Could a significant reputation requirement for asking questions be ethical and/or practical here? [closed]

Question

^{I imagine that this will be highly controversial but, well, we're here to ask and discuss, right?!}

In the tags that I frequent, namely c++/php/javascript on SO, it feels to me like we have reached a kind of saturation point, in that the vast majority of new questions daily are either duplicates or localised debugging questions. We've had discussions on meta before about the flood of low-quality posts and the concensus so far has been to just keep flagging and downvoting.

But there's a problem with that — for every one meta-conscious [sic] SO user who closevotes and downvotes a poor question, there are twenty new users who see the same question and "learn" that this is how SO is to work. Each of those twenty new users goes on to themselves write a lame debug-my-codez-plz post and then our review work, not to mention what I can only imagine to be a ballooning database, is twenty times worse. Rinse, lather, and repeat.

Back to the point, then; again I can only speak for the tags I use so perhaps this is not in actuality a site-wide phenomenon, but the only "new" questions I see now are relatively advanced ones posed by higher-rep users. The basic stuff has all been covered, be it in FAQ form (some tags designate a "co-tag" e.g. c++-faq to mark questions that should be used as common points of reference when marking duplicates to frequently asked questions).

Now, it would not be right to suggest that this means SO should be closed off to non-advanced questions, not at all. On the other hand, is there not a pattern of pretty much all of the rubbish being generated by users with low reputation? Users who write answers and gather rep over their first days and weeks on SO tend to be those who like to put a little thought into life, and thus write questions that may actually be useful for someone someday.

Would it really be such a bad thing to have new users wait this kind of amount of time before asking their first question? Why is everyone in such a hurry? If we can promote the use of brainpower as opposed to "my first port of call to solve this problem is posting it on Stack Overflow" then so much the better — along this line of reasoning is the notion that if somebody needs to post their question right damn now then it's probably the case that they haven't applied the necessary patience to properly solve a problem and learn from it too. Do we need to allow new users to post their first question right from the outset? Is that a priority? Making the barrier to "get help" in any form as low as possible? Or does the fact that the answers to the common questions are now all already there override that to a degree?

I think we can put a stop to the constant influx of nonsense questions into the SO database that take up valuable search result space and just generally cause a nuisance for the benefit of just one person, without losing our ability to help people and provide the information that we set out to provide... and without introducing any sort of elitism, since everybody can gain rep — it takes time, not expertise (at least, not beyond the very basics of the topic in question).

^{This has been raised before, of course, but two years ago, before this perceived "saturation point" was reached.}

So, here it is.

How about this: I propose a minimum reputation requirement of 500 to ask questions.

Go!

Answer 1

I get what you're going for, but I don't think the direction is a good one. The site's popularity and its efficiency when it comes to answering questions brings in elements we don't always like to see. But putting up a significant hurdle before you can even ask a question doesn't seem to be the solution.

Would it really be such a bad thing to have new users wait this kind of amount of time before asking their first question? Why is everyone in such a hurry?

Everyone is in a hurry because they have their question now. Not in a week, not in a month. This equally applies to both the hypothetical "crap user" and the "good user". If we're asking users to post questions related to actual practical problems they face, you can't really go "Good, keep that in mind. Ask again in a week or two when you have the required rep. But please do keep contributing to the site."

Yes, putting up the bar would certainly stop some of the crap. And that doesn't worry me one bit. But you're also stopping the new user with potential. The one who can formulate a pretty damn good question. The one who has done his research. The one that faces a nice little problem now. And it's them that I worry and care about.

Sure, it's a hypothetical scenario of the "good user", but I think it's not all that an unlikely one. And how motivating must it be to the new user when he's not even able to ask his question? Would you still be willing to contribute your expertise if you're not even allowed to ask your own question?

Stack Overflow on the outside does seem to have a reputation of being fairly strict and sometimes even "too strict" on what they allow as a question. (Sure, disgruntled former users on blogs, hearsay from colleagues and such. I didn't do the market study) And from the inside, I don't think that's a bad thing.

If you perceive a problem as a tag-community with the level of the questions asked, perhaps we have to find a way to be even more strict. And perhaps more efficiently so. How this would be shaped, I don't exactly know. Better duplicate detection? Better tag-wiki content to point to? Other means?

