
We’re Rewarding the Question Askers - Wowfunhappy
https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/11/13/were-rewarding-the-question-askers/
======
the_jeremy
This is a waste. Few people upvote questions because they are well-written; by
and large it is that they had the same question and you asked it before they
had to do so themselves. This heavily biases upvotes on extremely novice
questions from 8 years ago (before they were all asked), and gives new
question askers a bad example of what a good question is ("I just did the same
thing this person did, and they got 200 upvotes, and my question was closed in
2 minutes!").

Question askers get the reward of having their question answered. I think
votes on questions should be done away with entirely. Questions that should be
exemplified can have some other metric (stars for "this is well written and
generalizes easily for other users"), and low-quality questions should be
flagged or closed, which at least gives some sort of reason. Downvotes aren't
useful to askers because they have no idea what they're doing wrong when they
receive them.

~~~
tenebrisalietum
Keeping the participation friction as low as possible ensures the maximum
number participate, which ensures questions have maximum visibility. Changing
the simple vote up/down process with something requiring to specify a reason
can reduce the number views a question gets.

Also nothing is stopping a downvoter from leaving a comment explaining why the
question needs improvement, other than lack of reputation (you need a minimum
reputation for your downvotes to be visible anyway). People who care to
explain their downvotes can already use the existing process. Since comments
can be upvoted (but not downvoted), there is already an incentive in place for
that as well.

~~~
yabadabadoes
Many people mention they avoid commenting on downvoted questions for fear of
the wrath of the asker. People seem to feel differently about close voting,
perhaps since they are collected and presented as a group.

I don't really get the point of the vigilance toward bad but not intentionally
spam questions. The question # has been used, derank it and call it a day
until someone sees a reason to revive it.or the asker ASKS for help improving
their question.

~~~
jrumbut
The specific change I would like to see is to really raise the bar on what is
considered a duplicate.

I think a rule could be "if someone with a decent track record (for some
definition of decent, maybe 100 points? 1000?) felt the need to ask it, it's
not a duplicate." The bar could be raised in other ways as well, but this one
I think would reward people who have done the work to be a positive part of
the community.

We all have varying degrees of ability to generalize the principle of one
answer to another. The other part of this is that you get better at asking
questions through practice, which is hard to get early on. At this point, most
problems I can't answer are good questions or too specific, but it took a
while and I don't want SO to be the place where only those with 5-10 years in
can get help.

~~~
yabadabadoes
It seems to me like someone with few points is least likely to understand a
solution to a duplicate of their problem.. I don't really see the harm in
linking it and still letting people answer or comment on the proxied solution.

SE spends half the time saying an overlapping diversity makes it easy to find
a question and answer that fits and the other half eliminating that diversity
(and bringing non-adept people to dead ends in their searches that land on
SO.)

~~~
jrumbut
My proposal is intentionally moderate. If I had my way, I'd go further, but
this is something I've thought about and think it may be palatable to those at
SO who want to preserve the strictness and maintain respect for those who
contribute. You still have to put in a lot of work to figure out how things
work, but if you do the work you get credibility.

I see it as a way to meet in the middle.

------
fenomas
When one considers that the median experience of asking a question on
stackoverflow is "immediately closed as a duplicate of a vaguely similar
question from six years ago", this seems like a pretty superfluous change.

A far more meaningful way to reward askers would be to simply change how dupes
are handled. Instead of _closing_ questions with a link to a related
_question_ , give users a mechanism to _answer_ questions with a link to a
related _answer_. Then if the link really does solve the problem the asker can
accept that answer, and if not the original question can stay open.

I get why SO chose their current aggressive stance on dupes, but it's probably
time to try something else.

~~~
eitland
> I get why SO chose their current aggressive stance on dupes, but it's
> probably time to try something else.

Work is under way here and elsewhere:
[https://forum.codidact.org/](https://forum.codidact.org/)

Based on my past actions I guess I would be happy to donate a few dollars to
anyone who makes a better q/a site and makes me aware of it.

By better I mean:

\- important current database (allowed with current licensing)

\- rewrites the meta game to make helping (answering) more valuable than
administering (deleting).

\- raises bar to asking questions (stack overflow seems to always be crying
over all the stupid questions they get yet the thought of raising the bar for
asking questions never seen to get any traction)

\- have a karma tax or something on questions and contributors: just because
someone was the most valuable contributor or something was the best question
two years ago doesn't mean they still are.

\- don't split into many subsites for every topic, if people want to ask it
and other people want to answer it and it isn't illegal or scary or anything,
bust leave it alone. Karma tax will take care of it in the long run.

