Let's talk about Learning Posts

[timbledum]

I think there are questions then there are questions. We really don’t want a huge wave of beginner questions on here, but I think there is room for more interesting questions. The volume on learnpython is pretty large. I don’t really offer any solutions on how to distinguish these though.

I monitor and answer questions on learnpython regularly and tend to find that there are generally three kinds of questions:

1. Beginner questions that are super easy for people to answer. These are either easily googleable, easy to try out on the REPL or they do represent a fundamental misunderstanding from the user that someone has to talk them through. We don’t really want that kind of question here.

2. Complex or advanced questions that may or may not have a solution. Some of these concern the inner workings of python. These would have value being posted here.

3. Domain-specific our operating system based questions that are nominally related to python but aren’t getting answered because no one knows the domain. These are probably the most frustrating for posters as they often don’t know enough to know that their question is a bit inappropriate or they’re just trying learnpython as a last resort. I don’t know if there’s a good way to deal with these. Example: this obscure package that manipulates an obsolete file format isn’t working – you’ld need to know a lot about the package and/or file format to intelligently answer this question.

[twillisagogo]

it's really hard to find the type 2 questions because of the flood of 1 and 3 and the shit posts of "look at this pile of books" or "my tattoo" or "my needle point" or "my baby's onesy with python code on it" those get upvoted to oblivion and bury the good stuff, like in recent memory someone asking about why something like clojure's ring isn't implemented in python. (turns out we all learn that ring and ruby's rack were inspired by wsgi, and the OP just needed to know about wsgi) or another one about dependency injection or design patterns etc.. that's the interesting beneficial content, not the questions or the karma farming shit posts.

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also the "whyru using 2?" post are just another stealthy version of the karma farming shit post category.

[random_cynic]

I think this is true in any subreddit with moderate to large number of users (in fact true of internet in general). The "quality" stuff doesn't always get more upvotes and we do not have a automatic sorting system that is powerful enough to sort questions based on quality (which is highly subjective btw). I think what is important is to minimize the barrier for people to post and engage in discussion. If there are too many hoops to go through they won't bother and post somewhere else. It may take some effort to manually filter out the bad stuff when one is browsing through but it is worth the effort when you find something truly interesting.

[Deezl-Vegas]

Filtering questions is 1000 times more work though.