The goal of this filter is to provide some automation of the winnowing of questions that have zero chance of attracting even a semi-intelligent answer.
If we are to require nothing for someone to post other than being able to fill a web form - then there will be thousands of people that take advantage of that low bar to post things.
I think we can all agree that we are all for a filter that prevents posts like this (with the title being the text before the - and the body after the -):
- Q: Poop - What is is good for?
- Q: iOS - I want to make an app - what do I do? HELP PLASE NOW
- Q: EMACS or vi - Which is best for hadoop and go lang for making bespoke apps to attract VC dough?
The problem is that we don't have the data of all the thousands (millions) of failed attempts that didn't pass the filter, so most of us don't know how the filter works, what it does, what it's saving us from, what false positives are being thrown out with the poop. Since people are smart, those wanting to poop get better at pooping (especially since the filter is easily tested) and it's now time to implement some different approaches (or modified quality levels) to stem a very real quantity of very low quality information.
By saying no to some, we are saving more attention for measurably higher quality content.
I don't like filters, especially ones I didn't design, but I don't see a better option on the horizon than experimenting with tools to make the site better. From my interactions with the people that run the site, I would generalize that they are incredibly smart, aware of how their actions affect thousands of people daily, have the data to back up their decisions long before they make a code change and set up monitoring so that as the tool they designed interacts with the real world, they can and do check up on it to make sure it's actually working as intended.
On the flip side, there are some very terse questions that have provided some very awesome content for the site. Specifically, look over your site's greatest hits.
This list is filled with short, useful, detailed questions on all the original trilogy sites and whatever changes are being made will likely need to not have a high false-positive rate when it's fed a list of popular questions.
- What is the difference between "INNER JOIN" and "OUTER JOIN"?
- How do I redirect to another webpage?
- How do I install the Sun/Oracle Java SDK on Ubuntu?
- How do I reduce the desktop icon size in Windows 7?
- What port does SFTP use?
- Ping a Specific Port
- How to check if a port is blocked on a Windows machine?
I would expect that as long as the filter doesn't shut down questions of similar quality to these examples above, no one would object to the system being overly restrictive or something that a new user would be incapable of rising to the occasion to rephrase their question to pass the entrance exam for a new question to be submitted.
Do you have some specific examples of questions you could not ask due to the new filter or are you looking for a discussion to share how they're doing it (it's robots and neural learning patterns, big data analytics and VC dough BTW)? I've not seen a dramatic down turn in the availability of high quality questions due to the filter, so I'm not sure we've turned the filter up high enough yet, personally.
