tl;dr: Let's allow new users to request a temporary "pit stop" for their questions before they enter the race track - a mode where the question is visible only to a group of designated "guide" users who can provide assistance - or moderation, including downvoting/closing (it's not a free for all; SO quality guidelines still apply, they're just inflicted with more generous explanation!) The difference to the mentoring experiment is that there is no one-on-one commitment here; only a group of people donating slices of their time and often continuing threads and discussions that others have started, which traditionally is the SO way.


  • A non-negligible number of new users tends to have an unpleasant first experience on SO. Part of this is because the tone can be very to the point and this is perceived as hostility by some (and not others; a question of personality type methinks, and communicating through boxes of text with no voice/body language to read.) A small number of users is truly abrasive.
  • Even really lazy bozo users (as opposed to the honestly struggling that we want to help get on board) asking truly useless questions should be told off politely and professionally and never yelled at. Even if just because the yelling makes us look bad.
  • It is not reasonable to expect everyone on the site to become all kumbaya and extra nice and provide guidance to struggling askers of questions that aren't perfect. After all, the site is primarily about answering technical questions correctly.

  • However, there is a sizeable group of us willing to be extra friendly to users who ask for it (within reason.)

  • Everyone would benefit if new users and their questions were exposed to those users first.


  • Allow users with a certain minimum experience to sign up to a group of "onboarding guides".

  • Allow new users asking a question to request help from those users:

    enter image description here]

  • If they click this check box, their question will be displayed only to "guide" users for the first x number of views, or for a certain number of hours.

  • "Guides" will be browsing Stack Overflow as usual and see those questions in the list (although there could be a specialized review queue as well). The "guide" users will see a note on top of such questions (wording obviously subject to change):

    enter image description here

    After reaching the view count/time limit, the question will become an ordinary Stack Overflow question.

  • "Guide" users pledge to be extra welcoming and charitable with questions marked this way. This doesn't mean they'll accept any question no matter how bad, but they will

    • Explain when downvoting (if applicable; complete garbage, spam, etc. excepted)
    • Explain closevotes
    • Be generous with guidance
    • Leave a friendly comment before removing salutations and "thanks!" from questions
  • Questions in "pit stop" mode can't be answered until they leave the mode and become normal questions. I see no other way to avoid gross unfairness to the users who don't sign up to this scheme. (This has the inherent advantage of making the scheme unattractive to true bozos who WANT A SOLUTION NOW!!!!!!.)

  • New users could request this kind of protection for a number of questions, or until a certain reputation level - whatever works.

Possible advantages:

  • Differently from the Stack Overflow mentoring experiment, there would be a lot less commitment required from "guide" users. One-on-one mentoring means showing up and being available until an individual's problems are solved. This is something many busy folks can't provide. The "guide" approach works much more like Stack Overflow always has - many different people donate slices of their time.
  • New users are much more likely to have pleasant first interactions
  • "Guide" users have a chance to explain how the place works directly to newbies without snarky users sniping in between
  • Users who want to focus on questions rather than nurturing new users would be spared the sight of questions with problems
  • The questions coming out of this "protected mode" are more likely to be well received
  • Differently from the mentorship experiment, communication takes place in comments rather than chat, and there is no one-on-one relationship.

Potential problems:

  • The one big potential problem that is obvious is numbers - few guides drowning in a sea of pit stop requests, many of which will just be like "plz send the code" (which would need to be shut down quickly.) Will there be enough "guide" users to respond to requests? There would have to be a lot of "guide" users and they would have to be encouraged to sign up in great numbers. (There shouldn't be any badges for activity around this though, to avoid making this a trophy that everyone feels they need to win.)

The SWAT team of nice. They're going to breach your door and should your dog - but with /compassion/.

