How to deal with rep-farmers in case we move away from the current homework policy?

Conversation started Jun 11, 2018 at 14:14.

Gaurang Tandon

Jun 11, 2018 14:14

Offtopic to the current discussion but something that I wanted to mention for the past few days: in the absence of any effort-based homework closure policy whatsoever, is it possible that we might become similar to math/homeworkhelp.stackexchange.com...?

i know I trust the current userbase to downvote homework questions to oblivion, but what if over the next year, we accumulate users, who actually like answering such bad questions, aka the "rep-farmers". What if there's more than a dozen rep-farmers and they start upvoting and answering homework help on our site? How far would _we_ - the a…

hBy2Py

→ 1 message moved to Trash (detagged)

@Martin-マーチン It was from farther up

As a non-mod, merely a lowly room owner, I can't edit old messages in-place like you can.

Martin - マーチン

@GaurangTandon the truth is: we can't. And then the site deteriorates, those who ask and answer the better questions run away, and it'll become something else. If that is the course of the site, if it is driven by its community, there is nothing you could do.

Gaurang Tandon

@Martin-マーチン this is a bit too pessimistic :(

Martin - マーチン

Currently we have a community that does not like these questions, but if or when that changes, it is equally a democratic process as before, and then it becomes the direction the site is heading to.

@GaurangTandon That is not pessimistic, that is simply the observation how this would work out. You are the one being pessimistic by saying that there might be a time where the low-quality questions are liked more...

hBy2Py

@Martin-マーチン @Gaurang Concur. I've worked with Mart and others in that last round of Spring Cleaning, &c, and observed a variety of efforts to steer the ship of the site onto a different course.

It's remarkably hard to move the community in a direction it doesn't want to go.

(Without going all 'dictator' on the place, at least.)

Gaurang Tandon

Jun 11, 2018 14:24

@Martin-マーチン Yeah, I think I am being pessimistic :( But, how can we be sure that there won't be a time when low quality questions aren't liked more? Didn't this happen to Math.SE as well?

hBy2Py

@GaurangTandon We can't be sure.

Change happens.

Avnish Kabaj

Very bad questions at math go unanswered

Martin - マーチン

Exactly, change happens.

That all reminds me that I need to answer the meta-troll on meta...

Gaurang Tandon

I am only afraid that homework vampires with that "padding" of "I've been trying this problem for three hours and couldn't figure out. Any help is appreciated!" start getting detailed answers instead of being downvoted/marked as duplicate of canonical posts. While it is always easier to mark as duplicate or downvote, the lucrativeness of rep-farming can be overwhelming...and removing the homework closure will be a win for that lucrativeness... indeed, I guess change happens...

hBy2Py

All we can do is make the case as clearly as we can for why we want the site to stay a certain way, or change in a certain way.

Gaurang Tandon

Jun 11, 2018 14:29

@hBy2Py if the effort policy ever gets removed, we can (and should) have a good intentioned meta post explaining why we dislike certain types of questions and that we all should collectively downvote/cv duplicate as often as possible to maintain the quality of the site

...in the hope that it would work

hBy2Py

Cross that bridge if/when we come to it.

Avnish Kabaj

Another issue or maybe not an issue is that only 8-9 users regularly curate the review queues

hBy2Py

I don't see any likelihood of the HW close reason being eliminated or changed anytime soon.

Martin - マーチン

@GaurangTandon so far no-one has argued for getting rid of the homework closure; at least not in essence

Avnish Kabaj

@Martin-マーチン orthocresol

Had

Mentioned it

Martin - マーチン

Jun 11, 2018 14:31

Yes, the reason, not the intention of clearing out those questions

@AvnishKabaj also I'd need some more context for that

Avnish Kabaj

Gimme a sec it's somewhere in the periodic table

Martin - マーチン

I personally would like to shift away from effort and purely rely on whether it is a conceptual query or not.

Gaurang Tandon

@Martin-マーチン i guess you too wanted to move away from effort as a metric, based on your GitHub reply? I also believe @pentavalentcarbon and @hBy2Py too. also see

Avnish Kabaj

in The Periodic Table, May 28 at 0:54, by orthocresol

@pH13-YetanotherPhilipp Get rid of homework policy altogether? I'm on board...

Gaurang Tandon

@hBy2Py agreed wih that

Avnish Kabaj

Jun 11, 2018 14:35

@Martin-マーチン

hBy2Py

@AvnishKabaj <nod>, but in the broader, prior discussion, it was not just a cold removal of the HW policy, but identifying a more precise definition of what the problem posts actually embodied, and replacing the HW policy with that.

Martin - マーチン

hmmm I see

I hope everyone here gets, why we moved away from dealing with this problem... for better or worse...

hBy2Py

@Martin-マーチン <nod>: Lack of sufficient agreement community-wide that a change was needed, as I understood it.

Gaurang Tandon

@Martin-マーチン ...because it was difficult to quantify in objective terms what effort is sufficient to close a question?

Martin - マーチン

Basically most people did not regard it as a problem, because in the end, the questions we didn't want were closed and gone. The result will always be similar, the approach should be better (IMO). With the overall open model of SE, we'll always invite terrible questions.

Gaurang Tandon

Jun 11, 2018 14:44

@Martin-マーチン "...because in the end, the questions we didn't want were closed and gone" along with several more questions that could have been on our site :( apart from that. <nod>

(@hBy2Py I hope your <nod> isn't copyrighted, because I really like it :P)

Martin - マーチン

yeah, that's true, but that will most likely always happen

our community is not that large, so there will always be something not getting the attention it deserves; in the worst cases, these get also closed, down-voted, and/or deleted.

Gaurang Tandon

@Martin-マーチン yeah, though the chances of it happening would reduce if we move to a more objective, quantifiable close reason.

hBy2Py

@GaurangTandon Artifact of my AOL Instant Messenger days... <nod> <shakes head> <shrug> <blink> <grin> etc.

Martin - マーチン

My words for a long time... along with some leniency...

Conversation ended Jun 11, 2018 at 14:47.

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How to deal with rep-farmers in case we move away from the current homework policy?

Jun '1811

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