What are we trying to build?

Codidact Platform Ideas
186

Really new Here, but you nail down some of the features I’d always wanted SE network to support:

  • Human search engine, as you put it. How many times I myself wanted to ask a more knowledgeable audience where to find documentations beyond my google-fu! And How may times I had to reply in comments to newbies about how to find something!

  • A “personal space” for users (especially top ones), in the form of a blog or something like that. Especially one that could allow users to post more structured content, e.g. documentation written by their own (Have you written a tutorial on how to program an Arduino without the Arduino IDE? Heck! Stick it in your user-blog under a CC license and gain rep for that if people like it!)

187

Not everything is really suitable for a Q&A style. Some FAQ, although being formally a list of questions, could be rewritten as a compact reference manual, or a tutorial, or a set of brief tutorials.

That’s why I always wanted SE supported a sort of “blog” feature for expert users, where one could also post “personal” content like that (e.g. pdfs with tutorials, manuals and the like, of course whose copy rights are held by the users and he submit them with some form of CC license as well).

This may be an addition that may differentiate Codidact from SE and giving added value, as well as “fidelizing” top users by allowing them to develop a “social home page/blog”, giving them incentive not only to answer questions, but also provide material that could not be fit in Q&A form effectively.

This could turn Codidact in a great learning platform (which SE network is not, in general).

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188

I don’t think that defining different classes for questions will be so useful. The main problems with bad questions, besides outright laziness, is that the user (maybe a newbie, or someone having difficulty writing in english) cannot formulate the question in a way that complies with maybe complex guidelines.

Let’s face it, even if we tell people repeatedly to read the help first, wery few will do it thoroughly, even if they are not “lazyass”. Sometimes you just need an answer without too much reading about “rules”.

So a way to improve this (I’m really brainstorming here) is a sort of UI for “question incubation” (for a want of a better term). When you want to post a question you could have two choice: direct post, or “managed” post.

If you are sure your question more or less follows all the basic guidelines, you direct-post it (and you don’t complain if a lazyass BS question is insta-nuked to oblivion).

Otherwise you ask for “managed” posting: the post will be visible only to users (maybe with some minimal rep) that are willing to help the OP to build a question that is deemed acceptable. This special UI should help the OP and expert users collaborate, it shouldn’t be a sort of review queue with no back&forth interaction.

This facility could help the newbie (or inexpert) iron out a nice question before actually going public on the site.

I admit I have no specific idea about the actual functionalities of the UI or the process involved, but I thought it could be an interesting idea to put on the table.

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189

Yeah. That’s a valid point. Our spec currently allows for different post types and categories, which can be used to build for example a Wiki or a FAQ.

190

The smaller communities, especially, work on SE because they’re made up of people with a common purpose, who get to know each other and who keep bumping into each other. Newcomers are always welcome of course but there’s a common, recognizable core.

This!

You nail down the feeling I had being a high-rep user (top 100) on electrical engineering.SE (we have another one from there @olin, top one last I checked!).

Although it is a very technical site, there was a sense of community among top users (maybe not everyone of them realized that), even when there were some opinion clashes on what constituted on-topic questions, or whatever.

There was consensus built around some issues, and there was discordance on some other. But there was a recognizable and yet intangible border between the core community and the “outsiders” (in a good sense, as “not yet integrated in the community”), some shared “values”, if you want.

Lately SE moves has greatly let me down about how these de facto “communities of values” (top users, real enthusiasts, whatever) were “sacrificed” on the altar of “inclusion”, political correctness and business.

I really do share your view that “big bucket” communities seldom work. That’s what also why I stopped contributing to SO and concentrated on EE.SE. I had extenuating conversations on meta or in comments about, for example, why something was important for a C programmer and still got rebuked from much higher rep users that maybe hadn’t written a C code line in their life (according at least to their profile and activity pattern).

Moreover, another issue with too big communities (or too non-homogeneous ones, at least) is that the feeling of community get lost and gamification, which indeed is an important part of the whole thing, becomes the biggest thing. So you see frustrating FGITW (Fastest Gun In The West) answers skyrocketing with votes, while you are still in the process of writing a good answer that will never make it to the top five because, in the time you finish it, there are already a dozen of highly voted ones (and sometimes one crappiest than the other).

So, yes, I hope you come up with a viable substitute for SE network that allows communities to thrive.

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191

I had proposed this same mechanism for users that know they aren’t so good with English. It can probably be broadened, but not to the point were lazy askers just dump crap on us and expect us to fix it for them.

If we do have such a “improvement holding area”, then no votes can take place on the question, and the question can’t be answered. The only point of the improvement area is to improve the question. There should be a timeout too. Maybe 3 days with no activity from the OP, and the question is simply deleted. Those helping the OP if a question ever graduates and gets a positive score should get some rep or badges from it. There needs to be some reward for helping someone with their question.

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192

I’m not a particular fan of a holding area but this comment is key. Curation and improvement activities need to couple to our reward system in a way that doesn’t make them second-class citizens in the site economy.

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193

I mostly agree with what you say. Definitely, people helping others improve their question should get rewarded.

The improvement shouldn’t be limited to English. There are times in which you really have a good question in mind, but you have not the expertise (or the formal education) to focus it in a good written question.

