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by vadimberman
3008 days ago
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> It's nice that in a discussion that is in part about being nice you call someone that downvoted you an idiot. I call them an idiot because they were nitpicking on a question that was asking for help well within the already Procrustean bed of regulations. I stand by my assessment: it's hardly a reason to refuse help citing bureaucratic regulations if you're a public servant, but that's somewhat expected. If, however, it's a fellow forum contributor, this is both unexpected and serves no purpose. Not sure who's right, of course, but as you see, the number of people complaining is greater by day. Note that many of them are familiar with the Internet since 1990s and are netizens of good standing; still, they manage to somehow "violate" these rules. As soon as there is a real competition to the "soup Nazi's shop", many people will jump ship without hesitation. It's also interesting that other Stack Exchange communities are not that strict. |
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Its a matter of scale and the ratio of the amount of time people are willing to help to the incoming question rate.
Lets say there are 500 people who are willing to spend the time to help a user craft a better question. They are willing to spend 60 minutes per day helping. Thats 30,000 minutes per day. There are 8,000 question/day. If we generously apply Sturgeon's law to this, thats 7,2000 questions in need of help.
And now we're at 4.2 minutes per question for those 500 people. If you believe this is a smaller number based on https://stackoverflow.com/review/helper/stats and https://stackoverflow.com/review/close/stats then apply the appropriate scaling.
You might want to work off of the values in https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357198/mentorship-r...
> 63 mentors from the community volunteered to be our partners.
Lets think about a smaller site now. Electrical Engineering gets 80 questions per day. DBA gets 40. Now you've got a point where each question with potential to it can have someone spend a significant amount of time making it into a good question for the site.
The other half to that is the curation of the answers. Questions with discussions and polling are a nightmare to keep curated. Consider https://stackoverflow.com/q/1711 or https://stackoverflow.com/q/406760 or https://stackoverflow.com/q/184618 and how many duplicate answers there are in there. Consider that if that was open, how often would a new user go to that post and create another poor answer to add their own opinion.
Yes, each time a new answer is posted, there's activity on that the question that bumps it to the front page... but the front page scrolls too fast to do meaningful curation for all but the worst (and this also takes time out of the 1h for those 500 people).
A smaller site can spend a lot more time per user to guide them to ask a good question and a lot more time per answer to make it something that is a good answer.