In some Meta discussions, I came across criticism that Stack Overflow is flooded with noobs who ask questions but either
- Didn't do any research
- Gave up researching after like 1 minute
- Ask very individual questions that are not helpful to anyone
- Ask troll-level questions
- Ask other questions that indicate they aren't familiar with the rules of Stack Overflow
The discussions I saw were very old (around 2014/15), so I'm not sure if this is still as bad as it was (or better or even worse), but if it is, it means that the good questions are barely noticeable due to the many mediocre, bad or medium questions.
So I came up with an idea: what if there was some sort of a "Helpful contribution" or a "Helpful question" feature? One that can be added to questions to indicate they are not only for individual problems, but most likely helpful for other people too in the future?
This "Helpful contribution" / "Helpful question" feature could be filtered, so users see only questions marked as helpful instead of the ones that are pretty much useless.
My first idea was to implement it in a way that the one who asks the question can add this "Helpful contribution" / "Helpful question" feature to their question so the professional users are more likely to see it. However, I soon realized this feature would be abused massively to attract attention and let professional users see trash questions, hoping that they would answer them. So I came up with a few ideas how to prevent this from happening:
- If a question marked as "Helpful contribution" is actually not useful and only an individual or, even worse, troll question, it will get removed and the user gets a temporary "Helpful contribution" usage ban (without a warning, it will come already after the first wrong use). When this happens several times, they will get a permanent "Helpful contribution" usage ban instead of a temporary one or, in worst case, even a question ban.
- In order to use the feature, you need a certain amount of Reputation. By a certain amount I mean less than 50, but more than 2 or 3. I suggest 10 or perhaps 15.
- The feature is added not by the one who asked that question, but by a moderator who considers the question to be worthy of this feature. In this case, it might be implemented for answers (and perhaps comments) too.
In order to avoid age discrimination, it might be used retroactive too, to avoid questions asked more than a year or so ago to be excluded from using that feature. This would be done voluntarily by moderators who stumble across good questions. Of course, it would't be given to questions which were good once, but are outdated by now (like Python 2.1 questions which were helpful two decades ago when Python 2.1, which has been released in 2001, was a more current version).
I can imagine it would be difficult to implement, but I think this feature might be able to improve Stack Overflow's quality, as those who only want to do some research at Stack Overflow can filter out the rest and check only the helpful questions. Of course, this wouldn't make the "close/delete bad and/or duplicate questions" feature useless, since the regular questions would be still checked and deleted if they are trash.