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
27 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Dec 16, 2019 at 17:00 | comment | added | Tim | "What I have found unwelcoming has been the close voting of "imperfect questions" and downvoting of legitimate answers to questions deemed unfit for the community." Amen brother! What I truly love is when the clique running the site closes a question as off topic when the question is about word choice AND THEIR OWN HELP CENTER STATES ACCEPTABLE QUESTIONS ARE "Word choice and usage"!! I mean, how can your question be off-topic when that site is LITERALLY about your question?? | |
| Dec 5, 2019 at 3:16 | history | edited | This_is_NOT_a_forum | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
(While we are at it.) - yes, I did not bump it (that was by a question edit)! Removed (some) meta information (this belongs in comments).
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| Jun 4, 2019 at 20:24 | comment | added | Monica Cellio | @Servy, Michael, I've deleted some comments that were starting to get heated and were going in circles. I don't think either of you is going to convince the other, and both of you can make your cases in answers. | |
| Jun 4, 2019 at 16:39 | comment | added | Dan Bron | Thank you for your answer. I appreciate the open-mindedness of it and the honest perspective from a new users. I very much appreciate your demonstration of understanding of the prevailing perspective. There's things to chew on here. I'll be interested if your perspective changes, over time and as you see more and more (very similar) questions to see if it stays the same, converges towards the existing consensus, or something else. And welcome to EL&U! That's my primary site. | |
| Jun 4, 2019 at 16:18 | comment | added | fbueckert | Your standards are looser than ours. There's nothing wrong with that, but you're going to get a whole lot of pushback about trying to get curators to loosen up. If you've done any amount of curation for any length of time, you learn quick that people don't appreciate you for going easy on them. So most people now vote quick, vote often, and have no issue with new users needing to put more effort into their posts in order to allow them. | |
| Jun 4, 2019 at 15:51 | comment | added | fbueckert | Additionally, one of the primary reasons to close questions to to allow the asker to edit it into shape. At which point, it can be reopened. Unless it's egregious spam or rude, it usually has until the roomba comes and grabs it before it gets deleted. | |
| Jun 4, 2019 at 15:47 | comment | added | fbueckert | Using question, "legitimacy" is a common defense against curation. To be blunt, how badly (or even if) you need to solve the problem isn't something we weigh when curating. It's an often heard refrain to guilt curators into bypassing their question. And it doesn't work. If you want help on SE, then meet the quality standards. If you can't, or won't, do that, well, then I'm sorry, but your question doesn't belong here. | |
| Jun 4, 2019 at 15:24 | history | edited | Michael | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 188 characters in body
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| Jun 4, 2019 at 15:15 | comment | added | Michael | @Servy Actually, I did not make it a point to disallow closing questions that aren't useful to the community, rather my argument has been all along that broadening what is acceptable, particularly outside of StackOverflow, could be part of what's needed to make SE more welcoming. I see that leaving that out of my second point is a fault in my answer, which I will remedy. | |
| Jun 4, 2019 at 14:58 | comment | added | Servy | @Michael Just dismissing anyone that disagrees with you as being snarky and insulting, purely because they don't agree with completely destroying all of the core values with the site, is not appropriate. It's not snark to tell you that there are lots of sites out there that work in exactly the way you want this site to work. It's not snark, or unwelcoming, to tell you that SE was founded on the premise of being different from those sites. You're more than welcome to participate in the site, but you're expected to meet the site's standards while doing so. | |
| Jun 4, 2019 at 14:55 | comment | added | Servy | @Michael The closure criteria are the result of lots of discussions over an extended period of time to determine what is and isn't useful. You should familiarize yourself with those discussions, see why the current closure criteria exist, and if you have compelling evidence for why different criteria would be better, provide it. But just saying, "people shouldn't be closing questions because someone might find it useful," isn't going to be compelling argument for many. | |
| Jun 4, 2019 at 14:54 | comment | added | Servy | @Michael "There are questions there that have been closed that would, in my opinion, be useful to the community." And yet your answer makes a point of saying you don't think people should be allowed to downvote or close questions that aren't useful to the community. So that's clearly not what you've said thus far. If there's a particular category of questions that you feel is generally useful to the community, despite meeting a close criteria, then explain why you think those types of questions are useful and shouldn't be closed. | |
| Jun 4, 2019 at 14:50 | comment | added | Servy | @Troyen Sure, some questions are contentious as to whether they're in scope or not in various communities. There's always a line somewhere. But this answer seems to think that lots of questions unambiguously and contentiously poor questions belong here. | |
