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Q&A

Comments on Questionable Promotions!

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Questionable Promotions!

+9
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I notice we have a dearth of activity on this site.

With a relatively small number of active users, perhaps we can add a tab to the "Questions" Page. We have Activity, Age, Score as sorting algorithms. How about a "Lottery" tab?

Once a day, randomize the questions we have, and use that as the order for the "lottery" tab. Leave it up for the day; I think we can get new answers, or at least votes on questions.

I visit the site daily, as I did for SE, and (as my profile indicates) I pretty much exclusively answer questions. On SE, I seldom look past the "new questions" or "active questions". With not many users, those are dead zones; so perhaps in lieu of new questions, we can focus on "filling in" the content already created; particularly questions and answers without votes.

It would be nice to have something to do, here, and I think there are just not many questions (and I seldom have any...)

EDIT: I like Mark Baker's suggestion, instead of a randomized list, a tab of "On This Day" previous questions asked on the same calendar day (Jan 10). That would still amount to about a page's worth of questions, and could be constructed on the fly pretty easily, and would ensure all questions be shown within a year. (Well, Feb 29 gets the shaft).

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General comments (2 comments)
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Pondering this, I wonder what the point is of improving questions/answers that no one is reading. Is writing new answers to those questions going to make then suddenly start turning up in searches?

It occurs to me that as long as the version of this site on SE exists, it is what is going to show up in Google searches for any given topic. Not sure what you do about that. But that will mean that the only people who come here looking for answers will be people who know about this site and come here directly. What will they do then? Do a search here, or ask a new question? I suspect it will be the latter almost all of the time. (I suspect it was that way on SE as well, and that the only way people came there indirectly was via search.)

If people do search the site and find an old question that is relevant to them, then hopefully they will vote for the question and/or one or more answers, and that will the surface it as an active question. Or do votes not count in the activity of a question? And if they don't, maybe they should, at least for a while.

Anyway, I suspect that for a very long time to come, this site will sink or swim based on people asking new questions. Yes, that is more like a forum than a QA site, but my guess is that until a QA sites is rich enough and unique enough to rank on Google, that is how they are all going to work.

So, as far as traditional Q/A traffic is concerned, I don't think this proposal does anything useful, except entertain those of us who delight in answering question, whether the is anyone listening to the answers of not. (And I am one of those.)

The other model, in which this proposal would make more sense, is that of a band of regular site users who do not come to get specific questions answered, but who come either of a love of debating the craft, or as a way of getting an education on topics they might not have thought to ask, by looking at questions and answers that others have asked.

That might actually be what is happening here, particularly at this early stage, in which case, an algorithm that ensures that there are always fresh discussion topics, even if they are recycled ones, makes more sense, and would make sense as a permanent feature.

But in that case, it does not have to be randomly generated. In face, random generation would not produce an even distribution of resurfaced questions unless it ran for a very long time. So I would suggest a different model, that I suspect would be far easier to implement, and would ensure a more evenly distributed resurfacing of old questions:

Implement a list of "On this day in years past" questions. So, for instance, today it would list all the questions asked on Jan 10 in all the previous years in the dataset. That does the same job of resurfacing old questions.

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General comments (8 comments)
General comments
Amadeus‭ wrote almost 5 years ago

That sounds good to me, also. I am one of those that love to ask questions, too, as my profile says: 1376 questions answered, 1 asked!

I'd also say, I do enjoy debating the craft. I wouldn't mind the (SE Banned) "matter of opinion" or "survey" questions, for example, I find it interesting to read different opinions on approaches and they may change or refine my own. I'm a statistician, so surveys are also inherently interesting to me.

Amadeus‭ wrote almost 5 years ago

Continued: Listing "on this day" would be pretty interesting; since we end up with about 366 pages of questions, that would also result in approximately a page of questions resurfaced each day (maybe not on Christmas or New Years, but on average). I might even modify some of my own old answers on such a page.

Monica Cellio‭ wrote almost 5 years ago

I think right now we do have that band of regular users who don't have specific questions right now but love the topic and want to help build this repository. SE will get the Googlers but we can build a community here too. There are a lot of old questions that are timeless in nature and could be improved, including adding new answers. I want to encourage people to look through some of it; what the specific mechanism is doesn't matter as much.

Amadeus‭ wrote almost 5 years ago

Eventually, we would want the stuff they do on websites (not my field) like keyword optimization, banner exchange, and targeted advertising, I know Facebook has a lot of very fine distinctions for ads, they may allow selection by "writers', or may have relevant facebook groups. I presume we can also advertise here for revenue, however small, pay-by-click ads (vs pay for exposure) don't care how small the audience is, they only pay if they get clicked.

Amadeus‭ wrote almost 5 years ago

@MonicaCellio has done a successful GoFundMe, that might be a way to raise promotional funding; I'd contribute. But I don't think we're ready; being unable to import the scores on Q/A makes us look incomplete; no votes on anything loses all ranking. All questions look the same, all answers look the same. Very egalitarian, but useless for beginners looking for a consensus or most likely correct answer, or for the most interesting questions.

Monica Cellio‭ wrote almost 5 years ago

@Amadeus this site is a stopgap, a place where our community can continue where we left off while waiting for the more "solid" platform that we hope to move to but doesn't exist yet. Please do continue to look at questions and answers here, vote, improve where you can, and otherwise build things up.

Monica Cellio‭ wrote almost 5 years ago

We had to choose between a blank slate (which also wouldn't have looked great) and importing content. If the content is good, I think it's worth having even if scores are currently 0 because no one's voted yet. We can work on that.

Amadeus‭ wrote almost 5 years ago

@MonicaCellio Understood.