Yes, there is risk, as you pointed out yourself: "If you're lucky, the person asking comes back and asks a better question; usually, you get either no response, or overt hostility." More importantly, testosterone isn't just a male hormone, it's attributed to risk-taking, domination, anger and all those generally alpha male traits. And again, you and I may feel that answering and editing is more rewarding, but a lot of people do get a kick out of attacking things blindly. It's the same reason people love watching people screaming on TV debates. — Rei MiyasakaDec 30 '12 at 1:23
The ovaries produce both testosterone and estrogen. Relatively small quantities of testosterone are released into your bloodstream by the ovaries and adrenal glands. In addition to being produced by the ovaries, estrogen is also produced by the body's fat tissue.
A meta post titled "What to assume and what not to assume in a meta discussion". Go figure.
IOW, it's gonna be something like a "common misconception about site meta stuff".
The answer would contain stuff like "close votes are not blocking the questions; any closed question can be reopened if revised to fit the scope of the site".
@Ϻ.Λ.Ʀ. People who are ranting about stuff usually don't like someone saying "look here! Click on this link, and scroll down, and maybe you'll find something! Good luck!"
60% percent of the posts that get downvoted a lot are from people that don't care about site rules. 30% are from people that make mistakes trying to learn how and why the sites functions.
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@Ϻ.Λ.Ʀ. I want to see ELL succeed, but a lot of the time it's just a place to spread errors and misinformation. I think it can still be a valuable resource some of the time, and I don't expect any resource to be perfect – we all make errors, we're all always learning – but it really does get frustrating.
Basically, I wanna build that site's quality from scratch.
I think you basically hit it on the head. The goal is helping people get answers to their programming questions, and the main way we do that is through building a library of Q&A.
I went back and forth on this a lot, but at the end of the day, the library can't be the goal itself. If all you care...
Code-only answers fall under "Very Low Quality" for me and are candidates for deletion*.
This extends from my belief that "self-documenting code" is a myth. Code can only tell you the how, it doesn't tell you the why. That's what you need comments for.
On Stack Exchange, the how is important, ...
Imagine three scenarios in Q/A:
Q1: How can I say that "foo bars the baz"?
A1: Just say "the foo bars" instead.
Q2: Is "foo bars the baz" grammatically correct?
A2: Just say "the foo bars" instead.
Q3: What is the difference between "foo bars the baz" and "the baz is barred"...
> On StackExchange, you're not here to help the OP. You are hear to make a library of detailed answers to good questions. Helping the OP is but a side-effect.
> Incoming questions are a universal constant, all around us in countless billions. But answers -- truly brilliant, amazing, correct answers -- are as rare as pearls. Thus, questions are merely the sand that produces the pearl. If we have learned anything in the last three years, it is that you optimize for pearls, not sand.
tl;dr: if you have nothing to do but sit on a park bench all day, Questions are what you want. Unique, varied, interesting questions, as many as you can get your mitts on.
> From a comment: > With the size of the user base then there's always a good chance that someone will come by looking to pluck low-hanging fruit and I'll get my answer. So that's the problem you have to fix: remove all incentives for *answers* to bad questions. If a question is bad, an answerer should get *no reputation* from it. Then the only incentive for answering is the one to help someone out, and as an answerer I know that I'd rather help someone who shows some investment in the question. Then as a questioner, if I see all these other questions getting answers but mine doesn't, I hav…
@Shog9 This is a huge problem ^
SE doesn't do enough of disincentivizing answering bad questions.
Here's a Trello board, vote for what Stack Overflow topic you want to see a post on: https://trello.com/b/0zgQjktX/blog-post-queue-for-stack-overflow-topics Also, suggest more topics here.
So here's the real problem: for new users, folks who don't know how to write a good question yet, asking is less productive. But it still produces results enough of the time to make it worthwhile. especially if you don't invest much work into it.
