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  • This is a great essay, Jon, thanks for sharing these thoughts.
    – jscs
    Commented Dec 15, 2018 at 19:18
  • 2
    I have a number of currently noisy and overlapping thoughts on this through and well-presented answer. I may come back with a more substantive comment later. For now, I stand behind a lot of what you say, but I think you give “question quality” short shrift, and/or underestimate the numbing proportion of new questions which are just hopeless. I feel that every action you applaud in the section on comment curation, you dismiss or diminish when it comes to question curation, and vice versa. But outside of that, I am extremely impressed with this answer.
    – Dan Bron
    Commented Dec 16, 2018 at 11:44
  • 8
    It's far too late to say that Stack Overflow is for programmers I just can't agree with this. We have to have a minimum level of skill required to properly ask questions on SO. Removing that barrier is just opening the floodgates, and is already destroying the quality standards. This is likely the dichotomy between SE and curators; we deal with enough junk in a day, and want that limited as much as possible, and see loosening the standards as the first step to ruin. Your analysis is missing another class of user: those that believe in the mission above all else.
    – fbueckert
    Commented Feb 26, 2019 at 18:55
  • @fbueckert: If you re-read the section that you quoted from, you might see that I'm talking about readers, not posters necessarily. My analysis absolutely considers people who believe in the mission, but I suppose it wasn't as clear as it could be. It seems almost certain that if some system better than Stack Overflow gains traction, we'll quickly lose users such as yourself. I think the solution is to get more people onboard with the mission now while we have a chance.
    – Jon Ericson
    Commented Feb 26, 2019 at 19:43
  • 4
    Quantity has a quality all it's own. That's not usually used as a positive descriptor, though. Yes, if there was another system without this silly welcoming push, SE would lose a good chunk of it's userbase, and perhaps starting the spiral you're demonstrating. I think there can be a balance between being welcoming and maintaining quality, but it requires additional effort from new users. The current methods push far too much onto the established userbase, and indirectly faults us for the issues.
    – fbueckert
    Commented Feb 26, 2019 at 20:17
  • 3
    @fbueckert: We're close to announcing the results of our Ask a Question Wizard. The results are not dissimilar from the results of the question template experiment. People who get the more structured guidance are less likely to ask. We strongly suspect that it's because they didn't know how much effort was required. It's a very encouraging result.
    – Jon Ericson
    Commented Feb 26, 2019 at 20:51
  • 4
    I'd agree with that being pretty encouraging. But there needs to be a comparison between question rates with, and without, the wizard, along with relative quality comparisons. That's where much of this falls down; we can slow down the flood, but when most of what we get is junk, we still really only see junk. I doubt I'm the only one completely exhausted at trying to gently guide users into something approaching our standards, only to have that blow up in my face more often than not.
    – fbueckert
    Commented Feb 26, 2019 at 21:03
  • Great answer, and a powerful illustration of a point that can be very difficult to get across, both within SE and elsewhere.
    – duplode
    Commented Jun 4, 2019 at 16:31