyone else has even less.

And no, new askers weren't run off. The site died because it never really got going. Nobody out there knows about it. There was an initial trickle of activity from the few users that were into photography that were there at the start of Codidact, but they ran out of things to ask each other after a while. In hindsight, it should not have been launched when it was and in that form. Codidact was new, and we didn't know about launching sites back then. The way-too-many categories doesn't help either. They spread the sparse activity out, making it look even more sparse.

None of this has anything to do with what you are complaining about.

CD relies on word of mouth, so it's important to consider that before people advertise it, it must be a place they'd be comfortable showing to their friends. Ties into the being helpful vs. content quality. It's not correct to look at the site not growing, and conclude it was opened prematurely. It could also be that the seed community failed to form an attractive culture, and early adopters gave up on it.

As an example, I used to recommend StackOverflow to everyone back in the day. But over time, it became too self important that I stopped being comfortable telling people I know to go there, because despite doing nothing too wrong they'd get treated like crap.

It could also be that the seed community failed to form an attractive culture, and early adopters gave up on it.

But that's not what happened. All the posts are still there. You can see for yourself.