------
ebg13
I predict that this will have zero effect on anything. The people who care
strongly about accumulating SO e-points are the ones answering the questions,
not the ones asking them.

~~~
variaga
SO has always been hostile to questioners by design. It's a natural
consequence of requiring "high-quality" questions.

Since most questions will not be "high-quality" (for any reasonable definition
of "high-quality"), most new participants' experience will be of asking a
question and being told "that's a bad question" either explicitly (downvotes)
or implicitly (editing their question to "improve" it).

It gets worse as time goes on because of the "no duplicates" policy; the more
questions that are in the system, the harder it is to come up with a question
that isn't marked (correctly or incorrectly) as a dupe.

Banning all politeness words (hello/goodbye/please/thank you/you're welcome)
from questions/answers because they're "noise" is just the cherry on top that
makes people who aren't already immersed in SO culture think that everybody
there is rude/mean, no matter how many times they put "be nice" in the CoC.

Not saying these are _bad_ policies per se - SO has a stated goal of being a
"curated resource of high quality questions and answers", and they need to
separate the wheat from the chaff somehow, but the policies _will_ be
perceived as hostile by most new users.

Giving the questioners an extra +5 fake internet points will not fix any of
that.

~~~
a3n
> It gets worse as time goes on because of the "no duplicates" policy; the
> more questions that are in the system, the harder it is to come up with a
> question that isn't marked (correctly or incorrectly) as a dupe.

I'm curious why they don't have a no duplicate answers policy.

~~~
wyattpeak
I can't speak to their reasoning, but I value having multiple similar answers.

They often differ slightly in their assumptions or implementation, which can
help in grokking the core concept of the answer and not getting distracted by
implementation details, especially for languages and domains I'm not very
familiar with.

------
seph-reed
I've tried saying it on Meta, but that place is not great for discussion:

Newbies should help newbies.

There are lots of ways to incentivize this, but the basic gist is that users
who are just growing out of the newbie phase are in the best position to be
indoctrinating new arrivals. They'll have the most patience and understanding,
and it's an easy job that shouldn't be done by super experienced users.

Most of this could easily be isolated to a newbie pre-stage too. Basically, a
tutorial area in which new users work together to make their questions better
so they can move on to the non-tutorial experience.

Personally, I'd filter these posts out by default, but on days where I was
feeling nice I might go in and help out.

Worst case scenario: it takes some extra work from a newbie to get their first
bits of rep.

------
james-skemp
As meta visibility on SO is hit-or-miss, the thread on meta is at
[https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/391250/upvotes-
on-q...](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/391250/upvotes-on-questions-
will-now-be-worth-the-same-as-upvotes-on-answers)

------
whoisterencelee
It might be better to allow the market to decide how the reward mechanism
should work.

People who see a question as relevant and interesting to them, would add
points or monetary incentives. Thereby increasing the speed and quality of the
answers.

This mechanism has already been tested out and actually works only with crypto
currency due to low transaction costs.

Better explained 2 mins video:
[https://youtu.be/lcsgx_5c7D0](https://youtu.be/lcsgx_5c7D0)

Here is an example: What makes you nostalgic? Answer with #Obyte Know-it-all
and earn up to 410,172,272 Bytes :
[https://t.co/EaVFrscFC7](https://t.co/EaVFrscFC7) (enough Bytes to make >
700,000 transactions whenever you want in the future thanks to obytes' tiny
predictable fees)

------
andrewstuart
The biggest problem is downvoting.

Downvoting is toxic.

A better change would have been to make any downvote COST 10 points. Or at
least 1 point or 2.

~~~
KKPMW
I would urge you, or anyone who thinks that downvoting is toxic for this
matter, to volunteer in moderating questions written by new users for a day or
two.

Once you see a constant flood of "I made app, here my 1000 lines of code
(screenshot), I get error, where bug?" that the moderators have to defend the
site against - you might just change your opinion about the value of
downvotes.

~~~
andrewstuart
I'm not saying there should not be a mechanism for regulating that sort of
stuff.

BUT on StackOverflow it is entirely normal, even expected, that you post a
well thought out and reasoned question and its instantly downvoted because,
well, who knows why? Drive-by downvoting is simply negative.

A different mechanism could be used for the sorts of issues you identify.

~~~
Ajedi32
Can you point to an example of a "well thought out and reasoned question" on
SO that's at a negative score?

In my experience, that just doesn't happen. Most questions sit at a score of
0, and those which do receive votes are almost always upvoted. (The data
supports this[1].) Questions rarely end up with a negative score, and when
they do it's usually because there are obvious problems with their formatting
or content. (Usually low effort, off topic, or an obvious duplicate.)

[1]:
[https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1096887/q...](https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1096887/question-
score-frequency-whole-site#resultSets)

------
dsr_
Rewarding the question askers... like Monica Cellio, who asked a clarifying
question about the not-yet-implemented pronoun policy, and you canned her for
it? That sort of reward?

~~~
chowells
Why do you think she's telling the truth? Have you talked to any mods who
think stackoverflow made the right choice, but way too late?

I have. They say her behavior from start to finish was incredibly rude and
explicit in stating her plans to ignore the policy.

