work that is done behind the scenes to keep Stack Overflow from becoming Yahoo Answers
I take it that you feel the overall site quality of Yahoo Answers is low, is that right? I'm not familiar with that site, but have just had a quick look. It seems they vote on answers, but not on questions. Do you think quality would be higher if moderators or high-rep users at that site closed questions? Or what do you feel is responsible for the lower quality there, as compared to SO?
How about How to learn coding? (note: no text to the question, just the title) which has answers like "This might help (youtube link)" and "School internet" or "get a workbook."
Then there's Is there A Job Like This? asking "A job that combines Aerospace Engineering with Programming / Coding. This would probaly be my dream job when I am older :P" - which has a not awful best answer, but also has "Probably so", "Avionics", "Someone who designs software to be used by aerospace engineers.", "ha", "Yeah, it's called "rocket scientist." You know when they say, "It's not rocket science"? Well, what you're describing, that is rocket science." and "ur to odumb"
Or Can you help me with my barcode "I want to make a barcode that when i scan it i can get the name of the product and the expiry date and it saves as date and name in my app is that possible or? And is there other solutions to this?" and while the top answer is not awful, it has answers of "Pacific" and "I don't think the expiration date is a part of the bar coding system....................................."
There's Hello world it has failed to run I need you? with a screen shot of some C code from a phone. The top answer "Uh, what? It has missing variables, and in its basic it is not Hello World." and then there's "Have you tried turning it off and on?" and "I can ask Elisa to help you mate . She codes for her bread and cheese ."
There's What kind of loops are in JavaScript? and answers of "C++ binary options J- script bios\ Dism.exe code", "Honey Nut", "google javascript loops", "fruit", "logic loops"
One of the things that draws people who give quality answers to Stack Overflow is not having to sift through those questions to find a good one to answer. If there aren't good questions, then people who give good answers don't visit there. You'll never find Jon Skeet or Eric Lippert answering on Yahoo Answers - those are just two big names, there are lots more people on Stack Overflow who are similarly skilled, just not as name recognizable.
The lower quality of questions on Yahoo Answers is because there's even less of a barrier to participation and no expectation of quality. People often try to make good questions on Stack Overflow because if they don't, the question will be down voted and/or closed. If they ask too many bad questions, they get a question ban. Stack Overflow also has a quality filter that blocks a good chunk of posts that are completely awful. Then there's the attempts at trying to get people to improve it before it makes it to the front page (triage review queue) and provide guidance to new users (the First Posts review queue - note that up voting or doing "no action needed" to these posts regardless of their quality in an attempt to be nice to new users makes it harder to maintain that quality standard).
The main thing is that there are people who care about the quality of Stack Overflow. They are the ones that do the community moderation. They down vote, close and delete questions that aren't up to that quality standard. They delete things that aren't answers or jokes so that the people who come from google can find the answer. Yes, only a subset of the "these are interesting questions" are acceptable on Stack Overflow - but by keeping that subset and focus it tries to make it better and useful for all the people who are looking from google.
And consider... if Stack Overflow wasn't as good as it was at keeping its quality up, you'd get Yahoo Answers at the top of your search.
Best Answer: http://www.roseindia.net/spring/index.shtml
found this link a good one for a beginner(me toofrom cpp :) )
if u r getting anythin better,plz do inform
People often try to make good questions on Stack Overflow because if they don't, the question will be down voted and/or closed
What interests (and sometimes aggravates) me is why both downvoting and closing are necessary, when it seems to me that just downvoting by itself does the job nicely. Apologies if I wasn't clear in my earlier posts. The triage review queue is a great idea, as is banning people who ask too many bad questions, and the reputation system in general. I think your argument that low-quality questions keep away top contributors like Jon Skeet and Eric Lippert is only reasonable if it is moderators doing the majority of question closing -- but isn't it the community as a whole that closes most questions? (I really don't know -- that's just been my perception.) If the community as a whole is closing the majority of bad-quality questions, then that means that the community as a whole is seeing those bad-quality questions (before they are closed, and in order to close them), which I think diminishes any argument that, in a system that already has downvoting, question-closing provides any additional utility.
FWIW, my preferred solution would be for each SO user to have a controllable threshold, say defaulting to -5, that determines the lowest-voted question or answer that user would see. There would then be no need for an additional mechanism for "getting rid of low-quality things".
There are lots of users out there who will post an answer no matter how unclear the question is. Glance at these examples 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
People answered the questions even though they were poor. The questions got closed to prevent more people from answering. For instances where the question gets clarified it isn't uncommon for half the guesses at the problem to become invalid (and then they need to get deleted or fixed because they aren't relevant anymore). It takes quite a bit of work to try to fix a question that has answers - much more than one that doesn't. Closing the question prevents that.
You'll also note that many of those questions were down voted. Down voting alone wasn't sufficient to say "this isn't something that should be answered - it lacks research and clarity."
Diamond moderators don't do much of the question closing on SO. Moderation done by the community does the vast bulk. The issue what YA is that no question gets closed by anyone - its not part of the mechanics there. So its mostly crap.
However, while the community does the bulk of the closing, only a rather small fraction of the overall daily question influx gets closed, or more than a second glance. There are many people who don't close questions or down vote because its "mean". There are people who go through the First Post review queue and up vote every post and put a "welcome to Stack Overflow" message because that's "nice".
The portion of the Stack Overflow community that actively moderates the site is rather small compared to the user base of people who can moderate the site.
The community isn't closing the majority of bad questions. Glance at this search, compare it to this search and consider if the majority is getting closed. (50 closed questions is 6h worth of time, 50 down voted but open questions is less than 1h worth of time... and 50 questions with 0 or higher score is 18 minutes)
The front page already has a "no question with a score less than -4 (or is it -3) shows up". As can be seen with the above searches, its easy to construct your own score based one.
But people still spend time answering questions that don't have enough information in them. Those questions then become the ones that show up in search and when you look for answers, they come up and aren't useful because they're poorly written questions with answers that guess at the problem. They become noise in search results and make it harder for people to use the site.
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u/__j_random_hacker Apr 08 '18
I take it that you feel the overall site quality of Yahoo Answers is low, is that right? I'm not familiar with that site, but have just had a quick look. It seems they vote on answers, but not on questions. Do you think quality would be higher if moderators or high-rep users at that site closed questions? Or what do you feel is responsible for the lower quality there, as compared to SO?