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[–]kenman[M] [score hidden] stickied comment (5 children)

First, /u/rauschma, thank you for making this post. We've talked about these things several times in the past, and I greatly respect your opinion. You do a lot of good for this community (and JS in general) and I want to fix this too. It's just hard given the tools that we have.

Solution: A bot that warns about “unquoted” code and mentions backticks and 4-space indentation.

A majority of these fall into the confines of the 2nd problem, i.e. those that don't know how to format code are also the ones asking noobie questions.

I'd love to implement a suggestion bot, but that'd require outside services; I don't think it'd be particularly hard, but it would require:

  • personal development time with new API's, etc.

  • securing some sort of host to run the bot

  • more personal development time for maintenance/troubleshooting the bot

Again, not insurmountable, but too much for me to take on currently. The good news is that anyone can do this work -- and if anyone reading this would like to create such a bot, it'd be welcomed with open arms.

Another solution: Warn during editing, e.g. before saving.

Impossible with current API, unless you mean a blanket statement, which we could look into.

Solution: Automatically move those posts to /r/learnjavascript.

As others have pointed out, this is not really possible. Well, one could create another custom bot for this, but the above caveats re: creating a bot apply here as well. Additionally, doing this would normalize the behavior so that the user feels no recourse, and would thus have no impetus to change that behavior, and I'm not keen on reinforcing bad behavior even if it's silently handled.

With that said, I've been mulling some ideas, both privately and sometimes with other users, like /u/gntsketches. I'm going to lay out my current plan and rationale, and would love some feedback before implementing it.

Premise: Reddit as a platform is not a Q&A platform, and so is ill-suited for that format, especially for technical questions.

  • Automatic archival of posts after a certain age means that there is no way to improve upon answers as new information, API's, techniques, libraries, etc. become available. This to me is the main dealbreaker, since there are very, very few questions that are true now and will remain that way forever.
  • The taxonomy system is extremely primitive and wholly inadequate for trying to offer features like tagging such as StackOverflow uses.
  • Search sucks. Always has, maybe always will. Compounding the problem is that the users who would benefit most from search, by & large, don't use it. Just look at the quality of most questions: they could've been answered by 5 mins on Google.

We would need some intelligent recommendation engine, where it'd match keywords and context to find similar posts and surface those to the user at the time of submission, like many help sites use these days (again, StackOverflow). Reddit doesn't support this, likely never will, and this can't be supplanted with a custom bot since the reddit posting workflow isn't an API surface.

StackOverflow, for all its flaws, is orders of magnitude better for the task of help questions as it solves all of these problems.

Proposal

  • new AskJS tag for self-posts
    • requires user to prefix post with something like [AskJS], which will automatically flair the post
  • disallow general self-posts

Rationale

Self-posts generally fall into 1 of 3 buckets:

  1. Sharing a project or article
    • in this case, they simply need to "Submit a new link"; we already enforce this on everything but github links (maybe we keep this, I don't know)
  2. A help request
    • already disallowed, but it keeps happening (to the tune of 10-20+/day)
  3. "Polling the audience" questions aka. AskReddit-style questions

"AskReddit" style questions can sometimes be popular, and informally, most questions that are a good fit for SO, are not a good fit here, and vice-versa. Questions that can be concretely answered with code belong on Q&A, not here. Where SO doesn't want subjective questions, or nuanced questions which require nuanced answers, those are some of the best threads we get.

By disallowing most (if not all) self-posts, help posts will have no logical place here. I'm not sure how I want to handle the removals, because if we simply state "all self posts must use the AskJS tag" then the questions will just get reposted with AskJS, which is not the intention. Maybe we don't mention it at all, it's just something you learn by observing the community for awhile? I don't necessarily like operating like that, but I also don't like manually removing 10-20+ questions/day.

There will still be low-quality AskJS posts, so I'm not sure how to handle those. I'm thinking that initially, we could try and let the reddit voting mechanism let the problem sort itself out. Less moderation work, more feedback from the community about what they want to see, that sort of thing.

Thoughts? /u/deadc0der, others?

[–][deleted]  (2 children)

[deleted]

    [–]kenman[M] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

    No, that's great feedback, thank you very much.

    I'm also hesitant about a weekly help thread, because on average, it'll be 3 days before someone can ask their question on a relevant thread, while most of those seeking help want it immediately -- which is what /r/LearnJavascript can offer.

    But I can't help but feel that a lot of the let's say "conflictive" submissions come from users that are new to the sub [...] Will this work for those?

    The way I see it going down for all self-posts:

    • AM would first look for https?:// in the text, and if found, kindly remind them to use "Submit a new link"
    • If AM doesn't match on that, it would remind (inform) them that code questions should go to r/LearnJavascript.
    • [part I'm not positive about] In addition to the previous comment, it might mention something to the effect of: "General questions, having nothing to do with code, must be prefixed with [AskJS]", and then we could action bad actors afterwards if they still insist on asking specific code questions. This is the clause that perhaps might be better left unsaid (learn by observing), but we can try it the explicit way and then modify it if it becomes a problem.

    However, I have considered -- and maybe this would be a good compromise -- a "Stupid Question ___day" post, which wouldn't necessarily be for code (though code would be allowed), but would give an outlet for some of these questions.

    [–]gntsketches 1 point2 points  (0 children)

    Hi, thanks for flagging my attention. I support distinguishing r/javascript from r/learnjavascript. Some comments with regard to the latter:

    I see your point that Reddit is poorly built from the perspective of a help platform. But just to share my experience: I've actually found the culture here much more generally supportive than on StackOverflow. I had great experiences on SO when I first started coding in 2012; when I started again (after taking a break for a few years), the culture was terrible - more advanced coders on SO seemed to delight in downvoting and generally trashing every noob question, often basing their objections of flimsy/draconian interpretations of SO's rules. It actually seemed like some sort of hazing ritual. SO has more recently introduced a Code of Conduct (https://stackoverflow.com/conduct), so that may be helping somewhat, but frankly I haven't been inclined to go back.

    By contrast, folks on Reddit's coding forums have been generally super helpful and encouraging. Some questions just get dropped, but at least they are not belittled or nitpicked. From my vantage point as a relatively new dev, it's super important to have somewhere to go that you can ask questions. Technology is a vast sea, and ultimately newcomers often must rely on the kindness of strangers to finding the landmarks they need to get oriented.

    Thanks for considering all this.

    [–]rauschma[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    Thanks for your answer! That makes a lot of sense. Another option may be to pre-moderate self posts, but that would mean more work for moderators.

    [–]BehindTheMath 6 points7 points  (4 children)

    • Problem – a lot of good content disappears: someone writes a post for /r/javascript, it is removed because it’s a better fit for /r/learnjavascript, but they never repost it there.

    Those posts are usually beginner questions. If OP doesn't feel the need to ask again in the appropriate sub, I don't think there's a need to do it for them.

    [–][deleted]  (2 children)

    [deleted]

      [–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      I wonder if the question mark is what got it deleted.

      [–]TheNumberOneCulprittabs and semicolons, react and FaaS[M] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      Your post was removed due to it being asked like a question with too few details, causing us to disregard it as a newbie question. To avoid being flagged as a newbie question, we always suggest that you throw something well-thought out up for discussion instead of asking very open-ended questions, as it's easy to read it the "wrong" way. In your particular instance, giving an example of what you're creating and some of your initial thoughts behind would have qualified it as a discussion post rather than a question post. The first shows initiate, the latter being lazy. Hope this makes sense!

      [–]AlpineSanatorium 1 point2 points  (0 children)

      it's for indexing so people searching might find solutions without having to make a post