Why prefer Codidact to Stack Exchange?

There are several differences in the philosophy of Codidact vs. Stack Exchange that may contribute to people preferring CD over SE.

For-profit vs non-profit

Stack Exchange is a for-profit company. With that in mind, they have to worry about making a profit and monetizing their products; there's always that driving factor of the money driving what they do.

Codidact, on the other, is a non-profit venture, funded by donations and out of pocket expenses by the creators. (There's currently no actual organization that can accept donations, but we're working on setting up a non-profit or something similar.)

Community focus vs knowledge base

Stack's stated goal is to be a repository of information, which leads to strict policies reducing clutter.

Codidact's ultimate goal is to serve the communities it hosts. This means that each community can set its own goals and visions, including how strict they want to be with comments etc. Being a repository of information is a secondary goal.

Open-source vs closed-source

Codidact is entirely open-source; this means that anyone can access the codebase and use it, for free, allowing anyone to set up their own Q&A instance however they want. Stack, on the other hand, is closed-source (excluding the data explorer), and people have to pay to set up a Q&A instance.

Ultimately, most of the differences between Codidact and Stack come from Codidact explicitly focusing on serving the community's needs. This is where features such as Categories come from, and the upcoming Abilities change; both serve to address longstanding problems that arose with the Stack software. We can also include community-specific features for communities that need them, a la the Sefaria linker at Judaism Codidact.

There's the Codidact Arbitration & Review Panel, which will act as a supervisor and make sure that both moderators and staff members have a proper way to deal with conflicts that arise between them.

Yes, Stack is a much more advanced project, with over ten years in the game vs Codidact's year or so in development, and it shows. But I believe that Codidact has the ability to set itself apart as a viable alternative to Stack, and serve alongside Stack to meet the needs of various communities.
Some communities will prefer Codidact, others Stack, some neither; and that's fine. Different communities have different needs.

posted over 5 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

Mithical‭ staff

23 72 696 105

please note that many people, who are interested in contributing to a Q&A community, do not care meta subjects like "Code of Conduct", "Copyright Licenses", firing some community staff

The casual user of any system generally doesn't care about this type of stuff. The active, involved, users - a small percentage on almost any public system - do care. They care because it affects them directly in some cases, or because they are concerned about the goals, morals or other aspects of a system where they spend a lot of their time & energy.

It is, in some ways, similar to politics (in a nominally democratic nation, not the same in a totalitarian regime - but consider US, Canaa, Australia, most of Europe, etc.):

• A very small group really do things (career politicians, the Codidact developers)
• A larger group, but still a minority, put a lot of time & energy into the system (politically active, "Meta" users)
• The vast majority have their opinions but relatively little real action (voters, regular users)

We don't expect 100% of Codidact users to become developers or even significant Meta users. But we want to provide an environment where everyone who wants to participate in a productive way (from asking & answering on up to helping develop and run the system) can do so. For the casual user, Code of Conduct and similar issues will have zero effect on them - they just need a system where they can find answers to their questions. For the more active users, these things matter.

posted over 5 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

manassehkatz‭ staff

20 29 239 23

As I explained in this post and some community staff confirmed, Codidact is almost a miniature of SE. In fact, I see no radical difference between them.

Codidact is being used since not long, that explains the similarities. Even so, there are huge differences below the sea level:

• Codidact is open source, which means you can fix bugs, adapt to your needs as long as complying AGPLv3, you can publish your own instance.

• SE is an aged and dying platform, technologically speaking.

As we know, almost all (in my opinion, all without exception) people coming to Codidact are already familiar with SE. So, why should we expect that they prefer to contribute to this community, rather than SE? Only because of some meta issues?

They don't have to. Codidact is for communities, not for individual people.

I know that the main motivation for creating Codidact was some controversy about some meta issues. But, please note that many people, who are interested in contributing to a Q&A community, do not care meta subjects like "Code of Conduct", "Copyright Licenses", firing some community staff, ... .

Well, that's their motivation. Others are here only because open source.

Even, almost all Codidact community staff are still serious active SE users, and I think almost all user protestors against some SE policies will continue their contributions to SE even if they face more unpleasant policies. Why? Because the main important thing to almost all contributors is "asking and answering."

So what's the question?

