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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.

Post History

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Meta Why can we not vote for community proposals?

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. ...

posted 3mo ago by trichoplax‭

Answer
#1: Initial revision by user avatar trichoplax‭ · 2024-09-03T21:56:42Z (3 months ago)
> What was the rationale for removing it?

This wasn't my decision so I'll answer the <span class="badge is-tag is-filled">discussion</span> side rather than the <span class="badge is-tag is-filled">support</span> 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?](https://proposals.codidact.com/posts/292423) 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.