Quality questions and user engagement

The community managers have done a thing. You should read it. Part of that thing is this

What makes a high quality open-ended question? Where should that guidance be detailed? We’re hopeful that someone from the community will start this conversation.

We need to talk about the fundamentals here, but first let me tell you a story.

I used to know kids (decades ago) whose fathers would regularly take them to places like Disneyland. Some called them "Disneyland Dads" (may have a different meaning now). I remember telling one such kid how lucky they were to be able to go so often. I remember their sad look and the response "I'd gladly give it up if dad could live with us again."

Disneyland Dads were the absentee parents of a divorce. The philosophy there was kids need "quality time", not "quantity time". And what could be more quality then Disneyland?

There's a lie in there that's relevant to the discussion here: "quality time" is not something that you can just manufacture. In other words, "quality time" just happens, and you most often get there because you had lots of quantity.

Stack Overflow needs quantity. Money comes from quantity (ads). But not caring about quality drives away users. That was the problem forums (the SO predecessor) had: too much noise to sift through, and no incentive to solve the problem. Thus you get frustration that someone else experienced that and there was no answer posited.

The two extremes we've had here are also instructive: the help vampire ("Screw the rules, just give me the answer!") vs the strict curator, where earned privileges exist to gate-keep. The former is a luxury we probably can't afford. The latter depresses new users from engaging.

We're not getting away from quantity

Let's be honest: Opinion Based Questions (OBC) are just simply a suspension of some the normal curation rules. It's all about quantity. But we cannot dispense with curation, lest quality suffer. You need to have some rules or we degenerate into Reddit ("How do I find a spouse?").

That said, there is no way to answer the first question posited. We cannot set high quality standards. At best, we've got topical standards. You need folks to endlessly post about what the best programming books are, how to start learning to program, etc. Some of those should rise (via voting) into quality questions. They may be irritating to the long-time curators, but eventually you'll get quality of a sort.

What should we insist on for OBC, then?

1. Questions need to be focused on programming. That rule has always existed here. If you need, for instance, parenting advice, we literally have a site for that

2. We need the "Too Broad" closure option back. Will it be a rollup reason? Yes. But we need questions to remain as focused as possible. Giving a laundry list of questions is a poor experience for answerers AND users who come upon the content later. Given the noisier OBC format, this will turn new users off.

3. Content should be in English.

There was a question about why "Too Broad" should be brought back. In 2020 it was replaced with "Needs More Focus"

Please edit the question to limit it to a specific problem with enough detail to identify an adequate answer. Avoid asking multiple distinct questions at once. See the How to Ask page for help clarifying this question.

Others have found it confusing as well. I think it got changed because "Unclear" was, well, unclear and maybe we should rework all the things at once.

"Too Broad" sets an upper limit and is (at least marginally) more objective. It's still reliant on the opinion of close-voters, but it also implies it's a poor fit for the OBC format (which some will be). "Needs More Focus" sounds very semantic. There's one part that's confusing, so does that one thing needing more focus mean the whole thing get closed? More OBC questions will be multi-part, which is something we discouraged in Q&A. We're inviting a lower standard of question here, and I suspect a semantic argument will just prove to be too much friction. It might also necessitate five votes to close for OBC, rather than three.

Honestly, OBC can produce quality content. We've long needed it for less topical things like book lists or a developer for an open-source library explaining their motives. But those happened by accident. We also need quality users (and to not take them for granted).

I know not everyone will agree with me, but I also don't see another path forward here to keep the network afloat. Please feel free to discuss and add your own ideas.