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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.
3 answers
The question is not "what will you do", but "what will we do?"
This site is community-run. While of course there are a few rules that we need to impose to be able to host a community, for the most part, every community gets to choose its own way. That includes things like this - this community can choose for itself how it wants to handle things like homework questions and quality management. We're more than happy to advise and guide, but ultimately - it's up to you!
Is it a bad idea to create a newcomer-only Q&A category? Not now, but after a few years.
... or not a category but you know the tabs like "Meta" and "Code Reviews?" However those are called. Call this one "Hello, World" or "Hello, Newbie" or "Howdy, Stranger." I'm kind of attached to the "Hello" idea. Anyway. The standards for what passes as a decent question on "Hello" are much lower than the standards enforced on "Q&A" : it's ok to ask questions that have been answered elsewhere, it's ok if you have a problem with command-line tools instead of compiled code, it's ok if you don't list all the websites you tried before coming here. Most of the questions will come from desperate freshmen in Comp Sci 101, and eager sophomores who asked their CS 101 questions on Codidact last year will be happy to give answers. I mean they've only been on Codidact for a year now; how are they supposed to know which questions have been asked before? If everything goes right, experienced moderators will never need to look at the questions on "Hello."
There might be problems. What if North Korea liberalizes and all the incredibly experienced North Korean software engineers get access to the global internet and start asking real, never-before-seen questions on Codidact's "Hello" page? They don't have the reputation yet to post to "Q&A." Who will sort the signal from the noise? This might work with eager CS seniors who have been helping out on "Hello" for a few years now and know how to spot a real question when they see one. They flag the question if in doubt, and an experienced moderator can determine whether or not the question should be promoted to "Q&A."
But is this the way that we want to raise our next generation of question-askers and moderators? Sure the eager CS sophomore knows how to answer questions, but does she know how to gently coax the desperate CS freshman into making his second question a bit better than his first? How did she learn how to coach her students anyway, since she was indoctrinated by other second-rate moderators on the "Hello" page? I don't have a good prediction on this one. Maybe just try it and watch for problems.
When I first learned how to code I referenced Stack Overflow every day, asked a few questions, occasionally browsed through the list of new questions to see if there were any that I could help with. Never happened: all the new questions were way over my head. It's probably still that way, since I mostly work with languages designed in the 1980's... same thing happened on comp.lang.c. I think that a lot of newcomers will want to help, and something like this would give them their own space to vent those altruistic impulses.
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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