The hotness score of a question is influenced by the reaction of users arriving from across the network. Since most of such users do not have 125 rep on the question's site, the feedback SE receives is one-sided: the algorithm hears those who like the question (via upvotes), and ignores those wh...
As I mentioned in The Horror of No Answer: Revival and Necromancer:
It’s fine — expected, even — for there to be a “long tail” of questions that are too obscure, too narrow, or just plain unanswerable for whatever reason. Sometimes you have to be patient; it takes the time it takes. But seeing the number of zero-answer questions grow by 50% over a 3 month period is definitely concerning.
Part of this is our fault for not adapting the homepage to the massive amount of question activity that Stack Overflow now enjoys. We’re working on it, but it will take some time to figure out the right approach. …
Yesterday we were amused to see this post on Reddit’s sysadmin forum:
Our architecture lead Nick Craver looked into this and gave a great answer, including that about 29% of the previous day’s Stack Overflow traffic was to the home page.
From his perspective as a system administrator, that’s exactly the right analysis. Nick’s team has to ensure the site renders reliably and quickly, so counting the number of requests make sense. However, as a data scientist I’m more interested in how users view the site, and the vast majority of our traffic comes from automated traffic, including search engines and scrapers. …
For few recent months, I've got a habit of downvoting answers which quality doesn't look OK to me.
These probably can be generally described as low effort and/or these lacking relevance to question asked.
Opinionated slogans, claims that are not backed up by appropriate references or by ...