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    I like it, but can we make it clear to users subscribing their questions to this it does not mean their question will be accepted no matter what? It just means "whatever happens on your question, moderation wise, you'll have more explanations and tips on how not to do it in the future" or however we want to phrase this? – Patrice Apr 30 '18 at 14:06
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    Is it during the grace period possible to answer the question? If so, does it mean that nice people get a quick start on farming rep from easy/beginner questions? If not, how do we make sure that the question gets enough attention after the grace period to be answered? – BDL Apr 30 '18 at 14:07
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    Wouldn't it then be more like a review queue? Would this then be very similar to the first-post review queue (which doesn't work that great) just that it wouldn't show the question to others during review? – BDL Apr 30 '18 at 14:10
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    @BDL Would this then be very similar to the first-post review queue it would... the not showing the question to others, thus ensuring there's mostly nice interactions at first, is a big part of the equation, though. The worst that would happen is that your question has to wait longer until it's released into the wild (so there might have to be a feature allowing you to remove the protection if you get impatient) – Pekka 웃 Apr 30 '18 at 14:12
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    I would like this to be re-themed so it doesn't read (to me at least) as "the other users are not nice". I'm sure there's a way to wordsmith this to avoid that. – BlackVegetable Apr 30 '18 at 14:16
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    How is this different from the typical "we need a SO for inexperienced users" stuff? – Nicol Bolas Apr 30 '18 at 14:16
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    It needs to be made clear how this is different from the 'Mentor' scheme SO has already trialed. – Martin James Apr 30 '18 at 14:20
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    This sounds like a variation of Jon Ericson's (imho - rather nicely thought out) answer on MSE - which while I believe was basis for the mentorship experiment here on SO - seems to have had lost traction. – Jon Clements Apr 30 '18 at 14:32
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    *Innocent user clicks* -> "Error 404: No nice users were found on Stack Overflow". 👍 – Maroun Apr 30 '18 at 14:44
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    For UX purposes the tick should come before the button to "post question" because most will just click this button and then realize there was a tick box below! – JonH Apr 30 '18 at 15:00
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    You could do a systematic version of this for all posts. Have downvotes for new users instead become effective "helpme points", which place it into a mentorship queue and eventually hide it outside the queue at a certain threshold (to avoid harsh comments on the worst of posts). Shadowbanning of posts or users is a common solution to these kind of problems. Of course, you would need sufficient engagement in that queue to actually constructively interact with all those users and posts. But that's going to be an issue regardless. – bitnine Apr 30 '18 at 15:00
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    This is what the Triage and H&I review queues were supposed to be. That didn't work out. Maybe trying it again can't hurt, now without the ulterior motives. I suspect the bigger issue is to work the out-of-band communication, you can't really expose the final edit with a crapload of comments, some of which (hopefully) no longer apply. Why the mentorship research project produced nothing in 7 months has to be relevant. – Hans Passant Apr 30 '18 at 17:13
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    This seems like asking someone "Would you like the waiting staff in the restaurant to be friendly or grumpy?" Would anyone choose the grumpy option? – Raedwald May 1 '18 at 8:39
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    @Raedwald good point. I just happened to edit in something that addresses exactly that: it would have to be that questions in "guide" mode can't be answered until they leave the mode. I didn't like it at first, but don't see any other way to prevent being grossly unfair to the community (guide users would get to answer simple questions before everyone else, providing a perverse incentive for everyone to sign up as a guide.) Incidentally, the prolonged waiting this implies will help keep down the numbers of people using this service. – Pekka 웃 May 1 '18 at 8:44
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    Another change I'd suggest is that questions deleted from triage don't count towards the automatic question ban. The time wasted by them is given knowing the outcome, so there is no loss. Also, I see this as a great way to head off those off topic because they aren't suited questions. Yes/no questions, bug reports, stuff like that. You can give the answer in a comment and explain how the question isn't suitable and they should go ahead and delete it. "Nope, that's a bug. Just open a connect with MS/issue on GitHub and delete this question." – Will May 1 '18 at 13:58

12 Answers 12


I do like this as a potential idea if it works - but I'm not sure it will, I find it a bit utopian for (mainly) a couple of reasons:

"Nice" users have a chance to explain how the place works directly to newbies without snarky users sniping in between

The potential problem I can see here is that most people think that they're nice, very few would tend to outright admit to being arseholes. And different people have different ideas on what nice, constructive comments actually look like. (Combine that with the afformentioned often lack of communication skills, and I can see potential issues developing.)

