[emodendroket]

> An AI would be just as good, if it had decently accurate answers.

Well, this reminds me of "if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a bicycle."

Failing to clean up bad questions is encouraging all the bad behavior you're talking about, since answering yet another question from someone who couldn't be bothered to write his own regex is an easy 25 points that nobody will ever look at again.

[wokwokwok]

Does it help any of the issues I mentioned?

Or would those people be happier if they just had their questions answered?

The answerers with their karma; happy! The askers with their answers: happy.

The only “losers” are people who hoard their karma… because (I guess?) now other people are getting karma? …and I just do not care about those people.

[emodendroket]

Well, you said you were dissatisfied that people were avoiding challenging questions in favor of karma farming easy ones. Failing to prune lazy questions with no value to other users incentivizes that exact behavior because hard questions don't usually have a better payoff.

[avereveard]

It's a gargantuan task to clean up low quality post and fight back low quality copy paste blog spam from a community that has become resume padding for the masses.

The community has spoken, to the extent whether the majority of usage becomes the defacto standard, and basically filtered out all but the most basic coding issues that are just one peg above homework assignments.

[emodendroket]

Well, I wouldn’t say it was the community speaking. This is what the operators wanted because the old way was not “welcoming” enough and didn’t contribute enough to growth. Hey, it’s a business. I get it.

[yladiz]

No, it wasn’t “not ‘welcoming’”, it was just “not welcoming”. Sure it’s the owners who forced this, but it’s not a bad thing to be more welcoming and thinking otherwise because “it’s better” is problematic. You should also blame the owners for not giving a shit about moderation for the low quality of things now, if you want to blame them for the push for being “welcoming”.

[avereveard]

You can be welcoming and still enforce guidelines, it's not an either/or situation.

[emodendroket]

At the end of the day enforcing guidelines involves telling people "sorry, this is not the kind of question we want here," and people are always going to find this less than welcoming -- justifiably so, since they've objectively been excluded. You can be as nice as you want about it, and I'm not advocating being rude or cruel, but it doesn't matter.

[yladiz]

Right, I think so too. My point is more that moderation doesn’t imply being unwelcoming, and they are more or less distinct. A great example is HN, it’s a pretty welcoming place with good moderation, albeit at a much smaller size than SO.