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There's a thing that happened recently with someone leaving Stack Exchange. Jon Skeet even has a blog post about it. I was thinking about it, too.

I want to suggest a badge (Don't have a good name right now. Maybe "Hand-holder") to help address the problem. Provide a badge for users with more than 3000 rep (would have been eligible to vote to close) who edit a question scored -2 or less asked by a user with less than 50 rep, when that question later receives an upvote by someone else. Even better if the "new privileges" notification tells people they are now eligible for this badge.

The idea is to encourage people to fix bad questions to extent possible, rather than simply shouting them down right away. I don't think this will solve the problem, but it will send a better signal about the kind of behavior we expect from experienced users

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    What would this badge accomplish that the editor badge doesn't already cover?
    – Makoto
    Commented Mar 19, 2018 at 14:43
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    There is a disconnect here, Conery had 310 posts at SO before he decided to rage-quit. Not a newbie by a long shot. It is also very unclear how "check on comments and answers" was possibly getting him lectured and downvoted. The more typical pattern with users like that is that they get bored. Or got couple poorly received questions, they never forget that.
    – Hans Passant
    Commented Mar 19, 2018 at 14:48
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    Maybe "Hand-holder" The Twitter thread you linked to has several people insisting that the Tumbleweed badge is maliciously sarcastic. I think a badge given to higher rep users for improving a post for a low rep user is going to be viewed as "~elite~ SO users patting themselves on the back".
    – BSMP
    Commented Mar 19, 2018 at 14:55
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    @BSMP I'm definitely not thrilled with the name, please suggest a better one. But the 2000 rep minimum is hardly elite level, and "patting on the back" is what gamification systems are all about.
    – Joel Coehoorn
    Commented Mar 19, 2018 at 14:57
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    Keep in mind that of all of the problems that a question can have that make it a bad question, it's fairly uncommon for them to be problems that can be fixed by an editor other than the author. There are lots of ways for edits to make a question better, but generally they're either making a bad question less worse, but still bad, or making a good question even better, but when it was already acceptable from the start.
    – Servy
    Commented Mar 19, 2018 at 14:57
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    @JoelCoehoorn The problem is that the later upvotes are so much more likely to be caused by something other than the edit though. Either the OP added some information (either in comments or via a later edit) that helped the question actually become acceptable, or it was simply someone who disagreed with the earlier users' opinion on the quality of the post regardless of the edit (or only because the edit bumped the question), etc. The odds that the reason for the later upvote is the edit just isn't super high. Again, not zero, just not super high either.
    – Servy
    Commented Mar 19, 2018 at 15:01
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    I would ask the question about the rep limit on this idea. If a low rep user can edit a post in order to save it like you are looking for here why can't they also be eligible for the badge? I don't see why someone with low rep can't help a new user improve a question.
    – Joe W
    Commented Mar 19, 2018 at 15:04
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    Users without the vote to close privilege can still flag a question for closure and while it does not have the same weight as a close vote it still is attempting to draw attention to and close the question. If you are really trying to provide an alternative to closing a question it should take into account flagging which can lead to closure as well.
    – Joe W
    Commented Mar 19, 2018 at 15:09
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    Just to sound a contrarian note, suppose a -5 "steaming pile of low effort" that's been edited a couple of times (probably trying to make it at least comprehensible) that has managed to avoid being closed. Now it gets upvoted by a charitable soul "for the feelz". That deserves a badge?
    – Mark Benningfield
    Commented Mar 19, 2018 at 15:16
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    @Mark why not? We give bronze badges away just for filling out the profile. Maybe the edit saves a question. More likely not. But we reward the behavior for the editor. And now maybe the OP has a better experience and will stick around to ask better questions in the future.
    – Joel Coehoorn
    Commented Mar 19, 2018 at 15:36
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    It is one of the site's biggest problems, the steaming pile entries get re-activated over-and-over again and repeatedly makes it back onto users' Interesting page. A good question that doesn't need editing disappears quickly. Rewarding the crap with multiple edit badges seems counter-productive.
    – Hans Passant
    Commented Mar 19, 2018 at 15:38
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    Yes, we award token participation badges to new users that at least make an attempt at engaging with the site's charter principles. Although, as @Servy pointed out, the link between a subsequent upvote and a prior edit seems pretty ephemeral. And, if the badge is to be awarded to every editor of the question, this looks like it would incentivize "polishing turds" more than anything.
    – Mark Benningfield
    Commented Mar 19, 2018 at 15:57
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    I'm having some difficulty following the path from "answer with score +29" -> "rage quit" -> "blog by Jon Skeet about answers and askers meeting each other in the middle" -> "users are being shouted down". I agree with every word of Jon's post, and I don't find this badge to be a completely unreasonable idea, but I am befuddled as to what they have to do with each other.
    – jscs
    Commented Mar 21, 2018 at 0:35
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    @JoshCaswell Rob Conery got a childish comment in one of his answers, which gave him the final bit of confirmation that SO regulars are largely jerks. Lots of people think we are all jerks. Sometimes that is due to a genuinely bad experience; sometimes that comes out of a refusal to even try to understand the principles of the site. All causes get conflated into a shapeless mass of negativity (often hallmarked by the word "toxic", which is appropriately shapeless), and Rob's tweets got sucked into it. Presumably Jon realises the conflation, but wants to meet the aggrieved folks in the middle.
    – duplode
    Commented Mar 21, 2018 at 2:10
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    "All causes get conflated into a shapeless mass of negativity" This is an excellent observation; something I too have wondered how to address. That said, I saw the comment(s), and I'm sure they were aggravating. I sympathize completely with frustration of getting comments from people who don't quite know what they're talking about, where you know exactly what you're talking about. I still don't see the line from "people run their mouths in comments on answers" to "people who ask questions are being 'shouted down'".
    – jscs
    Commented Mar 21, 2018 at 2:48

1 Answer 1

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To this point:

The idea is to encourage people to fix bad questions to extent possible, rather than simply shouting them down right away.

There are two problems which exist with questions today which are being greatly simplified with this feature request.

  • A question with problems to warrant downvotes may not be (and more times than we like to admit, is not) fixable by some John Doe editor.
  • The mob exists and it gets it wrong sometimes. There's no system in place to pick up the pieces after such a thing happens.

A badge to edit content isn't going to help address the fact that the mob has already been here and ransacked the place, nor is it going to make the frustration go anywhere, either. Worse, it assumes that The Problem™ is something that anyone looking at a question can objectively identify, isolate, and fix without any further input from the OP.

Most questions I see that have problems usually follow the pattern of, "Can you do this for me?" No amount of editing effort I put into a question will ever be able to fix that. The questions that I do see which are rough copy edits but still serviceable questions are more the ones I spend my time and energy on, but those are incredibly rare. I've seen maybe a hundred in the six years I've been here.

A while back when Stack Exchange was looking for micro-privileges, I had floated the idea of spending your own rep to help a question get forgiven. I'm not sure what status that project is in right now but I'd hope it gets revisited for the simple use case you describe: we want to encourage users to improve their questions and not feel like this place is too overly oppressive.

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