@ChrisForrence From what I can tell, the script has been failing again. Your stats are what the tag would be without your two answers from two days ago.
@hichris123 No, but it's something that I wouldn't mind randomly receiving whenever people feel generous, and Amazon doesn't have a "no desired quantity" option.
Otherwise it would get removed from the list after 1.
I get that traffic will increase with popularity. And that's good. But to me there's a big difference between spikes in traffic (400%-500% normal in a day) and a steady increase.
Hot questions create those peaks, not steady increases in visits, so I'm not really following your points about "what happens when you get bigger?"
@Shog9 Sorry, perhaps I should have pinged the replies too
@jmac right. Figure that even getting into the hot list is essentially buying a lottery ticket. Sometimes, you get "lucky". Sometimes you get catastrophically lucky. But most of the time you just get a slip of cardboard.
Now, the site grows, and suddenly you're buying a dozen tickets a day.
1. SO has more volume, which means more of an ability for the community to handle popular questions (it is always around, but the moderation is enough to handle it)
2. TWP questions are more 'easily accessible' which means that everyone and their mother will happily comment on how to convince a manager to keep good developers, and far less who can actually say something about a very specific technical issue
3. SO has a lot more downvoters/close voters who are able to nip poor questions in the bud faster.
No, it's that thing I pointed out above. Even if you had 30K page views for a single question on a single day, you're still talking something like 0.1% of the traffic for that day, @jmac. It's just not gonna show up on Quantcast.
There is economies of scale in community moderation. Until you reach a certain scale, these huge peaks are harmful to the community moderation. Can we at least agree on that?
@jmac sure. It's the first thing I tell folks who think they want a separate site for their JavaScript library or whatever. "Great - you want to spend all your time moderating and none of it actually programming, eh?"
@Shog9 So if these hot questions are harmful to community moderation when the communities are small, is that really something we want the SE hot questions list to encourage?
@Shog9 Correct. And community moderators volunteer their time in the hopes that the site will grow, that burden will decrease, and the quality of the content will increase with scale.
We're like home owners putting in sweat equity to increase the value of our homes. We know it sucks, but we care enough about the result to be willing to do it.
So basically, if we had a 50% conversion rate, it'd be good growth. We'd be making a net gain on the hot questions without increasing the burden or risk of burnout.
@Shog9 As I said in my answer to that question, I would like the hot questions list to be customizable by the communities it is showing. So rather than showing questions that appeal to the lowest common denominator, we can show tough questions we would like answers to, or questions that we think will bring well thought-out answers instead.
@Shog9 Rather than appealing to people looking for a few minutes of entertainment, or to use TWP as a place to share their opinion on something, we could create something that allows us to appeal to the type of users we think would be positive contributors in the future
More than half of my team has been made redundant already, as have several other teams throughout the company. This is not due to financial reasons (we are very successful!) but there are some rumours that the company might be sold or something like that.
I am a junior manager and yet never hear...