Breaking the HNQ feedback loop on bad questions

Question

The Hot Network Questions sidebar is a bit of a contentious issue, because it tends to promote questions that are often perceived as 'cheap', of relatively low quality, or on the fringes of topicality for the site that hosts them.

One reason for this is that they're subject to a feedback loop: they're promoted widely, a bunch of people with no previous experience of the site click through, upvote it (because they bring their association bonus) but don't downvote it even if they recognize it as bad (because the association bonus doesn't let you downvote), and then the question score increases, and the system thinks it's really Hot and worthy of further promotion.

This has frustrated a lot of people, to the extent that people have asked that outsiders with just the association bonus be barred from voting on those questions (or, for that matter, asking how to get rid of the sidebar entirely). That, however, is a bit extreme, and makes understandable that the dev and community teams have given that proposal a wide berth over the two years since it was first proposed.

So, here's something a bit less extreme:

Let association-bonus users vote on HNQs, but don't count those votes and views into whatever algorithm does the decision that a question is Hot.

That is, separate all the votes and views on questions and answers into two categories,

• those by users with 100+ rep earned on the site in question, and
• those by everyone else, even if they have 100 rep from the association bonus,

and discard the second category when feeding it into the HNQ algorithm (possibly still this one?). (If you want to, you can change that 100 to some given threshold, no smaller than the earned ability to upvote at 15 rep.)

I think this is a good mix of not being too disruptive on the normal mechanisms while also allowing more room for the organic quality measures of the individual sites to decide what gets promoted more widely, instead of the current junk-food driven algorithm.

That said, I would at least like to know from the dev team whether there are insurmountable scaling and feasibility barriers to implementing this sort of separation.

Answer 1

What's proposed in the question is a good, easy, actionable improvement that would make an immediate positive difference and is worth doing.

It can be done, and should be done (and probably should have been done 2 years ago when it was first proposed).

It should be rolled out as soon as possible.

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Of course it's one improvement among many needed and not the mythical, magical one-fix-that-will-make-HNQs-perfect. We should, did, and probably will continue to spend large amounts of time discussing other, deeper, more fundamental improvements to the mechanisms around HNQ. That is important and needs doing. It is not a reason to not act on good, simple, quick improvements that will have an immediate positive effect.

If someone is bleeding heavily from the arm, you can and should spend time talking about why they're bleeding, how to prevent similar such bleeding, what the best bandaging technique is, etc etc. But that's not a good reason to dither and delay on treating the immediate symptom, bandaging the bleeding arm.

We should continue to discuss things like how to give sites more control over their HNQs, and discuss the details in posts like, for example:

• Allow mods or gold tag badge holders to prevent question from being on hot network questions list
• Let mods (and 10k?) know when questions go “hot”

...but that's not a good reason to delay taking a simple, easy to spec, easy to schedule and easy to implement action that will clearly reduce how often curious-looking but low-quality questions get stuck in the HNQ list because they're (often inadvertently) clickbait-y to people who don't know the topic.

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See also this related even-more-popular proposal, from 2014, Prevent questions on Hot List from being upvoted by casual visitors (only rep is from association bonus). I think that's maybe an even better solution - but the most important thing is that either this proposal or that one gets done, and another two years aren't spent ignoring the problem.

Answer 2

In my opinion, this proposal is treating the symptom rather than the cause of the issue. The sites themselves pretty much don't have any input on whether a question makes it to HNQ, since especially on smaller sites a few quick answers and votes can quickly put the question on the HNQ regardless of quality and how well it fits the site. Once it's there, the only thing the site can do to guarantee the question gets off the list is closing it, which in the typical case doesn't make any sense.

The HNQ is great especially for telling other SE users about smaller sites they may not know about, but the site should have some way of influencing whether a question makes it to the list. The HNQ should be for high quality questions that reflect the site and attract new users. As of now, we don't have have any feedback on the quality or that it reflects the site only if it is "hot" or not.

A simple suggestion is once a question reaches a certain threshold instead of just going directly to the HNQ bar, it is instead put into a queue to check the quality of the questions similar to the triage. Based on its score there the question will get a multiplier to its HNQ score which won't influence it's overall position on the HNQ, but determine if the site wants it there over other questions that have similar scores.