Post History

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 what buzzword that's fashionable for the moment. 
- Not a place where representatives from a private company keeps saying one thing and then doing something else. 
- Not something with closed source where which 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 contradicting opinions like:

- 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 in several ways. Another user might have one single thing they consider the most important of all and are propagating for that one. Not necessarily the same thing as yet another user. The end result will be a mix - a community consensus of what every user participating think 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.