Comment by shagie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shagie | Hacker News Reader

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There are far too many new questions each day for the people who are capable of mentoring an individual into asking a good question for Stack Overflow to scale.

Lets say that it takes 15 minutes in chat to help a person (who wants to be helped in asking a good question rather than getting the answer now).

Next, lets apply Sturgeon's law to Stack Overflow. There are 8000 questions a day and 90% of them are crap. Thats 7200 questions that need work. This is 1,800 hours of mentoring per day.

The close (and down vote) is such a minimal amount of work that it allows the group within the site that is striving for a particular vision of quality that it allows them to do the most they can. Furthermore, it is not infrequent that a person who provides assistant for trying to unravel a question from getting a "why can't you just help me now?" with assorted vulgarity interspersed.

On smaller sites, with a greatly reduced amount of questions per day the group capable of mentoring as well as moderating is able to spend the 15 minutes of time without significantly impacting the time taken to moderate and curate the rest of the questions.

With 8000 questions per day, its really hard to look at all of them. As I write this, there are only 16 people who have exhausted their close reviews for the day ( https://stackoverflow.com/review/close/stats - only 16 have 40 reviews). That doesn't show the people who are doing new questions, but it does give an idea of how shallow the bench of people who are spending time to moderate the site actually is.

Getting more people to help out would be great, but most people aren't doing anything to help.

There are also people who believe that up voting a newbie question and saying "welcome to the site" in the comments without improving the question is helpful.

The first post review and triage queues are intended for providing this help. You can see that this doesn't always work well ( https://stackoverflow.com/review/first-posts/19570266 or https://stackoverflow.com/review/first-posts/19569647 - note the not even trying to fix the grammar of the question or asking for the necessary information or providing help on how to improve the question, just no action needed)

The thing is, bad questions don't really matter in the grand scheme of things. If a question is bad, and it gets no answers, it will just languish. You don't need to do anything about it. Maybe have an auto-close after a week of inactivity or something. It probably doesn't really matter, as long as you actually sort questions by things like score, answer score, etc, so the bad questions just go down to the ends of all of the lists on pages no one ever browses to. Bits are cheap, a few bad questions being present on the site and not closed doesn't really hurt.

I don't expect every bad question will lead to a valuable mentorship opportunity. I've certainly encountered my fair share of those that weren't worth spending my time on.

Bad answers are more problematic; there's good reason to be vigilent about those.

And of course spam, obvious homework, and just completely incomprehensible questions should be closed instantly.

What I see is questions which are not phrased well but you can actually work out what they're asking being closed. So by the time I've written up an answer, the question is closed, and my answer is wasted. I can copy my answer elsewhere, and vote to re-open, maybe after editing the question to make it more clear, and it might get re-opened, but then I have to spend a lot more time and attention waiting for that. By closing out questions too aggressively, not only are people putting off newcomers, but also wasting the time of those answering questions.

> The first post review and triage queues are intended for providing this help. You can see that this doesn't always work well ( https://stackoverflow.com/review/first-posts/19570266 or https://stackoverflow.com/review/first-posts/19569647 - note the not even trying to fix the grammar of the question or asking for the necessary information or providing help on how to improve the question, just no action needed)

Yeah, one of the things that really frustrates me about the review process is that they just incentivize taking some quick and easy action, not actually doing the right thing.

Effective moderation is not easy, and a very different skill set than answering technical questions, but the rep needed to perform many of these mod duties is just given to those who accrue enough rep.

There is a system known as the Roomba ( https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/92006 ) that will automatically delete questions. A question has a negative score, and has no answers will be deleted in 30 days. A question that is at 0 or less, has no answers, has a low view count, and has at most 1 comment will be deleted after a year. A question that is closed, negatively scored, no accepted answer, and no answers with a positive score will be deleted in 9 days.

So that does exist, but it takes a LONG time for it to get cleaned up in some cases. And if people jump in with a "this might answer your question, hope it helps", it will likely never get deleted.

Its not that these questions hurt the site - bits are cheap. Its that they hurt the search results and the perception of the site. Admittedly a single reddit data point: https://www.reddit.com/r/stackoverflow/comments/8d15h4/10000...

> The toxicity is in all the unanswered questions.

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> What I see is questions which are not phrased well but you can actually work out what they're asking being closed.

Consider fixing the question with an edit before writing the answer so that it won't be closed when you get around to writing an answer. This way its a good question from an earlier point in the life of the question. Furthermore, it makes it easier for other people to provide answers too. Leaving the question in a poor state with an answer makes it harder for the google only user to find the question and understand what is being asked.

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Doing the right thing in review takes time. Many of the first post or triage reviews are done by people who haven't... fully bought into the philosophy of answers for people who haven't asked the question yet. They look ok to the standards of a 500 rep user who doesn't see what Jeff and Joel were trying for with Stack Overflow ( https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges/access-review-queu... ).

There's no instruction for people for how to help in the review queues. As such, everyone is doing their own thing with their own "this is the quality that I'd write at, it looks ok." The only way to correct this currently is with review bans... and that has its own problems with negativity and the perception of Stack Overflow as elitist.

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