If the problem is just repetitive, boring questions how about the power users just use the API to filter them out? Or improve the UI. The power to ruin someone else's experience is a heavy-handed alternative to some basic filtering.
If so, there's no obvious API call where one can put a "not boring" filter as a parameter. Do you have source code examples of what you're suggesting?
>The power to ruin someone else's experience is a heavy-handed
Right but there are 2 groups ... not just 1 group representing the question askers. There's also the other group of desirable experts providing answers.
If you tune the site's rules to avoid ruining the experience of the question askers', you've now ruined the experience for the answerers. (Again, refer to the cited threads of answerers' complaining about their experience being ruined because of bad quality questions.)
Create a "beginner" tag and then let people annoyed by beginner questions filter them out. Or allow people to filter out questions from askers with less than N reputation.
These solutions probably have their own flaws, but if there was an appetite to be more beginner friendly geberally you could probably road test them a bit more.
Without the tag "enforcement" means censoring a co-user and the problem manifests as "who can wield this authority fairly and justly against their co-users"?
With the tag enforcement means who can triage new posts to tag them appropriately when a co-user does not. They're not the same problems and I think objectively this is a better problem to have.
> who can wield this authority fairly and justly against their co-users
Not brand new users who don't appreciate how the site works and without moderation will make more work for users who are capable of answering question.
I don't have a code example but I think even if the API is inadequate it doesn't really matter - filtering content can be solved in many ways. The browser extension "Reddit Enhancement Suite" I think literally just parses the page you're on to remove undesired content. Reddit's /r/worldnews has content filtering I think might be done with CSS. SO could obviously make a minimal effort to empower such functionality too or build it into their UI. There's search services like the one HN uses that make the content a flexible API.