Even lazy bozo users asking truly useless questions should be told off politely and professionally and never yelled at.

Yes, but lazy bozo users aren't the ones that will tick that box, and they're the ones that usually result in, ahem, "unfriendly" comments. These are usually the users who want an answer now, with what they've hastily written with little to no effort, and they have absolutely no intent on improving their question at all.

So assuming there's no answering of questions in the "nice users only" period, why would they tick a box that, to them, is just a further barrier to getting their question answered?

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    Sadly, I suspect you are correct:( – Martin James Apr 30 '18 at 15:21
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    There is a danger that such a mechanism would filter out all the 'genuine' new users and put them through a SWAT. The deadbeats, vamps, socks, ring-voters etc. would just not bother. That could actually increase both the internal and external perceptions of 'unwelcomeness':( – Martin James Apr 30 '18 at 15:25
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    I wonder if "The potential problem I can see here is that most people think that they're nice" is true. I know that I'm not "Nice" though I also don't think I'm an arsehole most of the time. – Oleg Apr 30 '18 at 18:10
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    @Oleg there's a scale to it, depending on the amount of arsolium in your diet. It's not a binary thing:) – Martin James Apr 30 '18 at 20:03
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    @MartinJames: I'm having trouble seeing why separating new users who care from trolls and vampires is a problem. We just let the automatic question ban act twice as fast on questions released into the wild "maximize view rate" and continue to be lenient toward those who ask for help making their question good first. But then, I want trolls and vampires to be told to read more and post less, as firmly and politely as possible. Maybe we can have a big banner "Welcome to Lurk-Only Stack Overflow" for the troublemakers (and yes, that means taking away every textbox and only allowing browsing) – Ben Voigt May 1 '18 at 0:21
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    @MartinJames Assuming new users feel unwelcomed mostly by negative responses to their own activity, and far less by responses to others' activity, they might not even notice the increased negativity against these groups. And the deadbeats etc. are probably more insensitive to negativity than most, and may need to be hit squarely over the head with it. – Zev Spitz May 1 '18 at 14:18
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    @Oleg And you'd likely either opt out of it entirely -- because you're aware you're not suited to it -- or opt in, and be careful to be nicer. The problem isn't with people who are self-aware enough to know; the problem is with people who aren't. People who assume that, if you're honest, you can't possibly be rude; or people who think that bad questions deserve rude responses; or in general people who aren't self-aware enough to know they're bad fits for the program. – Nic Hartley May 1 '18 at 22:01
  • Worse yet, there are many users who will happily answer such questions, for whatever motives they have. So someone who wants an answer immediately will have almost no incentive. The only thing I can think of is making it mandatory, but that would put a huge burden on "polite reviewers," given SO's volume. – jpmc26 May 3 '18 at 6:47

Unfortunately I don't like this. This is making a slippery slope to a "safe place", not to mention how do you determine who is a "nice user", more votes? More internet points?

No system with a voting, dupe close, etc system will ever be a nice system (Jeff Atwood, iirc). We cannot cave into demands because a downvote is taken personally. This falls into a quote I've been pissing my sister in law off with: "That sounds like a you problem".

We are not a newbie tutorial system, this is a knowledge base! I've been here for about 7 years, and I believe my profile says logged in for over 1500 days, and I have never seen all this slew of unwelcomeness to a GOOD question.

I'm just going to say it: we need to be unwelcoming to crap. The unresearched, the ungoogled, the "blatantly in the docs", the syntax errors (send them to chat or something), etc. If somebody says to a new person who has made a good attempt, has read the rules, that's one thing, and it will almost always be flagged. However we need to stop catering to those who need a silver spoon. We don't need to adapt SO into a hand holding service.

I got downvoted heavily, and question banned when I started out here and gosh, I didn't feel attacked (shocking!). I took it as a challenge to work harder and actually ask a good question and dammit I felt great when I got that first upvote.

Semi-rant aside: no, we should not have a designated "nice sector" of SO because it only implies moreso that the rest of SO is not nice. It's emotionless, as I firmly believe it should be. Let the merit of your skills drive you, not your fragile emotions.

