If I could ask for one late Christmas gift from the Bitcoin community that I’d be sure to get, I’d for more people voting on content (upvotes and downvotes) on BSE.
1046 sats \ 4 replies \ @zuspotirko 7 Jan
Looking at how this person defined "Bad questions" and "Mildly bad" questions really is the same old story that forums are confronted with again and again and again:
Enthusiast want a place for denser and more high value information and everybody else wants a quantitative place to learn.
- It really is the same old topic. It's what made stackoverflow suck (exclude low level questions and be toxic towards noobs and not answer their questions). It's what made Quora suck (open the floodgates to the garbage)
- Reddit kinda solved this topic when some subreddits became big and mainstream and some subreddits became niche and sophisticated and heavily moderated. So you can have both.
- Other platforms tackle this question with more emphasis on the search function. This is the way to go in the future IMO
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565 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury 8 Jan
I agree w/ @Murch, this is a pretty good diagnosis. But we might consider this to be a desirable evolution, at least wrt bitcoin: if the ecosystem is differentiating to the extent where some people who've invested 200 hours into running a LN routing node want to ask detailed questions, and there's an audience who want to read that, I would consider that a giant success. Such a place would be conceptually different from a place where "I just sent some btc to this address, how do I get it back" was a question of interest.
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9 sats \ 2 replies \ @Murch OP 7 Jan
Your analysis is spot on, but I’m not sure your recommended path forward solves the issue. Search works great for people trying to find an answer. The search on the Stack Exchange site sucks hard, but either limiting your results to stackexchange in a general search engine, or using bitcoinsearch.xyz will get you good stuff.
However, search does not solve what regular site contributors see when they browse the page. If the frontpage is mostly garbage all the time, the experts just don’t come back after a while. Then nobody gets good answers anymore.
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42 sats \ 1 reply \ @zuspotirko 7 Jan
Well, you have to simultaneously make search more attractive and posting less attractive.
Make the search more powerful to lure people to only ask "good" questions on the forum and solve their "bad" questions with a chatbot. Make the chatbot read the forum itself. Maybe add tags/sorting/subforums in addition to that. Easier said than done, I know, but IMO this is what will make sites great in the future.
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100 sats \ 0 replies \ @Murch OP 7 Jan
Yeah, neat idea. If people attempting to ask a question were served a ChatGPT response compiled from the existing resources, and only post to the site if that doesn’t resolve their question that might be the best of both worlds: novice users would find their responses and get immediate feedback to improve their question as they iterate on the automatic response, and could even be helped to ask a good question if they don’t find what they are looking for.
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