12 Hours of GDSE: Is quality going downhill?

Question

I have just harvested the questions asked on Gamedev.SE in the last 12 hours (from when I started writing this). Here they are, from most recent to last:

1. The most popular pattern for game-related programming in C++
2. Do UDP game clients/servers block for receive calls?
3. 2D jerky motion with AddForce and physics
4. simulating light using masks on iPad
5. 2d character sprite customisation
6. Is there anything equivalent to Portal 2's linked_portal_door in any other engines?
7. How to make and correctly use progress bar in cocos2d-iphone?
8. What is the correct way of changing image of existing CCSprite?
9. Something like libgdx for C++ / cross-platform (with mobile) SDK
10. CCsprite.flipX not working!
11. Do Apple and Google ask for a share if custom payment is done in a free app?
12. Sea water shader using only fragment processor
13. VBO and gl*Pointer management practises?
14. Carmack Head Mounted Display optimized DOOM and the Oculus Rift are on the way, where are some good developer forums for this new class of HMDs?
15. XNA Framework sprite vectors and also scaling

In 12 hours, we got 15 questions. So let's look at how well we're doing.

#1 is pretty obviously unacceptable. If that were on SO, it'd have been closed and deleted inside of 10 minutes. It's clearly subjective, polling, and not constructive; it's not even good subjective.

#9 is likewise garbage. It's a "find me some tech" questions, which we don't do.

#13 is at best borderline.

#14 is obviously unacceptable too.

So, of the 15 questions, 4 are things that ought to be closed. The concern isn't the ratio of 4:11 (over 25%); the concern is the fact that all four questions remain open.

#1 is understandable; it's recent, and GDSE doesn't get huge amounts of traffic. But as of right now, #9 has exactly one close vote: mine. #13 again has only my close vote. And #14 has three including mine. (note: #1 was closed 1 hour 34 minutes after it was posted. Which is pretty reasonable for a site this size).

Question 9 has been on the site for 8 hours. Granted, these are daylight hours, and it's only been viewed by 35 people. Indeed, all of these questions have low view counts, mainly in the 30s and 40s.

Having these kinds of questions on the site for extended periods without closing them is a broken windows problem. It gives the appearance that these questions are accepted. If that's what we actually want to say, well, that's a matter that we should take up as a community. But if it's not, if these ought to have been closed, then not closing them is a problem.

So, what is going on here? Is this just the community refusing to close inappropriate questions? There has been some resistance to the idea of closing the obvious poll question.

Are there not enough users with close voting rights to do something about it? That suggests a deeper problem: that many users leave or otherwise aren't sufficiently active to get rep and privileges on the site. That we have a lot of new people but few experts. That's not healthy.

One thing that would be indicative of the latter is a large number of "newbie"-style questions. Things like 8 (due to the answer being something you could look up) and 12 (overly broad due to not really understanding how difficult that task is). I'm not sure if there's enough to say that this is happening, but I do have a general sense that there is a fair degree of cruft on the site.

What do you think? Is this a real phenomenon, or is it just a bad 12 hours (where the people who would close it weren't around or haven't yet dropped by)? Do we need to be more proactive about closing bad questions? If so, how do we do that?

Answer 1

Voting to close requires 3000 reputation. We only have about 50 users who are beyond that reputation gate, and while I recognize almost all of them, many of them seem to visit the site irregularly (based on a random sampling and review of the "activity" timeline for some of the users).

Of those fifty users, even fewer participate in meta discussion regularly. My hunch is that the core group of us to contribute to meta on a regular basis is probably no more than ten people.

Similarly, of those fifty or even those ten, I'm sure we don't all agree on taking such a stringent stand on discussion-oriented or subjective (et cetera) questions, or on how strict such a stand is warranted. We are only human after all.

Given that, I'm not entirely surprised that it takes us a while to amass the critical mass necessary to close some questions. Perhaps in addition to voting, one should flag the questions that are obviously egregiously off-topic or inappropriate, as the moderators tend to review flags rather quickly?

I don't think the overall quality of questions is going down, although I'm not sure if it's accelerating beyond our user growth rate (so in effect it stays approximately the same as we get an influx of new users who ask completely inappropriate questions but also retain older users who understand how to ask better ones).

Answer 2

I think that part of the problem has to do with the fact that the people who do know how to ask appropriate questions are plenty aware on how to search for answers (here and elsewhere), so you will see less "intelligent" questions here because those people know of other places to look.

Also, a lot of the inappropriate questions are coming from people that will most likely give up on game programming because they either don't know where to look for their answers or ask questions that some don't feel like answering. If you look through some of the old inappropriate questions that get closed, you will see (more times than not) that those questions are the only ones on their profiles. That and I think some of them get offended that their post was closed so they leave.

This site is open to the public so you can't easily control the huge influx of aspiring game devs, and nobody is required to help with the 'housekeeping'. I don't really see any other option than to continue doing your part and eventually, more users will hit the 3k rep and hopefully help out. I like coming here so I know when I do get to that point, I will help out.

Answer 3

I've been using GameDev.SE less lately because of just how many trivial, uninteresting questions there are, or how many "help my code isn't working" questions there are*.

I'm here to learn from others, and to learn by articulating what I know into really good answers or solving nontrivial problems like in that tiles-on-walls question, and there's less opportunity to do both now. It is beginning to feel like digging through trash to find the good stuff.

* On code problems:

Even these are fascinating sometimes. When it's about an algorithm or advanced concepts, I love it. I loved learning about L4D's solution to dynamic pathfinding. I also loved sharing what I'd learned about how to detect open space, developing a way to put tiles on walls, or teach a person about OO design in answering how bots should be recognised by the game engine. The challenging stuff I find fascinating.

The problem is that a lot of these aren't challenging issues. They're solved by the asker just understanding programming better, sometimes by understanding their library better. Sometimes those library-related questions are good questions, sometimes they're not and the person wouldn't need to ask if they understood how to use programming libraries.

This place should be a place that deals with serious game development issues. Questions like that though turn it more into a place where we teach people how to program. It would help to draw a line somewhere.

Answer 4

I'd say it's mostly the fact that most people in this site are newbies. there are some active experts giving answers to almost all the questions people ask, like Josh Petrie, Byte56, David Gouvia and yourself. But as far as I can tell, these people don't even look what is being asked if the question looks like it's worthless. besides how bad the questions are has a real big impact on how fast they get closed, like number one in your list is closed by the time I'm writing this answer. I'm not saying there is nothing wrong with out community. It is a fact that our experts are very few, and they don't check the site regularly either. So you can see there is almost all the question have only one answer and that one answer is accepted. people check the site and start from the top checking all the questions, if they have at least one answer they usually skip that question even if that answer was not accepted, since they assume that answer was given by another expert and it's not accepted yet but going to be accepted. At least that's my opinion about this site. And there is one more thing, lots of people who know something doesn't have a question, and lots of people who have a question doesn't know anything at all! just look at people asking last 50 questions, there are only 6 people with reputation more than 200, And only 3 of them are above 500. This means most questions here are asked by some newbies who found GD with a google search and think this a regular forum they can ask whatever they like as long as it's related to game development.

Answer 5

I resisted myself to the closing of #1, as I was feeling it needed an answer that could be linked to for future similar questions... until Jeff pointed to a dupe that I didn't know about.

Maybe closing questions as duplicates of already-answered (and probably already-closed) questions would cause less resistance. It gives OPs something more than "sorry, this is not welcome here, goodbye". We already have a good set of "generic answers" to "not a good fit" questions, maybe they should be linked to more often.