After my initial failed attempt to deliver the message, I started a thread on Meta Stack Exchange, against my better judgement. I KNEW beforehand my proposals would be received negatively, since those who spend the most time hanging out on meta are those who are most likely to resist changes. But I was still tempted by the possibility of conferring with like-minded people (and I found one). Among the slew of downvotes, the only verbal objection to my proposals, by a mod, alongside his straw man on the less important part of my post, using (apparently deliberate) repeated out of context quotes, comes down to the following one liner: Everything is fine the way it is, so don't bother. Obviously, the logical next step is for me to prove that everything is NOT fine the way it is, and therefore those who care about Stack Exchange should come up with something if they don't like my proposals. So I started a new thread the next day. Here is a screenshot since my post will probably be gone within a week, if I remember the procedures correctly. See, the diligent mob quickly exercised their power to the farthest extent to make sure someone pushing for change couldn't get anywhere. Ahh, I mean mod, the one with a diamond, and his happy followers.
I think this more or less helps prove the points I made in my previous blog post. But there is a silver lining. I am fortunate to have met an amazing person, Danilo. A wise man. A pragmatic philosopher. A true human being. Seriously Stack Exchange, checkout his reply to my post. If you can convince Danilo to work for you as Director of Community Moderation (or whatever title you choose to give him) then you will be LUCKY. Yes, I can see you guys want changes too, judging by Shog9's reply. But I don't think much is going to happen. Yes, you have put together a system that worked extremely well in the past, and is still working very well in many ways. But this is not surprising, because you have merely duplicated the fundamental structure that held human societies together for thousands of years: social hierarchy. Unfortunately, the successful system is also a highly inefficient one: the vast majority don't have vested interest in the society they live in, and therefore aren't motivated to improve it any more than to improve their individual conditions. It also has a deadly flaw: the elites don't want changes, and have the power to stop changes. That's why for thousands of years human societies never improved much. And that's why there aren't many hierarchical societies left: once a completely new and more efficient system emerged, it swept across the world in less than three hundred years. Now, I believe I have done my part. It's starting to feel like a full time job, and not a fun job. I can live with slow people getting confused, but I can't live with smart people confusing things (you can see those two people who were the most active in my threads). Stack Exchange, Good Luck! The ball is in your court now. You have to make a decision whether to change things while angering established users, or stay put and wait to be overtaken by other organizations, their programmers using Stack Overflow as a reference and, maybe, my ideas.
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Dear Stack Exchange: Let me start by expressing my sincere gratitude for your service to mankind, and your contribution to the spread of knowledge. Really. It's a praise you deserve. I have been using (lurking on) your sites since their early days, and the value I have derived from their high quality content is immeasurable. I can't imagine how I could have got to where I am without them. I am happy to see you grow. However, there are worrisome trends that need to be addressed. I've been thinking for a long time, and waiting for my ideas to ripen. Today a post by Sara is the reason I can't wait any longer. I have to write something now. It's going to take away many hours from my work and leisure, but for a healthy future of a service I love, I think it's worthwhile. Like Sara's post, I will start with my own recent experience, as a "new contributor". For those who don't feel like spending time on the gory details, including me catching and confronting two downvoters, feel free to skip straight to section 3. 1. An "off-topic" math question Let me start off by getting some math technicalities out of the way. In what follows we will be concerned about two types of math problems: Type A: Show that something does not satisfy a certain property. For example: Show that 1 is not a solution to: Type B: Show that there is nothing that satisfies a certain property. For example: Show that there is no real valued solution to: Type A is often quite easy. In this case, you only need to mechanically evaluate the left hand side of the equation with 1 in place of x and arrive at an inequality. Type B usually takes a lot more work. Give this example a try see if you still remember how to do it. In fact, some of the biggest problems in the history of mathematics, and some of the biggest open problems, are of type B. Solving them require a tremendous amount of ingenuity, sometimes giving birth to whole new branches of mathematics. Now starts the story of an "off-topic" math question. I decided to name this post "What two very bad days (and