Disclaimer: this is a general statement. "You" is definitely not aimed at Pekka (love Pekka)

  • 34
    What's wrong about making SO safe, with or without the scare quotes? Also, the selling point of this suggestion appears to be that SO will continue to avoid being a newbie tutorial system for everyone except those who opt in to this program. SO has already piloted several initiatives to help new users, with the template system and the tutoring system, and now announcing plans to implement some kind of new user wizard for questions... the inertia here is definitely in the direction of Pekka's suggestion. – TylerH Apr 30 '18 at 14:27
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    As for the second part and your experience, <3, but you are also a regular in the JavaScript chatroom. The people in that chatroom have some of the thickest skin of the whole site and regularly throw around some of the worst language/behavior (at least now that the C++ Lounge is history), and I think that makes y'all a little jaded toward people without that thick skin or those who have, as you say, fragile emotions. – TylerH Apr 30 '18 at 14:28
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    I will concede that we don't care who anybody is as long as they can follow rules -- maybe I am jaded, but I think that's a philosophy people should adopt. I like to think our contributions to the JS tag and the countless people helped over the years outweighs the blowoff of steam lol (not saying we should, but despite the context of the room we really love anybody who comes in eager to contribute) – Sterling Archer Apr 30 '18 at 14:31
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    " we need to be unwelcome to crap" I strongly disagree. It should be possible to tell people that there post is below the quality limit without being mean. For the recipient of a comment it makes a huge difference to write "Read the help center. Then you would now why your questions sucks" or to write "Unfortunately this question has some problems. Consider reading the help center to find out how you can improve it". – BDL Apr 30 '18 at 14:37
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    It takes years of older brother & sister tolerance to develop this kind of skin xD. However, BDL that's exactly what I mean, when I say unwelcome I'm not saying "go f urself noob", I mean, casting a downvote, commenting that it's off topic. It's fine to do that, however, this also clashes with the "downvotes are seen as personal attacks" nature. – Sterling Archer Apr 30 '18 at 14:45
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    Noone (as far as I have seen) has raised any points saying "Don't downvote because it's mean". Pekka only suggests that we should have a nice system that helps users to ask better question. I don't see how this would (1) make the rest of SO less nice or (2) would change anything on the question quality limit. Hopes are that it generates more questions that are good (or at least acceptable). – BDL Apr 30 '18 at 14:50
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    I think most of us agree that the blog posts wasn't optimal. But nevertheless, ideas born from the blog posts message can still be good. If Pekka suggested to have a separate area for answering newbie questions or that downvoting terrible questions should be prohibited, you'd have my full support. But he/she hasn't said anything like this. That's why I'm concerned that their idea might be shut down not because the idea is bad but because people assume wrong motives behind the idea. Let's just judge the idea here on it's own. Improving questions to prevent down-votes for the win!! – BDL Apr 30 '18 at 14:55
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    People who oppose safe spaces on principal are basically the problem here. – shogged Apr 30 '18 at 15:35
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    @shogged that's a rather broad and accusatory phrase to toss out there. You never know who is for what, and you may have just told a good number of decent people that they are the problem for a belief of opinion. – Sterling Archer Apr 30 '18 at 15:44
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    @Sterling it's okay though. They are in the 'we need to be more welcoming' camp. So right now they can do no wrong. They can even insult everyone and not be called out for it. Heck one of the first posts with suggestions ended with theOP calling everyone A-holes.. after preaching 'we need to be nicer'... – Patrice Apr 30 '18 at 17:09
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    I don't really see a "slippery slope to a 'safe place'". A "Stack Overflow for Newbies" with different rules would be more like a safe place. In particular, safe places don't expire automatically after x hours. – duplode May 1 '18 at 1:09
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    how do you determine who is a "nice user" they would have to sign up, and pledge to be extra friendly in this "guide" mode. No system with a voting, dupe close, etc system will ever be a nice system I agree - but my experience from nine years of activity here is that moderator actions tend to go down much better if accompanied with a personal explanation. That's all this aims for, rather than a "safe space". – Pekka 웃 May 1 '18 at 8:52
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    A real-world example would be being new to a town you want to move to, and mis-parking your car. There's a huge difference between a grumpy cop wordlessly slapping a ticket on your windshield (after all it's your fault! You should have paid attention to the signs! It says clearly no parking right there!) and them coming over to you, telling you what's what, you apologizing, and them letting you off with a warning just this once. Have half a dozen experiences like the former on your first day, you might start rethinking wanting to move there. – Pekka 웃 May 1 '18 at 8:56
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    @Pekka웃 well, to be fair, nobody really thinks about the grumpy cop who has to deal with the same person parking in a clearly marked "no parking zone" habitually. Not to mention they also has to deal with being yelled at by some for following the rules of their job. It may drive off some people, but when are are going to provide assistance to the tired cop who has been through years of abuse for doing the right thing? – Sterling Archer May 1 '18 at 16:01
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    @TuringTux I... don't see what you're saying here. I am not saying that "not posting an MCVE" is rude. I am literally saying that some users, right now, are basically saying "we need to be more welcoming and inclusive, you f*ckheads. If you disagree with me you are an a-hole". That is my issue. I find it highly hypocritical to say stuff like that. – Patrice May 2 '18 at 17:57

