@JesseSteele I just noticed a typo in your Charlie Chaplin blurb: "more than".

@Laurel Are the problematic posts mostly from people who ask here with no prior participation on the network? If so, it might be helpful to raise the participation barrier by requiring that users create an account rather than just allowing anyone to post. I have a feeling we get much less low quality stuff on Politics where we've had such a barrier for years

@Randal'Thor I agree that it can be daunting to post questions. Even if we get past language difficulties that make it hard to express questions about a new language in that new language, and a tendency to seek answers by request than by research, there are two more factors in the mix.

First, SE/ELU has expectations of what makes a good question, but doesn't make it obvious to new visitors what they are. SE addresses this by posting explanations and explanations on questions when they are closed, but that's a bit too late. I think they might be testing out more proactive mechanisms such as partially-filled question forms or question templates. That sounds promising.

Second, it only takes a few noisy detractors - even just one - to turn away a tentative visitor. This one's more tricky to handle, but from a moderation perspective, prevention isn't practical. So we need to rely on people flagging nasty comments. There's still a judgment call to make, but perhaps we should try to promote "don't be rude" as an ELU cultural norm.

This is a long-standing and multifaceted problem. I doubt there's a quick solution, and maybe not even a slow solution due to people coming and going. The starfish-rescue approach still holds, though ("it might not save many, but it saves this one").

And on top of all that, not everything that feels gruff comes from a nasty heart. There's a time and a place for both flowers and sandpaper. Also, people are inconsistent, me included. Putting all that together, I still think the way to counter the problem of posting questions being daunting is to say something nice and to provide guidance. Sometimes, one voice of encouragement is all that's needed.

@JesseSteele You make a good point. My training was in computer science. When programming, I want buggy programs to fail quickly - this makes problems easier to find and hence to fix.

I've recently spent a bit of time on Quora, and they seem to have a system where questions are voted on for release. A Stack Exchange version of this would be to have questions with "[Review for release]" tacked on to the end of new questions and shown only to high-rep users and require 2 or 3 votes for general release.

@Laurel That there shows why you should get a mod diamond, and I sincerely hope you get one by the end of this election week.

@Lawrence "Don't be rude" is an ELU and SE-wide cultural norm. Granted, ELU isn't particularly good at adhering to it, but it is one of the hard rules of the network.

@Lawrence <3 TY

@Lawrence Yep, that's the whole point. Some thresholds should be high, some low, no clear answers without experience.

@Laurel It is indeed hard for new users. 60% can't continue. Maybe it's not the "required 3 votes" to close that matters; maybe it's the "how many close votes you may cast per day" that matters. I think the same for downvotes.

The current ability to close-vote and down-vote are nearly unlimited for ultra-high rep users, making it a site for fuddy-duddies. Allow 125 reps to downvote without penalty, limit all to 5 down-votes per day; limit all review-privilege users to 5 close-votes per day, and you'll see a revolution.

@JesseSteele would it be a good revolution though or would it be a flood of low quality posts? Yes, there are some overzealous downvoters and closers on ELU, but on the other hand, there is also a huge amount of crap to deal with here. The founding error of the site, the choice of "English Language and Usage" as a name which makes people naturally assume this is the place to ask about learning English has never been fixed.

Nor is it likely to. Which means that yes, we should have much better onboarding information for new users but since that isn't going to happen any time soon, we do need aggressive curation if there's any chance of keeping the site interesting to "linguists, etymologists, and (serious) English language enthusiasts".

@terdon That would need to be carefully vetted and tested as soft as possible. Maybe we should advise Philippe. The issue is that high-reps can punish down rep of new users with new ideas that might be good. Get that to stop without upsetting the system. These are only suggestions, not immediate conclusions to implement absolutely.

@terdon Yes! Onboarding information!!!!!! And more strict enforcement, with gentler guidance.

There are MANY things that go into it. There are no simplistic solutions.

I'm just saying the close-vote and down-vote method currently favors fat cats eating the dinner for the baby cats, keeping it a fat cat house.

@terdon Is there a movement to change the name? I like it. But, perhaps the "Ask a question" form on ELU should have the AI suggest, "This looks more suited for ELL. Try asking there?" And it just bumps the question over to the form there. Again, advise Philippe.