everything else) on Stack Exchange taught me about building Stack Exchange's community", to make it a sequel to Sara's post. But there is a difference between the use of badness. While the badness in her story is merely perceived (as she realized later), the badness in my story is not. Let me know if you don't feel the badness in there after reading and I will have some questions about your childhood. jk By the way, my "off-topic" post is no longer there. But I am sure you guys still have it somewhere. Feel free to go and see what happened. I can only give an abbreviated account here, leaving out many details. A few months ago, I got into a serious quest for a good proof of this statement: A loop around a hole cannot deform continuously to a point. If you recognized that this is a type B problem, well done! If not, think of it as "there is no continuous deformation ...". You may have heard the saying that a donut is like a tea cup, but different from a golf ball. A proof of the statement above is the fundamental reason why such a saying is justified: a loop around the hole of the donut cannot contract to a point across the hole, but on a golf ball, there is no such obstacle. Obvious as this may seem, existing proofs are clear demonstration that this is far from trivial. Surprisingly, this interesting question of fundamental importance to algebraic geometry was absent from Math SE. So, I decided to add it there. I think the title I used was: Prove that a loop around a hole cannot deform continuously to a point. I also took care to properly set up the question in full mathematical formalism in the question body, properly typeset. Having used Stack Exchange for so many years, I have read many great questions that make Stack Exchange what it is. I know this question is what Stack Exchange deserves. Maybe I should also mention that I am fortunate to have studied math in one of the world's top math departments along leading experts in their fields (some with Fields), so I have a good idea what a math question should look like. Anyway. I got no answer the first day. The first evening, somebody helpfully left a comment pointing me to a similar question posted many years ago, without an answer, and with comments directing the OP to the same existing proofs I had already gone through but felt had much more to be desired. Feeling hopeless that I would get an answer any time soon, I decided to give it a try myself. The next day, I actually came up with a short sweet proof that would only be a third of the length of an existing proof and, hopefully, leave nothing to be doubted. Not bad! After years of disuse, my math is still with me! Eager to share my proof with the world, I came to Math SE, only to be greeted with an ugly notice on my question (which already had several upvotes) like the one below, with a confusing message, preventing me from even answering it myself: (found on a different question, names redacted, underscores are mine) Note the word "off-topic" appears twice there. Underneath my question, there was also a comment by one of the five who had voted to close my question, linking to a question he thought was "possible duplicate", which was, in fact, a question of type A. Let's refer this person as Angel Eye. More about him later. So my question was "off-topic" and/or "missing context" and/or "possible duplicate", which I struggled for quite a while to make sense of. I eventually decided that "off-topic" was probably due to a wrong template, to ignore "possible duplicate" for the time being, and to focus on "missing context". Nobody told me exactly what kind of context they thought was missing. But my guess was that something was needed to make the question more accessible and appealing to the average users there. So I spend an entire Friday afternoon editing my question to try to convince even those who have not received advanced math training of the shortcoming of existing proofs and the necessity for an alternative proof. After the edit, I decided to wait patiently for the notice to go away. The next day, Saturday, I got back online. The notice was still there. No comments about my extensive edit that had taken me an entire afternoon. No one seemed to care. I began begging for attention. I made one comment under my question politely inviting Angel Eye to give his feed back on my edit (since he seemed to care enough to have left a comment there linking to a "possible duplicate"), and then another comment pointing out my question and the "duplicate" he suggested were not really duplicates. No answer after hours, although Angel Eye was obviously online. I wasn't sure whether he saw my comments or not. I found out there was a chatroom named CRUDE. Landed there, met a decent person I will refer to as Blondie. Blondie helped me understand the situation: "off-topic" is also used to mean "Missing context" on Math Stack Exchange. For the first time I felt my English wasn't good enough for my participation there. It appeared from a post on meta Blondie referred me to that one high rep user once tried to change this. But given that he himself was under suspension at the time I saw that post, the hope of him materializing this change is minimal. Blondie led me to another chatroom, named "In search of a duplicate question" or something