I think of clutter primarily in terms of how it impacts community norms.

If your programming language Q&A site has an about page that says, ‘We welcome questions about all programming languages,’ but out of the last 100 questions, 97 of them were about SQL, you have a de facto SQL Q&A site. For a new user with a Julia question, do you think they're going to look at the about page first, conclude that this is a site where their Julia question is likely to get a good response, and ask it? Do you think they'll quickly reach for the tags feature to hide all the SQL-related questions and use that view to form their opinion of the site? Or do you think they'll conclude that the written policy is less salient than the self-evident norm that participants here are focused on SQL, and bounce off?

This likely bad outcome is despite the fact that SQL questions are on-topic for the site, as intended and as written! What to call this problem? I call it clutter.

The same concept applies to other community norms, like the one we're discussing in your post about research effort. If the last 97 questions out of 100 are low-effort and unresearched, a new user won't read our guidelines for how to write a good question; they'll just ask a low-effort, unresearched question themselves, because they correctly perceive that this is the norm. Any remaining users who would prefer a different norm will find that this is no longer the community they were originally interested in joining; no amount of tagging or AI filtering will restore to them the flow of new users who are now being trained to the low-effort norm. They have been cluttered out.

posted about 1 year ago

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