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Comments on How will you balance demanding high quality questions with maximising the number of users?
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How will you balance demanding high quality questions with maximising the number of users?
There is a well know trade-off between a site aiming for questions/answers that are of a high quality and useful for people who arrive from Google and a site being nice to new users who often only care about someone doing their homework for them, so they can complete a programme course, with no intention of ever writing software again or learning more than what is needed to pass.
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One aspect that helps with having a good balance is to have an enough number of users that help newbies ask good (or at least decent) questions. This is something reachable within rather small communities.
I have seen this being put in practice by Politics.SE where there is a more effort put into helping users rather than simply downvoting and/or closing questions or deleting content:
- editing lousy questions in good-enough ones whenever possible. It provides quite some satisfaction to see a negative score question becoming a "hot" one after being edited.
- providing constructive criticism through comments rather than simply downvoting / vote to close.
- use comments to argue against closing or downvoting a question by providing arguments for this.
- have a clear and concise (minimal) set of rules like Codidact has.
- remove content that blatantly goes against "Be nice" policy.
This is clearly possible for Codidact communities.
I think it is important to avoid having "maximizing number of users" as the main goal of any community. It is important that they feel welcomed and in the same time to understand that not every community is a good fit for any user.
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