to that effect. There, I make an important discovery. This is the part of the conversation I can recall: Angel Eye: I can't believe this question has not been asked before! Blondie: Somebody already linked a similar question. Are you not satisfied? Angel Eye: That question does not have an answer, therefore cannot be a dup. . . . Many lines below, Angel Eye declared that he finally found a "dup", which was the type A question linked in his comment under my question he referred to as a "possible duplicate". I had a bad feeling about this. Maybe I had just wasted a full day of my life and nothing good would come out of this. Nonetheless, having already spent so many hours there, I decided to pursue further. Worth noting is that Angel Eye was actually participating with his real name, and he didn't neglect to mention he is a math Phd candidate, studying at XYZ university. This made me sincerely worried about the future of this country that once landed man on the moon. A math Phd student unsure about the difference between a type A problem and a type B problem? Or was he trying so hard to close my question that he was willing to overlook the difference that a high school student should be able to discern? I thought a message in chat might be a good way of getting hold of Angel Eye. So again, I politely asked him for his feedback. Meanwhile, more disturbing discoveries: According to the timeline of my question, after my edit, five people had already voted to keep it closed. One person first voted to close it, then voted again to keep it closed, leaving no feedback whatsoever. Let's refer to him as Tuco. More about him later. Another finding: CRUDE is quite an appropriate name for what is in fact a new question slaughtering house. As I waited there, batches and batches of links rolled by. Those were the questions to kill. My question probably got killed just like that. When I was near my last straw, I finally heard back from Angel Eye. Interestingly, he seemed closer to his last straw. His first line was: Stop pinging me from all over the network! Which I read: sorry I was so busy I couldn't get back to you. And he went on (here I am trying to recall it the best I can): I don't care about your question any more! It was missing context. After the edit, it's still missing context. It's a poor question. I voted to close your question. I am glad I did. ... I felt I was starting to boil. I told him he obviously didn't understand what I was talking about, if he didn't care, he should have stayed off. But, I said: let's stop here. Then I left chat. I didn't want things to escalate. Stopping there was the best thing to do. Being told he didn't understand what a newbie was talking about was probably a big insult. Not long afterwards, my rep dropped. Guess who downvoted my question? Well, who else? In this case, it was pretty easy to find out: one suspect, matching time of "Last seen" and of the downvote in my question's timeline. I issued a warning in CRUDE, reminding him that the math world is a small world, telling him not to do anything stupid, but nonetheless, refrained from calling him out and carrying it to the next level. After all, he was participating with his real identity, and my dark side was still under control. It caused a little stir. I don't know if I give a talk titled How to catch a downvoter, whether it will help to improve the situation of "new contributors". Before that we are stupid new comers and worthless nuisance (obviously so in the eyes of Angel Eye), afterwards maybe we will become dangerous monsters and dreaded devils? Don't know which is better. That evening, the score of my question went up and down several times. Maybe there was some disagreement in CRUDE and they were fighting with votes. Maybe somebody wanted to test my ability to catch a downvoter. Don't know. Don't care. The next day, I make one final edit to my question. The previous night somebody came all the way over looking like he was interested in a mathy discussion. Turns out he just wanted to drop me a piece of his opinion, that I did not understand the existing proofs, then leave. Very disappointing. So I made a final edit, announcing that I would no longer monitor that question, and people who did not find it interesting need not care. Soon afterwards, my rep dropped again. Guess who this time? It was Tuco! The guy who voted to close my question, and then voted again to keep it closed. What happened next was both dark and comical. I found a post by Tuco bragging about how he came up with math questions for student assignments. NO! A math teacher he is! I left a comment, asking him why he just downvoted my question. Taken back, he quickly replied: I will vote to reopen your question What is this? A 540 degree turn??? He voted twice to close my question, then downvoted it, but now he was offering to reopen it!!! Really??? To interject, regarding the initial closing votes, besides these two obviously invalid votes, there was a third one by a student who was, judging by his questions, still learning the basics. I think I made him understand I did not appreciate his participation in the closing process. What I went through might be an extreme case (I sure don't want to try again to learn about the less extreme), but hopefully it offers insight into