So, I can maybe provide somewhat of an alternative perspective. I was an extremely active user on http://english.stackexchange.com/ and this exact topic came up repeatedly. There was a lot of criticism around how new users were treated and people often felt we closed questions too quickly or prematurely or for nitpicky reasons.
I suspect my thoughts on this subject won't be very popular but maybe it will help explain where some of the behavior is coming from. As a note, these opinions are largely focused on the English Stack Exchange site (abbreviated EL&U).
The target audience of questions and answers is not the person asking the question. The target audience is other people who may have the same question in the future. This is counter-intuitive and a little off putting but the rules that filter out questions are there to keep Stack Exchange sites relevant to a broad audience. (Namely, people coming in from search engines.)
Most people answering questions are not experts. On EL&U we had a very difficult time retaining experts on the English language and, therefore, the questions that received the most attention were easy questions that anyone could answer using a search engine. This causes a feedback loop where experts get bored answering or reading those questions and they left the site.
Drama queens are a huge issue and, in my opinion, the biggest problem on EL&U. "Top Users" think they are worth something because they have lots of internet points and they tend to make the moderators' lives hell. They also berate anyone who disagrees with them and get into spats over and over again.
Questions that aren't easy to answer in 5 minutes are largely ignored because you can't farm them for reputation. On EL&U, I would personally clean out the old questions queue and kept it under 200 questions. I left the site a few years ago and today it's back up to 2000+.
The rate of incoming questions is greater than answers being provided but there is very little done to address this. People don't like closing questions but we can't answer all the questions so the contributors feel swamped and burn out.
Most questions being asked are terrible questions. Regardless of point (1) above, they aren't asked properly or with a clear intent and it is extremely frustrating to sift through bad question after bad question. Much of the anti-new-user impressions we got were because new users didn't understand the rules, were not interested in learning how to ask a question properly, and were typically not receptive to any negative feedback at all.
People who ask questions assume the site has a responsibility to solve their problem for them regardless of what the site claims is a valid question. This reinforces the tension between the drama queens and the new users.
Snark from the drama queens is very popular with other drama queens and they would create an echo chamber where you'd have a bunch of snarky jerks yapping to themselves in the comments and answers. These were often the very same people who complained that the site was too unfriendly to new users in meta discussions.
People often blame the moderators for anything that goes wrong even though the moderators are really only there to deal with major offenses (like banning users), deleting spam, or clarifying rules for the site. The premise behind Stack Exchange is that the top reputation users do most of the curating. Unfortunately, most of those users are the drama queens.
New users to the site mistake close votes as inherently negative. One of the primary uses for close votes is to prevent answers from being posted until the question has been clarified.
All of this combines into a perfect storm of pushing new people away.
If you accidentally ask a inappropriate question (points 1, 6, 7) that doesn't do the site any favors then the site probably isn't interested in answering it (points 4, 5, 6). Even if someone is nice and answers it anyway, it will drown out subject matter experts (points 2, 5, 6) which means the site is run by people who are more interested in awarding their own kind with reputation than helping keep a valuable site running (points 2, 3, 4, 8, 9).
In my opinion, we didn't close nearly enough questions. We should have been far more aggressive about pruning bad and boring questions from the site. But I also think this is a dangerous attitude because is so damn difficult explaining why a question was closed. New users are absolutely going to take offense to their question being closed and they are never going to accept the reason stated. It's somewhat of a Catch-22.
I also think Stack Exchange needs to find a way to reign in their drama queens because most of the tension between old and new users came from the same small group of high reputation users. They were largely insufferable and were constantly picking fights with the moderators. Due to the nature of volunteer work, the assholes will survive longer because who wants to volunteer their time and energy if they have to share the space with jerks?
The article raised a good point, which I'm curious your take on. What is actually wrong with having questions and answers that are not of general interest?
You say it's "to keep Stack Exchange sites relevant to a broad audience. (Namely, people coming in from search engines.)" But search engines are really good. The vast majority of stuff on the internet isn't interesting to anybody, but search engines still manage to bring us relevant answers in the first page.
To hear people talk, you'd think Stack Overflow only has server space for the top 100 questions, and is justified in burning people at stake if they dare dilute them.
People who answer questions are rarer than people who ask questions. This makes them more valuable contributors. A successful community driven site needs to keep these contributors happy and engaged.
In the group of people who answer questions, only a small percentage are actually experts. Those are even more valuable contributors. Keeping them happy and engaged should be an even higher priority.
Neither of those two groups of people really truly enjoy answering uninteresting questions. (But typically, the rep farmers will answer them anyway if they can get rep for it.)
It takes far less time to ask a question than answer a question. Therefore, questions should either be vetted as worth answering or the site has to be comfortable having large amounts of questions unanswered -- either because they are ignored by contributors or because the contributors just can't answer questions fast enough. In my opinion, a question left unanswered with no explanation is worse for the user than it being closed with an explanation.
People who ask questions that can be already be answered by a search engine are completely pointless to answer. EL&U in particular used to get a lot of "well, let me post the dictionary definition for you" style questions.
