We outlined some of our broad goals (intended differentiators) here: https://meta.codidact.com/posts/276296, in case that helps. Codidact is a work in progress. The biggest non-technical difference from SO is how we treat communities and their members: communities have a lot more autonomy, and we treat people decently. No stockholders are driving anti-community business decisions.
On the technical level, while Q&A is central, we also have other post types and other models. That post I linked to is an article in a blog that's part of our Meta community. The Electrical Engineering community has papers, so people can present information outside of the Q&A structure. Code Golf has a sandbox where people can get feedback on draft challenges before posting them. Software Development has a Code Review category. Some of our communities have added their own customizations to the code, like Code Golf's leaderboard for challenge answers. We want to work together with our communities to build what best serves their needs.
We've done some things that look small but might have larger effects. For example, the asker of a question can't mark one answer as "accepted" like on SO, but anybody can mark an answer as "works for me" -- or "outdated", or other annotations that communities can define. Scoring takes controversy into account, because +10/-5 and +5/-0 are very different even if they're both "net 5". With threaded comments, it doesn't matter so much if two people have an extended conversation; it's not in the way. Abilities are granted based on activity and reputation is just a number -- or can be turned off entirely if that's what a community wants. We're trying to make as much stuff configurable as we can, because we can't possibly know what's going to be best for every single community and don't have the hubris to claim we do.
We have the usual bootstrapping problem of a new thing. Our communities are small and trying to grow. Because they're small, visitors don't see thousands of questions and high activity, so they don't participate either and wander away, making it harder to build activity. We would love to find people who want to work with us to build communities. We recognize that helping to build a community with us is going to be harder and slower than just asking your question on SO, but if everyone were happy with SO this thread wouldn't be here, so maybe we're an option to a few people reading this?
(I haven't posted much on Hacker News, so I hope I've read the room correctly and that this kind of comment is ok. If not, I apologize and would appreciate correction so I don't repeat mistakes. Thank you.)
On the technical level, while Q&A is central, we also have other post types and other models. That post I linked to is an article in a blog that's part of our Meta community. The Electrical Engineering community has papers, so people can present information outside of the Q&A structure. Code Golf has a sandbox where people can get feedback on draft challenges before posting them. Software Development has a Code Review category. Some of our communities have added their own customizations to the code, like Code Golf's leaderboard for challenge answers. We want to work together with our communities to build what best serves their needs.
We've done some things that look small but might have larger effects. For example, the asker of a question can't mark one answer as "accepted" like on SO, but anybody can mark an answer as "works for me" -- or "outdated", or other annotations that communities can define. Scoring takes controversy into account, because +10/-5 and +5/-0 are very different even if they're both "net 5". With threaded comments, it doesn't matter so much if two people have an extended conversation; it's not in the way. Abilities are granted based on activity and reputation is just a number -- or can be turned off entirely if that's what a community wants. We're trying to make as much stuff configurable as we can, because we can't possibly know what's going to be best for every single community and don't have the hubris to claim we do.
We have the usual bootstrapping problem of a new thing. Our communities are small and trying to grow. Because they're small, visitors don't see thousands of questions and high activity, so they don't participate either and wander away, making it harder to build activity. We would love to find people who want to work with us to build communities. We recognize that helping to build a community with us is going to be harder and slower than just asking your question on SO, but if everyone were happy with SO this thread wouldn't be here, so maybe we're an option to a few people reading this?
(I haven't posted much on Hacker News, so I hope I've read the room correctly and that this kind of comment is ok. If not, I apologize and would appreciate correction so I don't repeat mistakes. Thank you.)