what is wrong on Stack Exchange. Many good questions on Stack Exchange have the ugly closing notice hanging underneath. I am glad somebody answered them fast enough to prevent them from being closed. Back to the story: I questioned Turo whether he had standards or was just flipping coins. Got no answer. Moments later, his comment offering to reopen my question disappeared. And I could no longer type his name. Guess I was blocked by him. Ha! I had managed to make myself a dangerous monster, a dreaded devil. Remember that lousy math teacher that ruined/almost ruined your love for math (and maybe your trust in teachers in general)? Ever wondered where they hang out in their spare time? Maybe they are here! I found a party of lousy math teacher and maybe-soon-to-be lousy math teacher, who have questionable qualifications and doubtful integrity, who have such pathological desire for power that they need to be constantly bullying new comers, and who masqueraded as diligent maintainers of the quality of the site but don't even bother to make the obvious improvement to the quality of their own work by straightening up the confusing and self contradicting message in the boilerplate notice they slam on new questions every day! Well, at least this is what I thought of them for the next few days. I was also seriously considering contacting Angel Eye's math department, cautioning them against giving him any teaching jobs so that he doesn't have a chance to ruin any student's future: "This guy shall never teach, or he would ruin every student he touches". I eventually talked myself out of it. The problem is not that there are bad people. The problem is, in a bad system, good people become bad. If you guys are trying to repeat the Stanford Prison Experiment on your sites, then you are probably doing very well, at least on Math SE. (If you are not aware of that experiment, then I urge you to go learn about it now.) I eventually decided to believe those people I encountered are perfectly normal people in their normal lives, and maybe also are perfectly competent with math. It's just the dysfunctional system of Stack Exchange that got them not only to forget their math, but also to lose basic human decency. And I was probably right. 2. Ask Ubuntu, answers nobodyFew days ago, having already left the sick feelings from the previous episode behind, I got on Ask Ubuntu and became a "new contributor" again. This time, nobody went extra miles to try to close my question. Great. But this time, there is a different challenge: I don't think anybody will ever answer my question, or even leave a comment there. Here are the current counts: 325,137 questions 109,451 questions with no upvoted or accepted answers That's about a third! I am the kind of person who always tries to give back a little more than he takes. So I answered two questions. My first answer was to a scripting question. I wrote the script, tested to make sure it met OP's requirements. It was easy. I was glad I was able to help somebody quickly, until shortly afterwards, somebody else linked an identical question in a comment: the OP had crossposted the same question on Unix SE. A day later, the question I answered appeared abandoned, while the question on Unix got an accepted answer, which was actually posted nine hours after I posted mine. Although I hadn't spent much, I felt I wasted my time. And I felt taken advantage of. Used and discarded. As to my second answer, I'd just put the screenshot here to save myself from recapping it: This is not to show what is wrong with OP, but rather, that something was happening to me. I was getting restless, unreasonable and passive aggressive (probably didn't matter, since OP never showed up again), after only two answers. See, here is the issue with Ask Ubuntu. This is a free alternative to the paid consulting that costs maybe $500 a month on ubuntu.com, and is obviously also used as a free alternative to many other paid services, and maybe even Microsoft's paid services (one question I saw asked how to completely remove Ubuntu from a dual boot system with Windows 10; I am sure Microsoft would be happy to give him a BIG discount on this one). Most askers here just want to come get a quick and easy answer and leave. Most questions here are of the type "please troubleshoot my computer/server", with gruesome technical details about some obscure software issues. So what makes people want to participate here just to deal with these? I took a random sample of user rep from the newest 50 questions: "8,30,1,507,1,1,16,1,6,11,101,1,761,1,6,6,1,6,1,6,459,16,116,67,18,1,1,1,164,1,92,1,11,22,6,106,6,6,18,17.8K,101,30,106,1,1,1,1,11,386,53" 17 out of 50 are 1, who will probably never return. 