@DRF assuming some user is obliged to answer is a very different thing, to going out of one's way to disrupt the consenting behaviour of two independent people, one asker and another answerer due to having a different view of what belongs on the site.

@RobertFrost The important point there is it's the site. Currently this site is community managed and there is some (good/bad/indiferent) consensus of the people who spend a lot of their time managing it as to what the appropriate topics/content are. You might not like that or I might not like that. But that's the current consensus. Unless whoever actually is paying for the whole shebang comes and says guys we're changing this the only way to effect changes is to go through the proper channels.

@Amwhy can tell you I came here not because I thought "Hey I want to close lot's of questions, let's join this place", and I'm sure I still have different views than many people here but I try to be nice and help where we agree and politely disagree were we don't agree. I also try to understand the reasons people have for their views because that helps me better analyze them and decide which are good in my opinion and which not so good. So far I've found myself mostly persuaded.

@DRF This IS the channel. People might see merit in the argument and adjust their behaviour. I mean, if two people want to come together, one to ask a maths question and another to answer it, why put so much effort into disrupting that?

@RobertFrost I think I've answered that in the posts above.

@DRF immediately above, or much higher above?

@RobertFrost "Currently this site is community managed and there is some (good/bad/indiferent) consensus of the people who spend a lot of their time managing it as to what the appropriate topics/content are."

@DRF I came to this site to help, not hurt. Over time, I realized my help didn't always help, and sometimes hurt this site. Over time, I've adjusted my behavior, and seek only to preserve the usefulness of this site, and its preservation. I still have the instincts to help that brought me here 7.5 years ago, but I've had to "relearn" how best to help, over time.

@DRF that's what I'm referring to. You say the site is community-managed and change has to go through the channels. Well we're the community, we manage the site (you and I) and we're discussing how to manage the site. This is the channel and I'm going through it trying to persuade you to not disrupt the actions of people who would come together here to ask and answer questions. (Not that I'm saying that's what you would do).

But if you would.

@amWhy Oh I don't doubt that. I didn't doubt that even when I wrote the rant. I just felt you were being ... unfair maybe? I haven't really changed my opinion much about that particular incident I just now understand why and can see the point. I've done maybe 2 full days of the close queue and that was irritating as heck. I can't imagine trying to do that for ages.:)

@RobertFrost I'm quite understanding in terms of trying to get the people who ask the questions to bring them up to reasonable standards and then helping them. I'm afraid from the experiences I've had so far though that that understanding is likely to vane.

@DRF That's fair, because I'm sure I occasionally make the mistake of being unfair. And you likely had a point, though I didn't mean to come across as dismissive, which is what I likely came across as, in that incident. No need to rehash that incident. I have full respect for you, and can take criticism when appropriate.

@DRF I think there are some "cheats" for whom answering their homework is bad, but if they choose to come here and get somebody to do their homework for them, then "more fool them", I say. But policy is to be welcoming and to assume good intent. Policy is not to disrupt homework cheats.

Then there are others who ask homework / PSQ's who want to learn but need their question answering in order to do so, and those are getting disrupted too.

I think I've said all I really had to say plus it's like 1AM and I need to get some sleep. Good night to everyone.:)

@DRF Sleep well!!

Meh actually half two. @amwhy thanks.:)

@DRF see you soon!

@DRF good night

I more or less agree with Xander's take, @AlexanderGruber

I'd like to hear @user21820's take on this, and @Did's take on this, as both are also key members of this chat.

@AlexanderGruber For the most part I am opposed to dry and homework-y threads. The reason is that such questions rarely add new content to the site. Admittedly I am also extremely annoyed by the fact that they create opportunities for the local gang of homework automatons to participate in their hourly circle-jerk of textbook answers and upvotes.

@XanderHenderson (and others) I share you antipathy towards proof-verification questions. The chief reason is that often A) the answerers claim "not a duplicate" because the question is about this particular proof, and yet B) reproduce variants of the standard textbook proofs as answers that have appeared on our site earlier. The net effect is again that no new material was added to the site, only the entropy was increased in that the same material is now scattered into more places.

