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Comments on Marketing Math Codidact

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Marketing Math Codidact

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I don't think it's controversial to say that this site is currently suffering from a lack of new questions.

I believe the main problem is lack of awareness. People aren't coming to this site because they have no idea it exists. A distant second concern, in my opinion, is the value proposition relative to the Math StackExchange. Nevertheless, I think having a clear answer to the second concern is useful for any explicit "advertising".

The main questions I want to ask are thus:

How can we make more people aware of Math Codidact?

What are or can be the benefits of Math Codidact over Math StackExchange?

For the former, I don't have too many suggestions beyond people active here mentioning it to people/communities they think will find it useful. I hope others can provide more options. The main option I have beyond that is I don't believe running community promotion ad on Math StackExchange has been tried. I don't believe there is any policy reason not to. It was done for the Writing Codidact on the Writing StackExchange. Admittedly, the Math StackExchange and Writing StackExchange communities are not comparable, so how it would be received might be quite different.

An answer for the second question seems useful for any "ad copy" we might make for e.g. a community promotion ad on Math StackExchange.

Here are currently the points I see, roughly in the order I think people would find compelling, particularly for those asking questions.

  • It's not StackExchange. Many people have a negative perception of StackExchange whether from experience or reputation.
  • It's supported by a non-profit organization. Having a viable, non-profit alternative to StackExchange is a compelling story to me.
  • It's more responsive to change. I mostly intended this at the level of adding features, but it also applies to the social aspects of the community due to its size and youth.
  • For some topics, you are more likely to get an answer here than Math StackExchange. For example, I can single-handedly guarantee this for type theory questions. Are there other topics for which this is true?
  • It's based on open-source software.

What other points could be added? What features could we add to Math Codidact to improve its value proposition relative to Math StackExchange?

What is a short sentence and/or blurb that "sells" Math Codidact and incorporates some of the points above?

I'd be interested hearing how people who came here heard about Math Codidact and why the posted here instead of Math StackExchange, particularly people who were NOT part of the StackExchange diaspora from last year.

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General comments (2 comments)
General comments
Monica Cellio‭ wrote almost 4 years ago

The platform also gives you some options not available on SE -- categories, article post types, wiki posts (new), lots of configuration options. Math isn't currently using these features and I don't know what makes sense for this community, but feel free to look around the network and start meta threads if that inspires ideas. EE has a Papers category, a few communities have articles of various types (resources, recipes, a blog), Code Golf has a sandbox, Software Dev has code reviews.

celtschk‭ wrote almost 4 years ago · edited almost 4 years ago

I think the first thing that has to be addressed is the bad interaction between MarkDown and MathJax on this site (the backslash problem). See here for details. I have some ideas on how this might be addressed on an algorithmic level, but unfortunately I have zero knowledge of Ruby, and when I browsed the source code on Github, I wasn't even able to figure out where MarkDown rendering was done (or even where post handling in general was done).