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Your phrasing makes it seem like the people answering have the job of "keep up with the rate of incoming of questions." So, if there are a lot of incoming quest

Your phrasing makes it seem like the people answering have the job of "keep up with the rate of incoming of questions." So, if there are a lot of incoming questions, they must reduce quality of feedback, since they are spread thin. Personally, when I answer a question it's because I want to, and feel I can be helpful. I have no skin in the game with regard to the site's overall ability to keep up with incoming questions. So, I take as long as I need, and do as much hand-holding as I feel is appropriate, not governed by external pressure. But I suppose there are professional moderators and such who really do have that external pressure, and thus have incentive to give curt feedback, or even to drive people away — thus reducing that pressure, making their lives easier. As a SO user from the early days, I do miss that feeling of mostly interacting with people doing it "for the love of it," rather than governed by efficiency.

shagie 3y ago
The ability for you to find a good question to answer is in part based on the work that other people do in down voting and closing questions. If you go to the triage queue - those are questions that are being prevented from showing up. If you go through "newest questions" there are often questions there that can't be reasonably answered without more work to figure out what the problem is. As I write this, there's a question https://stackoverflow.com/questions/76123197/is-it-possible-to-achieve-color-gradient-overlay-like-resso-app https://stackoverflow.com/questions/76123197/is-it-possible-... which is apparently a Java and Kotlin question > Is it possible to achieve Color gradient overlay like Resso app > It's really going to be interesting (big inline image) And... is that worth clicking answering in that form? How much time should you spend trying to make it a better question that someone else can answer? Or just down vote it and move on? Would you ask "how does this related to Java?" or "could you explain a bit more about what you've done so far and what problems you've encountered?" - and is that considered rude? The corresponding part of it is that people who have their question down voted without any information may find it rude. Or if someone suggests a change to the question... they may find that rude too. And some people find not getting a response at all to their question on a site that is billed as the place to get your questions answered rather frustrating. In order to make it easier for people who want to answer questions to find questions to answer a lot of questions don't show up. Poke at the triage review queue and consider the additional difficulty of finding a question to answer if those were also present in browsing. Note also that there are no professional moderators on SO. Everyone there is a volunteer... and thus they're burning out a bit too. While it may be easy to say "well, then they should take a break" - they do... and more questions of questionable quality show up in the feed. The best way to find good questions to answer is to look at recently asked the up voted questions (and avoid the down voted ones)... but down voting is considered to be rude. And if you want to help a question by asking a clarifying comment in there for this one that might be interesting... and that one... and that one... and do it for ten questions or so you've spent half an hour... and those comments trying to get some information about how you should answer are seen as rude. How much time do you want to spend asking clarifying questions in comments? Ultimately, SO is suffering from issues of scale without the corresponding tooling to enable people who are trying to answer to find interesting questions more easily. That's not an issue on smaller sites where you can read all of a day's questions over lunch.
- interroboink 3y ago
  > Ultimately, SO is suffering from issues of scale without the corresponding tooling to enable people who are trying to answer to find interesting questions more easily. Yes, that seems like a reasonable take. I suppose in my imagined ideal reality, people simply don't answer questions that are not asked well, or that don't interest them for any other reason, rather than actively body-slamming those questions. If this results in a glut of low-effort questions, then the site suffers. As a result, the site has an incentive to provide better tools. Right now, volunteers heroically stem the flood of poor questions by burning themselves out and sometimes getting bitter. The site still suffers, but in a different, more pernicious way. I looked at a triage queue question just now, and it was indeed poorly-written. I selected "Needs author edit", and clicked "Submit". Then, I got a pop-up asking "Why should this question be closed?" and I was confused. I don't want to close the question. I don't want to send that signal to the question writer. I want them to improve their question, that's all. I canceled the interaction. So again: agreed about bad tools. Personally, I choose not to use them.
  - shagie 3y ago
    The difficulty that SO has had trouble with is the "then the site suffers." How do you measure that? They want to run some A/B test that allows the corresponding measurement to show that things are better with a change. However, it feels that the only way that they've really accepted measuring it from a sales / marketing view (as that's what brings in the revenue) is the "engagement" metric. People signing up, asking questions, and accessing the site. Better moderation tools which would result in fewer but higher quality questions on the site shows up in that measurement of engagement as "worse". --- The part that you encountered is that "if the question isn't answerable, it should be closed." That in turn feeds other parts of the system. Users are more likely to update their questions if they are closed rather than if they're left open. Other people who answer questions (but rarely engage in fixing up questions) are less likely to click on questions that are closed. People that routinely ask poor questions that get closed start getting automated warnings about their question quality before they ask a question and end up with a question ban if that behavior persists. A closed question without answers or edits to improve it get automatically deleted after 30 days. Without going in and commenting on a question and then spending time with the person ("why don't you just answer it if you think you know the answer rather than commenting? If you don't like it just don't read it." is something I've seen many times) closing the question is a way to suggest improvements to the question without exposing yourself to users who not infrequently then pursue a... negative engagement with the person trying to help them ask a better question. I can see about digging more (it's been a long time since I went looking for it) but somewhere on one of the meta sites was a post about the different interactions and the "engagement" metric for new users asking a first question. The best way to not have them ask a second question is to completely ignore their question - no votes, no comments, no answers. Closing a question results in more people asking a second question that is positively received than having no interaction. (late edit - did the digging - https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/216683/what-happens-to-new-users https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/216683/what-happens... )

