What kinds of question titles put a site's HNQ presence at risk?

Question

Last month Stack Exchange removed a site from the Hot Network Questions list across the network because of a complaint about some questions that appeared there. I'm not here to rehash that decision (there are other places for that), but I want to understand it because it affects other sites too. My concern is that I moderate a couple other sites that often appear in HNQ and sometimes generate complaints, and I want to know what kinds of question titles put us at risk too.

The original complaint included the following three questions:

• IPS: How to approach a friend about his girlfriend asking to sleep with me?
• IPS: How do I tell students at a school I volunteer at to stop flirting with me?
• SciFi: Story about aliens nicknamed "Eechees" who have created a network of tunnels on Mars

A followup complaint included one more:

• IPS: How do you tell a Facebook friend that they might be on the autism spectrum?

Something in the IPS questions was bad enough to prompt the site's immediate removal from HNQ. After things calmed down, SE declined to reinstate IPS -- so there are probably some lingering concerns there. I asked an IPS mod what specifically SE's concerns were with the questions, but that mod hadn't seen any such feedback.

My problem is that I don't see what was so terrible about these questions, which makes it hard for me to spot potential similar problems on my sites. The first two questions are from people trying to deflect or prevent unwanted sexual activity; that's a good thing, right? (We aren't being jumpy just because we know the gender of one of the people being asked about, are we?) The autism one, without the context in the question, does sound like somebody's being pushy, but in the same sense as "how do I talk to a friend about his alcoholism" or "how do I deal with the boss's incompetent brother" -- maybe pushy or assuming too much, but none of that sounds worse than many other hot network questions. (I assume the SciFi question was unobjectionable.)

The HNQ list often has provocative questions (that's a design feature). I've seen questions I considered much more problematic than these ones, but other sites have not been removed.

So, my questions:

• What was so bad about these questions?

• What do other communities need to be careful about in question titles?

I am particularly looking for an answer from SE, because they are the ones who took action and can take future action with regard to other sites. The rest of us can only guess, unless there was other communication from SE that people can report.

I am aware that SE can't specify a complete set of rules. That's why understanding the single case study we have is so important. We have the fact of one site's removal prompted by these three questions; while this case won't tell us everything we need to know, it can tell us something -- if somebody who was part of the decision is willing to share SE's thinking with us.

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Note: there are lots of ways that the HNQ itself could be modified to mitigate against problems like this. That discussion has its own post; if you don't find your suggestion in the 65 answers already present there, please add it there not here.

Answer 1

The general rule is, you know it when you see it. Keep in mind that we're talking about question titles being shown (and thus, interpreted, reacted to and even judged) separately from the actual question.

The tl;dr answer: It's too difficult to describe in natural language, much less something like regular expressions, which are our only current filtering mechanism for the hot network questions. A site where 'dating' style questions could be asked hundreds of different ways was just too problematic to selectively filter given our capabilities, which is why we removed it from the list.

I'm putting the following in spoiler tags because it contains multiple possible triggers, please do not remove the spoiler tags if you edit this post. The summary is, we have lots of situations where titles have proven to be problematic.

We have a site for Gaming, it's a fantastic site. When games like Grand Theft Auto release a new version, titles tend to get .. well .. problematic, especially when in-game content involves the solicitation and killing of prostitutes. We have a site for Parenting, but sometimes, titles talk about things like childhood sex abuse, spanking, or other things that tend to trigger strong emotions. We have a sites for cognitive sciences and health, where topics like suicide can and frequently do come up. We have many more examples.

We should have known that a regex-based filter for titles was woefully insufficient to meet our needs five years ago when Stack Exchange 2.0 first ventured into territory where we dropped the sort of unwritten qualifier that our sites should ideally help someone get better at their job. And back when we tried a couple variants of relationships & dating in extended private beta, it was a no-brainer that the site would definitely not be on the HNQ if made public, and that we'd possibly have to put it behind some kind of age verification check.

So it's not really the content, it's the appropriateness of advertising it based on velocity across the entire network, which includes sites that are absolutely professional in nature. And if you're an engineer looking to get your job done ....

and were a victim of sexual harassment, or currently dealing with being harassed in your workplace, or maybe you just don't want people behind you to think you're on some dating site

... the last thing you want to see on your screen is a question that asks how to tell if [opposite sex] is interested in you. This isn't about caving in to someone with X followers, this is about knowing problems when you see them and fixing things that you can when you can. If this were a one-off that I could have tweaked by sacrificing a Cadbury egg to the regex gods, I would have - but the nature of the site just doesn't lend well to that kind of thing. If it had been anyone else, we would have reacted the same way.

The solution here is to trust humans instead of algorithms.

