The CV experiment has officially failed...but what are we supposed to do about it?

Question

It should come as a surprise to no one that I am disappointed about the 3 close vote experiment being deemed a failure by the powers that be. Whether or not we did "fail" (and what that even means) is a big issue, which is already being hashed out in the answers to that question. But there's another equally large question that I don't think is getting discussed over there.

Assuming for the sake of argument that we did "fail" somehow, I have absolutely no idea what SE wants us to do about it.

The only thing Jon tells us to do in that meta question is to not distrust users so much. I didn't think any of my actions on the site were based on distrust, but simply voting to close poor content based on how poor it is. If anything, I seem to habitually give first-time askers significantly more hand-written advice than they are willing to or capable of acting on. So, I really don't know what we're supposed to do with this instruction.

Because I don't understand this suggestion, I currently feel like SE will do one of the following:

1. Give up and completely ignore this site for the foreseeable future because they simply don't understand what's going on here.
2. Assume they are correct in their belief that we close too many questions, and change the site mechanics to make it harder to close questions.
3. Assume Jon's claim that "distrust" is the core problem is entirely accurate, and start taking disciplinary action against the most "distrustful" users, presumably for violating "Be Nice".

I believe #1 is most likely, but part of me is genuinely concerned that #2, #3 or something equally misguided will happen.

My hope in asking this meta question is that Jon or someone else from SE can alleviate this uncertainty, ideally with a specific policy statement or some genuinely actionable advice.

Here are some random questions/prompts to help demonstrate what I mean by "actionable advice":

• Should we be downvoting questions more often?
• Should we be downvoting answers more often?
• Are there any close reasons we should be using more often?
• Are there any close reasons we should be using less often?
• Should we be having frequent meta threads about whether a specific question is reopen-worthy, or can be edited to become reopen-worthy?
• Should we encourage people to leave comments when downvoting or voting to close because of unclear/broad/POB? (as opposed to off-topic, which is much more self-explanatory)
• Should we encourage people to stop leaving generic comments that simply link to a meta post without any specific advice about that particular question?
• Should we stop trying to clean up "broken windows", and just ignore any Qs/As beyond a certain age?
• When a question is too unclear/broad to answer, and the OP never adds the missing details, are we supposed to make up details to edit in ourselves until the question becomes answerable?
• When a bikesheddable question (let's say "Should I use ++i or i += 1?") gets asked, should we close it as too broad/POB? Try to ruthlessly downvote the "merely okay" answers and hope only great ones survive? Just let people upvote everything into the stratosphere no matter how useless? Or something else entirely?
• When a question asks for "best practices" without any explanation of what "best" means for them, should we not close that as unclear/broad/POB?
• Should we try to come up with a clear set of guidelines that might help first-time askers avoid the unclear/broad/POB tarpit, better than the current FAQ does? For instance: describe what your application does, specify your language, specify whether you're after flexibility/intuitiveness/reliability/etc, explain why you want to do this, if there is a blindingly obvious solution explain why it doesn't apply, etc.

Answer 1

In my opinion this "spam" problem that gnat speaks to is one of those problems that is so deceptively simple, so completely obvious in hindsight, and something brought up before hiding in plain sight.

Here it is guys, the solution to the vast majority of bad content that I speak of is...

Our Domain Name

It is as simple as that. Change the domain name of the site from Programmers to Software Engineering and Architecture or something akin to this and I will personally step down as a moderator if spam on the site doesn't cut by half.

If you walk down the streets of your city past the homeless beggars and they all harass you asking for some change, don't act surprised when you are wearing a shirt that says, "I got lots of change to give..."

They don't care enough to research their problems, they certainly aren't going to study our Help Center to figure out what we are about. The name of the site deceives them as a quick fix for a problem that they are getting whipped to fix by their micromanaging boss.

Answer 2

I can not read their minds but from what I see, the only problem this site really has is a terrible flood of debugging / blatantly off-topic questions dumped by users who are banned or warned or simply scared off of Stack Overflow (my friends told me that "stack exchange" is undergraduate or master level, and "stack overflow" is PhD or research level, remember?)

Given above, it is only natural to assume that SE team looks for a cheap way to handle this, to make getting rid of this spam easier - and what can be cheaper than simply tuning close limit setting (to a value that was already tried and tested in the past, which makes it even easier).

The only thing to worry about in there was if it could have some undesired side effects... and, well, there were side effects.

These talks about trust / distrust and dreams on how meta visitors would suddenly reform from reading that post about experiment, I honestly can't take them seriously. Balance between tightening and broadening site scope is maintained by core community, not by management slogans.

And thing is, community over here could maintain the balance if site wasn't flooded by debugging spam. There are at least 8-10 members of core community who would be happy to vote reopen stuff "unfairly" closed by folks like you and me.

At the scale of our site, this would be more than enough to maintain a healthy balance without any management intervention. The only reason why this doesn't happen is flood of blatant garbage that buries questions worthy of wider community attention, like this bunch dropped at us today:

^{How to overcome the stack overflow problem?
Help: not able to compile C++ code
Injecting a java script to an iframe
Multiple viewpagers in one fragment
How do I increment a variable each time a program runs in C++?
Rewrite code snippet using ternary operators
Open cv help i m learnig open cv using youtube i get error when i try to run my frist program pls help
Android 6.0.1 couldn't enable wifi hotspot programmatically}

With the experiment they were probably hoping that lowering bar for reopening will make it easier for the other part of core community to keep the prior balance. This didn't happen, and I think the reason is just the same. Folks who could do this simply can't find questions they would vote on because these are buried under heaps of spam.

Note it's the third time I use the word spam, and it's intentional. I've seen Wikipedia defining spam as "unsolicited electronic message", and this fits here. It's easy even to a total outsider to see how much of the questions are blatantly off-topic (no matter how broadly one understands site topics).

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If my understanding is correct, then there's nothing for SE to expect of us, because spam is not something we, as community, can control.

It is also unlikely that ignoring what's going on here is an option for them. As of now, site front page says it loud and clear: "hey, SE team can't control spam" - that's sort of damaging their reputation of top Q&A system in the world.

Few years ago, they could probably attempt to close the site, under the cover that it has failed to grow. But their current official position changed, and now they claim that smaller sites can be okay without exploding to SO scale (why wouldn't they, given that smaller sites combined started bringing more views than Stack Overflow). As a result, closing would look solely like giving up to spam.