36 out of 50 are below 50. How many of them will stay and invest in the community? You guys have the data, can do some stats. Well, actually, I have them too! Thanks for making them available. So I ran some queries on Data Explorer and got these results on the top five sites. The percentage of users with rep=1: Stack Overflow: 69% Mathematics: 51% Super User: 58% Ask Ubuntu: 62% Server Fault: 47% About half of Stack Exchange are 1 rep users! What do we know about them? Since each site appears to have a large number of users who don't have any posts at all, we exclude them from the population and consider only what I will refer to as active users: who own at least one post, deleted or not. Users with rep=1 and with only a single post, which is a question, as a percentage of active users: Stack Overflow: 14% Mathematics: 10% Super User: 14% Ask Ubuntu: 16% Server Fault: 9% Users with rep=1 and with only a single post, which is a question, as a percentage of active users with rep=1: Stack Overflow: 53% Mathematics: 67% Super User: 54% Ask Ubuntu: 59% Server Fault: 50% Now I think I have a better understanding of what happened on Math SE. People thought I was just another 1 rep user to come and demand their valuable time and leave. And in a certain way, "solve this math problem" is like "troubleshoot my computer". Mass deletion of new questions keeps people's attention focused on those questions that survive, and thus helps produce good answers, even if this means deleting arbitrarily and indiscriminately. It's dysfunctional, but it's how the community copes. 3. The problem: the userbase has grown, but the system has not. Stack Exchange. On the one hand you are trying to expand your userbase. On the other hand, it's still using the system of an internet forum in the early 2000s. For a small forum with a few users that don't change much, it's easy to establish a small set of rules that are more or less consistent, that almost everyone knows about, and that are enforced more or less consistently by a few moderators. But for Stack Exchange with maybe tens of millions of users and countless sites, the same is vastly insufficient. Some privileged users randomly enforcing some arbitrary rules, some little known resolutions buried under years of meta posts, or simply, their personal tastes. This sums up how the sites are being run. In many ways, an internet community is like a country, and I am sure you guys already have a major country, by population of course. For a country to function properly, there has to be politics, law, and economy. You sure are trying hard to run everything democratically, allowing (and encouraging) users to vote everywhere on everything. But have you ever thought about how a democracy differs from a mobocracy? Rule of law, is what makes the difference. I am not implying there is no "law" on your sites. Problem is, some "laws" are impossible not to enforce arbitrarily without some kind of case law with cases to back up the laws. What is being "kind and friendly", "patient and welcoming", and what is considered "easy" in "make it easy for others to help you"? Everybody has different interpretations. A bigger problem is, there are probably many many decisions made over the years in thousands of threads that could end up as "laws", subject to the standard of not being vague and not causing contradiction. What if everybody in the US had to go through all the minutes of all the congressional sessions since 1776 just to determine what the law says? Do you think there would still be rule of law in this country? Users who participate here are forced to take a chance on the "laws", and to subject themselves to arbitrary decisions. Imagine a country where the only way to find out whether the law is with you or against you is through trial and error (a year in prison and you find out you did something against the law), and the law also varies depending on who is enforcing it. Do you want to live in that country? I certainly don't. An even bigger problem is the abuse of popular votes. Imagine a country where votes by five citizens over some vague charges, say blasphemy, can put someone to death, the same five citizens acting both as judges and as executors. Do you want to live in that country? I certainly don't. I am sure you are aware of a guy who has been doing his grand hack to get Stack Overflow blocked by the Great Firewall of China. He is everywhere. It appears from some posts on meta that the hack actually works. Even if not, judged by his own words, his actions are already off-putting enough to keep away a significant population, with Stack Exchange apparently behind him. And you can't just tell him to stop, because then it will look like an arbitrary, top-down decision that infringes on some user's right to free speech, as far off-topic as his "free speech" may be for a programming site and as offensive as his "free speech" may appear to users from China. The moderators sure won't bother. Probably some of them are perfectly happy with him halting Stack Exchange's expansion and the incoming army of clueless newbies. And you may also be aware of this guy: Ron Maimon. He has an interesting personality, but causes no harm to the vast population of average users. He contributed a lot of high quality content on Physics SE and other sites, yet was forced to go, because he couldn't play well with the power structure there. So we are talking about allowing one person to keep away the users from a country with a population of 1.3 billion (that's more that of the US and EU countries combined), and at the same time, kicking others away simply because they and the "majority" don't agree. See here is the irony of a mobocracy: On the one hand, everybody is free to make up and enforce rules. On the other hand, no serious rule can come out of it, much less any enforcement of the necessary. On the one