So many bad questions

Question

At the time I am writing this, 7 out of 15 questions in the first page have negative score. That's almost a half. Second page has 4 out of 15, and the third page has 6 out of 15. I never counted them on any other Stack Exchange site but I'm under impression other sites don't have such a big percentage of bad questions. I wonder why.

Maybe the purpose of this site is not as clear to a regular user... or maybe other sites just delete bad questions immediately and so they don't look overloaded with them. I have no idea. But it seems to me, when you come to a new site to ask question and see lots and lots of other questions downvoted, it may discourage you a bit, doesn't it. The site may even appear somewhat hostile.

I wonder what could be done to fix this. Even if you don't care about the site appearing hostile to new users, there's still a matter of people wasting time writing bad questions and then other people wasting time explaining why these questions are bad. What do you think?

EDIT

in the light of some answers I think I need to add this (wrote in comment as well): my intent was not to debate what questions are good what are bad, or to say that people are downvoting perfectly good questions.

Not at all. There are lots of really bad questions and people downvote them as they are supposed to do. I have never found a single "unjustly" downvoted or closed question so far. My intent was to find out how to limit the number of bad questions. Delete them faster? Provide more accessible, clearer FAQ to users?

Thank you to all of you who replied and who are going to reply, despite this question being a duplicate (quintuplicate?) ;)

Answer 1

The best thing to clarify things for new users would be to rename this site. I am relatively new here and I understand the distinction between Programmers.SE and StackOverflow, but I think many new users don't.

If this site was named "Software Design" or something similar I think much of the junk on "Programmers" would go away. The name "Programmers" is just too broad. If you don't read the FAQ (which a high percentage of people will not do, no matter what you wish), you could take "Programmers" to mean anything from working in the software industry (better for Workplace.SE), to how to implement a particular piece of code (better for StackOverflow), to what should I use to program X (better for SoftwareRecommendations.SE).

The name of the site should immediately and intuitively tell people what the site is there for. Until we fix this, we will continue to have a grab-bag of off-topic stuff cluttering up this site.

Answer 2

I've only been an active SE user for a couple of weeks, and since PSE is my favorite one I've been mulling this question over pretty much the entire time (not to mention reading far too many meta posts). Some days it feels like we're closing too aggressively. Some days it feels like you need a bachelor's in Q&A philosophy to tell what actually is on-topic for SO vs PSE vs all the other SEs. Some days it feels like the people writing questions can't construct a coherent sentence, much less an answerable question.

Based on my experience thus far, it looks like the truth is probably the latter: A lot of people are asking a lot of questions which are inherently bad, and they would be just as bad no matter what our scope or name was. There's even an old meta answer on this topic that reaches pretty much the same conclusion.

By that I mean questions which are too vague, broad, or unclear, typically because they don't have anywhere near enough detail for us to figure out what question is actually being asked (often the asker himself doesn't appear to understand it). When it comes to technical subjects like programming, the vast majority of newcomers do not understand that it is impossible to answer a question that hasn't been asked properly. Until they gain the experience to understand that, there's simply no way to respond that doesn't run some risk of them perceiving us as lazy, unhelpful, rude or elitist (though we can certainly lower that risk by being polite) rather than figuring out what they did wrong. This is just as true here as it is on SO and on all the other SEs about semi-accessible-but-still-highly-technical subjects (like security.stackexchange.com).

I really don't think there's anything we could do with PSE's question-asking UI to communicate this fundamental flaw in a newbie's conception of technical knowledge. PSE gets a bit more of it than most because people see it as SO with fewer restrictions, but we're not really that unique.

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So what can we do? Newbies are going to ask these questions no matter what, so in my opinion the best we can hope to do is improve our response to them:

1) Try to emphasize that subjective questions still have to be precise, specific and coherent enough to be answerable. This is the number one thing newbies are not getting.

2) Avoid emphasizing "ivory tower" close reasons like whether the question is "useful to other programmers". Newbies don't care about that. I don't care about that. I care about whether or not the question can be answered. If the question is "not useful", most of the time it's simply too broad/vague/unclear (or a code dump), so just say that.

3) When a question is just plain bad, so that it has no hope of being answerable on any SE site, we need to close it quickly. Looking at downvoted questions the front page right now, I see one that got put on hold, and several others that probably should have been put on hold or closed several hours ago.

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Edit: Case in point, look at the top of today's front page. Although I'm not sure how I feel about the intellectual property question, the others are fix my code, how do I learn to X, another fix my code, a question about how C socket functions work that probably could've been answered by googling, and a question about Windows filesystem behavior that's nowhere near detailed enough to be answerable.

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Edit 2: Case in point again, MichaelT just did the same thing with a much bigger sample size and reached the same conclusion.

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Edit 3: Since it's been a very long time since I wrote this, and I recently achieved 10k reputation, it seemed worth an update. To my surprise there is nothing in this post that I have since changed my mind on; it's all just as true as it was back then. The only difference is that I believe we have gotten somewhat better at closing poor questions quickly.

