@JNat I made a title edit to meta.stackoverflow.com/q/432459/11107541 in an attempt to make it more descriptive. not sure if I captured the experiment right, but I tried. feel free to adjust, or revert, though I'd love to have some sort of more descriptive title than "upcoming voting experiment".
I think I'm a little more grown up than I was when I wrote that, but I don't know if I'd be been much softer if myself now time-travelled back to relive those things and then be faced with the same question from the same person at the same time.
@KevinB if "this thing" is small scoped enough, I'd want to encourage that asker to just ask for the thing and don't provide any attempt, and don't entertain requests for attempts.
@Slate it brings up a different topic of new answers to old questions and "answer versioning", but for me the more interesting part is how new better answers take time, or now struggle to reach the top
@Slate my understanding is "searchable library of bite-sized, topical Q&A- practical questions". does it serve it well? not when for various reasons, it's not doing well on the external search interfaces it sort of depends upon or expects to serve people through. reasons like bad titles and questions, which I mentioned in my answer post, and maybe declining SEO juice, which may not be unrelated
@wizzwizz4 but I have never heard of this being a normal practice. I'd expect a rain of downvotes if I tried to do this without consulting meta, and I'd fear a rain of downvotes on meta if I tried to consult meta :P
@Mithical this has crossed my mind at times. what if instead of the current state of closing things as "needs more focus", in some cases, we had directory trees that break down questions? say someone wants to ask "how do I create a website"... SUPER broad. but maybe it could be broken down into smaller, but still broad categories, and then those broken down in multiple stages by questions about considerations.
people being able to ask those questions without going that deep into research and me answering them saves people time. it's my understanding of what makes a significant chunk of the value of this platform.
@Mithical in my experience, there's a significant threshold of practicality. I can answer the questions I can answer because I spend my time asking many of those foundational questions and finding the answers through exploration, reading source materiel, etc. if everyone did that, many of the questions I answer would not be asked on SO. people could answer them on their own.
@wizzwizz4 yeah, relating to the "library mission" thing, and tying to my answer post's part on "study group / office hours / helpful colleague at scale", the "at scale" part here requires the asker to do some work too so there's "no chit chat".
