An auto-unclose process that examined web logs for direct hits from google might be nice too. And closed question that gets N hits from google probably deserves to be reopened with a special "google wants an answer" tag.
I usually (always) search google for my problem de jour. And frequently (enough so I remember) the first stackoverflow result is my exact question... but closed. Probably happens once or twice a month, and usually on something "thorny" (i.e. no clear cut answer... so "primarily opinion based" answers are fine... I can compare the top voted answers and decide for myself).
Sometimes I find a two year old post on HN that I want to comment on, but it's "closed" - the reply button is gone. HN should implement that when N hits from Google occur, it bumps it back to the front page and makes it able to be discussed again.
More seriously though, Stack Exchanges platform isn't designed to handle opinion polls and endless discussions. You might want to consider asking the question on a site geared to opinions and discussions such as quora or reddit.
Also, are answers to closed questions stored? If not, and there is a new often used unclose workflow, it would be nice to let users still store their answer, to become visible when it becomes unclosed. This would help with the timing issue and would also give mods a way to see 'oh wait, looking at this answer it is actually too interesting to deserve these close votes'.
Once I saw a clique of mathematica.SE guys doing vote ring on reddit/r/programming and other places to promote their site. Some of them looked like working for Wolfram itself, based on simple online searches for other forums. It's possible they were just Wolfram fanatics, maybe.
They crafted a particular question/answer and submitted and vote brigaded it everywhere. They were quite obvious and denied everything when confronted. After pointing out the obvious ring (same people pushing the same link with similar comments on all sites) they ganged up on me and sent me horrible private messages.
This pissed me off and I overreacted, exactly what they wanted... After cooling down, I went to their chat rooms to apologize for my angry replies language and removed comments on reddit. But they never, ever accepted they did any wrongdoing and pat themselves in the back. Oh, and never apologized for their harassment that triggered me in the first place.
This is why SO, reddit, HN are slowly getting long time users disenchanted. If you are not part of some virtual gang you are just meat, like a ghetto.
> This is why SO, reddit, HN are slowly getting long time users disenchanted
Can't speak for reddit but I think HN is quite much better than SO. Specifically it seems:
* somehow grasping the house rules seems to be easier for people here than on SO. This might be because HN attracts another audience though, I don't know for sure.
* maybe because redditism and stupidity is mostly downvoted swiftly?
* spam and politics is dealt with before it hits the front page
* but contrary to SO moderators the ones on HN don't seem to get a kick out of finding something, anything that can be banned with the correct reading of the guidelines
I sometimes see what I consider to be abuse of downvotes but 1.) it doesn't seem to be rings and 2.) downvote abuse is very often corrected by the rest of the members.
According to the mods, it's not them but users clicking the report button. If so, it's abused and any story that is negative for any YC/HN related company, against bad social norms in tech hubs, denouncing anti-privacy issues at Google/Faceboo, talking against celebrities like Bill Gates, or anything about NSA tends to go quickly below the fold and mostly ignored. The ranking system is gamed.
I used to come here several times a day, submit stories, try to add interesting comments to discussion (even playing devil's advocate). Now I mostly just skim the front page on slow days and get sad on how concentrated the opinions get.
There is a huge availability bias at work here. You don't notice the stories that you don't like getting flagged off the site, but you naturally do notice when it happens to stories you like.
For at least some of these topics, Occam's Razor suggests it's the bias that's stinging you, not gamesmanship. What plausible gaming could be at work on behalf of Bill Gates?
For others, I have a really hard time believing that the gamesmanship has the directionality you think it does. NSA stories, for instance, have enormous support on HN. It is draining to express any skepticism on those stories at all. They also seem to be continually bolted to the top of the front page.
Availability bias? A major story about a chain of suicides of entrepreneurs on a Las Vegas tech hub was moved below the fold in spite of deserving the top position. And it quickly went to page 2 after that.
> against bad social norms in tech hubs, denouncing anti-privacy issues at Google/Faceboo, talking against celebrities like Bill Gates, or anything about NSA tends to go quickly below the fold and mostly ignored. The ranking system is gamed.
Interesting. I usually find the mix that hits the front page about perfect.
A few times I have seen what I consider interesting topics being flagged of after an initial boost but I can live with that, I guess unlike me quite a few people are fed up after the nth discussion about open floor plans and I can live with that.
I'm not talking about repetitive insignificant content. I'm talking about original and relevant content that is censored or allowed to be censored by small groups of users with financial/personal stakes.
Though not a frequent occurrence, I agree largely with tptacek here. My own most successful submissions have been almost exclusively about concerns with Google and privacy. At one point, the top three HN stories were all indirectly about my own G+ issues: https://i.imgur.com/YgEjUuI.jpg
Google and Facebook get a lot of flack here (and some support). Gates has his defenders and detractors (I heavily criticise his business practices, I'm modestly approving of his philanthropy), and there are numerous NSA stories.
