We’d equally be entirely open to the answer being "actually, our real challenge is Y, and that's what we'd rather focus on"

I'll be taking you up on that :p

(This isn't reflective of what the entire code golf community thinks, but I feel like it might be a fair representation of what might be happening)

Over on Code Golf and Coding Challenges, we've got a pretty good sense of policy - the whole premise of the site kind of relies on having policy to keep things (relatively) fair and to prevent endless rules laywering. For example, we have a list of loopholes that are banned, a set of allowed methods of recieving input and giving output, and of course our requirement that questions have an objective winning criteria. And that does not even mention the many "case law" type policies (examples: 1, 2, 3, 4). In fact, we even make policy to override older policy (example: old policy, new policy).

If anything, policy is exactly the opposite of what our site should be focusing on; historically, there's been attempts at trying to slow down policy, and points raised that what's more important is giving new (and existing) users a helpful "welcome" style resource. Additionally, when we've tried to update some of our own policy of our own volition, we ended up deciding not to! Needless to say, I think our site has a pretty good handle on scope, culture, policy, etc, and that focusing on updating policy and culture is not a solution for our own declining activity.

Our real challenge is that a lot of people have moved on from Code Golf without new people to replace them. There was a major activity spike around 2021 that gradually fizzled out. Admittedly, some of the activity decline was partly our own fault, but I believe that the greater cause of decline is that there's not enough people visiting the rest of the network to "trickle down" into our site.

Now, it isn't lost on me that StackOverflow launched Challenges, and that Code Golf (at least on paper) would have been a "better" candidate for the company to focus upon. While it is true that Challenges may be keeping people from Code Golf, I (still) don't think that blindly directing users to our site would have been beneficial - not when there are so many rules and site-specific norms to learn and follow, and not when our site culture requires more than just the "come and have a fun time with popularity contest" vibes of Challenges. In fact, a concern I've always had about Challenges is that its style of questions would not be well recieved on Code Golf. Treating Code Golf as the main site for programming puzzles without careful community input, as well as consideration of our existing policies, is probably not the best idea.

Essentially, in my personal opinion, we'd rather focus on getting more people on the site in a way that does not lead to our extensive catalogue of policy making the experience worse for both new and existing users. I don't have an idea of what that looks like at this stage, but hey, could be worth "reaching out to [our] community through [our] Meta site" :p. (Coming by and saying hi in our chatroom (like y'all previously have) is also something that could be good.)

We’d equally be entirely open to the answer being "actually, our real challenge is Y, and that's what we'd rather focus on"

I'll be taking you up on that :p

(This isn't reflective of what the entire code golf community thinks, but I feel like it might be a fair representation of what might be happening)

Over on Code Golf and Coding Challenges, we've got a pretty good sense of policy - the whole premise of the site kind of relies on having policy to keep things (relatively) fair and to prevent endless rules lawyering. For example, we have a list of loopholes that are banned, a set of allowed methods of receiving input and giving output, and of course our requirement that questions have an objective winning criteria. And that does not even mention the many "case law" type policies (examples: 1, 2, 3, 4). In fact, we even make policy to override older policy (example: old policy, new policy).

If anything, policy is exactly the opposite of what our site should be focusing on; historically, there's been attempts at trying to slow down policy, and points raised that what's more important is giving new (and existing) users a helpful "welcome" style resource. Additionally, when we've tried to update some of our own policy of our own volition, we ended up deciding not to! Needless to say, I think our site has a pretty good handle on scope, culture, policy, etc, and that focusing on updating policy and culture is not a solution for our own declining activity.

Our real challenge is that a lot of people have moved on from Code Golf without new people to replace them. There was a major activity spike around 2021 that gradually fizzled out. Admittedly, some of the activity decline was partly our own fault, but I believe that the greater cause of decline is that there's not enough people visiting the rest of the network to "trickle down" into our site.

Now, it isn't lost on me that Stack Overflow launched Challenges, and that Code Golf (at least on paper) would have been a "better" candidate for the company to focus upon. While it is true that Challenges may be keeping people from Code Golf, I (still) don't think that blindly directing users to our site would have been beneficial - not when there are so many rules and site-specific norms to learn and follow, and not when our site culture requires more than just the "come and have a fun time with popularity contest" vibes of Challenges. In fact, a concern I've always had about Challenges is that its style of questions would not be well recieved on Code Golf. Treating Code Golf as the main site for programming puzzles without careful community input, as well as consideration of our existing policies, is probably not the best idea.

Essentially, in my personal opinion, we'd rather focus on getting more people on the site in a way that does not lead to our extensive catalogue of policy making the experience worse for both new and existing users. I don't have an idea of what that looks like at this stage, but hey, could be worth "reaching out to [our] community through [our] Meta site" :p. (Coming by and saying hi in our chatroom (like y'all previously have) is also something that could be good.)

