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I understand that Jon Skeet was just doing a quick "brain dump" of his thoughts on Stackoverflow triggered by Rob Conery's tweet but his comments about "low qua
by jasode 9y ago
I understand that Jon Skeet was just doing a quick "brain dump" of his thoughts on Stackoverflow triggered by Rob Conery's tweet but his comments about "low quality" questions don't seem to actually address what Rob was complaining about. (Because Rob wasn't the one asking the "low quality" questions.)
I wish I could see the actual comments from others that irritated Rob but it seems like I can't find his SO profile. (Did Rob Conery delete his SO profile?[1])
Even if Jon Skeet's essay doesn't apply to RC, I think his assessment of "low quality" questions needs more dissection and it is missing a key psychology. He writes:
>This is a low-quality question, in my view. (I’ll talk more about that later.)
>[...]
>– but I think it’s important to accept that there are such things as low-quality questions,
Yes, Jon is correct that low-quality questions are a real problem but he's missing why they persist... the "askers" don't know enough to run their question through a self-diagnostic test to determine they are asking a low quality question. To beginners, it's a "high quality" question by one criteria: "I don't know the answer."
If they knew the answer -- they wouldn't be asking it! <-- That is the psychology that's very difficult to solve.
The SO experts want interesting and high quality questions to answer. If no questions were filtered out (closed), there would be too much crap to wade through and the site becomes a waste of their volunteer time. On the other hand, the beginners want their questions answered. Their questions being closed is a "toxic" environment and "unwelcoming."
I've given a lot of thought about what the optimal Q&A website would look like and I've determined you always have an unresolved tension between naive beginners and experts.
I would challenge anybody to come up with a Q&A system that filters questions in a way that the majority of askers who got their questions closed/deleted will agree that it was "fair".
To get a usable site, you have to favor the answerers over the askers because the experts are the ones contributing the valuable content.
[1] https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:YFH2o5BLgYwJ:https://stackoverflow.com/users/1151/rob-conery+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:YFH2o5...
- codinghorror 9y ago> I wish I could see the actual comments from others that irritated Rob but it seems like I can't find his SO profile. (Did Rob Conery delete his SO profile?[1]) You and me both. Rob emailed me about this and I asked him the same thing. Criticism without actual examples is not actionable. Also one person’s pot-ah-to is often another person’s poh-tah-to if you know what I mean.
- codinghorror 9y agoAlso note that the pattern of splitting into experts and newbies is common in the SE engine, look at English vs. English Learners and Math vs. Mathoverflow. You are correct.
- shagie 9y agoI think its more granular than experts and beginners where the friction is. There's friction with different visions of the site and what it should be. Realizing that this is very stereotyped... https://the-whiteboard.slack.com/files/U0VD3EZ97/F5RTXVA5V/The_social_groups_of_StackOverflow https://the-whiteboard.slack.com/files/U0VD3EZ97/F5RTXVA5V/T... (eghads thats big in HN - replaced with link above)