To the extent that moderation ever prevented questions from getting answers, that was by closing them.

When a question gets closed before an answer comes in, the OP has nine days to fix it before it gets deleted automatically by the system.

The value proposition is getting an answer to a question that is useful to a reasonably broad audience. That very often means a question that someone else asked, the answer to which is useful to you. It is not getting an "answer" to a "question" where an individual dumps some code trying to figure out what's wrong.

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NobodyNada 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

> When a question gets closed before an answer comes in, the OP has nine days to fix it before it gets deleted automatically by the system.

One of the bigger problems with the site's moderation systems was that 1) this system was incredibly opaque and unintuitive to new users, 2) the reopen queue was almost useless, leading to a very small percentage of closed questions ever getting reopened, and 3) even if a question did get reopened, it would be buried thousands of posts down the front page and answerers would likely never see it.

There were many plans and proposals to overhaul this system -- better "on hold" UI that would walk users through the process of revising their question, and a revamp of the review queues aimed at making them effective at pushing content towards reopening. These efforts got as far as the "triage" queue, which did little to help new users without the several other review queues that were planned to be downstream of it but scrapped as SE abruptly stopped working on improvements to the site.

Management should have been aggressively chasing metrics like "percentage of closed questions that get reopened" and "number of new users whose first question is well-received and answered". But it wasn't a priority for them, and the outcome is unsurprising.

	▲	zahlman 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yes. The "on hold" change got reversed because new users apparently just found it confusing. Other attempts to communicate have not worked because the company and the community are separate entities (and the company has more recently shown itself to be downright hostile to the community). We cannot communicate this system better because even moderators do not have access to update the documentation. The best we can really do is write posts on the meta site and hope people find them, and operate the "customer service desk" there where people get the bad news. But a lot of the time people really just don't read anyway. Especially when they get question-banned; they are sent messages that include links explaining the situation, and they ask on the meta site about things that are clearly explained in those links. (And they sometimes come up with strange theories about it that are directly contradicted by the information given to them. E.g. just the other day we had https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/437859.)

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sevenseacat 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

And that was the core problem with Stack Overflow - they wanted to build a system of core Q&As to be a reference, but everyone treated it as a "fix my very specific problem now".

99% of all the junk that got closed was just dumps of code and 'it doesn't work'. Not useful to anyone.

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immibis 3 days ago | parent [-]

And 99% of the other stuff, that wasn't just a code dump and "it doesn't work", was also closed.

	▲	sevenseacat 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Believe it or not, that's not correct :)