I think SU has a newbie-biting problem

Question

I was initially going to post this as an answer to Why do certain commenters take a rude tone with new users?, but I think there's a bigger problem here that requires more discussion.

Let's ignore the fact that the answer to that question was out-of-scope for a moment. That's the root cause of what was ultimately a justified action, but it's not the answer to what OP said, and after spending a small but significant amount of time reviewing, I'm noticing some patterns over and over again that jibe with their complaint.

The general pattern: SU has a problem with newbie biting.

This pattern includes, in my experience:

• Curt, unhelpful, unkind comments left by reviewers in general
• Long-time high-rep users being unfriendly/unkind enough to warrant having their comments flagged off
• Questions being closed without so much as a perfunctory or even Pro-forma "here's what you did wrong" commentary
• Widespread misuse of two specific closure votes:
  • "Needs details or clarity" when the question is detailed enough on its own to be answered, and sometimes, already was answered and accepted
  • "Needs focus" when only one question is was asked, and the user is speculating about possible solutions in the question (or in some cases, just giving further info!)
• Pile-on downvoting in meta
• General stinginess with upvoting on main (even when the questions "show research effort, are useful, and clear," as the tooltip on the button says.)
• VTCs for things where downvotes are more appropriate

Two things this post is not:

First, this is not a callout post. I have two or three specific people in mind with some of the issues I mentioned above, but the thrust of this post is the site's general atmosphere rather than the conduct of those people. If you think I'm talking about you, I probably am, but I don't want to litigate that here and turn what is supposed to be gentle ask to consider the guy on the other side of the keyboard into a public drama fire. I am not asking you to account for your actions, I am not slagging you off. I am asking you to reflect, nothing more.

Second, this post is not an attempt to relitigate specific review votes in specific circumstances. Everyone has their reasons for voting the way they do, and I sincerely do not think anyone who's been here long enough to obtain tens of thousands of points is some mustachioed cartoon villain or BOFH expy who's out to make people miserable on purpose.

What this post is, is me imploring reviewers to consider their actions before taking them, not just on the quality of the site, but also on the people you will impact by those actions. And I don't just mean by your votes; I mean how you communicate their consequences. I would gently ask that you consider the following:

Many users don't know what they don't know

If you have a high rep here, that indicates you are highly knowledgeable in a few technical aspects. Lots of the questioners coming in don't have that same knowledge and don't even know how to ask the "right" question yet because they're missing some vital piece of terminology or understanding of the subject matter.

Nothing about SU indicates that it's for experts only. That is because it isn't. The audience and average user not being experts mean that they will come along with objectively stupid questions that any familiarity with the subject matter would answer. But we don't, and shouldn't, require that familiarity in the first place. People do come here at the ends of their ropes, meaning they don't know where else to go. Often in that many words - and yet we nuke their questions with the "clarity" reason because they "didn't show research effort".

With all due respect, what research effort would you have them expend? Their post already indicated they don't know where to go!

Is it more useful, to SU, to them, and to the people who may encounter the question in the future, to comment asking for clarity and edit once that clarity is received, or immediately write off the question as unsalvageable and silently VTC it? If that clarity never comes, meaning the question is non-useful, by all means, you should VTC it, with the full knowledge that ROV is a black hole (more often than not, no amount of editing will get a question out of there, especially for the more subjective close reasons. Anything that's marked [closed] can be considered the site's trash bin.)

I want you to think about whether the "clarity" is actually lacking. I find that it's obvious, more often than not, what is being asked. If it's not blindingly obvious, but it's there, that's an explicitly stated purpose of the edit button. If it's an XY question, why not ask if their goal is X?

Closing a question is a hostile action regardless of intention

...in that, it will be received as such. Every criticism of the Stack* network you find online includes the willingness of reviewers to take adverse action on otherwise reasonable, useful questions at the drop of a hat.

That pisses people off. There's no way it can't piss people off. They were not attacked, but they don't know it yet. Not unless they have spent enough time on the site to get their head around some of the more unintuitive aspects, because:

The rep requirements have pathological downsides that are guaranteed to result in users doing things they're not supposed to do

...and resulting in annoyance for all parties concerned.

Let's consider the case of a random Google user who encountered a useful answer here. They find a well-written question, a solution that completely solves their problem. What will their first instinct be? Thank the person who made it! "I'm gonna go create an account and give this guy kudos. This was awesome!"