"Wouldn't this just be like a current review queue?"

No, because it's opt-in, and that makes all the difference.

"Are there enough 'nice' people?"

Well all the people here complaining about not niceness had better step up to the plate, and all the allegedly-not-nice-people protesting their niceness should give it a try too.

"Some people will still post rubbish"


"Ok, this might help people to ask better questions, but it won't stop the real clueless newbies"

Yeah, well maybe in parallel we should be drawing up a list of other resources we can point people to?


It's not the absence of niceness that's making me explode here, it's the overlap between people complaining about problems, and people shooting down every solution that's offered because it "might not work" or it might not work "perfectly.

The only question is could it make things better, and is it worth the cost? If the answer is yes then Just Do It! I mean if you can throw a Documentation spaghetti at the wall just to see if it sticks, surely we can at least trial something like this?

(And even if A/B testing proves that the question quality at the end is no better, maybe people will still feel better about it :P )

  • "Yeah, well maybe in parallel we should be drawing up a list of other resources we can point people to?" -- Yup. It sounds plausible that folks who sign up to be guides would be aware of which discussion venues about the tags they are active in would receive well and produce useful answers to library recommendation questions, newbie code review questions, interesting opinion-based questions, etc. – duplode May 2 '18 at 12:29
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    It's not the absence of niceness that's making me explode here, it's the overlap between people complaining about problems, and people shooting down every solution that's offered because it "might not work" or it might not work "perfectly. I've noticed this seems to happen to often on any significant change to site behavior that gets proposed on meta, related to "be nice" or not. Someone proposes an idea, then someone else comes up with a way it might hypothetically not work, and that's the end of the discussion. There's rarely a chance to improve the proposal or A/B test, etc. – Ajedi32 May 2 '18 at 15:19

This system would need some consideration of what to do about unsalvageable questions, chameleon questions, and posters who do not heed the advice they are given. Because despite the attempt to help the poster, their question must eventually be rejected, with the poster feeling unwelcome.

  • Oh absolutely. Clicking that button should not be advertised as "answer guaranteed!" Nor should the helpfulness extend to handing out free code, regexes, and library recommendations. Regular Rules still must apply! – usr2564301 May 1 '18 at 18:22
  • This was a problem with the mentorship experiment. From my anecdotal experience, about 60-70% of users would post their (still unsalvageable) question anyways – Magisch May 2 '18 at 8:54
  • @user5389107 hey I've missed you :'( how can I ping you with foal pics? – Yvette Colomb May 2 '18 at 19:31

This reminds me of the Sandbox for Proposed Challenges over on the Programming Puzzles & Code Golf (PPCG) Meta.

When I was active there, asking good challenges was not easy. There are a lot of details that have to be worked out for every challenge idea, and there are often loopholes that need to be closed.