In my opinion, if we want alive communities, we need many people to contribute regularly, especially for some communities like a math community.

Communities can be small and alive. I don't understand.

posted over 5 years ago

CC0

.                                                .‭

8 15 31 22

Superior technology

• The site software supports more post types than just Q&A, and multiple Q&A sections with separate labels. This allows each community to organize content, post high-quality information without the need to hew to the Q&A format, set up "staging" areas for questions that might need more work, organize contests or other community events, etc. etc.

• Threaded comments allow users to organize whatever discussion might be necessary, while keeping comment threads hidden behind a title by default to minimize their impact for readers who aren't involved (and don't want to get involved).

• Post reactions allow rapid identification of outdated or dangerous information, even if it represents a popular "hack" or was important to know years ago.

• Wilson scoring on posts gives a more accurate view of quality by implicitly giving dissenting votes more weight, pulling controversial content away from the top (and sometimes bottom).

• The site style sheet allows for useful fancy HTML formatting - in particular, to put text on a shaded background and collapse details - making it easier to skim posts while not omitting useful information completely.

• The "Copy link" option for posts includes a Markdown-formatted version of the link, suitable for immediate use in other posts and comments.

• Reputation is greatly de-emphasized, and a system exists to hand out privileges based on demonstrated skills, talent and dedication related to the privilege. There is still much that could be designed or improved in this implementation, but merely trying results in something far better than handing curation privileges to someone who asked a single hugely popular question years ago.

A fresh start

The simple fact of being a relatively new site, with far fewer posts, makes it easier to begin curating a canon of the most useful information on a topic. We also have the benefit of 15+ (now) years of experience from Stack Exchange, to understand what makes for really good questions and answers. If you ask a simple, fundamental question about the essential techniques of a craft (or the basic tenets of a religion, "old chestnut" advice for designers or hobbyists, etc.), you'll have the chance to define the scope of the question really properly, and get answers that don't drown in dozens of random related hints (or restatements of previous answers, or arbitrary combinations of two or three previous answers...).

Ownership that cares

The Codidact Foundation is made up of people who were dissatisfied with Stack Exchange and determined to do better - starting with a focus on community. This is a somewhat nebulous concept, of course; but you can be assured that they are far more in touch with each Codidact community than, say, Stack Exchange staff are with the consensus of curators on Meta Stack Overflow. Individual communities have greater power to tailor their site to their own needs - including in particular the content of the site's Help section.

posted over 1 year ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

Karl Knechtel‭

25 36 161 28

I appreciate your passion! It resonates very strongly with me, as someone who wears his heart on his sleeve. One thing I'll say though is many of your points seem to be based on assumptions, anecdotes, and wishes, but not real evidence.

None of us can see the future. It's impossible to say whether Math.CD will be more or less successful than Math.SE, because as you pointed out, Math.SE has been the only site large enough to encompass the broader maths community. If Math.CD users evangelize the service, however, there's no telling what the effect on Math.SE might be. The point applies to other communities on CD too.

Is it a little bit of Field of Dreams, i.e. "If you build it, they will come"? Sure, but all startup projects are founded on hope. The key is, "build" doesn't just mean "create the software in a vacuum and release it into the ether"; it also includes "be active participants, stewards, and evangelists of the software we're building and the communities that use it," as evidenced by the broad meta community and even this question right here.

posted over 5 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

ShowMeBillyJo‭

0 9 34 8

Since this is obviously open to individual answers, I will give my reason. The structure of SE leads to it being much more toxic for casual use. There is a reason people always joke about their SE questions being closed as a duplicate of a question that doesn't even answer their question. The reputation points on the site give power-users a physical authority over those who do not power-use.

To the casual user, asking a "good" question is very daunting, often because of arbitrary requirements in a community resistant to change. That is not to say there are not bad questions—there definitely are—but the definition is less rigid than the censors would lead you to believe.

posted over 5 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

1y ago by Michael‭

Aidan‭

1 1 19 1

I'm still new to Codidact, but reading previous answers one idea comes to my mind: currently, Codidact has no incentive to become a city.

To understand why we need to go through a little bit of history of Stack Exchange. I think we can divide the lifetime of Stack Exchange into two parts: when it was born by two programmers, and when it was acquired by a venture fund.

