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Observations about the Incubator "emergence-effect" and deadlocking
Why the Incubator does not produce what it is intended for
Example Persona Experience:
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Newbie-new-user comes to the Incubator as a fan of Movies, Worldbuilding - or ANY other non-existing community right now!
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A question / the first question that may be inviting to post something was downvoted and closed.
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Newbie: "Ohh... okay, better not post here. I had my share of such scorchings."
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Leaves.
Problem
The Incubator is kind of a sandbox where undefined measures of usefulness are applied. This is detrimental to a "real" incubator of ideas!
The downvoting is rooted in the assumption that those posts are not that much favored. BUT the community, which might create a rule to embrace such postings --- does not exist yet.
Broken Concept
There is a term for that in IT: A deadlock. I read about "vicious circle" in some comment recently.
Yes, that is one!
It will repell each and everyone coming here to just post something. But those postings would already constitute the basis for creating a community later.
Right now the Incubator is solely aimed to "attract" people who are willing to "build up a new community against the stream of not having the community". That is just not helpful and very exhausting.
Conclusion
This is not going to work. There has to be a change in the concept of Codidact's representation in the mind of new users that is: the outside world. The Incubator must be streamlined to its intended use.
The same story on a personal note
Feedback (in the incubator !) like "This does not belong on Codidact" or "This should go to meta" is not helpful. How are you supposed to build a community in the incubator if you're always shoving all the content away?? This is total non-sense. But it shows how broken the concept for the incubator is.
Currently it is just the perfect spot to prevent having new communities instead of incubating them.
Existing users - who probably don't even intend to do harm - can cast "vetos" far too early.
Either have positive feedback or don't give any feedback if you are not interested in such a community! Don't preconceive about if this could work or belongs here! It will never, if you post this to new content as the only feedback!
Do not downvote if you are not invested into the idea. And also do not close (in the incubator).
--> There are no people to counter the downvotes (or any other negative feedback) yet (!!) You are effectively destroying the incubation process.
And everybody who should upvote to embrace a new idea, is just not voting at all. They shrug and don't care. That is okay, at least it is not hampering the incubation.
But they who care to not having a new idea for a post or are in doubt about it and downvote, they become the most visible.
There is another IT term for this: Inversion of priority. A sub-kind of a deadlock.
1 answer
You seem to be interpreting the incubator as the home for all questions that don't fit anywhere else, and also as a primary entry point for people new to Codidact. That's not the goal.
The incubator is a place for people interested in specific new communities to ask and answer questions that would fit those new communities. Just as a question can be a good fit or a poor fit on an established community, it can also be a good fit or a poor fit on a proposed community. Because proposals are proposals, where the scope hasn't been fleshed out yet, "off topic" is not generally a factor. But questions can still get valid downvotes for other reasons. There's broad agreement that opinion polls don't work in this format, for example. Or if a question is unclear or missing essential information, people might downvote for that reason.
The Proposals site is not the best place for new users to dive in, unless they are there for a specific proposal. If, for example, you're interested in the Worldbuilding proposal and you invite your fellow worldbuilders to go there to help build it, that's great! But it's not meant to be a "come ask your questions about anything here!" magnet. A lot of sausage gets made as a new community is built -- meta discussions, and testing scope edge cases with actual questions, and drafting and often re-drafting community norms... this is primarily for the people who want to build a thing, not the people who want to consume an already-existing thing.
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