~~~
gjm11
If they say that, in that way, then they are being misleading.

Months ago, well before the current Stack Exchange pronoun policy was a thing,
she said (yes, explicitly) that she wasn't willing to use singular "they"
because it feels so wrong and confusing to her. This wasn't a "plan to ignore
the policy" because at that time there was no policy.

(It also doesn't appear to have been motivated by sexism, transphobia, etc.,
although people who say such things sometimes are; she is explicitly willing
to use neopronouns -- "xe" and the like -- for people who find that "he" and
"she" don't fit them.)

Then, much more recently, the upcoming change to the Code of Conduct was
announced in the moderators' chatroom. M.C. asked some questions about that,
_very definitely did not state any plan to ignore the policy_ , and promptly
got de-moderator-ated.

It's possible that she isn't telling the truth about what has happened in
private, away from the view of other moderators. Maybe she sent an email to SE
management saying "I'm not going to abide by this; fire me if you dare" or
something. But as far as externally-visible things are concerned, her account
of things matches up better with reality than SE's statements do.

There are, indeed, moderators who think M.C. should have been canned long ago,
but my impression is that there's something close to unanimity that SE should
not have canned her _the way they did_ , and that the majority of those with
any opinion on the matter think that they shouldn't have canned her _at all_.

(Source: am a moderator on a Stack Exchange site, have read all the relevant
transcripts from said chatroom. Note that discussions there are confidential,
so the above is about as specific as I am prepared to be about who said what.)

------
ddingus
Quora did this and the outcome was awesome, click bait type questions.

And a ton of them.

Net value loss.

~~~
unionpivo
But I bet their traffic increased. I see quora often in searches.

I might be pessimists but I think they knew exactly what they were doing and
are happy with results.

And I am guessing new SO leadership wants the same.

~~~
ddingus
I am sure they are quite happy. Users? Not so much.

Getting at great contributions is now much harder. I use Quora much less now.

Churn 'n burn for traffic dollars is a strategy.

Suppose it opens a door somewhere too. Do that enough, and there is clearly
room for a less noise filled source.

IMHO, the difference here is Quora has a plausible, casual user case that
makes sense. The people who helped to build Quora content won't give two shits
and will move on, but Quora itself may do just fine. Meh.

Degrading the value to current users of SO to attract more in general, leads
where for SO?

------
monksy
I'm still going to complain and not use the service. (I wrote the article a
while ago:
[https://theexceptioncatcher.com/blog/2012/09/stackoverflow-i...](https://theexceptioncatcher.com/blog/2012/09/stackoverflow-
is-a-difficult-community-to-participate-in/) ) [Which was after the first
recalc]

It took them 7 years to change their minds on it. Sigh.

\---

Side rant: This whole piss people off/break things and expect people to stick
around is a dumb idea. Company does stupid things, I'm going to find an
alternative company and not return.

------
ilaksh
That's awesome and its a step in the right direction.

And I notice a lot of female employees or managers being mentioned which might
be a coincidence but it also might be deliberate and somehow be related to the
idea that females might have more empathy? Which could just be my own
prejudice and not true but I dunno.

But anyway, if they are going for nicer/more empathetic employees and
policies, that's great, but its not going to stop all of the (mostly male)
super-critical narcissistic arrogant shaming-happy vote-whores who are eagerly
waiting to get in another passive-aggressive veiled hint that I am an idiot
while they downvote my question.

Not planning to ask another question on Stack Overflow anytime soon, thanks
though.

~~~
iudqnolq
How do you know who downvotes you? Isn't it anonymous?

~~~
ilaksh
Oh right. I meant to say anonymous (mostly male) super-critical narcissistic
arrogant shaming-happy vote-whores.

But also, less than 10% of Stack Overflow users are women.

~~~
iudqnolq
Fair enough.

------
killface
wow, what a great way to completely avoid the massive controversy they've been
trying to sweep under the rug for a couple months now.

------
reportgunner
This makes me feel like it's a beginning of the end.

It is beyond me why they would want to award spammers for creating more spam.

------
ShteiLoups
It is funny that we have the "techies" (programmers, engineers, etc) designing
and managing these social media platforms when the techies are stereotyped as
awkward and antisocial.

Who decided that software developers should have the final say over how people
interact? I feel like there's probably a field or two of experts on that that
should be being consulted.

------
JohnFen
Interesting.

I've never asked or answered a question on SO (I wouldn't dare!) because I can
plainly see the horrorshow that is likely to come with doing that by reading
other questions. Over time, I've come to simply ignoring SO for the most part.

I think I may check in from time to time to see if the place actually
improves.

