The site should be made newbie-friendly
Or, rather, question-friendly.
I realize that such a blunt suggestion is likely to be met with immediate backlash, from all sides.
But please hear me out.
Pl...
I’m curious as to what reward you believe that people are getting from closing questions?
there’s a bunch of badges for things that can only be accomplished by flagging.
You also get the nice ‘feeling’ of clearing your queue. The faster you do that the better you feel. It’s literally all rewards for putting as little effort in to get as much ‘reward’ as possible.
I’m not sure how rewarding those are - or common. A total of 257k out of 21M doesn’t suggest many people are getting rewarded for flagging (and that’s just one). Raising 80 helpful flags (for example flagging spam or people leaving rude comments) is less than 0.07% of the user base.
The cleaning the queue is… Stack Overflow’s review queues have never been cleared. Today’s stats for Stack Overflow’s close queue ( with 3000 items in it that time out after 3 days https://stackoverflow.com/review/close/stats ) has had 273 reviews done (not all were close votes) done by 18 people (out of 21 million) and most of those people who have done the majority of the reviews received the marshal badge over 5 years ago and so aren’t getting any new rewards for doing more. You are equally rewarded for clicking “leave open” as you are for clicking “close” in the queues.
There is no reputation reward for any of the review tasks either.
With over 1000 rep on Stack Overflow, you should have access to the First Posts and Late Answers review queues where you can get an idea of well, give it a try to see what’s in there. There’s a fair bit of people trying to sneak links into new answers to old questions (Late Answers) that having another set of eyes on would help catch before they get too far. Likewise, there’s a lot of posts to First Posts where someone could help a new user and take the time to help them make their question better… or if it isn’t a good fit for the Q&A format of Stack Overflow flag it for closure.
Without the gamification of the badges, the participation in community moderation and curation of the material would likely be even less active.
With over 1000 rep on Stack Overflow, you should have access to the First Posts and Late Answers review queues where you can get an idea of well, give it a try to see what’s in there. There’s a fair bit of people trying to sneak links into new answers to old questions (Late Answers) that having another set of eyes on would help catch before they get too far. Likewise, there’s a lot of posts to First Posts where someone could help a new user and take the time to help them make their question better… or if it isn’t a good fit for the Q&A format of Stack Overflow flag it for closure.
Those queues were the ones I’m talking about. SO rewards clearing your queue of 40 per day for each queue (maybe that’s different if you have more rep).
Without the gamification of the badges, the participation in community moderation and curation of the material would likely be even less active.
I very much doubt that. Forums for helping others existed for decades before SO and even now a lot of stuff has moved to discord, Reddit, Zulip, and slack and they still have moderation and most people actually get answers to their questions.
there’s a bunch of badges for things that can only be accomplished by flagging.
You also get the nice ‘feeling’ of clearing your queue. The faster you do that the better you feel. It’s literally all rewards for putting as little effort in to get as much ‘reward’ as possible.
I’m not sure how rewarding those are - or common. A total of 257k out of 21M doesn’t suggest many people are getting rewarded for flagging (and that’s just one). Raising 80 helpful flags (for example flagging spam or people leaving rude comments) is less than 0.07% of the user base.
The cleaning the queue is… Stack Overflow’s review queues have never been cleared. Today’s stats for Stack Overflow’s close queue ( with 3000 items in it that time out after 3 days https://stackoverflow.com/review/close/stats ) has had 273 reviews done (not all were close votes) done by 18 people (out of 21 million) and most of those people who have done the majority of the reviews received the marshal badge over 5 years ago and so aren’t getting any new rewards for doing more. You are equally rewarded for clicking “leave open” as you are for clicking “close” in the queues.
There is no reputation reward for any of the review tasks either.
With over 1000 rep on Stack Overflow, you should have access to the First Posts and Late Answers review queues where you can get an idea of well, give it a try to see what’s in there. There’s a fair bit of people trying to sneak links into new answers to old questions (Late Answers) that having another set of eyes on would help catch before they get too far. Likewise, there’s a lot of posts to First Posts where someone could help a new user and take the time to help them make their question better… or if it isn’t a good fit for the Q&A format of Stack Overflow flag it for closure.
Without the gamification of the badges, the participation in community moderation and curation of the material would likely be even less active.
Those queues were the ones I’m talking about. SO rewards clearing your queue of 40 per day for each queue (maybe that’s different if you have more rep).
I very much doubt that. Forums for helping others existed for decades before SO and even now a lot of stuff has moved to discord, Reddit, Zulip, and slack and they still have moderation and most people actually get answers to their questions.