And so we have JaneNewbie.. 1 point, no badges.

So what do they do? First, they try to upvote the answer, question, or both. Blocked. Angry red popup box. She doesn't get that ability until 15.

Jane thinks, "Okay, votes must be serious here. Maybe I can just say 'thanks' in a comment"? Blocked. She can't comment until 50 (and she shouldn't use comments for that anyway, but she doesn't know that yet).

The only avenue left to her is the answer box, which she uses because she doesn't know better yet. It looks like any other input box and fulfills the immediate goal of letting her communicate.

If she comes back later, she sees that her well-intentioned attempt to thank someone who helped her with some great content has wound up with an unappreciative flag on the account and possibly some restrictions depending on how many -1s they got piled on.

Now she's annoyed. If incredibly persistent or annoyed, she might wind up on meta and ask what I call the "y u do dis" special. The tone of this post will be upset. They will say unkind things. They will accuse the reviewers of being thoughtless jerks, or worse. Said question will be invariably bombarded with downvotes (likely with some rude comments added that barely qualify as nice enough not to be flag-bait) and closed as a duplicate because this pattern is hardly new.

JaneNewbie closes her tab, leaving SU, likely never to return, soured on the whole experience. If asked, she will refer to SU as an unfriendly bunch of elitists who got unreasonably mad at her when all he wanted to do was thank a guy who helped her out.

Jane is annoyed because this entire process was a waste of her time.

The reviewers and longtime members are annoyed because another clueless newb didn't read the tour and didn't get it.

This entire pattern is harmful. It could also be short-circuited in a few ways.

1. Some of the basic expectations could be made more apparent upfront. Not in a "this is how the site works" way like the tour does, but in a "don't make this handful of common mistakes" way before the newbie takes their first action.
2. The upvote requirement could be lowered to 1. Failing that:
3. The person who reviews Jane's bogus answer still needs to flag it for not being an answer, but they could add a gentle comment (one comment, these shouldn't be piled on by five different people) about why they're doing what they're doing. Failing that:
4. When the user winds up in meta, they could not be bombarded with downvotes (anyone who uses a site with a karma system can tell you that being downvoted is unpleasant, regardless of the site's justification for those votes). Failing that:
5. They could be explained to, patiently, how the site works.

Any of these steps taken alone could very potentially turn 1 point JaneNewbie into 10K point Jane months to years down the line. Or, at the very least, they won't go on to turn other users off the site because their very first interaction with it was filled with unfriendliness.

You'll note that at no point here did I talk about Jane's behavior. First off, Jane is a newbie. She's ranting on meta because she feels attacked and doesn't know any better yet. You, on the other hand, replying to her post, probably do know better. What's your excuse?

If you've been in tech long enough to back up your rep, you already know the golden rule: Users don't read docs. Users will take context clues, they can be guided, but most of them will never touch the tour. The tour is tl;dr. JaneNewbie will do stupid things out of ignorance, and expecting her (or most users) to understand how the site works in whole before using it is simply not realistic. People with experience in technology and psychology that outmatches that of every person that will read this post combined have been trying to do so for years.

SU is not going to be the final bastion that finally gets users to RTFM. We can either rage against it or we can accept that users will do stupid things out of ignorance and dealt with it in the most effective way possible for all involved.

Nothing about what I've asked here requires compromising SU's quality

I'm certainly not asking you to flag crap less or vote in ways contrary to the guidelines. The guidelines are reliable, and their precise application has led to this and the rest of the SE network being a fantastic resource.

But it does require effort. It takes more effort to be friendly and helpful than it does to be unfriendly and unhelpful.

It also takes more time, but SU isn't that busy compared to some of the other sites on the network. Most of the queues are either at zero or in the single digits more often than not. I don't think that there is some time pressure that requires you to blast through your 20 reviews/queue/day in a big hurry, and I think you agree.

The common refrain on meta here and on other Stack* metas is that people don't want to waste their time, not with clueless noobs, not with "help vampires," not with whatever.

To that end, my final ask:

Why are you here?

If you're not a paid employee of SE, and you've got tons of rep... why are you here? Why did you spend hours researching and crafting answers to questions, reviewing and editing questions and answers and so forth?

