I'm new to math.codidact, and I'm relatively new (1 month) to MSE. I discovered this site after I found about how SE lacks respect to the community. Let me share my experience with this site.

Cons

1. This is kind of a cosmetic detail, but the very thing that stroked me when I visited the site for the first time was the numbers about both up and down votes in HUGE fonts in addition to the graphical visualisations of the counts. This is a complete overkill in my opinion. Usually, the difference between the up and down votes is most informative, at least in math where things get less opinionated than what I can imagine that could be the case on other sites. I find redundant having both up and down votes in big font besides having the graphical illustration. I understand that informing about up and down votes is more fair than only promoting the opinion of the majority, but having the two counts in tiny font next to the difference, or only in the graphical representation of them, would be more than enough IMHO. I feel that the way it is now the counts distract too much attention away from the questions themselves.

2. Until now (several days of lightly using the site), I have not come across a page explaining how the reputation works here. I only figured it out after asking / answering questions. I did chase the information on how reputation works here, all I'm saying is that the information did not chase me. In contrast, how reputation work was the very first thing I learned on MSE, and it was how I got addicted to that site despite I only needed an answer to one question. I suppose that the philosophy of codidact might be not to put so much emphasis on such a childish aspect of the site: "gaining points in the Q&A game". My perspective is that the reputation is a good method of encouraging contributions to the site until one (hopefully) learns that the value of the community goes beyond that and going reputation points fast is not always aligned with being a good team player.

3. Things are slower here as the community is small. I edited a question and it has not been approved yet after 3 days (may my badly written edit was rejected and the system was polite enough to stay silent, I don't know). So I did not expect fast response after asking a question, but I would at least like to know if anyone read it. That is why I think that view counts is crucial, especially because the community is so small. I don't think that no budget concerns can justify this. If recording usernames and IP addresses of visitors was too much memory demanding, than at least some primitive count is better than nothing. I suppose that math.codidact is not at the stage as MSE that people would actually try to write bots to increase their visitors counts :-).

4. One has to use [ctrl]-B instead of [cmd]-B one mac ... I have to get used to it.

5. I really miss the list of linked and related posts in the right panel. I think that seeing related questions really helps in learning a specific topic.

6. I think that I would eventually miss the option of offering a bounty on this site. In a small community like this one bounties are not as important as on MSE where one hardly gets noticed without putting some reputation on the table. Anyways, I find it to be a fun feature, I think it is a way of challenging each other. Is it missing here because it is regarded as a corrupting feature, or it just has not been implemented yet?

Pros

1. Despite the dynamics is slow here, I'm impressed about the high answer rate that questions get here. Even some relatively hard questions get answered. In particular, I think that @PeterTaylor, besides others, deserves a lot of credit for it.

2. Having choice over the copy-rights (although I have not understood what the difference is in practical terms), especially the transparency about it seems like a nice thing. I think that a post explaining the copy-right from a practical perspective with a number of examples could be useful. I would find it useful if there was a link to it instead of the text site default: CC BY-SA 4.0 · category default: CC BY-SA 4.0 · your default: CC BY-SA 4.0. Keep in mind that having a difficult, although irrelevant, choice makes many people frustrated and in an extreme case could make them never submit.

3. Apparently many issues of SE, even those reported 10 year ago, have never got resolved. In contrast, my impression is that this site is really well programmed despite it limited resources, and I feel that the general attitude is more caring about its users.

4. I like the option of displaying a random question on the Q&A site and it is something that I thought already before that MSE was missing.

5. No feature to accept answers. I find this quite meaningful. When I join MSE I answered dozens of low lever questions and despite for writing careful answers, almost non of them were accepted, perhaps because the OP have not logged in the system any more or just did not bother to give any kind of thank for the answer. I think that the feature to accept an answer makes sense only when the OP is responsible, and yet, in the long-term the question is meant to serve the community, not the OP, so the acceptance of each answer by the community is more relevant.

Promotion

1. I'd be in favor of word of mouth. My plan is to ask a fraction of my questions here whilst asking the rest on MSE, and whenever there are interconnections, I would link to posts across the sites. I hope that this could eventually attract more of people with shared interests to join codidact for ideological reasons as I did. (Please tell me in comments if you think it was a bad idea.)

2. I really like the idea of advertisement containing random post. However, I'm discourage from putting on my website as the chances are that it will display some really poorly formed question. Could it be set to display only unanswered questions with at least one up vote and no down vote, for example? (Ideally, make the choice of minimal up votes variable and the limit on down votes be 20% of up votes for example. That way I could choose to display only challenging question, for example.) Also, I wish the advertisement templates were a bit more aesthetic (it is a box with sharp corners with no margins on the sides and huge margin in the bottom). I think that an investment into a nice design of the advertisement templates would be worthwhile.

3. I imagine that implementing dark-mode before SE finally, if ever, does so, could attract a lot of users.

posted almost 2 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

2y ago

Pavel Kocourek‭

96 reputation 3 2 11 4