How do we make sure there are more "good" questions on the front page (to inspire new users)?

Question

Recap of events

There was some discussion here and in chat with concerns of the quality of new questions and the quality of questions visible on the front-page. The consensus (or more honest: people I agree with so who I will selectively quote) is that if a users sees better questions on the front-page he/she is more inclined to ask better questions. To quote: "Make the front page represent the sorts of questions we want". Putting bad questions on-hold does not help with accomplishing this goal, even if moderators use their power to quickly close bad questions they are still very visible.

Implications

So closing questions does not give us a good front-page, does not inspire new users, and frankly pisses of existing users (who are irritated by all the bad/closed questions while trying to find something interesting to answer/comment/moderate).

Question

My question to meta is: how can we make bad questions less visible on the front page.

My thoughts on a good solution

While I don't have a direct answer to this question I think a good solution should not censor/remove bad questions. Visibility is the keyword here.

Answer 1

I definitely think improving the front-page question view is a good idea. I don't think we should do it by "closing less," (closing less is essentially another way to say, "allow softer questions," which I would much prefer we discuss -- if we're going to discuss it -- as a separate topic where we actually use that terminology; it is a viable option, but it also has serious risks).

Rather, I think we should do it by promoting pre-existing good questions to the front. There's only one effective way to do this, and fortunately that way goes hand-in-hand with what I perceive to be the fundamental key problem on this site (as discussed in the "be nice" threads): lack of engagement by existing active users. As I write this, we have 1279 (that's one thousand two hundred and seventy-nine!) unanswered (zero answer) questions.

A good portion of those questions are bad, many are duplicates, some are unclear. But there are also some really good questions in there, with difficult and/or interesting answers. There are also a lot of questions that could be good with a little love and editing. Answering or editing those questions not only increases user engagement, it improves the quality and utility of the site overall and (particularly relevant to this discussion) it bumps them to the front page.

Consequently, my call to action here would be for everybody who has participated in this thread (or the other one) to go out and start working through that backlog of unanswered questions. If you can't vote, flag. If you can't edit, propose a suggested edit instead. And every single one of you can answer. This is supposed to be your community. Take charge of it.

Answer 2

This isn't a real answer, just some stats that are too lengthy to fit into a comment:

Looking over the current front page, the vote score for a question actually looks like a pretty good heuristic for predicting the question's quality. That is, questions voted +2 or higher look pretty legitimate. And the ones voted -1 or lower look less ideal, in terms of being the type of questions we want to encourage on this site. This suggests that the voting members of the community are still successfully identifying good questions -- the problem we're perceiving is just the ratio of bad questions to good ones.

At the time of writing, out of 48 questions on our front page, 11 of them have a vote score of +2 or higher. 6 have a vote score of +4 or higher. 10 have a vote score of -1 or lower.

Comparing to other SE sites: On Stack Overflow, 9 of the 48 front page questions have a vote score of +2. 2 have a vote score of +4 or higher And 2 have a vote score of -1 or lower. (Note that Stack Overflow gets a much higher volume of questions; the vast majority of their questions have zero votes in total)

On Superuser, 12 out of their 48 front page questions have a vote score of +2 or higher, and 10 have a vote score of +4 or higher. 4 have a vote score of -1 or lower.

Per-site front page stats ("voted up" == +2 or higher, "voted down" == -1 or lower)

• Stack Overflow: 20% voted up, 4% voted down
• Superuser: 20% voted up, 8% voted down
• GameDev: 20% voted up, 20% voted down

It's interesting (and perhaps surprising) that the percentage of up-voted questions on the front page turns out to be almost identical between the three sites, even with Stack Overflow's substantially higher churn rate. The real difference between the questions shown on the front-page of the different sites seems to be in how many of the non-great questions are bad enough to attract down-votes.

I wonder whether any other SE sites have down-vote rates similar to ours? We might be able to learn from them, if they've dealt with this situation in the past.

Edit:

For the sake of interest, here's a graph showing the percentage of GameDev.SE questions asked in different months that were downvoted to -1 or below:

Interestingly, this shows a big peak of downvoted questions a little over a year ago, after which it fell right off, only to have a few brief peaks later on, including a big one that appears to be going on right now, which lends some support to @Anko's suspicions. But even these big peaks are topping out only at about 15% of questions being downvoted.

But here's another interesting graph, this one showing the percentage of questions asked in GameDev.SE each month which would eventually wind up with a score of at least 4:

Note that this isn't a cumulative graph; pretty regularly, month-on-month, we've had a lower and lower percentage of questions reaching a +4 score ever since the site opened. In July of 2011, nearly 50% of all questions asked were reaching a score of at least +4. In July of this year, only 4% of questions reached +4. (To be fair, though, we got almost twice as many questions in July of this year as we did in July of 2011)

The query I used is saved publicly here. It prompts you to specify a minimum threshold, and graphs the percentage of questions which scored beneath the specified value.

Please feel free to mock my rudimentary SQL skills, and let me know about the terrible blunders I've undoubtedly made which completely invalidate these graphs.

Answer 3

What I notice about the problem is that Gamedev seems to have a lack of high-rep questioners. I have a shakey hypothesis that the more knowledge a person has, the fewer questions they ask. Also that the more familiar with SO rules a person is, the fewer questions. Obviously, this isn't a problem unique to gamedev, it's just more pronounced here.

Here's an anecdotal comparison (big rep difference, not a big membership duration difference):

https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/users/1430/josh-petrie?tab=questions https://stackoverflow.com/users/22656/jon-skeet?tab=questions

One thing to note in those lists is that they both have self-answered questions. That's better than OK, it's really good. (Also note the extreme Answer-to-Question ratio.)

---

We could ask more good questions. We have talked about doing that before. Good questions do not rely on the asker not knowing the answer.

---

So the hard part about this solution is that it takes a LOT of individual work. I haven't followed my own suggestion from that meta post above, because Laziness. (As far as I've noticed, Josh is the only one who has. I'll take credit even if he would have done it anyway.) It takes far more time to construct a high-quality question AND an answer than it does to fire off close votes, comment on passable questions, and upvote the rare good question. But it would certainly help fix the lack of good questions.

I'm sure everyone has information they want to share. That's why we frequent the site in the first place. I just think we ought not wait for someone to ask the perfect question. Perhaps we could treated this site more like a blog with a wacky, 2-part format. You have a schizophrenic conversation with yourself. One side asks a question, and the other answers it.