IMO quid explained it perfectly here. The answers to proof-verification questions often prove that the question was treated as a dupe.

thanks for your thoughts everybody.

i'll weigh in my opinion, too, now that I've heard yours. In short, I miss "too localized" for cases like this. They're bad questions, but they technically satisfy the context requirement, and I feel like stretching context to try to encompass those cases would be nonsensical.

there's more to say, but i'm not sure quite how to word it.

let's try this. Maybe our frustration is misplaced.

MSE isn't a tutoring site, but none of us got our fabulous fortunes without rep chasing. Tutoring is where most of our traffic is, thus where most of the rep is. It's good for some people-- it gamifies studying.

It only annoys us because we feel the volume of the tutoring eclipses good content in a way that prevents us from achieving our ideal MSE.

so, logically, we attack the bad content, but it is frustrating that we aren't seeing more improvement.

maybe for the good content to remain competitive, there needs to be more of it.

and it needs to be more visible.

@amWhy I'm unsure what you'd like to hear my opinion on, but I'll just say that my main concern with this site is bad-faith behaviour, meaning either people who want to get others to do their work for them, or people who post pseudοmath, or people who purposely upvote useless stuff, or things like that.

Based on that, I am not against questions with effort shown, even if the question is of little mathematical interest. However, neither am I against closing such uninteresting questions nor, if it is marked as a duplicate, deleting them.

I'm not sure that this OP deserves closure. I agree that the arguments presentes by the asker are completely wrong but it seems to me that the question was genuinely posed and after the hints the asker can now solve the OP by themself. I asked the asker to add all the details for his final solution. What is your thought abiut that? Thanks

Could someone please explain why the following answer was considered so bad to be deleted? In particular I ask an advice on that to @JyrkiLahtonen @amWhy and T.Bongers. Thanks

@gimusi I don't know why the answer was deleted. But why the question was reopened is also beyond me. There has been exactly zero work done by the OP to add context and information to the question even though just choosing stuff from the comment thread would almost be enough to fix the question. I voted to reclose.

It's a question about a pathological case and it's answer is insanely context dependent. It depends on how you defined the Reals, exponantiation, powers. There is none of that context now.

For that other question which also contains an aswer of mine, I fully understand closure but I don't fully agree with the suddenly deletion operated. I would let to the asker some time more between closure and deletion in order to improve the answer. I've invited explicitely the asker to do that.

@gimusi As have I. Yet the OP has neither responded nor shown interest. Considering he was last seen 3 hour ago, that doesn't inspire me with confidence he is interested in it.

@DRF With reference to the $0^x$ question, we have already discussed on that, I agree that is a pathological case but I find that really helpful and instructive (at least for my level of knowledge). Anyway if you think that my answer does not deserve deletion please take into consideration the "undelete" option. Thanks

@gimusi I don't have the rep for that. I might be here for a while but I rarely answer questions.

@DRF That's a pity for the community that many skilled users like you do not partecipate more actively in the answering part. We could learn a lot form you!

@gimusi I doubt it. If I find a question I think I have a good answer for and it doesn't have a better one yet I do answer. There are a huge amount of people much more skilled than me here though. (I don't think there is any topic where I'm in the top 20

(I removed my two comments above as I misunderstood the context, and there was little point in them now.)

And even that is being generous as I'm only counting the users I know who show up a lot. My topic of choice would be Set Theory but I have forgotten lots and it has an extremely capable set of answerers.

@DRF I don't think that ranking and rep counts for that, and I hope to see some answer from you too. Yesterday I've read you question about reversing Stolz-Cesaro, it was very interesting for me.

@DRF Really I think that a current problem for the site is the high number of low quality questions but also the lacking in active partecipation by skilled users.

But maybe we are going OT here.

@gimusi Don't think that was my question. I don't even know what Stolz-Cesaro is. And agreed. We're certainly off-topic.

Hmm I can't remove my own comments older than something?

@DRF Sorry maybe I've confused you with some other acronym :)

Yes the OP was by RRL!

@AlexanderGruber Amen. I have mixed feelings about tutoring. My preference would be to keep it to comments. Of course, we also have users who conflate "answering a homework question" with tutoring. Some of them even call their answers "Hints."