It's probably because you wanted to help people. At the end of the day, you are providing a service.

All of these things I just got done complaining about? They represent failures to help people. Is it genuinely going to take you that much more time to write a thoughtful comment when someone screws up rather than smacking that "close" button and moving on to the next review out of your 20? Is it really worth forever turning off someone because you were afraid you were going to spend effort being nice to someone who might not reciprocate?

This is all words on a screen at the end of the day. The time expenditure on being nice is minimal, and it pays dividends.

I want to help people more. That's why I'm writing this.

I hope you do too.

Concrete takeaways (tl;dr)

"Well, that was all very touchy-feely and nice, but what are you asking?"

• Vote up more, in general. Votes on main SU are for usefulness, not exceptionality. There are a lot of good questions and answers out there that don't deserve the 0 scores they have, and comparatively few crap questions and answers that have an unjustifiably high score.
• Consider whether your VTC shouldn't be a downvote instead.
• Remember that a VTC effectively means "I think this is such crap that it should go away." It is "delete" with extra steps.
• Consider whether something that already has one downvote needs four more.
• Explain your work when you VTC things. Any first VTC without a comment is probably unhelpful in most cases. You are going to tick people off, necessarily. Nobody likes being told they screwed up... but you can and should soften the blow.
• That goes double if you're a moderator and your "votes" are binding. The automatic header that comes up when you close something lacks critical context. It often fails to explain "why". Write a comment.
• Consider whether an auto-message is the most appropriate way to inform someone they screwed up. Auto-messages are factual, but they are officious, not friendly.
• If a newbie disagrees with you on some aspect of site policy, consider that it's out of ignorance first and not out of malice or because they don't like you.

tl;dr for the tl;dr:

For the love of $deity, be more friendly to the users. It won't hurt you at all, and it won't break the site in the least.

Answer 1

There's a lot to respond to here, and there's a lot to take in (and I'm a little distracted today, so lots of major edits ahoy!)

While I usually go point by point, I think its broad enough that I'd like to talk about more general things. I promise this isn't a wookiee defence.

On Comments

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I'm not a fan of canned comments - but as someone who used to write specific, detailed comments on every post I closed as a regular user and a moderator, it takes up a lot of bandwidth. I'd love for folks with the time/energy to do so to do that.

I do think that we do abuse comments a bit. They're a source of friction, and sometimes even experienced users get it wrong.

Its worth remembering that we often don't have a choice over review autocomments, and they were put in place, pretty much because it was an option between no comments and canned ones - if folks wouldn't comment.

And well, sometimes, people don't want help to be better. They want an answer. Now. And that's wearying on some folks and we get grumpy. Its no excuse, of course.

I guess for us long time users, sometimes it worth reminding ourselves other don't have a decade or half decade of experience, or the opportunity to grow with the site. As much as we share and 'teach' our knowledge on PC, to some extent, helping people get to grips with effective site usage is something we need to sustain ourselves over time.

On the Ewok problem

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Back in the good old days, Jeff Atwood compared the original trilogy to the star wars movies

One word: ewoks. But also, Leia in a bikini. Still canon, but little odder than the earlier movies. In other words, things are going to get a little .. crazy .. in the finale

You would notice that the scopes there have changed over time. In a sense - our scope has evolved, and somewhat narrowed over time simply cause we've found its not worked that well. We even were the source of the network wide rule on product recs and we kind of had to figure out where that fit in our site

Its slightly unintiutive, and we worked around our own rules.

And its really difficult to sum stuff like that. Even Serverfault, which had a much better defined scope to start with had a few issues with what's on topic and what's not, and its own drama over time.

Ewoks are just as likely to make friends, as to roast and eat you, or topple your empire.

More seriously - getting new users to a grasp on the SE way of doing things, that's evolved over a decade is a problem that SE has been trying to tackle for ages. They tried a wizard (which apparently didn't have the expected results).

Anything dosen't go - but there's often disagreements on the lines. Quite a lot of the time, it is hard for newbies to get, and I guess we can do better.

Sometimes though, stuff is so vague that salvaging it is difficult, and some folks speculatively post answers that might end up being unhelpful.

At one point, we called 'closure' 'on hold' instead. And closed (or even deleted) posts can be salvaged and reopened/undeleted. There's at least a little onus on the original poster to make at least a minimal effort though.

