But then again there's a fine line that both side seem to constantly walk over. 30% of question consists of "how to do this on my homework, please submit a full solution", while the other 30% that are legitimate question being over zealously patrolled.
I've suggested a few times already that part of this problem might be that asking questions is the first privilege you get and you get it for free.
If it costs something people would be more careful.
The cost can be anything:
- Classify 5 answers correctly
- Pick answers from a multiple choice
- Pay a dollar
- Wait a few days to activate
- etc
Ideally the user should be able to choose a method that suits them but make the account worth something.
As long as accounts are free, activate instantly and comes with a free right to ask questions, stop being surprised that new accounts pop up to ask silly questions.
By voting I'm referring to things like whether or not a question is a duplicate of another etc.
- first: multiple choice. You get 5 good questions and 5 good or bad answers. For each of the questions you have to answer if the answer is good or bad.
- Next: 5 known questions, that might be good or bad. You have to answer if it is good or bad.
- Finally: the moderation queue where the answer is only used as an weak signal to the actual moderators.
Success rate of 100% required for stage 1, 60% for stage 2 and just completion for stage 3.
This would leave a new user with a good understanding of what the site is for before they can spam.
It will also make their account seem somewhat valuable.
And if someone wants to pay someone to take their test, fine with me, at least the account isn't free anymore.
I cited some meta SE threads about that idea in my other comment but I forgot to add this thread as well:
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357436/why-isnt-pro...
Forcing comments on downvotes looks reasonable but it doesn't work at the high-traffic scale of StackOverflow.
[To downvoters, (1) are there any other discussion websites with comparable high traffic to StackOverflow that have forced-downvote-explanations so we can see if they work ... and (2) are you aware of the degraded-signal-noise-ratio reason in 2011 that Jeff Atwood made downvotes easier (free) instead of harder?]
I honestly can't tell if your comment is snark or some type of realistic actionable advice.
If you intended actionable, what exactly do you propose SO to do to not be "high-traffic"? One of the meta threads say they got ~12k questions a day. (Most of them bad.) Should SO set a limit of 500 questions and after that, each person gets an error on the webform saying "Sorry, we've reached our max question limit today. We want to stay a low-traffic site so hope you'll understand!"
To recap some SO history from Atwood's posts...
2008 - StackOverflow is opened
2010 - Atwood and others notice they're getting inundated with too many bad questions. At this time downvoting questions cost karma.
2011 - To counteract the high volume of low-quality questions, they made downvoting questions free to remove friction.[1] Atwood noticed that users were too restrained in downvoting the questions and didn't exercise that power enough to clean up the site. Therefore, forcing the downvotes to have comments (add friction) is the opposite of what they were trying to solve in 2010 which was quickly suppressing the bad questions. SO has more traffic now in 2019 than back in 2011.
Perhaps some that are suggesting the idea of forced downvote explanations (I admit that it sounds like a wonderful feedback mechanism) -- don't know of SO's scale and the problems they had in 2010? I dunno.
[1] Jeff Atwood announced change of policy -- "Downvotes on questions no longer cost the casting user 1 reputation, so they are effectively “free”. [...] So, it’s imperative the question list have a high signal-to-noise ratio, and removing the penalty for those users who do take the time to read a question and later find it to be useless so they can down-vote is conducive to that." -- excerpt from : https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-...
It's a hard problem, because it's about patterns. Everyone has a bad day and posts a badly worded comment every once in a while; I certainly have. That's okay, it's human nature. The problems start when a small group of people do it all the time, and turns out it's rather hard to actually detect those kind of patterns.