Why don't we just make communities for every launched stack?

Because Codidact doesn't want to be a clone of SE but rather be its own thing, and that for good reasons.

Of course, every launched community over at Stack Exchange could be copied and transferred to here, even with all the questions and answers. The question, however, is: What is the purpose of that? Copying all the content doesn't bring users who participate and engage with that content.

Importing large amounts of content leads to the situation where a few users have to curate all the new stuff, a task which is infeasible. Furthermore, copying content doesn't really allow for an own dynamic to develop within that community as a very large part of the community, the content, is already a given fact rather than a to be dynamically generated and created part (on which communities users can leave their marks on). Think of it like that: Importing all the stuff means that basically ghost-writer authored every last bit of it and most of them are, just as the purpose of hiring a ghost-writer, not available after the fact, in this case having written a question and an answer. In fact, the content is rather "dead" in the sense that nearly every person who interacted with it in the past is not present here.

Copying is never a good thing to start with. Taking inspiration, yes, of course, no need to reinvent the wheel constantly but taking the exact same wheel and trying to fit it to a new car, well, yeah, not going to work most of the time. By allowing to create own communities here, with their own scope, with their own rules and especially with their own set of users paves the way for lasting and interested communities who like the Codidact idea and follow its principles.

In short, Codidact is its own thing (with its own communities and scopes), inspired by Stack Exchange for sure but not trying to imitate it. It has additional features, skips features or takes a different approach (for example voting and abilities).

Copying everything is just good for one thing in the end: for archiving. If Codidact's mission was to archive all the content from Stack Exchange, yes, that would be the way to go.

posted almost 4 years ago

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Zerotime‭

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As @Lundin stated in comments:

Because they have 100 or so of them and we don't want to create 100 ghost towns?

A community needs people and quality content.

• Without enough people, there will never be enough content (except spam, perhaps).
• Quality content requires people who really know a topic well in order to either seed with quality questions (possibly self-answered) or blogs, articles, etc. If you simply open communities without first recruiting the right people, you won't get the experts.
• With a large group of people, the site will be self-starting via Q&A. But that requires a large group of people, which we don't have yet.
• Content needs to be grouped properly. That will depend on choices made by the people running a community, but the choices can easily be different - more specialized or more open than the particular groupings that SomeOther site used.

Could we, legally, create a clone of every site and seed it with a dump of data from SomewhereElse? Yes, we could. And we would have a big link farm. I really don't like link farms.

posted almost 4 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

manassehkatz‭ staff

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why don't the admin[s] just create a community for each subject that Stack launched a site for?

Because content doesn't create a community. Engaged users do.

If sites here are just clones of elsewhere, then there is no point for a core group of users to be here. In fact, having content here be largely copies from elsewhere will actually drive those necessary core users away.

Even if new people happen to stumble on this site, all those attribution links will surely cause them to at least check out the other site. Once that happens, they are unlikely to come back. Why should they? All the activity and original copies of the content are Over There.

In case there is still any doubt, look at our experience here. We have 10 non-meta sites today. Of those, the three that heavily imported content from elsewhere (Writing, Outdoors, Scientific Speculation) are in the bottom 4 of activity and nearly dead.

The folks over at Writing are actually discussing deleting some of the imported content.

posted almost 4 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

Olin Lathrop‭

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