But overall I'd rather be "the site where your question gets closed if it doesn't fit in those damn tight boundaries" than "that site where you can't even ask your decent question without having to jump trough hoops for a month". The former might partially address the issue you raise. The latter I fear might cause harm.

Answer 2

You already note in your own answer that it will be hard for new users receive such reputation. Therefore, such a minimum reputation requirement will reduce the number of new SO users.

For me a better solution would be mandatory pre-moderation of questions asked by low-reputation users.

E.g., a user with a low reputation can post a new question. However, this question should not be published before revision by moderators or high-reputation users.

SO already has a 'First Posts Review' option. Therefore, required moderation can be implemented based on this option.

Answer 3

I see one particular problem with this on a practical note, which is that if new questions of a relatively basic level cease to flow into SO, there will be less and less for new users to actually answer and, as such, it will become progressively harder for them to accrue rep and actually reach the amount required to then go ahead and post a new question. A bit of a chicken-and-the-egg problem there.

Answer 4

The biggest problem with those newbie hundred-dupe beginner questions is that they get answered, not that they get asked. Beginners see them and get excited, because I KNOW THIS ONE and here is a chance for some of that sweet sweet rep. They should be flagging and editing and generally slapping down the bad content but they don't know about that part so they answer. And they get rep. And they give rep to the asker while they're at it.

You want to set a 500-rep bar? A mere 25 or 50 times answering one of those should-be-deleted questions will take care of that. And it will not ensure that anyone knows what kinds of questions to ask here.

It might be interesting, in particular tags that are plagued with bad questions, to ask for 3 or 4 helpful flags as a pre-req to asking. These are evaluated by mods, not other newbies, so they are likely to be meaningful. But I think we're better off encouraging those who know what they're doing to clean up the inappropriate first questions than banning questions from first timers.

Answer 5

I can think of a somewhat modified proposal: make posting questions cost reputation - that is, questions that do not get upvoted.

The idea would be that people might start with e.g. a bit more repuation, say 10 points, and posting a question costs them 5 points. If they use up these points, they can no longer ask questions.

However if they get upvoted one time per question, they get back their reputation and can go on. I think while people feel tempted to answer lousy questions just because they are quite simple, the same people might be hesitating to upvote such a question nevertheless.

It might seem that this will not help because people who are looking for simple questions will upvote exactly these simple questions because they want more of them. Well, I have to plead guilty of picking out simple questions and I am slowly learning that this is not a good idea, but while I have been proven to be a bit dense to get that point, I never thought of voting up a poorly asked question. Even though that might feed my reputation source, at least to me there is a solid psychologocial barrier to do so, because I can feel this hurts the site. After all this is mostly the site where I can find answers to the question I throw into google, not the site where I brag about to my buddies.

I am not sure how to handle the problem that people who have burned their points can just set up a new account. Maybe making it impossible to sign up if there is already a user with the same email might work?

Answer 6

No.

(The fact that the site that is now Meta Stack Exchange also once served as Stack Overflow's child meta complicates the relationship of my answer to the question. However, old questions can't be migrated so easily, so I'll answer with respect to the present site.)

Requiring 500 reputation to ask a question will block so many questions that new sites created through the Area 51 process will fail to gain enough of a community to graduate.

• Apply during private beta: The site never has a single question. All users have 1 or 101 rep and therefore not enough to ask anything.
• Apply during public beta: New users tend to find the site through interesting questions that appear in Hot New Questions. These questions already have answers. Though a user can provide an additional answer, I'll guess that most late answers don't gain near the visibility as earlier, already upvoted answers. A user may have to dig in Unanswered for opportunities to earn needed reputation, which may be difficult if the site is like Worldbuilding, which had fairly long periods when there were fewer than three open questions without an accepted or upvoted answer.
• Apply after site graduates: Similar to the public beta case. Though the set of unanswered questions will probably be larger, it still creates a class divide, giving those over 500 rep power to control who joins the club of being able to ask questions and who doesn't. So the moment a site gets a new design (and thus final privilege levels), promising users under 500 rep may quit because they don't feel like going through the red tape of answering a bunch of questions not in their specialty just to retain the question-asking privilege that they had had. Do we want to lose them to Quora over this?

As Phoshi said of a similar proposal, this proposal smacks of ExpertS-exChange mentality, which Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange network were created specifically to avoid.