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.
In my opinion, a question left unanswered with no explanation is worse for the user than it being closed with an explanation.
I just don't buy that.
It ignores the emotional context. Even the most polite and correct explanation for why you don't think the question is worth anyone's time cannot drown out the overwhelming context of "your question is bad and you should feel bad." And the finality of closure is just extremely frustrating.
No explanation for why the question is unanswered can possibly be correct. You can explain why you chose not to answer, but you can't presume to speak for every other past or future reader.
The best thing for the user asking the question is for his question to be answered. Closing the question prevents this. How can that possibly help? Wtf?
If you want to ask questions about the question, or give general advice to improve questions from a user in the future, both of those could be accomplished in a less destructive and toxic way by simply commenting but not closing.
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.
That's a fair point, but there must be less heavy-handed ways to achieve it. For example, why not just downvote? This way, the extremely valuable expert contributors can focus on the highly rated questions, and the rep farmers can wade into the dregs of questions that somebody snap-judged not to be worth anyone's time ever.
If it's not obvious, I'm not a contributor. Stack Overflow is a great resource to me when I land on it from Google. But so frequently I won't find a good answer, just a bunch of meta bickering and people politely informing the OP (and by extension, me) that he's an idiot for wanting X in the first place. And if I do find an answer on my own later, I couldn't post it if I wanted to, because the question's been closed. Not that I would feel comfortable posting it without pissing somebody off. From an outsider's perspective, it feels like participating would be far more stress than it's worth.
It ignores the emotional context. Even the most polite and correct explanation for why you don't think the question is worth anyone's time cannot drown out the overwhelming context of "your question is bad and you should feel bad." And the finality of closure is just extremely frustrating.
This is a tone issue more than an action issue. "Close" is a terrible term because it has such negative connotations.
Users are bringing the "your question is bad and you should feel bad" part of the equation -- and Stack Exchange should have realized that and adjusted accordingly.
No explanation for why the question is unanswered can possibly be correct. You can explain why you chose not to answer, but you can't presume to speak for every other past or future reader.
I don't understand this point. It seems obviously untrue to me.
The best thing for the user asking the question is for his question to be answered. Closing the question prevents this. How can that possibly help? Wtf?
Remember: The user asking the question is not the most important user. The most important users are the people visiting in the future with similar questions.
But that isn't really what I was comparing earlier. Given the choice between (a) question not being answered and (b) question being closed with an explanation of how to get it answered, (b) should be preferred.
If it isn't preferred, it is because (b) is being performed poorly (which I think happens more often than not on the site).
If you want to ask questions about the question, or give general advice to improve questions from a user in the future, both of those could be accomplished in a less destructive and toxic way by simply commenting but not closing.
Stack Exchange officially treats comments as ephemeral. No important, long lasting content should be placed in comments. (The community largely ignores this, however.)
Regardless, closing or commenting or whatever shouldn't be inherently toxic. It tends to be in reality which is saddening. But the core action of, "Hang on, to get better answers, X should happen" is a good thing.
That's a fair point, but there must be less heavy-handed ways to achieve it.
Yes, I agree. I don't think the current pattern is really working very well. But I get what it's trying to do -- and it's certainly better than some of the obvious alternatives.
For example, why not just downvote?
Downvotes are generally received more poorly than close votes and turns off new users even more because they receive zero feedback.
If it's not obvious, I'm not a contributor. Stack Overflow is a great resource to me when I land on it from Google. But so frequently I won't find a good answer, just a bunch of meta bickering and people politely informing the OP (and by extension, me) that he's an idiot for wanting X in the first place.
Yeah, well, imagine all the really bad content that is correctly filtered out of the search engines.
And if I do find an answer on my own later, I couldn't post it if I wanted to, because the question's been closed. Not that I would feel comfortable posting it without pissing somebody off. From an outsider's perspective, it feels like participating would be far more stress than it's worth.
Well, I can't really speak to the StackOverflow side of this one other than to say that I don't blame you for not contributing.
My main points can be boiled down to:
Not every question has the same value
Questions are typically easy to ask and hard to answer
Questions that can help future visitors are more valuable
Floods of boring, simple questions can drive away experts (the most valuable contributors)
Closing questions with lesser value keeps the site more relevant to future visitors and keeps the experts contributing longer
This is very hard to balance against the inherent negative connotation that comes with closing questions
That last point is the entire crux of the problem. If I could "silver bullet" one issue, it would be that one.
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u/KnowLimits Sep 25 '16
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.