shagie 3y ago

The ability for you to find a good question to answer is in part based on the work that other people do in down voting and closing questions. If you go to the triage queue - those are questions that are being prevented from showing up. If you go through "newest questions" there are often questions there that can't be reasonably answered without more work to figure out what the problem is. As I write this, there's a question https://stackoverflow.com/questions/76123197/is-it-possible-to-achieve-color-gradient-overlay-like-resso-app https://stackoverflow.com/questions/76123197/is-it-possible-... which is apparently a Java and Kotlin question > Is it possible to achieve Color gradient overlay like Resso app > It's really going to be interesting (big inline image) And... is that worth clicking answering in that form? How much time should you spend trying to make it a better question that someone else can answer? Or just down vote it and move on? Would you ask "how does this related to Java?" or "could you explain a bit more about what you've done so far and what problems you've encountered?" - and is that considered rude? The corresponding part of it is that people who have their question down voted without any information may find it rude. Or if someone suggests a change to the question... they may find that rude too. And some people find not getting a response at all to their question on a site that is billed as the place to get your questions answered rather frustrating. In order to make it easier for people who want to answer questions to find questions to answer a lot of questions don't show up. Poke at the triage review queue and consider the additional difficulty of finding a question to answer if those were also present in browsing. Note also that there are no professional moderators on SO. Everyone there is a volunteer... and thus they're burning out a bit too. While it may be easy to say "well, then they should take a break" - they do... and more questions of questionable quality show up in the feed. The best way to find good questions to answer is to look at recently asked the up voted questions (and avoid the down voted ones)... but down voting is considered to be rude. And if you want to help a question by asking a clarifying comment in there for this one that might be interesting... and that one... and that one... and do it for ten questions or so you've spent half an hour... and those comments trying to get some information about how you should answer are seen as rude. How much time do you want to spend asking clarifying questions in comments? Ultimately, SO is suffering from issues of scale without the corresponding tooling to enable people who are trying to answer to find interesting questions more easily. That's not an issue on smaller sites where you can read all of a day's questions over lunch.

interroboink 3y ago
> Ultimately, SO is suffering from issues of scale without the corresponding tooling to enable people who are trying to answer to find interesting questions more easily. Yes, that seems like a reasonable take. I suppose in my imagined ideal reality, people simply don't answer questions that are not asked well, or that don't interest them for any other reason, rather than actively body-slamming those questions. If this results in a glut of low-effort questions, then the site suffers. As a result, the site has an incentive to provide better tools. Right now, volunteers heroically stem the flood of poor questions by burning themselves out and sometimes getting bitter. The site still suffers, but in a different, more pernicious way. I looked at a triage queue question just now, and it was indeed poorly-written. I selected "Needs author edit", and clicked "Submit". Then, I got a pop-up asking "Why should this question be closed?" and I was confused. I don't want to close the question. I don't want to send that signal to the question writer. I want them to improve their question, that's all. I canceled the interaction. So again: agreed about bad tools. Personally, I choose not to use them.
- shagie 3y ago
  The difficulty that SO has had trouble with is the "then the site suffers." How do you measure that? They want to run some A/B test that allows the corresponding measurement to show that things are better with a change. However, it feels that the only way that they've really accepted measuring it from a sales / marketing view (as that's what brings in the revenue) is the "engagement" metric. People signing up, asking questions, and accessing the site. Better moderation tools which would result in fewer but higher quality questions on the site shows up in that measurement of engagement as "worse". --- The part that you encountered is that "if the question isn't answerable, it should be closed." That in turn feeds other parts of the system. Users are more likely to update their questions if they are closed rather than if they're left open. Other people who answer questions (but rarely engage in fixing up questions) are less likely to click on questions that are closed. People that routinely ask poor questions that get closed start getting automated warnings about their question quality before they ask a question and end up with a question ban if that behavior persists. A closed question without answers or edits to improve it get automatically deleted after 30 days. Without going in and commenting on a question and then spending time with the person ("why don't you just answer it if you think you know the answer rather than commenting? If you don't like it just don't read it." is something I've seen many times) closing the question is a way to suggest improvements to the question without exposing yourself to users who not infrequently then pursue a... negative engagement with the person trying to help them ask a better question. I can see about digging more (it's been a long time since I went looking for it) but somewhere on one of the meta sites was a post about the different interactions and the "engagement" metric for new users asking a first question. The best way to not have them ask a second question is to completely ignore their question - no votes, no comments, no answers. Closing a question results in more people asking a second question that is positively received than having no interaction. (late edit - did the digging - https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/216683/what-happens-to-new-users https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/216683/what-happens... )