As for the timeout, it is really the troubling point for me. I agree there should be a limit, but it shouldn’t be so strict. People have real lives that always get in the way. The timeout must be there to avoid building a wasteyard of half baked questions, however I think that a much bigger timeout would be needed (30 days?). After all you should take into account the availability of the “improvers”: maybe the OP posts the tentative questions in a period when people wanting/able to improve it are not available.

I see this improvement area also as a substitute for SE.meta where one posted a “pre-question” like “I’d like to post this question, is this on-topic?” and asked for advice.

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194

Then perhaps the OP needs to specify what exactly they seek help improving. Help with English can be a simple check box. There can also be an “other” choice where you enter a description.

One way or another we want the improvement area to be for OPs that are genuinely trying, not as an excuse for lazy people to dump crap on us. I’m open to ideas how to achieve that.

Exact values would be up to specific sites to set, so from a software point of view it doesn’t matter.

Then they need to take that into account before asking a bunch of people for a favor. When you’ve asked for free help to improve your question, you have some obligation to be responsive. 30 days is way too long in my opinion. I’m trying to keep the helpers in mind. It gets frustrating trying to help when the OP doesn’t respond. Perhaps there is a different timeout for responding to a suggestion from one of the helpers, versus dead answer that helpers aren’t responding to anymore. I can see the latter being longer.

195

This will rarely work. I think you will find 4 groups of people:

  • Ask a good question (i.e., only minor edits needed) - this “extra help” doesn’t apply.
  • Ask a horrible question - they may check all the boxes (literally) but it would still be a “bad” question and get closed anyway.
  • Ask a mediocre (salvageable) question but not check any boxes for help because they don’t know/think that they need the help. I think this will be quite common.
  • Ask a mediocre question and check the “right” boxes for help.

Unfortunately, I think the last situation will be the least common. Either because of ego (I know how to ask a question - I just need someone to give me the answer) or knowledge/skills (especially English-as-a-second-language but can also apply to people who have minimal-but-non-zero domain-specific knowledge), people just don’t think they are asking a bad question.

Which gets back to others (moderators, high-rep, etc.) spotting the problems and figuring out how to help.

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196

To be honest, I’m not sure the whole mechanism will work either. It’s definitely not something for MVP. It is something to keep in mind for experimenting with at a later time. As you, I can see a number of things that might go wrong. If we try this, we’ll need to expect some tweaking and experimenting. I think something can be made to work, but I’m not sure what exactly that something is without trying a few things.

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197

Yeah. Some kind of mentoring or sandboxing stuff will probably be a good idea after MVP. And having both the mentors and the mentored opinion on where help is needed is probably a good idea, too. I guess we won’t have a major problem with low-quality questions for now, though.

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198

Most of this is a cultural thing and while I did propose a sandbox myself, I don’t think its going to solve this problem.

There are users whose proposed solution to low quality questions is to “tar and feather” the askers so that the askers don’t come back and ask more questions (the majority of askers on SE don’t ever ask a second question) and who will extend that flaming to the users who will help newbies improve their first questions.

For example,

“I choose to just fix the problem.” No, you made the problem worse. The real problem is people dumping crap on us in the first place. By still letting them get the desired result, you have taught them and anyone watching that dumping crap here works. That’s a lot worse than losing a few questions. Shame on you!

Source

If said users try and run the newbies out of town at the first poor question and discourage other experienced users from helping the newbies out, then adding a sandbox is just going to take the newbie questions and shunt them elsewhere.

A sandbox isn’t going to make it easier for the people who want to help new users actually help improve their questions because they would do that regardless of whether its in the sandbox or not.

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199

I’m surprised said comment wasn’t moderated. Would it help said user to have a filtered view of the site, e.g. so they only see already-upvoted questions?

200

Perhaps, I will say that it seems kinda unfair for users to answer cleaned questions that come out of a sandbox, while choosing not to do any of the cleaning.

I know that I have gotten burned out from watching 5 other users vote to close instead of taking 15 seconds to remove a single offending sentence and make a question on topic.

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201

To each their own, eh? I wondered if it might help temperamentally-less-tolerant users coexist with other more-welcoming users who’d prefer not to close-immediately.

Another idea might be something like one’s own twit filter for questions – “I don’t want to see this question, so hide it from me” – which doesn’t necessarily involve closing said question for everyone.

I think are potential problems with this idea, i.e. counter-arguments; but it’s not that it’s unfair.

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202

No, because the problem isn’t personally seeing crappy questions on the site, but crappy questions being on the site. A filter doesn’t fix the problem, only make you not notice it. That’s even worse, since now you don’t even know there is something that needs to be fixed.

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203

And the reason that’s a bad idea is because it only addresses the immediate issue at the expense of making the long term problem worse. Without there being a cost to the user that posts a bad question, they have no reason not to continue posting bad questions.

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204

Try telling your mom that “Instead of nagging about that the dishes should go in the dishwasher, you could just put them there.” :slight_smile:

It’s kind of the same principle.

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205

My mum and wife were preschool teachers. They tended to praise good behaviour instead of focusing on bad behaviour.

Also people learn from good examples IMO – including (or especially) examples of how to improve or correct their own work.

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