Running a Q&A site is hard.

On burnout, turnover and the critical mass of meta

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I've not written one of these in ages. Admittedly, I'm not modding Super User as actively as I used to (work, and main meta seems to have more of my attention), but I noticed that my pattern of modding, or being a power user changed. I'm on the site less than I was - and when I am, its mostly flags that take my attention. The other mods leave not many flags for me to do, but if mods are doing most of the closures, we're also suffering from a lack of engagement. I used to hand write comments for every post I closed (and to this day, lost meta folks aside, I try to!), but its a lot of work.

I suspect a lot of the grumpiness is seeing a lot of the same thing, folks having a bit of an attitude with folks trying to help, and no small amount of burnout.

I don't blame the community, its been a pretty horribad 2019 and 2020 but folks are a lot less active-feeling than they did when I was a newbie. I guess we can do better but that needs a bit of a rejuvination, and that's going to take a lot of work, and spoons.

I'm going to steal a snippet of a nightwish song I am fond of

"Better to light a candle than to curse the dark"

We can do better. If you see something that should be open, make a case for it. Post a comment letting the user what's wrong if you can. Meta if it needs more attention. If you can let us know.

I'll try to spend a little bit more time, and try to help out where I can. I can't be everywhere, so to a big extent, the fix to this is more folks stepping up and letting us know what we're missing, and sheperding our newbies if the mods get too nippy.

Answer 2

I'll just add some rules I'm trying to follow. I've been guilty of all these things (and sometimes still am, probably), but at some point I've recognized them as harmful for the community.

When downvoting or VTC, always try to leave a comment

Is the question unclear? Let OP know what information is missing or which part you don't understand. Is there no info whatsoever? Tell them that you can't just guess what their issue is and what details they should provide. I know, I know: "it doesn't work plz help" and other users with magical thinking grind our gears, but bashing them doesn't get them any closer to understanding the problem with the way they ask for help.

Is the formatting bad? Let them know that the question is hard to read and they have to improve it, otherwise people who could help them won't even bother with reading it. This tells them why good formatting is important and that it's in their best interest to care about it. Tip: [edit] in a comment magically turns into an edit link.

Is it slightly off-topic and there are no sites where it could be migrated? Consider at least nudging OP in the right direction in the comments. Maybe recommend a non-Stack* community if you're aware of one.

The question is chatty and doesn't fit the Q&A format? Heck, consider abusing the comments sections and being helpful.

TL;DR: Use downvotes and VTC to be helpful, not toxic.

Think twice before closing as unclear

Is the question actually unclear, or is it just unclear for you because you're not an expert on the topic?

On multiple occasions I was able to provide a complete, detailed solution and just solve someone's problem, but the question got closed as unclear when I was typing the answer. I can vote to reopen, but my one vote is not enough. Even if it actually gets reopened later, I probably won't get back to it and it may remain unanswered.

At the end of the day maybe it's better to leave a question opened and unanswered, rather than closed while it could be answered?

Recognize if OP tries to improve

We're not here to discipline users, but to help them. Don't punish them for not making the question perfect or not knowing something. Work with them towards that goal instead. You're more knowledgeable than them, so try to get them on your level.

If OP keeps editing the question, maybe it's better to abstain from the final VTC to avoid discouraging them?

Avoid emotionally loaded adjectives

Pointing at specific problems with a post is much nicer and more productive than expressing how you feel about it.

Rather than call a question "badly written", you could say it's not cleanly formatted or that it lacks proper punctuation and capitalization and is therefore hard to read.

An answer may be a "terrible advice", but it's better to say that it's factually incorrect, based on false premise, risky or potentially harmful.

Answer 3

Low-hanging fruit: put voting buttons on ALL review queues, either in their typical place to the left of the post being reviewed, or in line with the other review buttons. Make them an explicit option for reviewing.

Answer 4

"SU has a newbie-biting problem" Really? As usual, we are ignoring here the bigger elephant in the room. Until profile age or some sort of stronger authentication+some effort to create profiles is required, there is no proof whatsoever low-rep users are newbie users.

What we have here in SE, is drive by users who actively do not want to abide with the quality requirements and make effort asking questions, and who are the most vocal complaining they are "mistreated". And the regular users who are "punished" and saddled with the community rules. Sadly, I think, and it is just my personal opinion, this seems to be in the best interest of stack exchange to inflate artificially user numbers.

