Should we be more exclusive?

Question

I mean this kind of thing is all over but here's an example from today:

I mean there can't be a more stereotypical noob entry "I just wanna make a game" type question.

It's a bad question because it's not specific, and what's more is it's breaking the first 3 of the FAQ principles:

Yet people are voting it up, hailing it as a great question. Why?

I'm not so concerned with this specific question, but what it means about this site's community. Either it's crowded with noobs who think "Yeah that's a great question wish I asked it", OR the reception of some of the more clever guys on here is too lax. "Oh ask anything you want, there are no dumb questions."

I don't mean to turn newbies away, but are people too accepting? Should we be more exclusive? Why does this type of FAQ breaking question get such a critical acclaim reception?

Answer 1

Well, this is simply my opinion, and while I'm not exactly a high-scorer within SE in general, I am a user.

I used to be a big user of gamedev.net, but left due to the new layout and I got sick of questions that were so localised that they might as well have had an address where to send the answer! In short it was pointless even viewing them; so, I gave up and just started to use SE. After getting used to SE a while I spotted GDSE and used that for my fix as I enjoy simply browsing the sensible questions and answers as there are clearly some very clever people on GDSE, sadly there aren't as many quality questions as I would hope that could demonstrate just how many people of such calibre there are.

I've observed (either for wrong or right) that the signal to noise ratio for GDSE appears a little more skewed than the other SE sites. It appears that the 'noise' type questions tend to be ones that are too localised to be any good to anyone other than the asker, or questions that would require an epic novel to answer! I don't like to categorise people, but I would imagine that most (not all) of the closed questions were asked by people who had minimal experience of general development, were quite young and immature and were hoping for a quick solution for their new super game. Similarly, I wouldn't be suprised if the number of people who are capable of putting a well formed and meaningful question together are about the same number of people who can answer such a question as gamedev is a little more specific than a C/C++ question on SE. Unfortunately, the number of people who care little about asking (or rather caring about) the quality of a question is much higher than the other two groups!

I agree with what you say - in fact I came to meta.gamedev.SE now to ask something very similar and found your question! Saying that, there is nothing wrong with a new user being completely ignorant on a subject, however they either fall into the category of wanting to learn about the subject or will just come back tomorrow with question number 2. Distinguishing between the two is simple, the question and the way it is written gives it away - handling it... well that's a different matter.

I would hope that GDSE could be a little more exclusive, but a big issue is that people are quite happy to put quite a bit of effort into answering what is essentially be a terrible question, only for it to be accepted, then later down the line closed; I'm assuming so they get a few points. Granted, that's their business to waste their time with somebody who doesn't appreciate it but such actions can only encourage the asker that abysmal questions are tolerated - closing or even deleting the question after any sort of answer has been posted is well... the words horse, door and bolted come to mind!

As for the upvoting of useless questions, I would probably say it is nothing more than a result of people upvoting questions which are the sort of questions they would ask. It speaks volumes of the general crowd GDSE is attracting (although to be fair, it seems that game dev in general attacts such people looking for an "easy win").

It would be very nice to stop such questions from appearing to begin with. The thing is, if somebody comes to GDSE and knows nothing about general development, or any other disciplines of game development, then they are hardly likely to ask questions/give answers that could be classed as gems. Obviously, it's not possible to test somebodys knowledge on game development (that kind of defeats the purpose of having a GDSE!), but game dev isn't isolated from other disciplines, so I don't know if there are any reasonable methods, but perhaps one (granted, it may be a little far fetched) is to ask for a minimum reputation on a relevant SE site before questions can be asked. It's trivial to get say for example 150 points on SE even just by asking some sensible questions, I imagine that would be enough of a barrier to stop these half-baked questions as effort is required which is exactly what most people who ask these sort of questions aren't prepared to give.

Obviously, this isn't exactly perfect, consider this question by philllies. Its his first question on GDSE and while I don't quite understand it, it is very clear that it is well thought out and he cares about the content... Then there is the other side of the coin. Actually, I've just checked and I don't meant to pick on him but the questions that author makes (4 so far, all negative votes and only two closed), won't be improving within a year, along with a profile that reads:

I'm 13 and incredibly cut! XD

Andy Harglesis

As I say, I certainly don't mean to single him out (I only found his question randomly), but this is why GDSE is having these, for lack of a better term, quality control issues as accounts like this exist are tolerated rather than just been given a short ban with a quick link to what questions are acceptable on GDSE.

Answer 2

Lots of votes on a question usually means that a lot of people can understand the problem set. Easy/"noob" questions generally fall into this realm, mainly because more people can comprehend and possibly want to see an answer to a question like "how can I make a quick game" rather than "how do I set up springs in cocos2d" (for example).

If you look at the list of all questions sorted by vote count, you'll see that a large number of the super high voted up questions are all closed. https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=votes This is hardly a new predicament in the Stack Exchange universe. You'll see on programmers, for example, they went with more of a community wiki approach. I suspect Stack Overflow has some logic under the hood to make their older questions like https://stackoverflow.com/questions/84556/whats-your-favorite-programmer-cartoon not show up in those lists.

That being said, the best thing to do is just vote to close and/or flag bad questions. Likewise leave a comment saying why it's a bad question.

Answer 3

Stack Overflow is not a democracy. Stack Overflow, and the Stack Exchange network, was built on a series of guiding principles set down by its founders. Among those principles is a zero tolerance policy for crap.

First among that is the belief that a question must justify itself. Yes, a crap question can yield good answers, but that is not sufficient reason to leave a crap question around. If someone wants to turn it into a good question, fine. But we do not waste time with crap questions just because they might lead to good, useful answers. We want good questions; we punish bad ones.