hand, everybody can exercise great power. On the other hand, anybody could fall victim to somebody else's power at any time. No wonder new users don't want to stay. If I were an average new user, I would do the least possible to get my problem solved and get out ASAP. At the same time, existing users are obviously also growing frustrated by the new users, feeling that they come and go without investing in the community, and the need to police them is a constant drain on the scarce resources of the community. If someone is thinking: "go away, you don't deserve my attention", then can't expect them to act like "come and let me help you". It's a vicious cycle. This leads us to the malfunctioning economy. On Stack Exchange, the economy is supply and demand of knowledge. If you want an economy to work, you can't simply increase demand. When a site has tons of unanswered questions, constantly growing, there is something wrong with the economy. Demand is pretty easy to come by. Desire for knowledge is human nature. And if it takes ten minutes to come here, ask for help, and leave with a solution, why bother spending hours figuring it out? Supply, however, is not, with a few exceptions like Politics or Workplace. For most sites, people who choose to come here and share their knowledge, going through gruesome technical details and risking being wrong, do so for various and complex reasons. Do you understand these reasons? If not, then when you are busy inviting new users, maybe it's worth keeping in mind it's those who are here to share their knowledge, the suppliers, that you should focus on. Think about how to attract them to your sites. 4. How to improve the system As I said, to fix the malfunctioning economy, the focus should be on boosting the supply.
It will be helpful to let users self classify their questions according to whether they want to get help with their problems, or help the community discover something interesting. Note it's very wrong to simply assume everybody asking a question here is trying to get help. There are some well researched questions with rich references that are themselves valuable sources of knowledge. There are also some highly interesting questions that are natural catalysts for energetic and fruitful discussions. Questions like these are rare but are what make Stack Exchange what it is. This separation by intent will let those who come here to help others (see (c) below) better focus on those who really need help. Some kind of priority and fairness minded scheduling can be implemented to handle the questions, giving the "help me" kind some boost when they need to be answered quickly, while the "help the community" kind can wait and gather good and thorough answers. The separation will also help prevent some existing users from over-interpreting "why it's relevant to the community". Most questions are irrelevant to most people. (The more advanced and technical, the more irrelevant.) But it makes sense to have them here because they may help a few people now, they may become relevant to more people later, and most importantly, they are what keep things going, because they are the vast majority of questions. Regarding the implementation details, since the two categories are not mutually exclusive, could ask the user something like: "Please choose one of the following statements that better describes the reason why you ask this question". For those who choose "getting help with a problem", there should be an onboarding process for first timers: Make sure they know what is expected of them, and give them enough positive examples of how to make it easy for others to help them. Make sure they have read the relevant rules, especially those that may be enforced against them so that there are no unpleasant surprises. Allow them, actually, require them to ask questions about the expectations and rules unless they promise they already understand all. Those should be their first questions on the site, not something they have to figure out through trial and error until when they have finally accumulated enough rep to participate in meta. This also constitutes a proof of work. Once they have made a little investment, they will have the incentive to continue to invest in the community, instead of opening a new account each time they want to ask a new question and then disappearing without a trace afterwards. For those who choose "helping the community discover something interesting", make things easy for them. And for those who come to answer questions, make things very easy for them, unless it's a site like SE Politics for example, in which case make sure they go through some kind of onboarding on how to write good answers (back up your opinion with with facts, etc.). Regarding those various and complex reasons why suppliers choose to come and share their knowledge, here is a list I can come up with, from the more important to the less: (a) the fun of sharing what they know (b) the challenge of new problems (c) the joy of helping others (d) the respect of their peers (e) the approval of their colleagues (f) building their resumes (g) earning points We will leave (a) and (b) to the last. So let's starting with (c). (c) the joy of helping others: The joy can be felt only with the knowledge that the help has been