I would never would wish being in a moderator's shoes when the shift of burden of dealing with those users is imposed on other users, and asking for rules defining the regular users have to make several thousands more a bigger effort the original askers are actively avoiding to make and flouting rules creating drive-by users by the thousands, seems too unfair and twisted.

Answer 5

A large majority of bad questions I see from newbies are people seeking a conversation about how to solve a problem. They don't have their SE qualified question yet because they haven't made it that far before getting stuck. I often find myself telling new users that their question is better suited for a forum where discussion occurs. SE's Q&A format is not a forum and if there is a long discussion in the comments the site tells you to stop doing that and take it to chat.

Maybe the solution is to bring new users to a new user chat first. This new user chat can bring them to topic specific chats. The topic specific chats can tell the user "Ok, now you have a question. Go post that on this board:". We would need to be careful not to provide all the answers in chat because then it's not documented in the Q&A system. This would be a natural flow to getting help and learning how things go. There can be sticky or canned responses given by chat moderators. The mods of new user chat could even have the power to award points in chat that would give the new user power to upvote or comment. This would be a simple way to prove that the new user isn't a spammer or a robot, and validate that they are here to join the community.

The only downside I see to my solution is that it's a lot of work. It depends upon people in chat acting as ambassadors to the site. I think it's worth a try. If it doesn't work organically then maybe SE employees need to fill that role.

Answer 6

If you're not a paid employee of SE, and you've got tons of rep... why are you here? Why did you spend hours researching and crafting answers to questions, reviewing and editing questions and answers and so forth?

Well, the reason I'm here is because I am literally addicted to the website. There have been several occassions which made me want to leave the site entirely, but I can't seem to do so.

I try to not be snippy but.

"Needs details or clarity" when the question is detailed enough on its own to be answered, and sometimes, already was answered and accepted

And if it's not that, then it's questions being mod-closed as "unclear" within minutes, if not seconds after they've been posted. First ask the user to clarify¹, wait for them to maybe respond, then resort to moderator tools.

¹ Unless you're that moderator who doesn't understand irony and says "please add information to your post, we are not mind-readers" but doesn't bother to specify what information.

Also – every mod should consider that some questions can be unclear to them, specifically, but completely fine to people who have already had experience with the topic or technology that is being asked about. This doesn't mean the questions shouldn't be clarified, but it also doesn't mean those questions are un-answerable as-is.

There are also other kinds. I've seen a few questions insta-closed as shopping recommendations, which would make sense except they're literally asking what the help page told them to ask to avoid the question being closed as a shopping recommendation. Why? What's the point of having those suggestions in the rules if users get punished for following them?

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As for comments... comments are just bad. I see bad answers being posted as comments (where they cannot be downvoted), I see useful comments get wiped without a trace ("you should have edited it into the answer" well sure but they cannot be recovered after the fact), but most importantly I've seen incredibly rude comments stay put even after they have been flagged. I swear some of them were almost word-for-word taken from the "Which comments to flag as rude/abusive" instructions, but they have the mod diamond so of course they're immune to flags. It's a bit disheartening to see that.

Answer 7

The general pattern: SU has a problem with newbie biting.

All the issues you mentioned are not specific to newbies. I've been asking ~500 questions over 9 years on SU and there is a clear pattern of negativity around here. Negativity deters positive users from sticking around, while negative users remain, so that's the vicious cycle. Being more accountable for VTC/downvotes/unkind comments could be one solution, but obviously the clique of negative users always militate for the right to VTC/downvote/comment whatever they want.

E.g. look at https://superuser.com/users?tab=Voters&filter=all and you'll see that the top 2 most active voters have many more downvotes than upvotes (the #1 most active voter has almost 10 times more downvotes than upvotes!). Doesn't sound that positive to me.

Answer 8

First, this is not a callout post. I have two or three specific people in mind with some of the issues I mentioned above, but the thrust of this post is the site's general atmosphere rather than the conduct of those people. If you think I'm talking about you, I probably am, but I don't want to litigate that here and turn what is supposed to be gentle ask to consider the guy on the other side of the keyboard into a public drama fire. I am not asking you to account for your actions, and I am not slagging you off. I am asking you to reflect, nothing more.