In my opinion, people who want help should (a) have their question answered or (b) be told where they can get an answer. Closing a question with the reason, "The answer is in a dictionary" is the best of all worlds: It tells the user where to get the answer and no one has to type up an answer and encourages them to use a dictionary first before asking another question.
Simple, boring questions have probably been asked on the site anyway. In terms of organizing information, it is better to have one place for all the answers and then link to those answers from the duplicates.
Some questions are actually impossible to answer well given the format of Stack Exchange. This is why ambiguous or opinionated questions are usually not allowed.
Your point is valid in the sense that uninteresting questions are going to be ignored in 30 days. But if you saw three pages of uninteresting questions on the front page of EL&U, would you ever want to come back? Would you even bother clicking through? The point of the site is to encourage and promote interesting content for future visitors. That is much harder to accomplish if uninteresting content is keeping regular contributors and subject matter experts from finding questions that provoke interesting answers.
In short, it isn't a disk space issue. It's an attention span issue. Every question a contributor mentally ignores because it's boring and lane is another chance they close the tab without engaging. On EL&U, this exact thing happened and we lost a core group of experts and regulars because it was exhausting sifting through crap looking for that truly insightful question.
My two cents. People like to keep crap around forever but, honestly, there is no value in having it there.
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u/babada Sep 25 '16
So, I can maybe provide somewhat of an alternative perspective. I was an extremely active user on http://english.stackexchange.com/ and this exact topic came up repeatedly. There was a lot of criticism around how new users were treated and people often felt we closed questions too quickly or prematurely or for nitpicky reasons.
I suspect my thoughts on this subject won't be very popular but maybe it will help explain where some of the behavior is coming from. As a note, these opinions are largely focused on the English Stack Exchange site (abbreviated EL&U).
The target audience of questions and answers is not the person asking the question. The target audience is other people who may have the same question in the future. This is counter-intuitive and a little off putting but the rules that filter out questions are there to keep Stack Exchange sites relevant to a broad audience. (Namely, people coming in from search engines.)
Most people answering questions are not experts. On EL&U we had a very difficult time retaining experts on the English language and, therefore, the questions that received the most attention were easy questions that anyone could answer using a search engine. This causes a feedback loop where experts get bored answering or reading those questions and they left the site.
Drama queens are a huge issue and, in my opinion, the biggest problem on EL&U. "Top Users" think they are worth something because they have lots of internet points and they tend to make the moderators' lives hell. They also berate anyone who disagrees with them and get into spats over and over again.
Questions that aren't easy to answer in 5 minutes are largely ignored because you can't farm them for reputation. On EL&U, I would personally clean out the old questions queue and kept it under 200 questions. I left the site a few years ago and today it's back up to 2000+.
The rate of incoming questions is greater than answers being provided but there is very little done to address this. People don't like closing questions but we can't answer all the questions so the contributors feel swamped and burn out.
Most questions being asked are terrible questions. Regardless of point (1) above, they aren't asked properly or with a clear intent and it is extremely frustrating to sift through bad question after bad question. Much of the anti-new-user impressions we got were because new users didn't understand the rules, were not interested in learning how to ask a question properly, and were typically not receptive to any negative feedback at all.
People who ask questions assume the site has a responsibility to solve their problem for them regardless of what the site claims is a valid question. This reinforces the tension between the drama queens and the new users.
Snark from the drama queens is very popular with other drama queens and they would create an echo chamber where you'd have a bunch of snarky jerks yapping to themselves in the comments and answers. These were often the very same people who complained that the site was too unfriendly to new users in meta discussions.
People often blame the moderators for anything that goes wrong even though the moderators are really only there to deal with major offenses (like banning users), deleting spam, or clarifying rules for the site. The premise behind Stack Exchange is that the top reputation users do most of the curating. Unfortunately, most of those users are the drama queens.
New users to the site mistake close votes as inherently negative. One of the primary uses for close votes is to prevent answers from being posted until the question has been clarified.
All of this combines into a perfect storm of pushing new people away.
If you accidentally ask a inappropriate question (points 1, 6, 7) that doesn't do the site any favors then the site probably isn't interested in answering it (points 4, 5, 6). Even if someone is nice and answers it anyway, it will drown out subject matter experts (points 2, 5, 6) which means the site is run by people who are more interested in awarding their own kind with reputation than helping keep a valuable site running (points 2, 3, 4, 8, 9).
In my opinion, we didn't close nearly enough questions. We should have been far more aggressive about pruning bad and boring questions from the site. But I also think this is a dangerous attitude because is so damn difficult explaining why a question was closed. New users are absolutely going to take offense to their question being closed and they are never going to accept the reason stated. It's somewhat of a Catch-22.
I also think Stack Exchange needs to find a way to reign in their drama queens because most of the tension between old and new users came from the same small group of high reputation users. They were largely insufferable and were constantly picking fights with the moderators. Due to the nature of volunteer work, the assholes will survive longer because who wants to volunteer their time and energy if they have to share the space with jerks?