@JyrkiLahtonen I wonder if a chat room for tutoring wouldn't help? On the other part of your comment though, while I have seen "Hints" that ended at the point where you were supposed to add two numbers to get the answer I have also seen (and hopefully written) Hints which were just that.

Admittedly some of their "hints" are complete solutions only to those who already know. And, just recently I searched my old posts for the buzzword "Hint". Some of them made me shudder. Not proud at all of them :-/

@DRF I agree. Writing good hints is very difficult. I recall good posts summarizing the difficulties in meta .... by quid and Hurkyl (?)

@JyrkiLahtonen I think that in part the problem could be the level of the questions. Maybe when the level of question is low, more skilled users tends to consider those questions in a too bad perspective. But for an asker who is learning that concept or a trick to manipulate an expression can be difficult to understand. I'm in favour to hints aimed to make the askers work on their questions, solve it and learn something.

Here is a recent thread on Hints from Meta. The answer from quid raises many excellent posts. We have too many "Hint/answers" in violation of those. I'm still somewhat in favor of hints as a form of math golf (I can condense this argument to a 2-liner). But that is just a personal opinion. I'm not sure whether having those is good for the site.

@JyrkiLahtonen I'll take a look to it. As we already have discussed in the recent past, I want to stress out that answers given in comments and also suddenly dupes with full answers, which are apparently tolerated, are really bad to obtain the result to have less bad questions. A hint which force the asker to work for me is always the best choice. of course we can also give it by a comment but it doesn't change so much for the final scope.

@JyrkiLahtonen I tried to look for some past threads to check whether I can find which one you have in mind, but I posted what I found in another room - so that I don't leave here many massages which digress from your discussion. And since I found a room where you are pingable, I'll mention this message in a different room which is related to your post.

The problem with a hint that gives the main point is that it is then not really a hint. It is more like an incomplete solution. In some other meta disucssion it was brought up that such posts are pedagogically harmful because they leave the asker with the illusion that they themselves worked, but didn't really learn anything. I have been guilty of such "hints" myself. And avoiding that is very difficult.

@JyrkiLahtonen Indeed when the hint is used in that way and the question si not complete, I always invite the asker to show his work on that editing the question. When no improvement is made, I agree to close the answer and also delete that after a reasonable time to let the asker think about it. I've obtained some good result reently in that way.

@gimusi On such occasions my preference is to leave a few comments, and encourage the learner to post an answer (assuming they see the light). I derive no pleasure from answering a question that is total turkey shoot for me, and therefore I shudder at the though of receiving rep points for providing such hints. I try to derive pleasure from teaching.

@JyrkiLahtonen That's absolutely fine even if I think that the comments should be used for the comments and the answer for answer, but anyone must be free to make his choice on that. The ideal case is when the asker follow the hint and then present the progress by editing the question. After that or in the meanwhile the hint can be also expanded in a complete and detailed answer. That's my point of view and I don't think it is detrimental for the quality of the site.

@JyrkiLahtonen On the other hand, it's a bit more comfortable to write some stuff in answers than in comment. If not for other things, answers are easier to expand and you can correct a typo more easily. Personally, I've write quite a few answers where I was absolutely aware that it's most likely going to be deleted together with the question (unless the OP improves the question), but this was the easiest way to help the OP to move in the right direction.

@JyrkiLahtonen Moreover I need to observe that I'm here since a year now and when I started the state of the art on MSE was alredy as it is now. Are you sure you old users to have done things in the best way along the years to have a better site. I'm not accusing anyone and I think that maybe users make a great job here but self criticism sometimes is very helpful to change bad things in good ones. I take my part of fault but others need to take their one.

Unconvinced @MartinSleziak. That still leaves the impression that such questions were to an extent ok. Both to the asker, and noobs who see such answers posted. Admittedly getting hints in comments may also encourage such askers to come back for more.

@JyrkiLahtonen Notably the climate of hostility created in the way of handling many questions is really detrimental to the site from my humble point of view and it is totally not effective. That's my opinion after 1 year here.

