An explanation of Codidact and my involvement with it

Description and History

Codidact is a "Q&A site" similar to Stack Exchange, billing itself as a "community-run, open-source Q&A platform". Like Stack Exchange, separate subdomains are used to host separate Q&A about a variety of topics of interest. Though all terms are used in both places, Codidact members seem to more commonly refer to the subdomains as "communities" rather than "sites", which exist on a "platform" rather than as part of a "network".

A separate site is used to describe (and promote) the platform itself as a project. The main site runs on a custom-written Ruby on Rails project called QPixel. Meta discussion about the site software generally takes place on the main site, in the Q&A section of the "Meta" community - but QPixel of course also has an issue tracker for technical problems.)

The project is operated by "the Codidact Foundation" which is also described in the main-site help. The Foundation incorporated in November 2020; the site dates to October of 2019 (see this first anniversary post).

Codidact exists in large part due to the fallout surrounding the (apparently newsworthy) removal of Codidact community lead Monica Cellio as a Stack Exchange moderator and the overall handling of that decision and its consequences.

Selected Questions and Answers

(TODO)

Codidact vs Stack Exchange: My View

Since August 2023, by personal policy I no longer contribute new questions or answers to Stack Overflow. My last answer was on August 1, 2023, and my last question (a deliberately asked, self-answered one) was on April 25, 2023. I still edit and curate content there (including to keep my own Q&A up to date), and sometimes ask and answer questions on other, smaller Stack Exchange sites.

My reasons for this have little to do with Ms. Cellio's treatment on Stack Exchange - although of course I am very sympathetic, and I agree that Stack Exchange made severe errors in judgment (to say the least). It's really a combination of that and several other things:

• The company, Stack Exchange Inc., was sold in mid 2021 and the new leadership seems entirely ignorant of the original intent and purpose of Stack Exchange.

• Specifically, there have been repeated attempts to introduce new features to the site that are extremely poorly received by the community, mostly to do with AI, despite the community's resolution to ban generative AI content from the site. Leadership seems very insistent about being able to market the site with AI buzzwords. They do this despite embarrassing problems discovered in lazy implementations of features, and are happy to petition the community for help implementing the things they very clearly don't want (things which, as I pointed out there, actively make the site worse and act counter to the site's foundational goals, even when nobody is trying to "jailbreak" the AI) and then just try again later and hope nobody notices the glaringly obvious.

• The rate of new questions on Stack Overflow has been in decline since 2014, and this trend accelerated with the introduction of LLMs. This is actually fine in itself (much better that people ask an LLM on their own, rather than hoping someone else on Stack Overflow will do it for them; and much better that they don't post the results and pretend to be "sharing knowledge" or doing something the OP couldn't do independently), but it's strongly suggestive that the site has fulfilled its purpose already. There are increasingly few useful questions one can ask that have not been asked before, and thus the questions that do trickle in nowadays tend to be quite poor and/or unoriginal.

To be clear, I still think there is great value in writing canonical Q&A that basically fills out missing documentation (or makes it easier to find information that is present in existing well-written documentation that for whatever reason is hard to find). This is especially important for "beginner-level" questions because there will always be far more beginners than experts around in any worthwhile field - a lack of beginners implies that nobody cares any more.

But now I write it on Codidact instead.

For now, Codidact gets much less web traffic. But this is always subject to change. To me, it's clear that Stack Exchange will continue to decline, while Codidact's star is rising.

More importantly, by writing while the site is still small, I can produce content that doesn't drown in noise - and which can serve as a model for other contributors.

To elaborate: Stack Overflow has hordes of low-quality, mostly ignored questions that a search engine could easily find instead of a better question. Search engines don't know anything about other sites' internal content-rating systems, and lots of Stack Overflow content has unjustifiably high scores anyway. Despite the common, long-standing perception of Stack Overflow as negative and hostile, users are actually very reluctant to downvote bad content, and the overall incentive system is completely broken.

Aside from that, questions often have clickbait titles that completely fail to describe the OP's actual problem (because OP didn't understand the problem), but incidentally draw a lot of attention from people trying to answer a completely different question (or for reasons entirely unrelated to the topic, although that's probably almost all bot traffic). There are also, almost certainly, vast hordes of unrecognized duplicates. (In the past, I have used the site search and gone on multi-day sprees locating and hammering literally hundreds of them for a single canonical duplicate - and concluded that there could be thousands more that are harder to search for).

In short, it's a mess where you can't find the answer you're looking for, so you ask again poorly - but the reason you can't find the answer you're looking for is because of all the other clueless people who did exactly that. On Codidact, I don't have to worry about any of that.

See Also

Ms. Cellio wrote a Medium piece which offers an extensive explanation of her involvement with the Codidact project, its goals, and how it seeks to distinguish itself from Stack Exchange.

New Codidact users with Stack Exchange experience should also check the featured Meta post "What should I know when coming here from Stack Exchange?".