What you likely don't see is how many stories total simply fall off the submissions page. I check it every so often -- perhaps several times a week, perhaps only every few weeks. But there's a lot of inflow and much of it sinks. That's typical of any curated site. An editor's job is to say "no". Hopefully their accuracy in doing this is better than random.
As sites grow in popularity, if the front page keeps the same capacity, any given submission's odds will fall. reddit's answer was subreddits -- there are now well over a half million: http://redditmetrics.com/history
HN's going to have to resolve this conflict somehow eventually.
I'm close to being able to close Python duplicates in a single vote when I get my Python gold badge (9/10 of the way there.) http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/254590/541136 - Also, considering the huge close vote queue, I can see why SO would want to close-close-close (or at least vote-vote-vote). What you really need are more voters voting. Not sure how you get there, though.
Careful, this maybe isn't the correct place for telling everybody how easily you can crush them : )
> What you really need are more voters voting. Not sure how you get there, though.
I guess a whole lot of the people who could have helped you left long ago because of your fellow moderators. A reasonable first step would be by adjusting the attitude.
Maybe part of the problem is we just don't see all those "primarily opinion based" and "ugly discussions" questions that seems to be oh such a serious problem.
We definitely see a whole lot of the most useful questions closed, often for technicalities. It doesn't exactly encourage participation, does it?
HN somehow seems to be better at dealing with the problems without scaring good community members away. Of course HN has issues as well but so far the moderation team is doing a very good job of keeping politics and promotion away while leaving to the broader community to vote if something is interesting or not.
Yes it's definitely difficult to get a foot-hold on the site, now isn't it. Maybe they need a real sort of wiki, or some sort of discussion community built around them. Seems like they started doing that, then killed it.
The problem with discussion boards is that it is absolutely painful to dig through a post until you stumble on a solution, and even then, you're in no way sure it's a good solution.
They need to harness that opinion/discussion/off-topic-subject energy in a way that doesn't work against their strategy. I think they are losing a lot of opportunity along the way.
They need to harness that opinion/discussion/off-topic-subject energy in a way that doesn't work against their strategy. I think they are losing a lot of opportunity along the way.
I totally agree. This manifests itself in the worst way at http://programmers.stackexchange.com/. Or at least it did when I bothered with that site at all.
> What you really need are more voters voting. Not sure how you get there, though.
Or maybe, as I have already answered ircmaxell, Stack Overflow could raise the bar for asking questions ever so slightly from being the one thing you can do without rep?
If torrents of new users asking stupid questions are the biggest problem on the site this seems like a first obvious step.
Would it be reasonable to have an invitation from a person with x reputation bump someone up to the required rep to ask questions? One could spend time in meta, and the chat room where people could get to know them. For the well-intended but naive, this would encourage getting to know the site and expectations of the culture. For the people who are just a bad fit, they could be filtered with minimal effort. Would there be any undesirable consequences from this approach?
Who do you imagine would be the user that would bother going through this interview process? If you've used the site before you already know how strict the moderation is on questions keeping people from asking questions already, do you really want to add a process where the user has to kiss up to the moderators for a couple weeks before asking their question as well?
It just would not be worth any new users time, especially given that when a user wants a question answered, it tends be slightly time sensitive.
I've given this some consideration, but they have put the barrier to entry to the chat feature above a minimal reputation ranking.
One can easily overcome that with ten skillful edits, 2 upvotes (or 1 upvote and an accept) on an answer, or 4 upvotes on a question (20 rep is required for chat).
It's fairly easy for an individual to get into the chat, if they want.
That barrier does keep spammers from flooding the chat, though. And if you consider it an interview process, that's what the earning of reputation points accomplishes, and I'd argue it does so rather elegantly.
You can make it so that if a closed question gets an answer, the question will only be visible for the one making the question and the one answering the question.
Sure, but my job isn't affected by voting rings on HN, nor does YCombinator justify a totalitarian moderation policy by claiming to be the best google-able SEO-optimized source for whatever it is I'm questioning.
An argument could be made that many people are hitting SO multiple times a day in the course of doing their jobs. If the questions and answers are biased by voting rings the results might not be optimal
So, GP suggested that the behavior of people in the chats was to basically rally to close questions, and likened it to voting rings on HN (which are, I believe, algorithmically regulated or at least are supposed to be).
My issue is that SO is a dominating first-hit for lots of technical questions, and that by setting themselves into that position they kind of owe it to the community to make sure they don't have jerks (via voting rings or any such analogue) screwing up the quality of their results.
For example, I've searched for "what is the best x for y?" or "what are the tradeoffs for x vs y", and had even (a long time ago) contributed answers to similar questions in their game development exchange--however, they (or their users) have decided that there is no value whatsoever in fielding questions of that variety.