helpful. Right now however, most of the "new contributors" (more like "new takers") just come, ask a question, and completely disappear. It's unclear whether they got what they need or simply forgot about their (maybe unimportant) questions. To fix this, in the onboarding process which I will talk about later, make sure new users understand that once somebody starts working with them, they should make their best effort following through. (d) the respect of their peers, and (e) the approval of their colleagues: What I propose may be controversial among the established users, but since you are more concerned about welcoming new users, and since this will be, in the long run, good for the health of the community, let me be straight forward: Stop displaying a user's rep along their names. If someone cares, let them go to the user's profile page to find out. We like to judge each other. We all do. But we don't like being judged. The negative utility of being judged far outweighs what we get from judging others, if there is any positive utility there at all. So why make it so easy for people to judge each other, when this can quickly turns into prejudice? Also, a single ruler can't measure everything, so why emphasize rep as the single ruler on Stack Exchange? Imagine a world where wealth is the only ruler, because "it measures a person's contribution", no matter how imperfectly, and people judge each other by the amount of gold or diamonds on them. Would you feel comfortable living in that world? In fact, what a user's rep measures is rather unclear. Somebody could ask a smart question and get a lot of points. And a one liner answer to a popular and easy question is usually worth far more points than a long, detailed answer to a difficult and obscure question. Maybe it measures a combination of a user's helpfulness and public appeal, accumulated overtime (so newbies are at a severe disadvantage), but one thing is for sure: it does not measure the user's expertise and knowledge. Otherwise the rest of the world with 0 rep would all be cavemen from the stone age, include Terence Tao and Albert Einstein, if he were still around. The focus should be on the arguments themselves, not who said them. But subconsciously, we like to think that the more rep a user has, the more he knows, and the better everything he says. It works it's way into people's minds (include mine). One sure way of discouraging a new contributor is to let him feel his contribution is worth less because he has less rep. Of course, at the core of the problem is the flawed voting system, where rep is produced. First of all, the semantics of a vote is rather unclear. It could range from "I agree" to "upvoting is free, so why not", and in case of a downvote, from "I don't think so" to "Here comes the vengeance! It's what you get for hurting my ego! Catch me if you can!". Even if everybody used votes to express agreement and disagreement, it' would still be hard to tell what these votes sum up to, when a voter could range from a freshman in high school struggling with some new concepts to a professor emeritus from a top university who's taught a related subject all his life. What if, say, ten high school students upvote an answer while one professor casts a downvote. Is this answer correct or not? A good voting system is an interesting topic I cannot possibly cover here. But if what I have said so far has convinced you that the existing voting system and the rep points they generate are an important contributing factor to the bad user experience on your sites, a breeding ground for prejudice and distraction from things that matter, then you are probably interested in an alternative. Here is the idea: The key is not to identify good questions or good answers, but to find good matches between those who ask and those who answer. Instead of letting users cast votes with undefined semantics, let them rate the match. While an upvote increases the likelihood that a user (and those similar to him/her) gets matched with a similar question/answer, a downvote merely does the opposite. If a user is unhappy with a match. Just try a different match. The same goes for posts and viewers. We want good matches. Don't display the ratings. Use them to sort what you show to a user. Those who can't ask a good question or write a good answer don't need to be constantly policed, or to be told loudly that they are bad. They will learn when they have seen enough good examples. No rep needed. No feelings are hurt. No beating the newbies until they are either scared away or meet the expectations of the elders. And this naturally creates a more welcoming environment for those who come to ask questions. They are not left out. Of course there will still be an influx of bad questions and bad answers. But they are not a problem if not many people see them. And the nice thing is, algorithms doing content recommendation are already plenty. No need for heavy R&D. Of course, often there is still the need to improve an existing question or answer. Currently, that's done through comments. And although I think there is strong consensus that each downvote must be accompanied by an explanation in the comment to be considered constructive, more often than not I see frustrated people asking "Downvoter, care to explain