That is part of the founding principles of Stack Overflow. Of Stack Exchange. Of all of the successful sites in the SE network.

SO exists because forums were a terrible way to deal with questions. And one of the reasons for that is exactly this: every post is equally valid. There's no way to stop the flow of crap. There's no way for a community driven by principles to shut down nonsense before it does its damage. Eventually, people get tired of answering the same garbage over and over again. And they leave. This is the forum life-cycle, and it is something SO was designed to stop.

But for all of SO's great technology, what fundamentally makes SO work is the zero tolerance the SO community has for garbage. On SO, it began with its founders and the initial beta users. That culture spread among the initial crop of public users. And now, the SO community, moderators, and founders alike will tolerate no compromises on their principles. And without that, SO would be a cesspool.

Which is what GDSE is becoming.

The culture of SO was very clear, as laid down by its founders. But the culture of GDSE continues to have forum-like elements. Permissive. Let that question go, because it might "yield good and useful answers." No principles, no rigid rules and regulation. Just let anyone ask pretty much anything; only stop the most egregious of problems.

Just look at MSO. This question would never have been asked on Meta Stack Overflow. Instead, it's inverse question is usually asked: why don't we allow more poll questions? Why don't we allow more of these questions? Why was my question closed in 5 minutes? And so forth.

And in most cases, MSO users will quickly downvote and expurgate such questions. The community has said in a clear and convincing voice that there will be no retreat, no surrender, no compromise on its core principles.

That GDSE's community can't/won't do the same is a damning indictment of GDSE as a whole. It shows that we don't have enough high-rep users who follow the SO principles. It shows that our culture is damaged, cancerous, riven with those who do not stand for what makes SO great.

Moderators are supposed to be the last line of defense. They're supposed to do what the community can't, act as a failsafe when the community can't achieve the goal alone. They should be the janitors, taking out the trash. But because they see the community as "divided" on the issue, they sit on the sidelines and let the crap build and grow. They see bad questions but won't use their moderator close votes to close them, simply because they don't feel there is a community consensus on the issue.

In short, it is the failure of democracy: one side gets its way by simply being obstinate. All it takes to keep this site down is for enough members of the community to say that "garbage questions are fine." If enough of them do, then the moderators won't act, and our one fail-safe is sabotaged.

I don't really see a way out of this. So long as enough of the community clings to this forum mentality, where we believe that everyone should have a voice no matter how stupid, where we allow anyone to ask just about anything no matter how insipid, where you can get away with bad questions so long as someone comes along and blesses it with an undeservingly good answer, then GDSE will be a forum. A rathole of filth and garbage that few people would ever use as a viable resource.

Or, to put it another way, the fact that some people disagree with the SO principles does not mean that they are right. It does not mean that their voices and opinions need to be appeased. And it does not mean that their opinions should be allowed to hold back moderators from doing their jobs and getting rid of what needs to be gotten rid of.

Either we take a hard line stand against garbage like most SE sites, or GDSE should stop pretending to be a Stack Exchange site.

Answer 4

StackExchange isn't a community; See the About page. We have a duty to close questions which do not meet the guidelines laid out in our FAQ. It's important.

StackExchange is a system specifically designed to collect and archive expert knowledge forever, and to make that expert knowledge easily and freely accessible via internet search engines.

By providing this expert knowledge freely, the Internet becomes a richer resource and indirectly makes the world a better place for everyone. The rules set out in the FAQ are there specifically in order to assist in achieving these goals; they're specifically designed to try to generate questions and answers which can become useful Internet resources for lots of people and remain accurate and useful for decades (if not longer).

If we're going to ignore the rules in the FAQ and treat (for example) lolcats pictures as being on-topic and worthy of archiving forever just because the "community" likes them, then we might as well drop the whole "expert knowledge" pretense and just be Reddit (or less charitably, 4chan), stop our "archive answers forever" policy, and simply think of the site as a source of light transient entertainment, rather than as a part of an effort to create long-term good in the world.

Because honestly, that's all we'd be.

Answer 5

There have been so many of these sorts of questions already. The more that mods shy away from doing their duty -- which I think is clearly defined -- the more acceptable bad questions become. It's a bit like when you see one parent who wants the kids to have a good degree of discipline, while the other parent is letting them do exactly as the please. It just doesn't work.

I really don't think it's acceptable that we with mod privileges, who've gained our status on this site knowing that there are rules to be followed, now think we can debate the rules? The rules are pretty clear, though as discovered today in this question, one can do one's duty and then discover that the FAQ doesn't accurately reflect what we as mods know the rules to be (in this case, I'm referring to rules that evince themselves via the "close" panel but not in the FAQ -- which leaves me feeling a tad let down by the site).

In fact the number of posts like this, where the scope is basically, "Please help me fix a bug that nobody else is ever going to have again" is quite overwhelming. This is why I've been advocating for a while now that this site link directly to gamedev.net from the FAQ. The problem is, this is almost certainly against SE policy.

So yes, I absolutely think we should be more exclusive as the rules make it clear we should be.

Answer 6

We can, but we risk being jerks.

Moderation is very harsh here IMO and not always on topic with what the actual community wants.

Let a question sit for a day and see how the community at large reacts to it. THEN moderate it as you think this is reflected. This may be a noob question to a mod, but maybe to others it's a very valid one.

Communities are defined by the community, not by someone laying out a set of rules that define it. Unless that is you want to risk being an elitist club.