| Jun 4, 2019 at 7:25 | comment | added | Magisch | @Michael This is the inherent clash here. You want to change what SE is and looks like, and a bunch of people see this as it becoming worse, while you see it as becoming better. You probably won't find much support for that here, as meta tends to be rather conservative as far as SE is concerned. | |
| Jun 4, 2019 at 0:45 | history | edited | Michael | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
answer edited to reflect what was brought up in the comments
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| Jun 4, 2019 at 0:28 | comment | added | Michael | @Servy I must thank you, as your comments on acceptable questions really illustrates exactly what I was talking about. You would prefer an exclusive, not-overly welcoming environment on SE, and I can see the benefit in that, but I believe an adjustment to the standard can be made and actually increase the usefulness of SE to all of its users. On the other hand, the polite snark with which you dismissed me ("but if that's what you're looking for...there are plenty of other places that offer it") cuts against my argument that comments aren't the main issue. :P | |
| Jun 4, 2019 at 0:21 | comment | added | Michael | @Servy You have misunderstood me. I am certainly not saying that there should be no quality standards for questions. What I'm saying is that the standard is too high, at least on certain stacks. I can understand why you wouldn't want to open up StackOverflow to basic questions of syntax, etc., but that same standard shouldn't be used on say the English Language & Usage or English Language Learners stacks. There are questions there that have been closed that would, in my opinion, be useful to the community. | |
| Jun 4, 2019 at 0:14 | comment | added | Troyen | There's a difference between "I don't like closing questions" in general and a fight over whether certain types of questions provide "value to the community" (which is amorphous since people find different things valuable). Gathering data about that distinction would be difficult, but the answer might result in dramatically different approaches to how to address the unwelcome culture (via tool changes, process changes, whatever). I think ultimately comments are a visible byproduct, but generally not themselves the cause. | |
| Jun 4, 2019 at 0:10 | comment | added | Troyen | @Servy Some questions are clearly off-topic (e.g. a programming question on MSE), but every site has a gray area of topics where the community splits on whether they should be allowed or rejected (e.g. software tools on SO, game identification on Arqade, homebrew on RPG, etc.). Rulings on those areas are often contentious and applied inconsistently, and it'd be interesting to see how much of the unwelcome effect comes from questions in those types of categories vs general downvote/closure culture. Even bystanders get sucked into contentious category wars, moreso than a downvote on a question. | |
| Jun 4, 2019 at 0:03 | comment | added | Michael | @Magisch I agree that the change would need to be cultural rather than forced by the system, which was what I intended. I'll edit my answer to reflect that I mean for users to reserve downvoting for those purposes. | |
| Jun 3, 2019 at 23:51 | history | edited | Michael | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
corrected a typo
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| Jun 3, 2019 at 22:01 | comment | added | Servy | On a personal note though, there are lots of sites out there on the internet that are designed around the premise that all questions (or at least all non-spam questions) are welcome, and to which there aren't quality standards for questions or answers, merely a place for anyone to say whatever they want. Of course, SE is not one of those places, and doesn't try to be one of those places, but if that's what you're looking for, instead of a highly curated place designed to produce a high standard of quality, there are plenty of other places that offer it. | |
| Jun 3, 2019 at 21:59 | comment | added | Servy | But regardless, thanks for confirming that SE is incorrect to focus on comments, in in your eyes as a new user, and that it's actually the very idea of having quality standards, and the closing and downvoting of bad content, that you as a new user find unwelcoming. | |
| Jun 3, 2019 at 21:57 | comment | added | Servy | "I think downvoting good questions is antithetical to the purpose of the site" You're not going to get pretty much anyone to disagree with that here. The problem is you've defined "literally every question" as "a good question", rather than defining "questions that are actually useful to the community" as "good questions", the way the site itself has defined it. | |
| Jun 3, 2019 at 11:19 | comment | added | Magisch | Reserve downvoting for answers to that give incorrect answers. That is a cultural change which might be positive but is unenforceable by the software unless you require reasons for downvote, which is a suggestion that has been discussed and declined a good two or three hundred times so far. | |
| Jun 3, 2019 at 11:18 | comment | added | Magisch | Reserve the option to close answers for duplicates, wrong category, or incomprehensible. Off topic questions do need to be closed and deleted, and there are many off topic questions where changing tags or migration aren't an option, because they're off topic everywhere on stack exchange. To be closed as duplicate a link to the duplicate is already required and displayed prominently in a banner at the top of the question. | |
| Jun 3, 2019 at 8:28 | history | answered | Michael | CC BY-SA 4.0 |