Answer 3

This has already come up several times before. Here are the related questions that I found quickly:

• Are we closing too many good questions now? (December 2010)
• Why are so many questions closed? (November 2011)
• What can be done about bad questions on Programmers? (January 2012)
• Why are so many questions closed? (October 2012 - duplicate of the November 2011 question)
• Why are there so many closed, on hold, and down voted questions here? (October 2013)
• Cutting down on off topic posts (June 2014)
• A lot of front page down votes (July 2014 - closed as a duplicate of he October 2013 and June 2014 questions)

Answer 4

What do you think? As a new user your perspective is much more interesting and potentially helpful than mine (and any other veteran user's). Do you find our help articles clear? Do you feel confident asking questions on the site? Do you understand why we close the questions we do? Is there anything about our site and policies you think should be changed? ...etc. If you have the time, please consider telling us how a relatively new user experiences the site (in an answer please, not in comments). - Yannis Rizos

Well, I was reading programmers SE for quite a while before registering, and I am user of stackoverflow probably since it launched, so not your run of the mill newbie. But lets answer the questions.

• Your help articles, I have never read them. I am going to, but that's besides the point, majority of newbies do not read them, or so I believe. They only help users who already have enough common sense and willingness to try and find out what the site is about before posting their questions
• Do I feel confident asking questions? Yes of course. I only had a need to ask once though, and while researching with Google how to best explain what I needed I accidentally stumbled upon all the answers on my own (happens to me a lot when I use stackexchange). It was a question on Multi-Tenant Data architecture, if you are curious.
• Do I understand why you close the questions? Sure I do. Every single one. Never found a closed question that I'd object to closing, yet. That's not the point.
• Is there anything about the site that I'd like to change... I think I'd like really bad questions to be summarily deleted. That way majority of the questions a new user sees would be good questions, questions one can use as a good example, questions that do not discourage a new user to post. Other than that, I don't know, maybe the background of textarea in 'ask question' could be used to present a very short bullet point list of dos and donts? The point is no matter how good your FAQ and HELP is, vast majority of new users won't read them before going straight to 'Ask question' form.

Generally I really like the idea behind this SE, I think it's useful to a beginner and veteran alike, and I strongly support keeping it clear, closing questions that do not belong here. But the amount of closed/downvoted ones are just disturbing, and I think something should be done about it, if possible.

Answer 5

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Suggested change 1

When a question has negative total votes (-2 or below) and is also being nominated for closing (by 2 or more), any user who is about to begin writing an answer will be given the following popup:

(1) Answers written for a question with negative total votes and being nominated for closing will not give its answerer any positive reputation points, even if the answer is upvoted.

(2) If the question is deleted later, your answer will be deleted as well.

(3) If the question later gets a positive total vote, or if the closing nominations are withdrawn, reputations will be awarded for upvotes on your answer.

(4) The question asker is allowed to improve the question, but in this process the question may have been altered significantly such that your answer might become irrelevant.

I understand the bloody consequences

Nevermind I don't want to waste time on this dude

In some sense, this tries to discourage other users from writing an answer on a soon-to-be-deleted question. If the answerer still chooses to, it is on the answerer's own volition.

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Suggested change 2

Try to make it really really easy to link to Wikipedia articles so that question askers who is simply knowledge-deficient can spend some time reading before they proceed to ask the question.

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Suggested change 3

Thanks to @gnat's link, and my reflection.

Delete the question right away, but forward the original URL into a private chatroom (or even an iframe that pretends to be embedded inside the familiar "main site look-and-feel"), which can only be seen by the asker, the commenters, and the authors of the now-deleted answers. All others should see the 404.

This serves to reduce the cognitive load and repellant factor of having to switch the mode to "a different site" that is the "chatroom".

Answer 6

Maybe, when a user posts his 1st, 2nd or 3rd post, after hitting 'post' redirect to a page where the user is prompted with the question "Are you sure this is the right place for your question, we are about '......'".

Then after 3 times, there is more chance the user knows what this place is about.

Answer 7

Stack Overflow has got an interesting feature that may be related.

I can't tell that it helps to lower amount of bad questions asked (I honestly don't know if this is possible at all) - but it at least helps to save site home page from being polluted by such questions (bold font in below quote is mine):

All questions flagged Very Low Quality now immediately enter Triage

...and while these questions are being triaged, they're not shown on the home page. Take that, wall of crap.

See also:

• MSE discussion of instilling above features network wide:
  Triage and Help & Improvement review queues at sites other than Stack Overflow?

Answer 8

I think this would help significantly:

This could be shown, let say, for the first 3 posts by a user.

This is also very similar to Michel's idea.

Answer 9

I find that there are two types of questions.

1. The questions I know the answers too.
2. The questions I do not know the answers too.

Neither type is inherently bad.

With that in my mind, and when I'm wearing my answerer hat, there are definitely questions that, after reading them once I do not wish to ever see them appear in a search result again for multiple reasons. In addition to the reasons mention above I also do not wish to see questions that I feel have been perfectly well answered by someone else.

It would be great to have a flagging system against each question (and probably against answers) where I can explicitly flag it as "like", "dislike" or "neutral".

A second great feature would be a "Saved filters" system.

Regarding the "Saved filters" system I won't take the time to consider this in detail but am implementation similar to what I am talking about would be the filtering provided by job search sites where I get to store sets of criteria and apply those criteria at my leisure.