Post History

TL;DR: The problem is not with stuff on the platform that needs fixing. The problem is that the platform appears dead.

I'm still at the "old" platform, and a moderator on a tiny site (Arts & Crafts, and I see someone suggested created a similar community here, but there hasn't been strong enough interest or a champion). At the "old" platform, many small sites, including mine, are atrophying. The core users who keep the communities vital are drifting away and they aren't being replaced by new users who want to get involved. So the core user base keeps shrinking until the sites aren't much more than archives of old Q&A. It's depressing when you care about a site, but no matter what you do, it doesn't help.

So I came to check out Codidact. The platform is impressive, and fixes most of the big problems the "old" platform has. This platform seems like the kind of place where I would want to participate. There is always stuff to fine-tune, but the fundamentals are right. 

So good first impression. It's the second impression that's the problem. The problem isn't unanswered questions or bad question scores. A visitor doesn't get far enough to notice those. Inactivity is the issue, but that's the wrong term. The platform appears abandoned, like a ghost town. Communities that I expected should be thriving haven't had a post in over a year. Others have had only a few posts in the last year, with the most recent one months ago. Only a few communities have had something posted within the last week. And it all looks like it's progressively declining. There's almost nothing going on in Discord.

At least four members of the management team are back and active on the old platform, two as moderators. There's nothing wrong with that, especially if there isn't enough activity to keep people busy here. It looks like they are still taking care of business when needed here because their names appear on activity within the last few days. I tried to contact two and never got a response. 

The appearance is that people have given up on this project, but are keeping things clean and polished in case a guest happens to show up. As someone looking for a viable replacement for the "old" platform, this doesn't give the appearance of long-term viability. If you haven't given up on this project, you will never get the growth to turn it into a vital platform while people get this experience when visiting.

The very first step needs to be activity, no matter how you create it. Whoever is moderating or championing each community needs to do more than check it for activity. Find questions to ask, even if you borrow ideas from the "old" platform. And get them answered even in you need to rope in people from the "old" platform or improve on answer from there. Every open community needs several new posts per day on an ongoing basis, no matter how you get them populated. And if they're good, interesting Q&A that's even better. People will want to periodically check back.

If you aren't doing that, you're just waiting for the project to slowly die. No other action will matter.

But the next thing I noticed was the voting. Big vote counts on posts indicate that lots of people are reading and voting (activity and an audience). Big positive voting suggests that the posts are good and worth reading. Big negative voting indicates that the post sucks (why bother to read it?) or the voters are overly picky (so why would I want to post myself?). A lot of the posts I came across, especially within the last year, had little voting or substantial negative voting.

A number of questions with substantial negative votes were answered, and the answer had substantial positive votes. If the question is so bad, why did it get answered? And if could be so well answered, why did it merit such a negative score? Occasionally, that can happen, but not with the frequency I saw. The voting didn't seem to make sense, and there was a lot of it that didn't. 

That casts doubt on the usefulness of the voter opinions, and suggests that there's something artificial going on. It's something to look at. Do people need better training or explanations of voting criteria? The "old" site has voting guidance as hover instructions on the buttons, which is a good reminder. Is there voting abuse? Are people answering questions that really should be closed or deleted? Might you want the default display of questions to hide questions below some threshold score, with a different view that includes them?

Some of this odd voting could be due to the substantial number of troll posts. Multiply your resources by tapping into the troll and spam identification at the "old" platform. One of your trolls is periodically discussed in the Teachers Lounge, accessible to the team members serving as moderators there.