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Timeline for What we'd like to do about those gosh darn "identification requests" questions

Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0

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Mar 20, 2017 at 10:31 history edited CommunityBot
replaced http://meta.stackexchange.com/ with https://meta.stackexchange.com/
May 9, 2016 at 19:37 comment added Pwassonne I've never had the chance to answer an ID request (tried to once, but somehow my answer didn't send and by the time I realized, someone had answered. Turns out we had it right, too ^^) but if I did, I'd do my best to provide an objective description of what the media in question is like, or at least a description that completes what the identification request said. Like "what's this post apocalyptic anime where there's a robot that does this and that?" "it is ___, it's like your description because ___, and it's also rather graphic and has a deep message".
May 2, 2016 at 14:09 comment added Memor-X @Pwassonne some people have felt the same but the problem remains when the questions and answers just bad and are taking away too much time from the community to fix. personally while i would love to discover new Shoujo Ai/Yuri titles through ID Requests but i feel that it's a disservice for them when we have a horrible id request for a hentai about a shouta having sex with multiple lolis says it's yuri when nothing they describe even hints at it
May 1, 2016 at 12:30 comment added Pwassonne I disagree with the idea that identification requests only help the asker. When answered, they sometimes make suprisingly good (as in serendipitous) anime / sci-fi / whatever recommendations. But of course that is entirely subjective.
Apr 26, 2016 at 7:06 comment added Memor-X @RossRidge which then brings us to what Krazer said in the question "We're not here to be someone's personal search engine/concierge service, we're here to ask and answer questions about the world and culture of anime and manga.". if a user comes here just to ask id request questions then they are just proving him right in thinking they are only using us as their personal search engine.
Apr 26, 2016 at 6:54 comment added Ross Ridge @Memor-X They can but they won't.
Apr 26, 2016 at 6:34 comment added Memor-X @RossRidge "if people making id-requests never stick around as you suggest, not even to see their questions downvoted, closed and/or edited, then they're not going to stick around to see their questions closed now. They're never going to gain the reputation necessary to ask their question on chat instead." they can by asking/answering other kinds of questions. we're Anime and Manga not Anime and Manga Identification Request
Apr 26, 2016 at 6:30 comment added Memor-X @RossRidge "the fact that we have a community of experts that are good at answering the questions" with other kinds of questions yes but with id requests the number of users who can produce high quality answers diminish considerably and most answers end up being one liners which look nothing short from a random guess. while they might answer the question in the end the answer is still crap and ends up being deleted because of a high number of downvotes
Apr 25, 2016 at 17:03 comment added JNat StaffMod You mention "the questions fit the Stack Exchange Q/A format" — I disagree with this statement. As I said before, they fit a Q/A format, but if they fit the Stack Exchange Q/A format, it's just barely. And I agree that your last sentence may end up being true: in fact, I might have said it myself, and added "and we don't lose much (if anything at all) from that."
Apr 25, 2016 at 16:51 comment added Ross Ridge @JNat Also, I don't think chat is going to be a substitute. If comments are Stack Exchange's second-class citizens, chat is its red-headed stepchild. It's not the same community, and it doesn't have the same vote/edit/close mechanisms to help moderate the "disease". Not that it matters, if people making id-requests never stick around as you suggest, not even to see their questions downvoted, closed and/or edited, then they're not going to stick around to see their questions closed now. They're never going to gain the reputation necessary to ask their question on chat instead.
Apr 25, 2016 at 16:33 comment added Ross Ridge @JNat Again, it's not just that one factor. It's the fact the questions are within the scope of "Anime and Manga", it's the fact that the questions fit the Stack Exchange Q/A format and it's the fact that we have a community of experts that are good at answering the questions. Normally when a whole class of questions are banned on a SE site one or more of these factors isn't true. When this happens despite all of them being true there should be a very good reason. I argue that in this case, while there is one good reason for getting rid of them anyways it's not quite sufficient.
Apr 25, 2016 at 14:43 comment added JNat StaffMod We're better off motivating users to positively contribute to our community, so they earn enough rep to go to chat and ask about the anime they're looking for there — win-win situation: we can still be the top place in the 'net to get your anime identified, and we rid our front page of this disease while helping our community grow.
Apr 25, 2016 at 14:40 comment added JNat StaffMod (cont'd) same question? Are the users even sticking around to help us grow and to help others after they get their answer? Do they even care if we downvote and close their questions, and come back to edit and improve them? These put a great toll on our community, as part of it spends time and effort trying to help a single person, and not the community — in that sense, id-requests do not fit well into our format: they may fit well into the Q&A format, but not into the SE philosphy.
Apr 25, 2016 at 14:40 comment added JNat StaffMod Why is the fact that we seem to be the place that identifies anime better of any importance here? We can still keep doing that in chat, and don't need to fill our front page with crap just because we seem to be the best community in the 'net doing it. Is it worth filling our site with low-quality questions, prone to be abandoned by the hit-and-run users who ask them, just because we appear to be able to do it better than anyone else? What benefit to they bring to the table? Do they help other users? Is anyone going to remember the same anime in the same way and find it through that...
Apr 24, 2016 at 18:51 comment added Torisuda I don't do much moderation on Stack Overflow, but I too see a ton of really awful, vague, poorly written questions. What's shocking is that, proportional to our size, I see just as many here. None of the other smaller sites I frequent has that many bad questions. I argued in my answer that moderating all these bad questions takes away time that people might be using to ask and answer good questions, so banning id requests is not orthogonal to getting more good questions, because policing them takes away the time of potential good question writers.
