Summary: This week, the Stack Exchange podcast travels to England, where Jeff and Joel are joined by Stack Overflow legend Jon Skeet (and son!) along with Marc Gravell. Picking up the discussion from last week’s episode: what constitutes a good question? Our very own “How to Ask” page is a start — and it’s a mandatory page on Stack Overflow for all new askers. It’s partially based on Jon’s own post, Writing the Perfect Question. Why should you downvote a question? Is there such a thing as a bad question? There most certainly is! We generally tend to consider questions where the asker put virtually zero effort into asking worthy of a downvote. Jon has also written a bit about reasons for voting on questions and answers. Two of the most important aspects of a good question, per Jon, are providing evidence that you’ve researched the problem yourself, and providing as much information as possible: detailed code snippets, error messages, objectives, etc. Some users don’t want to answer questions by users with low accept rates. Jon deeply disapproves of the practice of leaving comments nagging users about their accept rate, especially since you can gain far more reputation by writing good answers that are highly upvoted rather than ones that are accepted. Accept rate by itself doesn’t capture all of the information about how good (or bad) a member of the community a given user is. Perhaps accept rate could be expanded into a broader numeric metric of how “civic minded” a user is. Only two things keep Jeff up at night: the size of the constantly growing database, and maintaining quality within the community. We absolutely want a friendly and civil atmosphere, but as the site grows, people have to learn to follow the norms and guidelines of the site themselves without manual hand holding. It doesn’t scale. Ultimately, we can’t save every user, and some have to be turned away from the site in order to protect the overall quality of the community. You must give a little to get. To maintain quality, we started capping the number of questions that can be asked by a user in a given time period. If users are submitting more than 6 questions a day, or more than 50 questions a month … are they really putting the appropriate amount of research effort into their questions? Jon wonders if there are algorithmic solutions to detect users asking low quality questions – similar to how GMail reminds you when you reference an attached document in your email, but forget to actually attach something. Jeff responds that we already do that for answers, and are beginning to aggressively extend it to questions. Following up on the previous conversations about improved flagging tools — we get hundreds of flags per day, and the vast majority of them are valid. (Comment flags … not so much). Even though we’re buried in them at the moment, we welcome flags from the community because nearly every one goes directly towards a better signal-to-noise quality ratio on your site. So keep ‘em coming! Jon wonders whether the quality of answers is increasing or declining. Jeff and Joel respond that not only are the percentage of answered questions increasing but that answer quality, to their knowledge, has never been disputed. It’s fundamentally easier to preserve the answer experience than the question experience because users love to vote on answers: good answers go to the top, bad answers to the bottom. But the flow of incoming questions — which make up the entirety of the front page and the top 25% of every question page — have a hugely disproportionate effect on any Q&A system; that’s why we spend so much time focusing on them. The main issues we see with answers isn’t quality per se, but that people misuse the answer field to enter thank yous, pleas for help, and other irrelevancies. We do provide the How to Answ[...]