Before Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky created the first site of Stack Exchange, they could only search for answers of their programing questions on forums. The nature of forum allows for unfocused discussions, and people who only need the answer can get annoyed. So Stack Overflow was born to address these needs: cut to the chase, get the answer as fast as possible. That is its raison d'être.

So the site, and the network later on, heavily reflects this motivation: comments are highly discouraged, answers are sorted by scores, accepted answers are ranked first (because in programing, what works for me is really likely works for you), disallow opinion-based questions. This satisfied the needs of many other people, so the site grew well.

Its growth attracted venture companies. As a part of financial capitalism, their need is not to get quality answers as fast as possible, but to get as much money as possible. Doing the former does get you the latter, but sometimes it doesn't. And when it is a hindrance, it should be curtailed. That's why you see more and more behaviors that are conflicting with the raison d'être or the willing of the community, like introducing AI features, pushing the idea of being nice to new users, firing staffs that represent the community, graduating beta sites prematurely, equaling the reputation point gained from having a question upvoted with the point gained from having an answer upvoted, and so on. As long as a behavior helps acquire new users, then in the eyes of the shareholders it's a good one, even at the cost of pushing a portion of old users away. Growth = inflow - outflow.

Guess what entity also shares the same characteristic of growing with this cost? It's city. Cities grew because more people move to them than died inside of them. And guess what narrative the founders and community use to describe Stack Exchange? It's city.

Now, cities have their value. I'm living in a city. Probably many of you are. I can still live in it because my gain from it outweighs the cost to live in it. But for some others that's no longer the case. They don't want to die in cities, so they leave. (Well, they are still counted as died in the cities anyway). Those people gather together and build other places that first serve their own need, like the founders of cities do, but this time they want to strictly keep it in control to avoid its purposes from changing. Those places have different conditions, different variations and thus different names. Here I'll call them as "villages".

So Stack Exchange is a city, Codidact is a village. I'd argue that population or density shouldn't be the factor to distinguish them. If there are small cities, then why is it not possible to have big villages, or even megavilles? A village doesn't care if it grows or not, because its low birth/acquisition rate can match with it low death/leaving rate. However, a city must care for growth to compensate for its high death/leaving rate. Both are different ways of human cooperation, have their own pros and cons, and perhaps we need both. A person can live in a city for some times, and in a village for another times. This is not a problem with that particular people or the village, though may create a little bit of worry for the city, especially when there is a trend of migration.

I think Stack Exchange used to be a big village. Those were the days the community believed that the top priority of this network was to serve their needs, or at least the majority's. The moment it is intended to be sold to venture funds that its model started to change. At first this was was still fine, and perhaps even welcomed. But now the city life has changed so fast that some people decided to migrate from it for good, accepting losing the benefits the city provides. Amongst the villagers, some had swear that they would never come back, and some can still return to enjoy the benefits of the city occasionally. Amongst the citizen, some only need to travel to the village to refresh occasionally, and some don't need to go outside of it at all.

The lack of resource or diversity is not a problem of any village at the very beginning. Just like beta sites in Stack Exchange, it is hoped that as long as quality questions are asked, then quality answers will eventually come, and thus the population will eventually grow. To quote Jeff Atwood: Build it, and they will come. But more importantly, living with the lack of resource or diversity is the price the Codidact villagers are willing to pay. Anyone who misses them should just simply live in the Stack Exchange city. Anyone who wants a resourceful and diverse village (a megaville) should stay here and contribute. And you can live in both places at the same time. And if some day the people in the village decide that they need to follow the city model, then that can be argued as the success of the village model. If one day the city could satisfy the villagers' needs than even the village, then there will be a trend to migrate to the city. The village is still fine even when it becomes a ghost town. The day it is closed forever would be the best day for all villagers.

Some food for thought:

• Startup = Growth
• Farewell Stack Exchange, Stack Exchange Raises $40m – Joel on Software
• Stack Exchange - Wikipedia
• Stack Exchange is not open sourced. Why do you decide to participate here?
• The Dark Forest and Generative AI
• The BIGGEST INTENTIONAL COMMUNITIES in the World | ECO VILLAGES that you will want to Visit - YouTube
• Conway's law:

posted 3 months ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

3mo ago

Ooker‭

3 1 1 1