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    I've never been in an organization where expectations didn't increase with membership time: school, business, the military, even personal relationships. If you expected the same from a first date that you do from a marriage of ten years I don't see a second date ever coming. The Marines spend at least 4 months on-boarding and when you're done you're still a "boot" (newbie).
    – TemporalWolf
    Commented Aug 17, 2018 at 18:37
  • 31
    @TemporalWolf: Sure, but Stack Exchange communities are none of those. Sure, some sites have lots of rules, but the expectation has largely stayed the same: ask a clear, concise and on-topic question, complete with any details that would enable anyone else to help you with your problem. The fact that someone is new to a topic or a community is so irrelevant that it's edited out of Stack Overflow questions as noise.
    – Makoto
    Commented Aug 17, 2018 at 19:19
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    It shouldn't matter, but it almost certainly does. I can't find it now, but someone - Jon maybe - made the point recently that we're pretty good at providing feedback when someone's doing poorly, but not so good at it when they're improving. Upvotes vs downvote and close and comments. Statistically, someone's very first post is likely to be terrible... But if they stick around, their next post will be considerably better, and the next one better yet, and so on - the trick is to get 'em past that hump where they're very bad at this but they've learned something and can do better.
    – Shog9
    Commented Aug 17, 2018 at 19:19
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    I'm not going to deny that any beginner questions are awful or that asking questions is a hard problem @Shog9, since both of those statements are independently and verifiable of their own volition. What I'm highly leery of is the fact that a new system feature is being built to emphasize the kind of noise we keep out of our questions. Years of removing, "I am new to..." has demonstrated to me that it's not germane to the problem or the question at hand. What value are you looking to get out of a feature that does this? What problem is this really attempting to solve?
    – Makoto
    Commented Aug 17, 2018 at 19:24
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    @Shog9 Statistically we're much better at providing positive feedback than negative feedback, just look at how many more upvotes are cast than downvotes. Jon's post was saying that statistically people are more likely to come back when they get lots of comments, regardless of what the comments say, than if they get none, and that people that got lots of downvotes were less likely to come back than those that didn't, but that it was a much smaller effect than other factors, such as comments.
    – Servy
    Commented Aug 17, 2018 at 20:47
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    We're great at providing positive feedback, @Servy (albeit served up as intermittent reinforcement), but that's not what I'm talking about. Tell me if you've seen this: user posts terrible question - it's missing details, code is excessively long and isn't formatted, title contains no useful information whatsoever. Then they edit it to include missing details, maybe format the code. Question is still very much not good... But they've improved it a lot. To get them to improve it further, they need some reinforcement - but the question still sucks, so they don't get it.
    – Shog9
    Commented Aug 17, 2018 at 21:00
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    @Shog9 Sure, that's true enough. The question is how to give them feedback that they've made it better, while still making sure everyone else can still see that the question isn't actually good, because everyone other than the author (usually) just wants to know if it's good or not, not whether it's better or worse than it used to be.
    – Servy
    Commented Aug 17, 2018 at 21:03
  • Maybe I'm off base here, but it seems the answer to why is that SE is turning their focus away from producing and maintaining quality Q&A and towards making it a friendly and inclusive environment. Probably the ultimate goal is to increase retention so users will contribute more and improve the Q&A. Certainly, though, the put on your kid gloves message won't immediately impact the quality of Q&A in a positive way, so this is absolutely a user-focused change, not content-focused.
    – BlackThorn
    Commented Aug 21, 2018 at 23:06
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    @Shog9 Sorry, you're leaving out the fate of 98% of new users, and only counting the ultimate success of 2% of users, and blaming current users for the fate of those that never moved on. Show me the stats; show me how many users ask one question, maybe four in one day, and then disappear, and come back one week later, create a new account, ask the homework questions they put off doing, say five questions in 3 hours, then the account ends. Then before the final exam, or during their final take home exam, create yet another account and ask away, as they are yet again, a new contributor.
    – amWhy
    Commented Aug 21, 2018 at 23:31
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    There are lots of them, @amWhy. What's your point?
    – Shog9
    Commented Aug 21, 2018 at 23:34
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    Show me why in the heck we should parade a "New Contributor" banner attached to the eighth username for the eighth and newest account of one chronic new-account-creator gaming the system? New Contributors are going to be just as suspect as "member since today" new users. This is NOT FIXING what NEEDS to be fixed. Go back to the drawing board.
    – amWhy
    Commented Aug 21, 2018 at 23:40