Despite your stating it isn't a callout post it most certainly reads like one in my opinion. Many of the things you point and claim is hostile behavior, for instance not adding additional personalized commentary when closing a question, actually goes against the community guidance I have read over at meta.stackexchange.com and meta.stackoverflow.com

I am sure I will repeat the statement that closing a question is not actually considered to be rude or hostile behavior. Additionally, voting to remove a contribution and not personalizing a comment, that explains the reason the contribution was removed is not actually considered rude or hostile behavior. If anyone can show me clear guidance that says otherwise, I will change my approach, and kindly explain my votes to delete and close contributions.

Second, this post is not an attempt to relitigate specific review votes in specific circumstances. Everyone has their reasons for voting the way they do, and I sincerely do not think anyone who's been here long enough to obtain tens of thousands of points is some mustachioed cartoon villain or BOFH expy who's out to make people miserable on purpose.

It actually does seem like an attempt to change the way those users are voting. After reading your question several times, I have no doubt you believe those users are being unreasonable in their actions. I must reiterate the fact that voting on contributions is really not a personal action.

What this post is, is me imploring reviewers to consider their actions before taking them, not just on the quality of the site, but also on the people you will impact by those actions. And I don't just mean by your votes; I mean how you communicate their consequences. I would gently ask that you consider the following:

You really have not been gentle in any of your requests. This is obviously my own opinion, but I am considering our interactions both in the chatroom earlier and in the comment section to actual questions. My opinion is primarily based on the theoretical user's behavior.

It might be essential to point out that I am not asking anyone to disown the behavior of an uninformed user who submits commentary as an answer. Still, it certainly shouldn't be encouraged or justified.

If you have a high rep here, that indicates you are highly knowledgeable in a few technical aspects. Lots of the questioners coming in don't have that same knowledge and don't even know how to ask the "right" question yet because they're missing some vital piece of terminology or understanding of the subject matter.

Reputation does not indicate you are highly knowledgeable. I could give examples of answers that have hundreds of votes, and the only reason they have those votes is being prompted on Twitter. I have a few of those answers. I am honestly dumbfounded when one of those answers are promoted.

Indeed, some of those promoted answers are helpful, but even I can admit some of my own promoted answers don't deserve hundreds of upvotes.

People do come here at the ends of their ropes, meaning they don't know where else to go. Often in that many words - and yet we nuke their questions with the "clarity" reason because they "didn't show research effort".

They also come here and ask questions after doing absolutely no research on the subject. Which of course is fine but they have to be willing to provide the necessary information. Closing their question sometimes is a necessary step in the process of helping those users.

With all due respect, what research effort would you have them expend? Their post already indicated they don't know where to go!

The necessary information required to answer the question.

s it more useful, to SU, to them, and to the people who may encounter the question in the future, to comment asking for clarity and edit once that clarity is received, or immediately write off the question as unsalvageable and silently VTC it? If that clarity never comes, meaning the question is non-useful, by all means, you should VTC it, with the full knowledge that ROV is a black hole (more often than not, no amount of editing will get a question out of there, especially for the more subjective close reasons. Anything that's marked [closed] can be considered the site's trash bin.)

In my opinion, the close reasons while they are not perfect, actually do indicate what is required to answer the question. It is stated in a way that is far superior to what I personally could say in a comment. I choose NOT to submit commentary in these cases. I am also not going to allow somebody to incorrectly state that I am being rude by NOT submitting a comment.

Closing a question is a hostile action regardless of intention in that, it will be received as such. Every criticism of the Stack* network you find online include the willingness of reviewers to take adverse action on otherwise reasonable, useful questions at the drop of a hat.

This is absolutely false

The only avenue left to her is the answer box, which she uses because she doesn't know better yet. It looks like any other input box and fulfills the immediate goal of letting her communicate.

I am not going to quote the entire impractical outline of your example but the user wasn't forced to submit their commentary as an answer. You also won't be able to change my mind that that example is sort of ridiculous.

JaneNewbie closes her tab, leaving SU, likely never to return, soured on the whole experience. If asked, she will refer to SU as an unfriendly bunch of elitists who got unreasonably mad at her when all he wanted to do was thank a guy who helped her out.

