It is evident that SO tries to remove hurdles and make it easy for newcomers to post questions. While this surely reduces the "friction" that new users encounter, it has the downside of letting people post anything they want without regard of what might be considered a good, on-topic post.
I would like to focus on a very specific demographic within new users, namely those who have not earned the Informed badge. "Why does this demographic deserve special interest?" you might ask - well let's look at some statistics!
This SEDE query compares the percentage of closed questions between informed and uninformed users. While the query might not be a 100% correct (i.e. it doesn't take into account when the badge was introduced, etc.), the result is still quite interesting:
- ~0.73% of posts were closed/deleted at the time users were informed.
- ~6.42% of posts were closed/deleted at the time users were uninformed.
That's an order of magnitude difference!
I know that getting the informed badge is trivial, but some users won't even take a few seconds to hastily scroll through the tour page. I believe that it is time to take action and start incentivizing more strongly the education of oneself about the site's rules (at the very least - going over the tour page). Even if just a fraction of those who just scroll ends up reading - that would already help.
I can think of a couple of approaches:
- A harsher approach, which involves disallowing uninformed users to post.
- A lighter approach, which involves reducing the number of required close votes (e.g. from 5 to 3) or delete votes (e.g. from 4 to 2) for posts by uninformed users.
I think implementing something like this would improve the quality of the content on the site and help unclog the notoriously long Close Votes review queue.
