Welcome to Codidact Meta!
Codidact Meta is the meta-discussion site for the Codidact community network and the Codidact software. Whether you have bug reports or feature requests, support questions or rule discussions that touch the whole network – this is the site for you.
How discussions work in Codidact?
Stack Overflow was created on the premise of having questions and answers without the chitchat and other common problems well-known in Internet discussion forums. The founders learned they still need a place where to have feedback from "community" and after several months they made a clone of the question-and-answer site to replace the original website used for gathering community input which lead to creating their "Meta" and at some point to introduce the use of meta tags: discussion, bug, support, and feature request.
That might work well enough for some time but as the "community" become more diverse "Meta" become a mess. I.E.:
- It's unclear the meaning of upvotes and downvotes. Some claimed that they mean agreement / disagreement respectively despite that the SO / Stack Exchange docs mention that meaning applies only to feature requests.
- There isn't a shared understanding of the meaning of "consensus". Some claim that a post having a lot of upvotes means that there is community consensus, while others claim that to have consensus is required that all community members agree on something.
- Several problems become worse due to groupthink. Some pro-tempore, community moderators, and community managers do reject to handle a situation just to avoid making mad a few community members.
- ...
What measures are being taken in Codidact to avoid that Meta become a mess?
What measures are being taken to handle community wicked problems?
From Wikipedia (1)
Groupthink is a psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people in which the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome.
From Wikipedia (2)
In planning and policy, a wicked problem is a problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize. It refers to an idea or problem that cannot be fixed, where there is no single solution to the problem; and "wicked" denotes resistance to resolution, rather than evil.[1] Another definition is "a problem whose social complexity means that it has no determinable stopping point".[2] Moreover, because of complex interdependencies, the effort to solve one aspect of a wicked problem may reveal or create other problems. Due to their complexity, wicked problems are often characterized by organized irresponsibility.
1 answer
- Votes on meta should mean agreement or disagreement with whatever the post is proposing.
Corolary: That means meta votes should not count towards rep. It is not "bad" to disagree with someone. We expect some range of opinions within a community. Users shouldn't be penalized or rewarded for saying something unpopular or popular.
Unfortunately the current system seems to still count votes in meta towards rep. That should be changed (if it hasn't already, not sure).
- Consensus means that most, preferably more than just a majority, agree. Requiring everyone to agree is unworkable and silly.
- We can't worry about "group think". Individuals think for themselves. Users need to feel comfortable expressing unpopular views on meta, as long as they are expressed respectfully and constructively. If a few people agree with something only because others do too, there is nothing we can do about it, and no way to measure it in the first place.
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