So the user is going to leave the community after having a single contribution deleted? We have to keep in mind their single contribution was a comment that would have been automatically deleted after a single flag. If this user is leaving after having a single contribution deleted then we need a better system to avoid commentary being submitted as an answer. Until that better system is released the only tools we have are to delete commentary submitted as an answer.

The upvote requirement could be lowered to 1.

The upvote requirement was set to the current threshold after it was determined it was just low enough to stop unwanted behavior and voter fraud. The requirement for an upvote is meet after having a single contribution upvoted. This requirement cannot be changed by the community users nor should the fact this requirement exists be held against the community.

The person who reviews Jane's bogus answer still needs to flag it for not being an answer, but they could add a gentle comment (one comment, these shouldn't be piled on by five different people) about why they're doing what they're doing.

I am not required to submit a comment when I perform reviews.

You'll note that at no point here did I talk about Jane's behavior. First off, Jane is a newbie. She's ranting on meta because she feels attacked and doesn't know any better yet. You, on the other hand, replying to her post, probably do know better. What's your excuse?

We actually should be talking about their behavior. There actually should be more protections in place to prevent contributions that will be deleted from being submitted in the first place.

If you've been in tech long enough to back up your rep, you already know the golden rule: Users don't read docs. Users will take context clues, they can be guided, but most of them will never touch the tour. The tour is tl;dr. JaneNewbie will do stupid things out of ignorance, and expecting her (or most users) to understand how the site works in whole before using it is simply not realistic. People with experience in technology and psychology that outmatches that of every person that will read this post combined have been trying to do so for years.

I read the help tour when I was a new user. What is their excuse?

I'm certainly not asking you to flag crap less or vote in ways contrary to the guidelines. The guidelines are reliable, and their precise application has led to this and the rest of the SE network being a fantastic resource.

You actually have asked us to do that. You have only spoken about the review actions that are incorrectly and unfairly being perceived as negative events. Closing a question is not a negative event. Removing an answer that is submitted as commentary is a positive event, but in that process, a comment is automatically submitted explaining the reason it was removed.

If you're not a paid employee of SE, and you've got tons of rep... why are you here? Why did you spend hours researching and crafting answers to questions, reviewing and editing questions and answers and so forth?

I am starting to wonder that myself.

All of these things I just got done complaining about? They represent failures to help people. Is it genuinely going to take you that much more time to write a thoughtful comment when someone screws up rather than smacking that "close" button and moving on to the next review out of your 20? Is it really worth forever turning off someone because you were afraid you were going to spend effort being nice to someone who might not reciprocate?

The only failure you describe is the example user who despite everything still submitted their commentary as an answer. It sounds like Stack Exchange needs to do more work to prevent that from happening.

Remember that a VTC effectively means "I think this is such crap that it should go away." It is "delete" with extra steps.

This is absolutely false.

Explain your work when you VTC things. Any first VTC without a comment is probably unhelpful in most cases. You are going to tick people off, necessarily. Nobody likes being told they screwed up... but you can and should soften the blow.

Additional commentary explaining a VTC is unnecessary and likely to be flagged.

Vote up more, in general. Votes on main SU are for usefulness, not exceptionality. There are a lot of good questions and answers out there that don't deserve the 0 scores they have, and comparatively few crap questions and answers that have an unjustifiably high score.

In reality, upvotes and downvotes are equal, and users should upvote helpful contributions and downvote unhelpful contributions.

Consider whether an auto-message is the most appropriate way to inform someone they screwed up. Auto-messages are factual, but they are officious, not friendly.

This is absolutely false. It is not possible for commentary automatically submitted to be unfriendly.

Questions being closed without so much as a perfunctory or even Pro-forma "here's what you did wrong" commentary

Commentary explaining a close vote is not required.

Widespread misuse of two specific closure votes:

• "Needs details or clarity."
• "Needs focus"

The individual Stack Exchange website cannot customize these close-reasons. These close reasons are the closest thing to the actual close reason when closing vague unanswerable questions. Closing a question is not a negative event. It's an opportunity for the author to increase the quality of the question.

General stinginess with upvoting on main (even when the questions "show research effort, are useful, and clear," as the tooltip on the button says.)

I don't personally find unclear or broad questions to be helpful. I routinely reverse my downvotes once the question has been clarified so it can be answered.