We’d equally be entirely open to the answer being "actually, our real challenge is Y, and that's what we'd rather focus on"

I'll be taking you up on that :p

(This isn't reflective of what the entire code golf community thinks, but I feel like it might be a fair representation of what might be happening)

Over on Code Golf and Coding Challenges, we've got a pretty good sense of policy - the whole premise of the site kind of relies on having policy to keep things (relatively) fair and to prevent endless rules laywering. For example, we have a list of loopholes that are banned, a set of allowed methods of recieving input and giving output, and of course our requirement that questions have an objective winning criteria. And that does not even mention the many "case law" type policies (examples: 1, 2, 3, 4). In fact, we even make policy to override older policy (example: old policy, new policy).

If anything, policy is exactly the opposite of what our site should be focusing on; historically, there's been attempts at trying to slow down policy, and points raised that what's more important is giving new (and existing) users a helpful "welcome" style resource. Needless to say, I think our site has a pretty good handle on scope, culture, policy, etc.

Our real challenge is that a lot of people have moved on from Code Golf without new people to replace them. There was a major activity spike around 2021 that gradually fizzled out. Admittedly, some of the activity decline was partly our own fault, but I believe that the greater cause of decline is that there's not enough people visiting the rest of the network to "trickle down" into our site.

Now, it isn't lost on me that StackOverflow launched Challenges, and that Code Golf (at least on paper) would have been a "better" candidate for the company to focus upon. While it is true that Challenges may be keeping people from Code Golf, I (still) don't think that blindly directing users to our site would have been beneficial - not when there are so many rules and site-specific norms to learn and follow, and not when our site culture requires more than just the "come and have a fun time with popularity contest" vibes of Challenges. In fact, a concern I've always had about Challenges is that its style of questions would not be well recieved on Code Golf. Treating Code Golf as the main site for programming puzzles without careful community input, as well as consideration of our existing policies, is probably not the best idea.

Essentially, in my personal opinion, we'd rather focus on getting more people on the site in a way that does not lead to our extensive catalogue of policy making the experience worse for both new and existing users. I don't have an idea of what that looks like at this stage, but hey, could be worth "reaching out to [our] community through [our] Meta site" :p. (Coming by and saying hi in our chatroom (like y'all previously have) is also something that could be good.)

We’d equally be entirely open to the answer being "actually, our real challenge is Y, and that's what we'd rather focus on"

I'll be taking you up on that :p

(This isn't reflective of what the entire code golf community thinks, but I feel like it might be a fair representation of what might be happening)

Over on Code Golf and Coding Challenges, we've got a pretty good sense of policy - the whole premise of the site kind of relies on having policy to keep things (relatively) fair and to prevent endless rules laywering. For example, we have a list of loopholes that are banned, a set of allowed methods of recieving input and giving output, and of course our requirement that questions have an objective winning criteria. And that does not even mention the many "case law" type policies (examples: 1, 2, 3, 4). In fact, we even make policy to override older policy (example: old policy, new policy).

If anything, policy is exactly the opposite of what our site should be focusing on; historically, there's been attempts at trying to slow down policy, and points raised that what's more important is giving new (and existing) users a helpful "welcome" style resource. Additionally, when we've tried to update some of our own policy of our own volition, we ended up deciding not to! Needless to say, I think our site has a pretty good handle on scope, culture, policy, etc, and that focusing on updating policy and culture is not a solution for our own declining activity.

Our real challenge is that a lot of people have moved on from Code Golf without new people to replace them. There was a major activity spike around 2021 that gradually fizzled out. Admittedly, some of the activity decline was partly our own fault, but I believe that the greater cause of decline is that there's not enough people visiting the rest of the network to "trickle down" into our site.

Now, it isn't lost on me that StackOverflow launched Challenges, and that Code Golf (at least on paper) would have been a "better" candidate for the company to focus upon. While it is true that Challenges may be keeping people from Code Golf, I (still) don't think that blindly directing users to our site would have been beneficial - not when there are so many rules and site-specific norms to learn and follow, and not when our site culture requires more than just the "come and have a fun time with popularity contest" vibes of Challenges. In fact, a concern I've always had about Challenges is that its style of questions would not be well recieved on Code Golf. Treating Code Golf as the main site for programming puzzles without careful community input, as well as consideration of our existing policies, is probably not the best idea.

Essentially, in my personal opinion, we'd rather focus on getting more people on the site in a way that does not lead to our extensive catalogue of policy making the experience worse for both new and existing users. I don't have an idea of what that looks like at this stage, but hey, could be worth "reaching out to [our] community through [our] Meta site" :p. (Coming by and saying hi in our chatroom (like y'all previously have) is also something that could be good.)