Timeline for If 95%+ of comments have been rated as "fine", does the site deserve its reputation of "unwelcoming"? Do we still need to focus on it?

Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0

12 events

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Jul 23, 2020 at 22:17	history	bounty ended	anonymous
Jul 23, 2020 at 0:05	history	edited	Jon Ericson	CC BY-SA 4.0	Add an image to support a link that might break at any time.
Jun 4, 2019 at 16:31	comment	added	duplode		Great answer, and a powerful illustration of a point that can be very difficult to get across, both within SE and elsewhere.
Feb 26, 2019 at 21:03	comment	added	fbueckert		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.
Feb 26, 2019 at 20:51	comment	added	Jon Ericson		@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.
Feb 26, 2019 at 20:17	comment	added	fbueckert		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.
Feb 26, 2019 at 19:43	comment	added	Jon Ericson		@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.
Feb 26, 2019 at 18:55	comment	added	fbueckert		`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.
Dec 21, 2018 at 18:56	history	bounty ended	jscs
Dec 16, 2018 at 11:44	comment	added	Dan Bron		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.
Dec 15, 2018 at 19:18	comment	added	jscs		This is a great essay, Jon, thanks for sharing these thoughts.
Dec 12, 2018 at 6:10	history	answered	Jon Ericson	CC BY-SA 4.0