VTCs for things where downvotes are more appropriate

You literally just got done indicating that there is a widespread issue of misusing two specific, close votes. So I guess that means that we are not supposed to issue close votes against it nor issue a downvote, so it just sits in an unanswerable form. Sooner or later, somebody will come around and say not answering those questions is rude behavior. I personally won't be changing the way we issue close votes until there is a better system released.

I was initially going to post this to answer why certain commenters take a rude tone with new users? But I think there's a bigger problem here that requires more discussion.

Let's ignore the fact that the answer to that question was out-of-scope for a moment. That's the root cause of what was ultimately a justified action, but it's not the answer to what OP said, and after spending a small but significant amount of time reviewing, I'm noticing some patterns over and over again that jibe with their complaint.

Let's not actually ignore the fact that the author was attempting to answer a question that was obviously out of scope. The question was temporarily locked to prevent additional commentary due to their own actions. Voting to close a question that is obviously not within the scope of SuperUser without any commentary is not actually considered rude behavior.

The author in question believes that a moderator should be banned for performing moderator actions. This is the exact type of mindset that typically isn't reasonable, and their negativity should be ignored.

, E.g., look at https://superuser.com/users?tab=Voters&filter=all, and you'll see that the top 2 most active voters have many more downvotes than upvotes (the #1 most active voter has almost 10 times more downvotes than upvotes!). Doesn't sound that positive to me.

I am equally encouraged to issue both downvotes and upvotes. I primarily downvote answers submitted as a comment. I downvote unclear questions. I downvote answers that I feel are technically incorrect. I also upvote helpful correct high-quality contributions.

While the raw statistics indicate that I downvote more than I upvote, it doesn’t indicate that the community is deleting 95% of contributions I downvote. It also doesn’t consider the votes I end up reversing, but not necessarily, replacing with an upvote.

I am not actually required to explain any vote I issue. It doesn’t matter what my upvote to downvote ratio actually is because it doesn’t consider the contributions that I downvote end up being deleted. It’s a ratio of raw votes

If you disagree with any downvote I have issued, you are free to upvote it, which is worth 5x more than an upvote. I am not going to be bullied to not vote on contributions I feel are unhelpful. I am just not going to submit a comment indicating that I believe that.

Answer 9

People do come here at the ends of their ropes, meaning they don't know where else to go. Often in that many words - and yet we nuke their questions with the "clarity" reason because they "didn't show research effort".

IMHO it's OK to ask a user to do more research or update the question in a comment - without downvoting the question. This is what I prefer to do.

Closing a question is a hostile action regardless of intention

I think the more popular Stack Exchange sites should have more than 5 votes needed to close a question. Stack Overflow probably should be at 10.

Let's consider the case of a random Google user who encountered a useful answer here. They find a well-written question, a solution that completely solves their problem. What will their first instinct be? Thank the person who made it!

I wish there was a socially-acceptable kind way of really getting people to understand that a "thank you" isn't necessary. Upvote=thanks.

I think it's right to suppress this and don't agree that it's harmful.

What makes Stack Exchange great is a laser focus on it being a Q&A site.

People need to understand it's a Q&A site and if you are not Q'ing or A'ing, use the chat. This is not a forum. This is not us trying to be mean, this is us just trying to develop and maintain a good repository of knowledge. I want to add this focus is what makes this a good place for answers and doesn't degrade into meme-drivel like other sites.

When I search for answers on Google I want answers, not conversation. This isn't a place for chit chat. This isn't a social network. Go to a forum, Facebook, Twitter, whatever else for that. Stack Exchange has a chat facility, if you want to chat, use the chat.

As an aside, IMHO the top-level Stack Exchange Meta is real bad about blurring the lines between Q&A and chat and I think it harms the site overall.

This being said, I will not bite a new user's head off who is doing this accidentally. I'll tell them in a comment what they are doing wrong in a kind manner and ask them to delete their comment.

Answer 10

If you're in doubt about what OP is talking, go to Quora and search for "Stack exchange". You'll discover tons of people who moved over to Quora, because of the rampant hostility on "Stack Exchange"-type forums (instant closing of questions etc). On Quora, you'll find questions phrased exactly like OP's "Why is Stack Exchange so hostile?"

As far as reasons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment. Give people unchecked authority, and 95% quickly degenerate into prison guards. There's nothing in Stack Exchange's mechanism that prevents hostility / abuse from "high-scorers"