Skip to main content
Meta Stack Exchange

You are not logged in. Your edit will be placed in a queue until it is peer reviewed.

We welcome edits that make the post easier to understand and more valuable for readers. Because community members review edits, please try to make the post substantially better than how you found it, for example, by fixing grammar or adding additional resources and hyperlinks.

Required fields*

25
  • …fills it with terrible posts… a bit hyperbolic, there have been some very interesting questions that have piqued my curiosity, questions on SE Workplace and Accademia to mention but two. If questions are always so bad, people would stop visiting HNQ Commented Oct 18, 2018 at 9:22
  • 6
    Of course it's not "full" of terrible posts in the sense that 100% of what's on the list is terrible. But would certainly put down money on that 90% of the time, 5% of the list is stuff that really shouldn't be there, and it's those posts that persist the longest. Commented Oct 18, 2018 at 9:34
  • 3
    And as for that last sentence - that's not how clickbait works. The internet is full of sites that use misleading titles to funnel audiences to content that the audience itself knows it probably doesn't want to see. It's a pervasive and well-known problem with the internet. SE generally strives to be better than the average but in this aspect it's dropped the ball significantly. Commented Oct 18, 2018 at 9:36
  • What would you say if the title was clickbaity, but the content was more than valid? Good questions sometimes need a hook in the title to catch people's attention. SE developers do it all the time! See the cheese question that is still attracting new answers as we speak, have you seen the number of views on that Q? Commented Oct 18, 2018 at 9:41
  • @Mari-LouA The cheese question is Featured and not HNQ - it is a straw man. I'm happy to discuss but I won't discuss straw men. Commented Oct 18, 2018 at 9:45
  • There are plenty of meta posts that use clickbaity titles but whose content is valid and deserve our attention. I'm not going to condemn someone on a smaller site who wants to attract visitors to their question b/c they have created a catchy title. It's the content that matters in the end. Great title but sh**ty content gets closed pretty quickly in my experience. Commented Oct 18, 2018 at 9:57
  • 2
    @Mari-LouA It sounds like you either don't understand what clickbait is, or you do understand it and you don't care about its presence, in which case we'll have to agree to disagree. I do condemn someone who is happy to write a mis-representative title in order to draw traffic, and I think that should not have a place on SE. There's a difference between "catchy" titles that are honest about the question's contents even when taken completely out of context (it is possible to write them) and clickbait. The latter should have no place on SE. Commented Oct 18, 2018 at 10:05
  • OK, maybe my understanding is flawed. Can you please give a few examples of clickbait titles that hit the HNQ and enjoyed unmerited upvotes so I may understand better. Commented Oct 18, 2018 at 10:10
  • 13
    @Mari-LouA Try "By 18 years of age, I want a brand new car that's $43,668", or "I slept with my advisor's daughter and she is blackmailing me now. What can I do?" or half of the posts here. But providing a good listing is hampered by the fact that there is no reliable HNQ log (which we've complained about for years). Commented Oct 18, 2018 at 10:21
  • if I understood correctly, and I won't bother you any further after this, the meta post is implying that one user is making up scenarios in order to win rep. So, it's not just the titles which are suspect but entire posts, and maybe the user themself is "fake". I agree, knowing how many Qs actually entered HNQ would be useful to know, as it is only the number of views accumulated gives some kind of indication. Commented Oct 18, 2018 at 10:30
  • If a question is on the list, it gets a bunch of traffic which brings with it a bunch of upvotes for the questions and the answers. and The 'hotness' score that determines whether a question stays on the list is a direct measure of how many upvotes it gets: That can be circumvented: once in the HNQ, no longer consider this question as a future candidate. Together with limiting the maximum period (as Monica C suggested), it will drop out earlier. This may be what you mean with "cut the feedback loop". Commented Oct 18, 2018 at 12:35
  • 2
    @trlkly Out of curiosity, would you consider a title like "Ten terrible SE question titles that nevertheless made the HNQ list" (where the question contained exactly that) to be clickbait? (Or, to make this explicit: your definition of clickbait differs significantly from any widely-accepted ones.) Commented Oct 18, 2018 at 14:00
  • 1
    @EP No. I would consider it a listicle, and would consider those also undesirable. That said, I've also never seen those in the HNQ list. Commented Oct 18, 2018 at 14:02
  • 7
    @GalacticCowboy I don't understand your comment. I am not proposing any changes to who can vote on what. I am proposing that the hotness score disregard any upvotes that come from users who, absent their association bonus, would not be able to upvote, i.e. the same sort of deal as with protected questions - you have to earn 15 rep in the site itself for your upvotes to be counted towards the hotness score. Commented Oct 18, 2018 at 21:07
  • 2
    @trlkly well, sometimes factual title can also still be clickbait without knowing context... like, How can I kill adorable animals?, which I believe it's also upvoted because of the title (interesting), not because the voters play the game (usefulness). Commented Oct 19, 2018 at 3:22