The model of the sandbox was as follows:

  • Some user A has an idea for a challenge
  • A writes the question as an answer to that Sandbox meta thread (title and tags are in the body of the answer). This question should fit the format that PPCG requires.
  • Devoted members of the site regularly go over new challenges posted in the Sandbox and raise concerns in the comments. If the challenge is deemed fit to be posted to the main site as-is, then they upvote the answer.
  • Once the challenge reaches a reasonable score (basically, whatever A is comfortable with, but should be at least +2 or +3), A posts the question to the main site.

Questions that went through the sandbox process were much more likely to get a positive reception on the main site. Most questions that were closed or heavily downvoted were ones that never went through the sandbox.

While this Sandboxing process worked well for PPCG, I'm not sure it will scale well to Stack Overflow. It definitely needs to be its own dedicated feature here for it to have a chance of success. I can't guess whether it would succeed or fail; we'd have to try it for me to know. My main concerns are:

  • Users not using the feature. Even though the Sandbox existed on PPCG and is always featured, many users didn't use it, so experienced users had to keep directing users to it.
  • Too many users using the feature. If there aren't enough "guides," sandboxed questions would pile up and not get addressed.
  • Users becoming dependent on the feature. We want to teach them how to ask good questions, not always be there to revise their question. Confidence has something to do with this.
  • Users wasting the Guides' time with poor questions. Questions that could be addressed by simple google searches (things like basic syntax of the language), or questions that are commonly asked duplicates.
  • Guides answering by linking duplicates. This could easily get out of hand. On the one hand, linking the duplicate would save everyone time, but on the other hand, it is a form of answering the question. This feature is about learning how to ask good questions, not about "give me an answer to this question."
  • Questions getting closed anyways. It needs to be made clear that this feature doesn't guarantee that the question will get a good reception. I'd anticipate that many of these questions would get closed as duplicates.

The actual votes should not be upvotes and downvotes. The votes should be something like:

  • "This question is ready to be posted to the main site."
  • "This question needs some work." Intended as "wait, don't post this yet, there are some problems that haven't been addressed."
  • "This question is unsalvageable." No matter what we do, there are going to be terrible questions with no hope posted here.
  • 1
    These are absolutely the potential pitfalls that could bring the idea down! With 1 through 4, I guess time would have to tell (dependency could be prevented by limiting the number you can take into pit stop). That guides answering by linking duplicates could be a problem didn‘t occur to me; interesting (although an outcome that says „hey I searched for x keyword and found y duplicate, do you want to withdraw this question?“ doesn‘t sound terrible to me. Your proposed alternative voting system sounds great. Closevoting could be a step after „this question is unsalvageable“ – Pekka 웃 May 3 '18 at 6:27
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    @Pekka웃 teaching how to search seems good to me. Non-obvious duplicates should probably be posted as questions anyway (they're the "good duplicates"). That was mainly what I was getting at. – Justin May 3 '18 at 7:04

I will comment on a specific detail of this fine proposal:


This is not ideal, to the extent it feels a bit like imposing a cost to good faith new users that opt for guidance. I don't find unfairness to other answer writers a sufficient concern to justify this aspect of the feature, as it gives gamification undue importance in this scenario. I find the other motivations mooted by Raedwald...


... and by you...

[...] guide users would get to answer simple questions before everyone else, providing a perverse incentive for everyone to sign up as a guide.

... to be more compelling reasons for such a compromise.

In particular, the guidance system becoming a FGITW queue for answer writers not actually interested in guiding anyone sounds like a plausible failure mode. An alternative way of mitigating that might be giving guides an option to say "This is a fine question already; the buck stops here", which would end the "pit stop" early and allow any eventual answer by the guide to be posted in a timely manner. By doing so, the guide would be claiming some of the responsibility for the fate of the question for themselves; accordingly, there should be a mechanism to detect that too many of the questions manually given clearance by a guide end up closed, so that appropriate disciplinary actions can be taken.

(A third, somewhat weirder, possibility might be making it possible for guides to post delayed answers, that only show up after the guidance period is over. While it might seem that wouldn't accomplish much, it would at least free guides that want to answer the questions from having to remember to go back to it several hours later.)

