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Q&A What is "clutter" in the context of Codidact?

This is not an answer, but more detail about why it confuses me. I left it out of the question to keep it succinct. You can read this as an answer to the effect of "I have searched for a meaning/de...

posted 7mo ago by matthewsnyder‭

Answer
#1: Initial revision by user avatar matthewsnyder‭ · 2023-10-12T15:01:46Z (7 months ago)
This is not an answer, but more detail about why it confuses me. I left it out of the question to keep it succinct. You can read this as an answer to the effect of "I have searched for a meaning/definition and failed to find one".

I know I hate my house or my desk being cluttered. I am not wealthy, so space is very limited on both. When there is clutter, it is hard an available space to put things I'm working on. The clutter, being disorganized, is hard to find things in. Also, I see my entire house, entire desk on any given day, clutter and all, and it bothers me. But I can't connect this to a QA site: Stack sites have millions of questions and usually pages are a few tens. I never see most of them. It is not hard to "find" things in "the pile" because the search and tag features usually work very well. Space is effectively unlimited (obviously storage costs money, but I assume short text questions are not many GBs each).

I can relate to "clogging" - I hate it when my toilet gets clogged. It clogs because I try to flush too much, and the pipe is of a limited size. Too much throughput. However, a QA site has effectively unbounded throughput. Every new user increases it. To be sure, users have preferences - people who like to edit and tag help with the *categorization throughput* (ie. how many questions per time we can effectively triage, QC and give feedback on) while people who like answering increase the *answering throughput*. But even question-only users are potential answerers and curators. No human is really allergic to answering, some are just less confident about it than others. But when there's enough unanswered questions floating about, even shy people tend to start venturing an attempt. So even if we started getting new users that only ask, never answer, the problem would self-correct because they would *start* answering. If only my sewer pipe grew wider on its own every time I flush...

Spam is another familiar problem. I have many email accounts I abandoned, because the sheer volume of spam makes it impossible for me to find pertinent emails. Of course, many mail providers severely limit filtering features (some want you to pay for them). The problem is that I am one person, and the rate at which I can sort emails is fixed. In fact, it probably reduces somewhat with age, as does the time and patience I have available for sorting them. However, the spam only grows, as my address gets out there and spreads among spammers. But in a QA site, as I noted in the previous paragraph, the filtering capacity organically grows without limit. Moreover, technology is very advanced now and it's not hard to do all sorts of automations, like suggesting tags based on word content. SO did this a decade ago and it worked very well. Now that we have LLMs, I feel like the sky is the limit for *categorizing* questions with minimal human involvement.