Welcome to the staging ground for new communities! Each proposal has a description in the "Descriptions" category and a body of questions and answers in "Incubator Q&A". You can ask questions (and get answers, we hope!) right away, and start new proposals.
Are you here to participate in a specific proposal? Click on the proposal tag (with the dark outline) to see only posts about that proposal and not all of the others that are in progress. Tags are at the bottom of each post.
Why can we not vote for community proposals?
Codidact is rather strongly centered around the idea of voting on content. Personally, I am open to revisit the manner in which we rank and asses content on the network, but for the time being, that is part of the core of Codidact. Then why can we not vote for proposed communities?
The now defunct and superseded proposals category on Meta had voting on the proposals, but there must have been a conscious decision not to carry it over here. What was the rationale for removing it?
2 answers
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What was the rationale for removing it?
This wasn't my decision so I'll answer the discussion side rather than the support side. I'll leave the rationale to be answered by someone who knows.
I like the new approach
Instead of votes up and down, we now have reactions so people can indicate whether they will join the community as:
- Active user
- Casual browser
- Subject matter expert
This gives more fine grained data than upvotes, giving a better idea of how ready a proposed community is.
What's lost is the ability to downvote, but I see this as an improvement too. If someone thinks part of the scope or the wording should be changed, they can start a discussion on Meta, where there are upvotes and downvotes to reach consensus.
This leaves no reason to downvote other than objecting to the proposal existing. If anyone has an objection beyond just disinterest, there is a separate discussion of How do I object to a community proposal? Apart from that, the group of people who are interested in a proposed community shouldn't have to contend with downvotes from people who are not interested.
Real questions and answers
More importantly than the small change from votes to reactions, the bigger reason I much prefer the new Proposals community is that it has real questions and answers. This gives a much better idea of whether a group is ready for their own Codidact community, because you can see it happening in real time and see activity go up and down. This is even more meaningful than the reactions (which is a list of people who said at some point in the past that they would join a community at some point in the future - better than just votes but less dynamic than questions and answers).
These questions and answers do have upvotes and downvotes. This allows steering the scope of the proposed community, rather than just downvoting the idea of the community existing at all.
The viability of a community doesn't depend on votes; it depends on activity. If a proposal attracts a body of Q&A (and other posts) from enough people, those are signs of a solid community. If a proposal has little activity and it's mostly from just a few people, it doesn't much matter if bunches of people said they were interested. Communities need people who ask and answer.
This was a problem with the old way of doing proposals -- several times we thought we had critical mass to sustain a community, and after launching it turned out we didn't. Launching prematurely harms the new community. We don't want to hold communities back but we want to do enough prep work here to help them succeed. And that prep is largely Q&A in the incubator, not votes on descriptions.
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