We should blame new people less and look more at our own faults

Question

I read posts about how we can harder punish people for "abusing" the system, as if all people around here are intrinsically bad. They abuse the system so we need to punish them harder and all problems will disappear.

But here is my claim. People often don't know why they get downvoted. I once got downvoted when I was new without knowing why. I thought I wrote a bad question (too trivial) but this was actually not the case. I didn't know I needed to show the work I had already done on the website, because I assumed that most people here would like to answer questions to earn points. A similar person that made this assumption can be found here, and I could give a long list of examples. If you start talking with them, you see that in at least 50% of the cases they really want to do effort, but fail for a diverse set of reasons: don't speak language well enough, didn't know they should have shown their effort while they actually did effort, some didn't know that lazy people where not allowed on this website, ... .

If we make clear policies and really punish the lazy people that should be punished, we will be more effective. We should make clear policies in order to prevent people from answering questions from people that showed no effort, because people tend to believe here that this is the reason why they keep coming back (and there might be some truth in this for the big abusers). However, so many people really want to collaborate and learn but don't get proper reasons why their question got downvoted so they think they wrote bad trivial questions which is often not the case.

I want to introduce a system in which new people get better information about what they should do when posting there first post. They should press a check mark that they have shown enough effort (in the form of saying what they already tried, thought of, where they are stuck, ...) when posting their first post AND important, write that their question WILL NOT BE ANSWERED when they fail to show effort. Of course it can be that in reality some persons will still do this, but over time, this amount of people that answer questions with lack of effort will decrease. Especially people from the post-caution banner era where they needed to check a mark, will not answer those questions because they know it violates the rules. You should not blame people for breaing the rules, if the rules are somewhat hidden.

We should blame ourselves for not showing enough effort ourselves to make the rules clear to new users, and fail to warn them for the consequences of abusing the system. We should blame ourselves, not the new users.

I believe we should give this idea a try. Believers in the idea really believe that this will reduce the amount of questions with no effort shown drastically, if the policy is correctly implemented (> 50% reduce in bad questions). To those initially opposed to the idea I would say, we can always give it a try. We have nothing to lose with this policy, only to win. If it works, and we truly believe it will, this will reduce the amount of posts which show a lack of effort drastically. I can't imagine that anyone can be against a policy that at it's best can have a huge positive impact but by no means have a negative impact on the community.

Answer 1

"I can't imagine that anyone can be against a policy that at its best can have a huge positive impact but by no means have a negative impact on the community."

The arrogance of this statement reveals the naïveté of its creator, however well-intentioned. What in the OP's experience makes him believe this with such certitude? Part of the reason that Math.SE has grown the way it does is the opportunity afforded to both those who answer those who ask questions, however bad. That growth has afforded Math.SE investment in the site to make it better. Less questions, however bad, means less answerers, less growth, and less investment. There's your means.

That all said, I sympathize. We have created a nasty little prisoner's dilemma with regard to answering questions on the site. (Hey, nobody should answer this horrible question showing zero effort, but I know that so-and-so is going to answer and get the +15 acceptance for little effort, so why shouldn't I?) Nevertheless, the system as we have it works as well as any other. In short, rather than change the system, put the onus on those who think they will profit from answering such questions. They should know better.

Some thoughts:

• It is not our job to enforce any school's honesty policy, although we are also not other peoples' slaves. So some schmuck answers a ZEQ (Zero Effort Question) because...rep. I think the community tries to make it not worthwhile for such a person to answer them in the future. People who answer clear ZEQs may score an acceptance, but with that they quickly get downvotes. I have seen this and it is the correct response. Whatever gain in rep obtained will be more than offset in the loss of upvotes in the question tags. (Protests that the answer is useful ring hollow because they contribute to lower standards for the site.)

• Not all apparent ZEQs are pleas to do homework, but are just hard problems that the OP would like to see done. This is especially true in the definite-integral, closed-form, and sequences-and-series tags. Such questions are welcome here because they bring in a lot of traffic and spur interesting discussions.

So, yes, let's look at our own "faults." In short, self-policing is how the community thrives, and I think we do a pretty good job of it. Sure we get a lot of bad questions and answers...but this is, you know, the Internet. The downvote and comment tools are our means of maintaining quality. Use them.