Apr 23, 2016 at 18:42 comment added Maroon Re: the fact that ID requests fit the site, and that we answer them well. Low-effort "translation" ("what does this Chinese text mean") or reference ("how do I pronounce this word") questions are usually not allowed on language SE's, even though top users tend to be pretty good at answering those.
Apr 23, 2016 at 6:48 comment added Ross Ridge @Evilloli Those ideas are orthogonal to banning id-requests. If they can actually get better questions they can get better questions regardless of whether id-requests are allowed. Your right that banning them will make it easier to police them. Though personally it doesn't seem too bad to me, not compared to what I see on Stack Overflow. However I don't really do any policing here, SO keeps me busy enough with that, so I'm not really in a position to judge.
Apr 23, 2016 at 6:29 comment added Torisuda ʞɹɐzǝɹ presented some ideas to encourage more questions to fill in the gap. Yes, we might shrink. I'm not worried about it. If it's a choice between quality or quantity, I choose the former. Since we're not a beta anymore, it's unlikely that SE will shut us down, and several on the SE staff have an aversion to id requests anyway, so if anything they'll be happy that we've gotten rid of them.
Apr 23, 2016 at 6:26 comment added Torisuda The answer I just posted presents my thoughts on your first comment. In terms of the zoo metaphor: it takes a lot less energy to stop monkey-seeking kids at the gates and tell them "No monkeys, take a hike" than it does to let them in, let them start acting out, round them all up, and kick them out, then repeat the process several times a day every day.
Apr 23, 2016 at 6:24 comment added Ross Ridge @Evilloli On the other hand, what makes this different from a monkey-less zoo is that while getting rid of monkeys makes room for something else, that's not the case here. This site is one of the smallest in the Stack Exchange network, there's already room for it to get a 1000 times bigger. Better questions won't be sucked into fill the vacuum left by the loss of the id-requests. This site will simply just shrink. The monkeys won't be replaced with donkeys, the monkey habitat will simply be left empty. Donkeys won't just wander in on their own.
Apr 23, 2016 at 6:10 comment added Ross Ridge @Evilloli Well, let me put it another way. You would expect a zoo to have monkeys. You would expect a Anime & Manga Q&A site to be able to identify an anime or manga. Banning id-request isn't going to change that expectation, not if the people who ask these questions only ever post one question and never return. They'll never get the chance to learn differently. So these posts won't stop, they'll just be all closed now. Kids will still come to the zoo expecting to see monkeys. Maybe they'll spread the word that zoo doesn't have monkeys anymore, more likely they'll tell everyone that zoo sucks.
Apr 23, 2016 at 5:43 comment added Torisuda Except that in our case we can't kick out the kids, because more kids who behave the same way keep coming in. We can't stop them coming in. We can't keep kicking them out, because our zoo will get a bad reputation and people will stop coming. Our clientele is just not mature enough to have monkeys around. While it would really be nice if we could change our clientele and make them mature enough to handle monkeys, like the clientele over at that Science Fiction and Fantasy Zoo, it's not realistic. So we have to get rid of the monkeys, and replace them with some donkeys or something.
Apr 23, 2016 at 5:41 comment added Torisuda I think your metaphor--"a zoo getting rid of monkeys because they behave like monkeys"--is misplaced. The crappiness of id requests is a combination of immature people in our community and the qualities of the question type that make it attractive to those people. It's more like we have these monkeys (id requests) that behave like monkeys, and for that reason we need zoo visitors not to egg them on. Then a bunch of kids come in and start yelling and screaming and hooting and carrying on and making faces at the monkeys. We can do two things: kick out the kids, or get rid of the monkeys.
Apr 23, 2016 at 5:18 comment added Torisuda I've also been saying recently that we do a good job of answering id requests and that there's nowhere better. No, a "good" job doesn't even begin to cover it--we do a heroic job of answering them, and our format and skill vastly surpasses any other venue. But I've also supported banning them for a fairly long time, because they just suck. They don't have to suck as much as they do--SF&F's story ident questions actually aren't that bad--but somehow the crowd we attract by having them is just full of lazy, entitled, illiterate people who are too lazy to correct "mocha" to "mecha".
Apr 23, 2016 at 3:36 comment added Ross Ridge @senshin You've taken that out of context, it's not just this place does a better job, it's also that we do a good job of it, and the questions fit the scope and format of the site. It's like a zoo getting rid of it's monkeys because they behave like monkeys.
Apr 23, 2016 at 2:37 comment added senshin "There doesn't seem to be another place that does a better job." - my house could, in principle, serve as a venue for persons looking for a place to fling excrement at the walls, and I'm sure I cpuld outfit my house to serve that purpose quite well. And yet I somehow manage to resist the urge to invite excrement-flingers to my home.
Apr 22, 2016 at 17:52 comment added Maroon I like the point that these questions can be interesting to read, but lately, I frankly haven't really enjoyed reading the questions that have popped up, so this doesn't really help me enjoy the site more (even though as of right now, I'm not interested in most of the anime that has been asked about on the front page).
Apr 22, 2016 at 15:54 comment added Ross Ridge @Makoto As I said it's easy to get numbers based on accounts. Finding numbers based on actual people is harder.
Apr 22, 2016 at 15:27 comment added Makoto It actually is easy to say that users that post identification requests don't contribute to the site. The activity from users asking identification requests here is sporadic and not long lasting, and if we're basing our participation on one of those statistics alone, then we're in a pretty bad spot.
Apr 22, 2016 at 10:08 comment added Gao +1 for raising the possible snowball effect and not knowing if id askers return and registered for new account. As to how helpful ids are, I liken them to questions on code review. Unless you're reviewing code for a popular project, they aren't likely to help many people, yet code review exists as an SE subnetwork.
Apr 22, 2016 at 7:52 history answered Ross Ridge CC BY-SA 3.0
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