Sorry maybe I went OT, I'm stopping now. Bye

@gimusi When you joined in, the site was already broken in that way. And, IMHO, you are making it worse.

@JyrkiLahtonen I accept your point of view but I invite you to intervene and let me know on specific cases in order to analize what is the best thing to do in order to improve the site.

@JyrkiLahtonen The recent idea and proposal to protect old bad questions, for example, is from your point of view a good example in the direction you are indicating? From my point of view and IMHO is the worst thing to do!

@JyrkiLahtonen Well, I wanted merely to mention that I am too guilty of occasionally answering a PSQ. I'd guess most of us are.

@gimusi You understand that the requirements on questions (and answers) on this site evolved over time, right? So if you take a question which is some 6 years old, when the answer was posted, the answer did not violate any rules of the site. It's quite different to current posts which violate the current rules of the site.

How to deal with the questions posted before the changes of the rules and to which extent should the rules be applied retroactively is for a separate discussion. To add also some details about the timeline, it seems that missing context close reason was added in 2013.

Although I am repeating myself, here are at least some discussions on meta related to this: Is it good practice to analyse past questions by today standards? and Why close old questions with accepted answers using the “no context” reason?

@MartinSleziak So after years that users have answered to bad questions with full answers, promoting the presence of bad questions on the site, now I have to complain myself because I try to help the asker giving only hint, sometimes working 1 hour with thw asker, and finally see all my work wasted because (often the same users) delete tose questions (sometimes also after improving)? No, thanks, frankly it really do not seems correct to me.

@MartinSleziak I'm the first among all which desire to have a better quality for questions which answer to.

You did not answer my question whether you see the difference between somebody who made a post in accordance with the rules of the site (at least the rules as they were agreed upon at the time) and somebody who knowingly violates the current rules of the site.

@MartinSleziak Am I violating some rule? I think we can discuss about that.

@gimusi I think you should know the answer yourself - you've been around for some time. And you are probably in better position to judge this than me, since you know content of the messages that moderators sent you.

@MartinSleziak We need to make rules more clear in my opinion. I anwer to the questions posed and when questions are posed in apoor way I nevergive full aswer (with some exception of course for my fault or a s a defensive action).

In short, yes, answering PSQs might be considered rule violation. Some people are stricter about this, some are less strict.

Re: I think we can discuss about that. We can certainly discuss this, but perhaps elsewhere (it seems that we are digressing from the purpose of the room). And maybe some other time.

@MartinSleziak I've shared all messages received by moderators on my meta questions, you can check that.

@MartinSleziak Yes of course, I would like to face with you on that. Thanks

@MartinSleziak I don't answer PSQ I try to involve new contributors and invite them to present questions in a proper way. Why should I be in favour for bad questions? I repeat my aim is have better questions. Maybe I've have differnt ideas to the way we need to follow to obtain that, but the scope is the same. Is it out of the rule?

Ok stop there, we'll talk about that another time. Bye

@MartinSleziak @JyrkiLahtonen Just to give an example and to be concrete, is that last answer detrimental for the site or out of the rules?

@gimusi Since you asked, this particular question and both answers that are posted at the moment look fine to me.

@gimusi I think it is not good. That trick has been used in so many contexts here already. Sequences and series. Repetitive => not useful.

@JyrkiLahtonen That's why I asked that. it is clear that we have two opposite point of view on that. But one thing are opinions another ones are accusations. The main point for me is: do you consider my hint given here out of the rules of the site?

You're moving the goalposts. You first asked if it was detrimental.

Now you only care if you're actually breaking rules. Well, there are not that many rules. Moderation is mostly community enforced by design.

"Is this detrimental to the site? Oh, okay. Can I keep getting away with it anyway?"

@MikeMiller Mu question is related to a previus discussion. The fact is that I see that often the two levels are mixed up and that raises some confusion. Moreover different users have different opinions on that and since lately I'm receiving some bad feedback I would like to understand what is going wrong. If I can do better I'll do.

My pourpose is to understand the point of view of other users. it is not an easy task.

Up for deletion: 1, 2, 3.

4, 5, 6.

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