Two years ago I asked an adorable question: is 180,000 unanswered questions too many?
Now there are 704,563 questions with no up-voted answers and counting. I've had the feeling that this flood was starting to overwhelm the site, but I went looking for some concrete data.
Percentage of open questions with answers, by quarter:
This is probably the most telling. The percentage with any answer is dropping steadily, while the percentage with a good answer (Score > 0) is in freefall. Voters don't seem very impressed with all the new questions, either:
This also suggests an increase in bad questions (score < 0), but just as importantly, 60% now have a score of 0. If the flood is too much even for simple actions like voting which almost everyone can do, what chance do editors and moderators have of keeping up? I'd also be interested in seeing the percentage of users with close-vote privileges over time, as well as the ratio of those users to new questions over time. I don't think SEDE has the required data though.
Eventually the site will simply cease to work if these trends continue. Community moderation will be affecting such a small percentage of questions that it might as well not be happening at all.
I can see three avenues of attacking the problem: increasing the number of (good) moderators, increasing the amount of moderating individuals can do, and building more flood gates. I'm hoping to trigger some brainstorming and draw attention to any other proposals that attempt to address parts of this problem.
Related Reading to help your brainstorming:
- http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/106717/does-so-need-social-networking-features-to-improve-the-experience-for-expert-use
- http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/77103/improve-tools-for-closing-as-duplicate
- http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/136089/not-just-closing-duplicate-nor-canonical-answers-but-optimizing-for-pearls-h?lq=1
- http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/88447/1-5-million-questions-on-so-organization-beyond-tags
- http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/139216/what-do-you-think-of-an-so-for-beginners-only
Assorted other things to ponder:
- How can we reduce the feeling of futility when trying to moderate such a large and growing backlog?
- If we were to hypothetically "raise the bar"/narrow the scope of the site, what would we exclude? How would we draw that line in a non-arbitrary way?