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How does Codidact avoid repeating Stack Exchange's mistakes?
I received an important question in private email, and I'm bringing it here so we can improve on the answer I sent. This won't be the last time we get this question; let's develop a clear, effective response.
The question, slightly paraphrased, was:
How will you prevent Codidact from repeating the problems that got Stack Exchange (SE) into its current state? What, in your opinion, caused SE's problems, and how are you avoiding them?
To elaborate a bit, those problems include:
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SE management neglecting, ignoring, and then changing things out from under the communities they host and the volunteers who support them (e.g. license changes, policy changes), apparently for financial reasons
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Lack of transparency and accountability in company actions that affect communities
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Community turmoil caused by company actions that seem mysterious and harmful, and community fragmentation and decline as some leave, others stay, some change their behavior, and so on
You ask an important question. If Codidact just becomes Stack Exchange Inc. version 2 in several years, we've failed our …
4y ago
Richard Branson once said: > Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, th …
5y ago
One of the key differences is that by being community-driven, Codidact will be able to expand the system in different wa …
5y ago
As Monica already explained, making the software open-source does a lot to reduce the barrier to entry for competitors. …
9mo ago
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One of the key differences is that by being community-driven, Codidact will be able to expand the system in different ways from SE. This includes the ability to host different types of content where SE, for whatever reasons, never did. Current plans, but subject to change, include blogs, canonical answers (the name may change), wikis, sandbox, and other things.
In addition, if any group decides they want additional features and the primary Codidact group of developers does not want to support writing the necessary changes, the group will be free to make changes themselves to the basic Codidact code instead of having to (as we are now!) start from scratch.
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You ask an important question. If Codidact just becomes Stack Exchange Inc. version 2 in several years, we've failed our communities and ourselves. We don't want to go down the path that SE took; we all saw where that led. So we're doing some things differently from the start.
First, Codidact is a not-for-profit venture. We will never get our priorities from stockholders or venture capitalists looking to make a profit. The need to greatly increase their profits is a major cause of the changes SE has been making.
Second, the Codidact platform is open-source. We will be running an instance and welcoming a network of communities, but any community that feels we have lost our way, or just has different goals, can leave at any time, taking not only the content but the software as well. Anybody can set up another instance. On SE, in comparison, while people can take the content, the software itself is proprietary -- so you can't just take your community and set it up easily somewhere else, but you need to get new software first. Because SE's business depends on that proprietary software, they will never change that policy. We are open from the start.
Because we're not bound to people seeking a profit, we are free to be much more community-driven than is possible on SE. Different communities have different needs, at both the software and policy level. SE in recent years has been centralizing control, making it harder for communities to do what is best for themselves. Our instance will have some lightweight rules too; for example we don't want to host neo-Nazi groups or 4chan or that sort of things. But everybody who follows our very basic code of conduct is welcome. We're not going to micro-manage communities.
There are never guarantees in life; it's always possible that something bad that I can't currently imagine would happen someday. But we're doing our best to avoid repeating SE's mistakes, and we think being open, accountable, and free gives us our best shot to do right by the communities that join us.
Richard Branson once said:
Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients
I'd like to paraphrase that in terms of Codidact.
Take care of your core community, your moderators, your 0.015%, they will take care of your users.
Stack Overflow forgot the core community in order to please their clients and new users. That hurt them. Remembering that the community is your strength and not your weakness would be the best way to not get into similar mistakes.
As Monica already explained, making the software open-source does a lot to reduce the barrier to entry for competitors. This provides both an escape hatch in case Codidact does end up following SX, but also is a self-breaking prophecy. The fact that people could just host their own instance easily will help encourage humility in management, I think.
A second step could be taken that would reduce the barrier even more and strengthen the protection against Codidact developing problems. The licensing/software availability barrier is solved, but there is still a large advantage in the form of critical mass. If Codidact grows large, and then management decides to be evil, yes others could run their own instance but they would have the challenge of acquiring enough users, just as Codidact does now.
The solution to this would be federation. If Codidact instances could share questions and answers, this would empower the users to vote with their feet. Of course, federation is technically laborious to implement, and there are some nuances to exactly how it would work. However, it looks like there's already a system for importing questions, so that can be built on to set up full federation.
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