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 due to being prompted on Twitter. I have a few of those answers, I am honestly dumbfounded, when one of those answers are prompted. Certainly, some of those prompted answers were helpful, even I can admit some of my own prompted answers don't actually 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.