There are a significant amount of questions here that do not follow the criteria in the sidebar, especially “1. Open-ended question” and “5. An actual topic of discussion”. It seems some folks want others to do research for them, or to troubleshoot some random issue.
This bugs me. Of course, I can ignore and/or downvote those posts, and I do. However, I’m wondering if anyone else feels the same way. I’m don’t want to stifle content and discussion on such a burgeoning platform, but could we do something about this?
Perhaps we could “tag” posts in some way (I know tags aren’t officially supported yet) or maybe we could redirect folks to a sister community for non-discussion questions. Or something else?
Just throwin’ it out there. If I’m alone in this, I’ll take my lumps and quietly sit back down.
If I’m honest I have no idea what would be a open ended question. I asked yesterday how people learned a new language because I’m struggling with it and wanted to see how other people do it. But that doesn’t seem like a open ended question and would not be allowed?
The difference is whether or not there’s one objective answer to a question, or if a question could have any number of answers.
For instance, look at “How do you replace the starter on a 2006 Ford Taurus?”, which is rather closed-ended, as the only acceptable answer is “With the wrath of a perturbed god, as you’ve already replaced the starter three times in just as many years.”
Whereas, “What advice would you give someone starting their first job as a car mechanic?” is open-ended and could have a million answers, ranging from “Get comfortable replacing Ford starters, because those sombitches burn out once a year” all the way to “Buy a good set of wrenches, and also a ouija board so you can tell the ghost of Henry Ford to go fuck himself”.
I think questions with “how”, " why", “where” etc. tend to be open. An example for a closed question would be: “Do you use apps to learn a new language?”
Maybe you could argue about “what” and “who” questions, but I prefer uninteresting questions to be filtered out by votes instead of rules, anyway, so I don’t care.
Also, even a “bad” question can be saved by a good answer, e.g. a report on language learning apps.