I'm not convinced of that, to be honest. I've stopped being very active here because it has become boring: most questions are uninteresting and can be answered by any native speaker. I used to come here because I could ask and be answered by proper experts, professional linguists and deeply knowledgeable enthusiasts. I stopped coming because these people have mostly stopped participating and the questions have largely become trivial.

Yes, there is also a problem with toxicity, but that's secondary (serious, important, but secondary) to my mind.

@JesseSteele There was a few years back.

I was driven away from the previously wonderful ELU main chat room by a particularly unpleasant user, but lost interest in the site because of what I perceive as the precipitous drop in quality.

There doesn’t seem to be a ‘reply to’ button when accessing the page from a phone.

@Lawrence eh, chat on the phone is pretty bad. Tap on a message, that makes the reply thing appear.

@terdon “Don’t be rude” is a site-wide policy, but it’s not necessarily a cultural norm in the sense of describing typical behaviour. Kind of ‘law vs habit’. I’m saying that we need to encourage the habit that the “don’t be rude” policy requires.

@terdon Oh, it’s right at the top of the screen. Thanks! :)

@Lawrence Fair. We do have quite a few high rep users who are not very good on the civility front, absolutely.

@terdon And, I think that's what this election has become about. We have goals and policies, but how do we make it happen?

At his inauguration, Ronald Regan said, "'Status quo' is Latin for 'the mess we're in'."

@terdon I wonder if you have a different perspective from me because of your high rep here. You probably know me well enough to be aware of my English level - I'm nowhere near comparable to this site's experts, but more of a grammar nerd than almost anyone I know IRL - and I'm too scared to post a question here. Surely I should be the sort of asker this site should appreciate? Not expert enough to be a top answerer, but knowledgeable enough to post informed and non-basic questions. And yet.

@Randal'Thor And yet, indeed. I was quite surprised to hear you say this actually. I've posted many questions over the years and most of them were well received, many before I had much rep to speak of. There are specific users who can be relied upon to be unpleasant on pretty much any question, but overall it shouldn't be that hard.

Maybe my rep protects me (now), I guess.

Your rep isn't negligible either though.

4,525

I do agree that low-quality posts are a problem - I've spent enough time in the ELU review queues to know that - but, for me, very secondary to the problem of unfriendliness to questions. Yes, basic stuff should be closed or punted to ELL, but to me it feels hard to get anything past the close-voters here.

I completely agree that if someone with your knowledge of the SE style and of English has trouble, that is a red flag.

That said, I see 13 questions on your profile, all but one with a positive score, and only two closed, one of which was closed as a dupe. That doesn't seem too bad.

Not sure if you've seen my meta answer about this issue, btw.

> My last three questions here (2016, 2019, 2021) have all entered the Close Votes review queue, although I can't see now how many close votes were cast altogether.

So it's not necessarily an issue of getting closed (although I think I've had at least one question closed and reopened) but of getting close votes and negative comments.

@terdon Btw, feel free to tell me if you think some of my questions are crap from an ELU-regular perspective :-)

Oh, don't worry, I would :) I haven't actually looked at them though, to be honest. And I don't really qualify as a regular any more. I haven't been very active here for a few years now.

@Lawrence They have a new wizard on Stack Overflow. You can test it by using the link in the featured post on meta SO. I doubt it would come here any time soon and I'm not sure how much it would help

We can customize the onboarding information (eg tag wikis, tag warnings and even that popup that's shown when first asking) but what could you put there that would help people? With many of the questions that I see close votes on I just want to ask the close voters which common reference the question is answered by

@Laurel Yes, that's the one I was thinking of. It helps to structure common forms of questions to tell users what kinds of information to include.

@Laurel A lot of close-votes for SWRs are due to a lack of context. More generally, it might help SE's aspirations if it was compulsory for questions to include "Question", "What have you found so far?", and perhaps tag-specific boxes such as "Give an example of how you would use the word in a sentence."

@Lawrence I don't think that's what they're building exactly (ie, tag dependent guidance), though it would be useful on many sites. I wanted to explore the wizard a little more though since I only really played around with the first part of it

The instructions for SWRs are shown as a tag warning when asking and I think it caused a little increase in quality since it was added. What's frustrating is that not everyone uses the swr tag, which means they don't see the advice