Loosen quality standards without losing our power users Question

I created my account a few days ago; this is my very first post here. IRC I have participated in online forums as an active member since 2008. One of the things that I have learned is that each online community is different, and b/c of this, a new community member should spend some time learning the community ropes before posting... but I also learned that "you can't have the cake and eat it too".

If this platform has the same premises as SO, like not having an entry barrier for new users and is promoted as a platform where anyone can participate, then their sites will be deemed to suffer the same problems as SO and Stack Exchange sites.

You should find a way to keep posts from new users while the post quality is uncertain away from the eyes of the power users and only allow that posts that meet the quality standards go to them to be reviewed.

A quality standard is a baseline, the minimal requirements that a post should meet not to be deleted, like being on-topic, according to the site scope, complete, well written, among other things defined in the site proposal. "Power users" might be looking for questions beyond the baseline and for challenging questions that will help attract subject matter experts, new users able to answer questions the reviewer can't answer. "Power users" might be looking for answers beyond the baseline, answers that show originality and something interesting to the reviewer.

Stack Overflow (SO) has been dealing with the same problem for years. Recently they have been working on something called "staging ground". Posts from people who do not have experience posting questions pass through a special workflow instead of the regular one. In this special workflow, the tools to curate posts are designed to improve them before releasing them to the public. So, new users that never understand the site topic, scope and quality standards are saved from suffering "the effects of post deletion by power users". New users that can write a good enough post have a high chance of being better received by power users.

posted 11 months ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

11mo ago

Wicket‭

2 13 10

I've been a heavy user of SO/SE for quite some time on and off. I never really understood the issue other longtime users have with "bad questions".

It's one thing when it's something obvious like a question with no punctuation, plaintext or screenshot used for code instead of the Markdown syntax, incomprehensibly bad writing, etc. But scope is very hard for new users to get right, and having a hair trigger on the "off topic" close seems unnecessary to me. When I get tired of seeing a particular type of question, I simply try to figure out what tag it tends to have and start ignoring that tag.

Deleting and closing questions, IMO, is the nuclear option. Much like a nuke, it solves the problem but there is a lot of collateral damage to the environment. It's much better to convince the author to edit and improve their questions. This has several beneficial effects:

• Site gains a better quality question
• New user is convinced that they are qualified to participate in the site and the moderators are reasonable
• Site gains a "good" new user (one who takes feedback and improves their participation)

None of these happen if you close or delete the question (or even downvote, IMO) without the author understanding what's wrong and what they're supposed to do instead. Which, for new users, is almost all the time.

You really can't expect a new user of a Q&A site to do much work before asking their first question - they'll maybe take a minute or two to glance through what's there, and use their best guess about what's appropriate. After all, why should they bother learning a bunch of our rules when they don't even know yet that the site is worth participating in to begin with?

It sounds to me like a "put on slippers or sweep the world" problem. Why should we go to the effort of ensuring perfect compliance to complex rules from thousands of newbies, when instead we can just allow the users to filter out questions they don't want to see? We already have a great implementation of tags and ways to filter on tags. We can just use those for many things. For example:

• beginner-question for things that are answered by reading the respective "getting started" doc article (which you should have read anyway, tut tut). Or maybe even make an rtfm tag.
• open-ended tag for subjective questions without one right answer
• recommendation tag - obvious
• homework tag for questions that grind the gears of anti-homework folks, whether they are genuinely homework or not
• specific-troubleshooting for questions asking about a very specific situation (can't name this troubleshooting because that should be used for general troubleshooting questions like "how do I print local variables in my exception traces")
• design when OP is asking for a whole program instead of just one specific thing
• general-advice for questions where the scope is too broad and it would not be possible to address all details

The idea is to come up with a tag for common types of question that cause contention, and start tagging them. Then people on the negative side of that contention can simply hide the tag, without having to lobby the entire community to get their way (and instigating a political struggle with their opponents on the other side of the contention). Importantly, this insulates new users from the subtleties of site meta-politics.

So my moderation policy suggestion is:

• When you see a bad question, strongly prefer tags and comments (constructive criticism) to address it
• Only use deletion, closing and downvotes (subjective, I know) when the question absolutely, positively, must die. Examples:
  • Abandoned questions: OP omitted critical details, comments have not been responded to in ages, last login from OP is months ago
  • Illegal content
  • Spam (as in, commercial bots advertising a site, not just "newbie asked 5 questions in same day")

My suggestion to power users is:

• When you see a question that should be better, mentor the person on improving it
• When you see a type of question you hate, try hiding its tag
• Remember what it was like to be a newbie and not know the rules of this site
• If stupid newbie questions are really pissing you off, before you act on it, step away from the screen and go for a walk outside first

PS1: I know the above is a radical proposal and I have no illusions that it would be adopted as is. However, I decided to post it (and phrase it strongly) because I think it's a perspective worth considering in this discussion. It's one of the "poles" of the dilemma, so to speak.

PS2: I wrote this with a coding bias, but I feel that it is obvious how you would extend the idea to non-coding sections of the site.

posted 11 months ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

matthewsnyder‭

128 65 52