While it's one of the most downvoted questions in MSE history, this request for commentary was extremely useful.

The solution we're looking toward is one where:

1. Sites opt in to being on the list. Many sites really don't like being on that list. With some of our academic sites, it's actually contractual that we won't ever put them on the list.
2. The HNQ algorithm runs, but dumps likely 'good' questions into a queue where users vote on which ones are great examples in their scope. There's also a means to nominate questions that the algorithm doesn't catch.
3. Mods have much more oversight and control over the list.
4. Users need to be able to 'mute' sites on the list. E.g. "Don't ever show me stuff from that cooking site, it always makes me hungry!" (not picking on anyone)
5. CMs need a more simplified interface to keep triggers out of titles. Right now it's essentially three of us that are able to maintain that ever-growing filter. This could mean "You've been kicked off the list until you get your scope sorted out" - but at least there's an action to take

... I don't know when we're going to be able to implement that. I have it as one of our highest priorities for next year but we need a couple more PMs and developers to come on board and train up before we get into full swing.

We may just turn the HNQ off on all sidebars for now and leave it running only on stackexchange.com; removing IPS from the list certainly didn't fix anything, it just postponed the need to deal with how the system was never brought in line with what we need out of it as the network grew.

But it's not anyone's fault, it's just a question of content appropriateness, selection and placement. Despite how broken the system is, most of our sites happen to have a scope where it's unlikely to ever be an issue - that's how this managed to keep getting kicked down the road for so long. But as we venture further out of the technical realm, well, anywhere that we made an assumption about the nature of our content becomes a potential powder keg.

I don't mean this to be winded, but this isn't as simple as "we took them off the list" - this is debt. It just happens to be the first case where we weren't able to swoop in like XKCD and type in a regex as we swung from a rope to fix it quietly. And while you might be able to write a regex that could, we don't want to keep adding to that debt, at some point we just have to say we need a system that works more deliberately than accidentally.

Answer 2

From the way this mess unfolded, we can be pretty sure that there is no defined internal policy by SE on this topic. It was a rather spontaneous decision to remove IPS from the host questions list, not based on any previously communicated policy or principles. I don't expect SE to create a policy now, especially as they might actually change some fundamental stuff about the entire HNQ feature. Our best bet is probably to reverse engineer the potential rules from the incident that sparked the IPS removal.

The first thing we have to do is to change our perspective. We have to view this through the eyes of an occasional SO user, it does make much less sense when you're an SE mod or a very active SE user. So there is this site where you can find answers to your programming problems. It's generally quite helpful, but there are lots of grumpy people closing questions for weird reasons. I don't know that there are even any other SE sites, I don't know what the SE network is or what exactly is shown in this Hot Network questions list in the sidebar.

Now you see some titles in the HNQ list that are about people flirting and cheating. This is the point where the changed perspective is very important, and where we make some assumptions based on our experience with those topics on the internet. In this case you don't know how SE moderation works, you don't know anything about the IPS site, but our hypothetical SO visitor might be familiar with some of the darker corners on the popular site Reddit like r/redpill and r/incels (for anyone not familiar with them, I suggest not to visit them, for your sanity).

Now, when you're familiar with SE sites and IPS in particular, when you read "How to approach a friend about his girlfriend asking to sleep with me?" you'll expect some reasonable Q&A behind those titles. But if your experiences with how these topics are handled on the internet goes more along the dark corners I mentioned before, you might assume the worst-possible case that you can fit into that title. Then you might expect that behind that link is a bunch of men ranting about how all women are sluts that cheat on you on every possible occasion. Think of it as a sexism detector calibrated to much darker places on the internet than SE. There are certain common sexist stereotypes, and one of those fits pretty neatly into that title, if you don't have any context.

The problem with the HNQ list is that it has no context by design. And people will make snap judgements based on the out of context title alone. Of course that's not fair to reasonable questions about dicey topics, but it is pretty much inevitable that people will make assumptions based on the titles alone.

I don't think it's possible to have questions about certain topics that can't easily be misinterpreted as sexist or ableist when only viewing the title out of context. The best we can do right now is probably to take a hard look at popular questions about topics we know to be controversial, and then try to think of the worst possible interpretations of the title out of context. It might sometimes be possible to rephrase the title to avoid associations with common sexist stereotypes.

Answer 3

I don't think a general (or specific) guideline is possible or desirable. I think there was a major breakdown in processes - and these things should, going forward, be handled in consultation with the communities in question. What we don't want is these event having a broad chilling effect on communities, when we fear if we could be next.

