Codidact – A community-run, open-source Q&A platform | Hacker News Reader

Codidact – A community-run, open-source Q&A platform

codidact.com

52 pointsleonry18 comments

This looks pretty awesome. Cool to see a new open source Ruby-based platform enter the scene (along with Forem, Discourse, Mastodon, and so many others).

It'll be interesting to see how their open proposal process for creating new communities in the main network scales over time. I like the fact many of the initial communities here aren't just in the super-nerd tech territory.

I've seen the language section of this platform before and I'm under no illusion that their etymology section would be more welcoming than other prominent ones about speculation like, for example, is codidact a pun on addict?

Although this could be a useful usecase for me personally, I do in any other event not see what value they are trying to add over the big SE

If you are familiar with the rather uncommon word didact (I am), then co-didact is a meaningful and clever name for the site.

I take codidact as a portmanteau of "collaborative" and "didactic".

I was thinking the co was like coworkers.

That's correct. "Co" + "didact", learning together. (I am one of the founders, though not the person who suggested this name.)

Probably a pun on autodidact. I first read it as "co did act", but once I saw the tag line it clicked.

Regarding SE, if you mean StackExchange, Codidact is open source, so you can host your own.

> I do in any other event not see what value they are trying to add over the big SE

They started as a breakaway group; the project was created as a result of severe user dissatisfaction with some of Stack Exchange's actions.

The FAQ also has this entry:

> We differ from Stack Exchange in several core ways, of which perhaps the most significant is that Stack Exchange is a for-profit company while Codidact is currently run by volunteers and incorporated as a UK Community Interest Company (CIC). This means that instead of focusing on profit, we can focus entirely on the needs of our communities. You can read more in [The Codidact Vision][0].

[0]:https://meta.codidact.com/articles/276296

There is value in non-profit for the users. Think of Facebook and how their business-model benefits from getting users engaged by getting enraged, to keep them reading more "shocking stuff".

SE is a for-profit company and no doubt that is a reason behind their gamified approach of making users more or less compete on who gets the most points, which can lead to an adversarial atmosphere. A non-profit's main priority will be getting users to collaborate, not compete.

this looks very similar to question2answers(https://www.question2answer.org/), but with a more updated UI. q2a has a lot of features and has been around for a long time, and since it is PHP it is simple to setup.

Codidact hosts a network of communities, so if you've got a group of people who are enthusiastic about a topic, you can propose it instead of having to host it yourself. Of course, you can also download the code and set up your own, same as with Q2A or Discourse or others, if you prefer to host.

There are differences among all of these platforms (and Stack Exchange) in terms of specific features. I'm not as familiar with Q2A as I am with SE, so it's hard for me to do a detailed comparison, but some things that I think improve Codidact include: more post types (like articles), privileges based on related activity rather than overall points (for example, a pattern of good edit suggestions leads to being able to edit directly), categories, and lots of customization options for communities.

Another service/community is referred on the main site. It is called TopAnswers (https://topanswers.xyz/).

Discourse (although written in Ruby), is very good at Q&As IMHO

I absolutely detest Discourse

(1) It's super bloated. It requires a 10x the resources of an old school PHP forum. I'm not saying an old school PHP forum is better. Only that gees! Why do I need to pay 1GIG dedicated machine when a shared PHP host was working for ~15yrs

(2) All the damn gamification that's so effing annoying. I've got enough notifications in my life. I don't need "You posted your first message", "You posted your first reply", "You edited your first message". The only notifications I want are those that are actually useful for me "You got a reply"

(3) Poor design for engagement. I have no data on this but I've never seen a discourse forum be as active as older non-discourse forums. Something about the way it's designed IMO discourages long lived lively topics. Where is the NeoGAF of discourse? Where is the Tigsource of discourse?

I've seen way too many forums die in the switch from an old school forum to Discourse. Makes me sad.

I've been using this for a while. The major problem is lack of users -- everything else is pretty well set up.

Hahaha, this is great. Imagine you have this idea, you execute on it and you come up with a clever name. Only some of your audience has never heard of the word didact and thinks it's a pun on addict. From codeine addict I guess? In reality it's quite a fitting name, it means to learn together.

That name tho.

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