Please assume good faith whenever reasonable when dealing with post-banned users

Question

Note

Please see my answer below. I have incorrectly applied my Wikipedia experience to Stack Exchange and based my assumptions on biased data, and I am deeply sorry for the controversy I have generated.

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A follow-up to this question.

I find the attitude towards post-banned users to be very harsh, giving the message of "you're on your own" rather than "here are some suggestions on how to improve". Can we actually help users who are post-banned improve their posts instead of saying "tough luck")? Even if users are making low-quality posts, we really should be assuming good faith whenever reasonably possible, since these users generally aren't being malicious.

I hate seeing post-banned users crying "miséricorde" but not getting any mercy from the community. A lot of these users really want to and can improve. User behavior is not set in stone, and assuming that they can't improve is the wrong thing to do.

We should stop assuming that users know the rules or understand how to write better posts by the time they get post-banned. As Kyle Strand said in this answer:

We need to stop relying on our tools--the FAQ, the pop-up suggestions, and so on--to teach new users to become valuable contributors, and start teaching them ourselves.

Answer 1

You are almost pretending as if none of this ever existed:

• People leaving comments as to why questions are closed
• People explaining their downvotes
• The messages below closed questions
• The message you get when a question doesn't meet quality standards
• The message you get when you're banned from posting
• All the examples of good content on the site
• Editors who waste spend their time fixing posts for others

… and finally:

• Meta, where you can constructively discuss your ban. Not in the way of "plz halp unban", but specifically asking about what and how to improve. But that only works if the users understood the message in the first place, and know what the goal of this network of sites is.

You're saying:

We should stop assuming that users know the rules or understand how to write better posts by the time they get post-banned

This has probably been repeated to death, but: By the time a user is post banned, they will have a clue about what is wrong, unless they're ignoring all the warnings they get—and be it just downvotes on their questions. What are we to do about this?

You cannot expect every single user here to hold new users' hands. Granted, there's no place for non constructive comments either, the "What have you tried?" epidemic being a good example, but even the fact that this kind of comment needs to be posted should get the OP thinking that something is wrong. And maybe, if they're a little attentive, they will think again before asking the next question, expecting the next comment that asks for what they've tried, and actually show their efforts in their question.

But honestly, by the time you have to tell a user for the third time how the code formatting works, that the "i" should be capitalized, and that questions should show research effort, how is that your fault if they get banned at some point? Why should we be the ones to take extra special care so as not to assume bad faith, when (most) users should have gotten clear messages about one or the other thing they've done wrong?

Answer 2

This isn't a complete answer, but it's worth noting anyway. For all of those questions, the users were given some form of help.

• In this question, Harvey decided to undelete many deleted posts, allowing the OP to improve them.

  Your question ban is almost 100% due to self-deleted posts. You should try to improve questions instead of deleting them. I undeleted most that weren't closed first by the community. stackoverflow.com/q/*** stackoverflow.com/q/*** stackoverflow.com/q/*** stackoverflow.com/q/***

• In this question, there is a +26 answer with a very clear guide as to how to become unbanned.
• In this question, the user was informed that their edits to their questions are effective and beneficial, and it received a constructive answer.
• In this question, the user was told by Atwood that their massive number of deleted questions resulted in a question ban.

• In this question, the user was particularly close to being unbanned, and received a suggestion to post a couple good answers.

  It looks like you're close, have you tried also writing some helpful answers that also receive up votes?

Need I go on? We do help users become unbanned, when they show effort and clear thinking.

Answer 3

I suppose that I am basing my assumptions on incomplete data. A certain level of competence is always expected, whether on Wikipedia or on Stack Exchange. While I still strongly believe that newcomers need to be treated friendlier than they currently are and should be more clearly warned when they do make multiple low-quality posts, this Wikipedia essay comes to mind. The real issue is not that we need to hold hands with users who are truly unable to meet the quality standards (and I now accept that not everyone can meet the standards regardless of good-faith effort). It is that users are not being warned adequately about the consequences of repeated low-quality posts. Stack Exchange lacks a uniform user warning system, leaving users unprepared and unwilling to correct their posts before it's too late.

The requirements of a high-quality Q&A system limit the amount of effort that can reasonably be spent on users who are posting low-quality content. There are some things about these types of users that could be done on Wikipedia but cannot be done here without interfering with the end goal of Stack Exchange. Wikipedia can tolerate a fairly high degree of nonconstructive editing and can be more open to rehabilitating users because improper edits can easily be reverted. The same cannot be done on Stack Exchange by virtue of its Q&A nature: whenever someone makes a low-quality post, a significant amount of effort is needed to handle it, and it is more difficult to engage in discussions with problem users. Stack Exchange is not a wiki and cannot tolerate continuous low-quality posts to the extent a wiki can.

As a person who always wants to assume good faith, I find it hard to accept that some users really can't meet our standards no matter how hard we and they try, but I've decided to swallow this bitter truth.

Answer 4

Here's a slightly different perspective: (from someone who votes the most - including downvoting and voting to close - on ServerFault, which is much "smaller" than SO)

For me, good faith or bad faith has nothing to do with it - I spend very little time handholding new users (any users, actually) because that's not what I want to spend my time doing.

I vote a lot because I think it's important to vote and it's something that seems to come easily to me. I read a bunch of questions and vote on them as I go; editing posts or writing comments would give more feedback, but it would take a lot more time.

I don't have any evidence, but I think that someone who can figure out how SF (or SO or any SE site) works - someone who can recognize that votes are feedback, even if they're downvotes or votes to close - is more likely to be a good contributor.