why?" and innocent attempts by beginners getting tons of downvotes with nobody caring to explain why. So why not add a new feature "suggest an improvement", and along with that, "I have something to add". They together should fulfill all the legitimate purposes that comments fulfill right now. Upvotes in the sense of approval have better alternatives: collectibles, which I will talk about later. (f) building resumes: You obviously have already given it plenty of consideration. I have nothing to add here. (g) earning points: As childish as it may seem, we like to collect useless things. That's why Pokemon had such a successful go. If you want to incentivize users to share their knowledge, why not create some badges, tokens, stars, banners, bears, dinos, unicorns, or whatever looks cute or fancy, and award them to users when, for example, they answer a question no one else likes to bother with? They are free for you to give away (aside from a small one time design cost and a little bandwidth), but could create enough utility by themselves for lots of people to want to come and stay. And most importantly, when everybody feels they have plenty, conflicts will reduce, and politics will be lighter. To be backward compatible, there could be something special, for example, a gold plate with current rep embossed on it, that existing high rep users can display along with other collectibles, so that they can continue to enjoy their status here. And as a replacement of upvotes, people can give away their own collectibles. Yes, I said "give away", not create out of thin air, like the current upvotes. That's what makes them valuable. There should only be limited ways for them to be created, controlled by you guys, and used, for example, to give a boost to questions needing a little extra attention. Now, do you think we have a reasonable replacement for the existing voting system and rep points? Back to (a) the fun of sharing what they know, and (b) the challenge of new problems. Both are intrinsic, so don't need external stimulation. What you need to do is to provide a good environment so that (a) and (b) are not damaged. Most people who come here to volunteer their free time probably prefer not to be embroiled in some power game here. Your focus should be on making the sites appealing to them. Make it easy and simple for them to share what they know while enjoying the process, and minimize everything else, including politics. But the existing system, with its chaotic, conflicting, vague and often implicit rules, their arbitrary enforcement, the abuse of popular votes (tyranny of the majority), and the emphasis on social status, provides the exact opposite. Hopefully, the alternative system I proposed above can eliminate most conflicts that would happen today (in particular, free up most of the resources currently occupied with running the new question slaughter houses) but "law" will still be necessary when there is disagreement. Here is what you need to do: Establish procedures for establishing new rules. Organize meetings where rules can be passed (or rejected) by elected representatives. Compile and index established rules to make them easy to look up. (Probably can't expect volunteers to do this kind of work for free. You guys, I mean, those of you who are paid by the company, should step in.) Establish an independent committee that arbitrate disputes following established rules. The members may not at the same time act as rule enforcers. An archive of cases should be maintained, and consistent applications of rules in the cases is a must. The goal is that: (a) the rules should be able to evolve organically in a well organized fashion. (b) everybody participating here should know the rules that matter to them. (c) there should be sufficient separation of power. And consider incorporating the following Five Pillars of Stack Exchange Sites, in the spirit of Wikipedia's "Five Pillars" : Every user has the right to ask questions and post answers, provided such answers and questions facilitate the spread of knowledge. A user's participation shall not impede the spread of knowledge. Users shall obey the rules enacted by the community following established procedures. Users shall treat each other with respect. Users shall behave as if they were in a classroom or workplace. Note that much of Code of Conduct is already covered by a single requirement, respect, which can be defined with little ambiguity: if a users feels somebody else is disrespectful, then that person is disrespectful (excluding extreme cases). It's hard to *require* people to be nice, but it's easy to require them to be respectful. Together with the last pillar, it should be loud and clear to users what is expected of them. More importantly, note the phrase "spread of knowledge" appears twice. Hope you guys all agree it's ultimately what we are here for. All the debating on meta, all the headache of babying new comers while keeping the content quality up, all your hard work building and maintaining the hardware and software, are, and should be, ultimately, for the purpose of making it as easy as possible for people to spread knowledge and share what they know. So why not make it explicit? Sincerely, A "new contributor" |
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