meta doesn't have that problem

@KevinB sure it does

Actually in a lot of ways it's a little scarier/worse

oh, sorry i meant the whole, people countering downvotes with upvotes

probably still happens, but not nearly as bad

Looks like i just swapped ideas mid-convo

@M.A.R.ಠ_ಠ imo it's a terrible tag

Grill with extreme prejudice

I mean just look at the questions

@KevinB the problem is you penalise someone without them knowing. What's the point of feedback you can't see

It's just a slot filler

I don't know if i'd even consider it feedback, at least not necessarily for the user who wrote the post

meta.stackexchange.com/questions/129460/… and meta.stackexchange.com/questions/109019/… and meta.stackexchange.com/questions/91855/…

@M.A.R.ಠ_ಠ it will be

The only thing they have in common is the language they're written in

And some common words. Like "the", "and" etc.

And the site they're posted on

And that they have an accepted answer

Crap, I digress.

Actually hence me calling it a classic meta tag

I might post an answer to the hedgehog's post for the easy repz. But meh

2 a.m.

I have no idea how my eyes haven't given up on me already. Night

Now the question is what other tags should I nuke there?

[support]

wrong-answer seems terrible

Feels more like a search query than a tag

@KevinB what are invisible downvotes?

a signal for the roomba to pick up on

@M.A.R.ಠ_ಠ then I would ask if it's useful

@KevinB which results in a baffled new user in 6 to 8 weeks

Nice, I should go find tags with ~20 questions that suck.

Ugh

Work for the new mods and all

does it though? if they kept the rep for it, and their post, that apparently isn't useful, goes away, does anyone notice?

The nice thing about the vampire tag was it was not used much

@KevinB ah. But what has the new user learnt?

They eventually get qbanned with no clue what happened

eh, i don't think they should really be punished for that.

i'd rather there be less friction there

Ideally we want to maximize the conversation of clueless question asking n00b to productive user.

@KevinB by gutting quality control?

We don't want to have people asking terrible questions

I'm more drawing a line between meh questions and useful ones

a middleground where a question isn't really terrible, but doesn't rise to the point where it's a question we'd want to be the one people find. not a good dupe target

We want them posting good answers ( which is what gets people in) and interesting or at least we'll scoped question

That's why dupes are manual and the master question can be newer than a duplicate

questions that currently fit that criteria get an upvote or two or don't, and then just stick around forever

like that sql question, it's a pretty terrible question... is a dupe, but the dupe is also terrible... so what do we do?

as it stands, both are going to stick around because someone answered it with a correct answer

Improve it. Close against a future non terrible question?

@Catija not a lot. Excluding all employees actually brings the median age up in a few spots:

eh, what makes it terrible isn't a content or syntax/grammar etc problem, it's poorly researched

the user simply didn't know what to look for to find the answer

Which is common

I was actually complaining about how knowing how to troubleshoot a thing is as important as writing or building it

So a good answer would also teach future readers where to look

Cause I know there's a few answers I've posted which were literally just grokking error codes

@Shog9 The staff-inclusive line seems slightly higher, overall. But that's not unexpected... particularly if that query doesn't check whether the person was staff when they posted the question... which I'm guessing it doesn't?

:7544558 Ugh.

The point is that the meta participation is somewhat cyclical. While there are many people still here from long ago, there's a lot of people who aren't... Look through the top 4-5 pages of rep here and count how many of those users haven't been around in a year or two.

@Catija answered the question. And yes, it does

It was this question, i wanted to avoid linking directly to it, but i think enough time has gone by that the normal process for a question in that tag has pretty much already happened. stackoverflow.com/questions/54599696/…

@Shog9 Fancy.

basically, the user thinks they know what the keyword is and what the % sign is, but wanted confirmation. Instead of looking for confirmation in the docs... they asked here

I on't think it's necessarily a bad question

Happy Hour!

If you subtracted one for each year past 2009 that chart would show a steady decline.

IMO, the teachable moment on that question is where to look for such information. For example, a link to official docs for whatever db they're using. w3schools works, though i still despise that site as a source of information, i'd much rather people provide links to official docs but that's not a battle worth fighting. but... then we're left with this question... which hopefully won't show up in search results in favor of better sources of information

@KevinB though, without the dialect of SQL being clear in the question...

Ah my bad

in this case... the tutorial they were following has a search bar in the top left, that pulls up documentation when you search "like" that covers everything asked in the question

...

and, of course, is more relevant than a general sql answer or a link to w3schools, since it's specific to this dialect

Ah. Wouldn't hurt to post a comments pointing that out. Teach a man to fish?

Or even an answer

i'm not sure if the tutorial they are following is actually on the official docs

but a link to the docs would be useful