I don't want to say the a random outsider in question isn't worth talking to, but they're tourists. They've seen the broken down ugly old shack that's clearly a fire risk, but doesn't realise that it's a local institution with the best $local_delicacy. They want it gone 'cause they wants their Disneyland with programming questions. Now the authorities have shut it down, and it's a lot harder to find.

We cannot be walking on eggshells, wondering what a tourist feels is appropriate and what is not. This is how we get gentrification, lack of diversity, and eventually dead communities.

I get that the essential question should be "do these questions align with what we want the community to be?"

We can't and should not circle the wagons. We can't dismiss useful input, but we also can't let others dictate how people live their lives, or run their sites on a whim.

Quite honestly, the (second?) worst thing that can happen is that all this causes communities to constantly look over their shoulder worried that some random person on Twitter is going to tweet the right person, and... boom, we get kicked out of the sandbox.

I guess there's a secondary, unspoken issue though, that for many folks, Stack Overflow is...all that matters, so there's also the relationship between SO and the rest of us. Some folks are annoyed that they were seeing non-programming questions. Chances are, someone, somewhere is going to find something they don't like, and will complain about. The trick is handling it constructively

Thats to say, it's impossible to really generally say "these questions are always bad" or "these questions are always good" at the network level.

We cannot be thinking of things in terms of "will this get our site in trouble", and if we do, it's another thing we really need to fix first.

If anything needs to be done, it is to give mods and the community better tools to work out what's on HNQ, and what's potentially problematic, so we can actually make these decisions in time.

Answer 4

Any titles that an arbitrary Twitter user with more than a certain number of followers gets offended over, apparently.

Answer 5

My problem is that I don't see what was so terrible about these questions, which makes it hard for me to spot potential similar problems on my sites.

You're not the only one. I never realized the first impression titles could leave and never thought twice about any of them, until someone pointed it out. It takes quite some brain gymnastics to find out whether something can be construed as offensive. You should scratch all your knowledge about what your site is for and does, and you need to be aware of cultural differences, and of some pretty intangible things.

It's hard to write all of those down, but one phenomenon I read a little about recently before IPS was taken out of HNQ was 'self-stigma'. People sometimes have bad things happening to them. If you encounter examples of e.g. sexism in your daily life a lot, you might start to see sexism in places where there's none intended as well. So a good-natured co-worker's joke may hurt, as it reminds you of what you've been through, a question title out of context in the HNQ may remind you of sexism being everywhere online.

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The first two questions are from people trying to deflect or prevent unwanted sexual activity; that's a good thing, right?

Are they? If you get served that first title, out of context, is it really about rejecting? Step into the shoes of someone that doesn't know about IPS, that doesn't read anything but the titles and has probably seen their share of sexism around. Such a mindset might not make the connection that a title of How to approach a friend about his girlfriend asking to sleep with me? is about rejecting and thus a good thing. After all, the title doesn't say anything about rejecting.

The one about wanting students to stop flirting may give off the vibe of a humble-brag (I'm so great, everyone is flirting with me!), especially when you're already in a full-blown defensive mode about the first title. Although there's no context as to gender in that title, seeing it in combination with the first one may have people jump to see another instance of sexism or at least two very unprofessional questions. Remember, these two titles appeared together, one on top of the other. Multiple very slightly off things, when put together, can be a catastrophe.

The autism question is about telling someone 'you may be autistic'. Not really a nice thing to say on the internet, where context gets lost, and especially not if you're assuming the one saying it isn't on the spectrum themselves (that context was lost in the question body) or why they want to say it. It's again a title that may easily be misinterpreted as someone with no knowledge of these things diagnosing someone because they're different.

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What was so bad about these questions?

The questions, like you said, aren't bad at all. It's the titles, and them being presented out of context to people, that make things bad and worse. Taken from the feedback that's on IPS meta:

• Titles, however, when taken out of context and put in the list ... aren't great for displaying on professional and academic sites. Things that talk about dating (especially a lack of fidelity), and other stuff .. just got to be problematic.

• The unfortunate truth is that what is perfectly reasonable for IPS and makes for a great question isn't going to necessarily be something that everyone finds to be workplace appropriate,

Question titles are presented out of context. Not only do they miss the context of their question body and them being asked on a site about Interpersonal Skills, they're also presented to people that have no interest in seeing any of those things when at work.

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What do other communities need to be careful about in question titles?

I think the biggest lesson learned here, is that whenever possible, try to have as much context and as precise titles as possible, with as little clickbait as possible. IPS still has to have a discussion on meta to hammer out exactly what that's going to mean, and I'm not really expecting a network-wide policy to guide that discussion. But there's some precedence here: Christianity was penalized and effectively excluded from HNQ in the past, but apparently having their questions become more precise and less clickbait allowed them back in.