  • 1
    Indeed, there probably should be a system for guide users to vote a question „ready for the race track“, so to speak. The idea of guide(s) casting that vote and hence taking some (visible) responsibility for the question (like with close voting) is fascinating. I won‘t work it into the current proposal to keep it relatively simple, but should this actually be picked up by the powers that be it‘s definitely a great addition – Pekka 웃 May 3 '18 at 6:29

If we're going to do this, I think we need to go the whole way and lock the guides out of taking any moderation actions on posts that they review.

As long as a guide user can perform hostile actions towards an asker, he is a potential enemy. If such a guide says "Your post has problem X; you should fix it by doing Y", that's an imminent threat of downvoting or closure - not only by the guide user, but by anyone who reads what they wrote and is persuaded to follow suit. The natural and logical response to that threat is the one that we witness regularly from new askers: to try to immediately combat it by arguing that the criticism is bullshit and that the critic is an asshole. (This isn't a hard mindset for me to get into personally, because I feel the same impulse myself on the occasions when I ask what I consider to be a perfectly good question and it starts accruing close votes for what I consider to be bullshit reasons. You may also have experienced the same.)

If you want to ensure that a question's asker and a question's initial readers will interact in a genuinely cooperative way, then you need to eliminate the perception from the asker's mind that people criticizing their post are a threat. I don't think that can be done without removing those critics' moderation powers, because as long as they have them, that perception will be correct.

(A natural consequence of doing as I suggest above, in order to avoid it being strictly advantageous from a selfish perspective for an answer to put all their questions into guide mode, is that we'd also need to make a question unanswerable and unupvotable for as long as it remains in guide mode. Guide mode should be for feedback and guidance only, and it should be expected that once they're confident new users will cease to use it.)

  • The difficulty with this is that the new poster is not then exposed to the "harsh" world of down-votes and close-votes in the supportive environment of the guides, and they will have a rude awakening when they emerge. I can see how that will pan out: they will complain "the guides were nice, but everyone else was unwelcoming". – Raedwald May 2 '18 at 9:51
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    It might be better for the guides to down-vote and close vote as usual (arguably, even more harshly than usual), but explain what that means and what the poster could do to fix the post. – Raedwald May 2 '18 at 9:56
  • I definitely agree with the parenthetical last paragraph. The rest, meh. – Heretic Monkey May 2 '18 at 16:00
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    @Raedwald I don't see much benefit to that compared to just trying to persuade users in general to explain their downvotes and close votes. Unfortunately, a proposal to ban such explanations (or at least a proposal that we should all "refrain" from them) lest they cause offence currently has a lot of support, and is in keeping with the company's view on the matter, so, uh, good luck. – Mark Amery May 2 '18 at 19:24
  • So essentially your thesis is that we can't tell people to improve content without making an implicit threat. Even just not making it out of the no-answer guide mode is effectively a death sentence to the question. So essentially, what you're saying is SO can't be nice. To which I say, you're right. We can't be nice to everyone and have quality, which contradicts the article. We have to decide which one is higher priority. – jpmc26 May 3 '18 at 7:00
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    "Even just not making it out of the no-answer guide mode is effectively a death sentence to the question." - so don't put that choice in the hands of the guides. If an asker wants to ignore their advice and risk the wrath of the community, so be it. (Who knows - the guides may be talking nonsense and the asker's judgement may be right!) – Mark Amery May 3 '18 at 8:02

How about letting the new users help themselves? Temporarily show the post to only the user.

Once a question is submitted by a user new to SO, they could be informed with something along the lines of

Your question will be visible to other users on the site in 15 minutes.
This is to give you time to make edits to your post and confirm your research.

Hopefully that would encourage them to have another look at their post and stick around (they know something will happen in 15 minutes) so that they see comments and can act on them before lots of downvotes happen.