SELECT Count(Id), ParentId As taid FROM Posts pq WHERE PostTypeId=2
AND DeletionDate IS NOT NULL AND ClosedDate IS NOT NULL AND SCORE > AnswerCount + CommentCount / 2 AND
(SELECT Id FROM Posts WHERE PostTypeId=1 AND ParentId=pq.taid) IS NOT NULL
@Shog9 So then what do you do? Yelling at the people asking poor questions to go away is fruitless; making people ask good questions isn't easy either.
@MikeEdenfield Column 'Posts.ParentId' is invalid in the select list because it is not contained in either an aggregate function or the GROUP BY clause.
@hichris123 1) Maintain a standard quality of questions by deleting stuff, 2) remove the backlog of broken window, 3) Empower caretakers of the site, 4) Establish a guiding ideology of the site — crush the "I'm here to help people" mentality, 5) Disincentivize behaviors that you can identify as bad (like answering questions that get closed), 6) Incentivize care taking (eg, rep for closing as dup)
`SELECT COUNT(Id), ParentId AS [taid] FROM Posts pq INNER JOIN Posts p ON p.ParentId = pq.ParentId AND p.PostTypeId = 1 WHERE pd.PostTypeID = 2 AND pq.DeletionDate IS NOT NULL AND pq.ClosedDate IS NOT NULL AND pq.Score > pq.AnswerCount + pq.CommentCount / 2`
@Ϻ.Λ.Ʀ. Well, you'll love DevDoodle where we will 1) Delete questions instead of close them, 2) Start without a huge pile of bad questions, 3) Disproportionately hand out privileges to moderating rather than creating content that could be problematic, 4) Be extremely explicit on what is valid and invalid use of the site, 5) Prohibit and severely punish behavior that goes against the ideology of the site, and 6) Incentivize caretaking efforts over content creation to the necessary extent.
@bjb568 the inner join is pretty much identical to your subselect. "link up these two sets of rows based on having some field in common and only return rows where there was a match"
@Shog9 I don't know anything about sex changes, but given that low rep users ask worse questions, what's wrong with muting them? Wouldn't that increase question quality?
If they work at writing answers that get upvotes, wouldn't they be more likely to write questions that aren't crap? This would also prevent drive-by "I WANT TEH ANZARZ/CODEZ/TUTORIALZ" questions.
I've been looking at what happens when new users post their first questions on Stack Overflow... Not really done yet, but I figured I'd toss what I have up here in case anyone else has useful suggestions.
For window of time between 30 and 90 days ago, I looked at users who posted their first que...
@bjb568 Especially back in the day when it was the biggest game in town and folks desperately wanted to be able to ask... Which you could earn by answering.
@Shog9 In theory, requiring upvotes on the answers too would make it harder to game. Especially since upvoting requires rep in itself (tho I think it should be raised to 125 for questions and answers on not-your-question).
@Shog9 I don't think requiring answering is as much solving the problem of educating the crap-askers as filtering them. We can even almost hand-hold users who want to learn. But trying to hand-hold the average new user now who has no desire to learn is fruitless, counter-productive, and unscalable. We don't need to ensure quality first-questions, we just need to ensure a baseline understanding of the site and of programming, and a minimum requirement of effort.
Community FAQ
For sites in the Stack Exchange 2.0 network
To see a list of commonly used words and phrases, see the glossary.
For official guidance from Stack Exchange, visit the Help Center.
Asking questions
How do I write a good title?
How can I get answers fast?
Where can I ask a ques...
Code-only answers fall under "Very Low Quality" for me and are candidates for deletion*.
This extends from my belief that "self-documenting code" is a myth. Code can only tell you the how, it doesn't tell you the why. That's what you need comments for.
On Stack Exchange, the how is important, ...
Imagine three scenarios in Q/A:
Q1: How can I say that "foo bars the baz"?
A1: Just say "the foo bars" instead.
Q2: Is "foo bars the baz" grammatically correct?
A2: Just say "the foo bars" instead.
Q3: What is the difference between "foo bars the baz" and "the baz is barred"...