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    If they haven't looked at their own question with a sufficiently critical eye before posting it, why would they do so after posting it?? – AakashM May 3 '18 at 8:31
  • I guess, this would only help if op already knows about the site and culture and what we expect from them – BDL May 3 '18 at 8:33
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    @AakashM My idea was that it would be a subconscious prompt to get them to do that. They might think "Why would I do that? What's wrong with this <fx:user looks at question> ?" – Andrew Morton May 3 '18 at 8:42
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    I wonder if a 15 minute time delay will actually trigger people to be in even more of a rush to get their question out, since at the moment of posting it will take a further 15 minutes to become visible :/ – Gimby May 3 '18 at 9:08
  • @Gimby But then they still have 15 minutes to cool down and look at what they have written. – Andrew Morton May 3 '18 at 9:19
  • Maybe the 15 minute delay could be instigated as soon as the first downvote happens, making it so that the user knows there's something wrong with the post and has a time to fix it before more downvotes pour in. If the user has written a decent question, then it wouldn't need the wait time, but as soon as there's any indicators that it's not good, it could be throttled back by this idea. – Davy M May 5 '18 at 4:02

Whether or not we do this, we need better tools around the comments.

I'm not surprised that some people could feel alienated when they post a question and there are quickly 15 different voices telling them they're wrong.

Frequently, these comments overlap. The problem (often) is whilst they overlap 80% (NPFA), each one does include some slight nuance not covered by the others. So none of the commenter's feel that they should remove their comment, since the question asker would then be losing (valuable?) insights.

We need a way for commenters to be able to group and amalgamate comments. So that the asker gets a single piece of feedback stating "these are the current shortcomings of your post" rather than it feeling like 10s (and those can feel like hundreds or thousands if you're not prepared) of people are all saying that they're wrong.

This also assumes we somehow shield the OP whilst the initial comment/consolidation happens.

The simplest mechanism (though obviously open to abuse) would be to allow someone to flag multiple comments as somehow "overlapping" and to provide their own comment that incorporates each of the individual comments.


I proposed something just like this along time ago, maybe it will get some traction now.

If questions are not posted you cannot get down votes.

  • Ha! Nice. Had already upvoted that one, probably back in 2014 – Pekka 웃 May 3 '18 at 19:40

I'm for this suggestion in general, but I think it would require hard thinking about implementation.

At first glance, a simple implementation is to make all first posts invisible except in the first post queue - and make sure the guidelines for reviewing are "be extra nice". Volunteers are essentially any one who wants to review these. This is a minimal effort implementation I think, but consider possible problems:

  1. Everything in other questions here
  2. The queue becoming a vampire queue, burning through exasperated reviewers, and eventually becoming useless.
  3. There is still much room for offense here - if this is a learning experience, than reviews still need to close/down vote, but with a nice explanation (maybe stressing not to take offense) - this might still not be taken well.
  4. The " nicest " reviewers might in the end become full time question writers.

So in short, very good idea, but we need to think hard about implementation (read what guidelines do we set?).


I don't find preventing immediate answers a con. SO is for the long run, and we shouldn't care how fast a user needs an answer. Immediacy can be a privilege earned from question 2.

  • In my experience, many newbies mean well but don't understand how Stack Overflow works, and they appreciate being politely corrected. I like the idea of Nice People handling all new user questions before the downvoters/critics arrive. That way we won't lose or alienate people who will contribute good questions once they know how. – jkdev Jul 5 '18 at 9:34

I feel this is an attempt to route around an issue in the system rather than fix the issue - I'd see at as a patch for a symptom rather than a resolution of the cause of a bug.

I think the concept of an initial walled garden of questions is a decent one but won't solve the problem of parts of the community resorting to toxicity, it might even have the effect of resulting in more toxicity as question askers are reprimanded for not using the pit stop.

Flag and deal with toxic behaviours and rudeness don't offer alternative workflows while not dealing with the toxicity.

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    The problem is that tone is a grey area and "toxicity" means many different things to many different people. Most clearly toxic behaviour we already punish and delete on the spot. Absence of constant super ultra niceness doesn't fit that category though. How do you police that? Plus, many people's bad mood stems from a constant flood of what looks to them like lazy questions. If folks with more tolerance for imperfection can help users to beat their contributions into shape, things are likely to get better. – Pekka 웃 May 1 '18 at 10:34
  • @Sam Completely agree. Over the past couple years SO has become extremely toxic and the only outcome here would be people being told that they did not have their questions vetted properly. – Cross_ May 2 '18 at 17:50

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