Has Academia Being Featured in Hot Network Questions Improved the Community?

Question

Stemming partially from this meta thread: Why are we challenging the premise rather than answering the question (question on potential sexist remarks)?

And especially this comment by @Wrzlprmft:

"@Fomite: For whatever it’s worth, most of the problematic comments and answers come from users attracted to the question via the hot network questions and not directly from our own community."

Does the Academia community actually benefit from being in that listing? As far as I can see, the primary benefit is a sudden influx of users, but do we have evidence that they stay? Growth from that listing is only useful growth if the visitors go on to continue to be members of the community. I'd be happy to hear from individual users here who found us via Hot Network Questions.

As far as I can tell, the primary detriment is the questions that end up on the Hot Network Questions listing tend to drop fairly dramatically in quality, become more controversial, etc. I can say, as a fairly active user and contributor to the site that the questions and answers that have made me consider throwing in the towel have all been Hot Network Questions.

For the sake of "Meta-votes are Agree/Disagree" clairity, I'd suggest an Upvote is "HNQs are helpful" and a Downvote is "HNQs are unhelpful."

Answer 1

From what I've seen: At best, they've been slightly helpful. At worst, they're a temporary nuisance.

• Moderately helpful – As Massimo pointed out, he came to this site through the network questions. This isn't so terribly unusual; I would guess that for every fifty network questions, we gain one user who didn't know we existed. We've been on there a lot lately, so over time that sort of thing does prove useful to the community. It also gives people an exposure to what Academia is like, although sometimes the questions are slightly (often?) more inflammatory than they need to be.

• Temporary nuisance – Network questions always bring a lot of people, who leave all sorts of often bizarre comments and answers. These people rarely, if ever, return, and don't really add much to the community, or even that question. They frequently cause all sorts of automatic flags to get set off (tons of comments, tons of answers, low quality new user posts) which are a stupid and a pain. These questions also often end up with a bunch of cruft (old useless comments, bad answers), which leads to all sorts of flags being raised on these questions months or years later.

Someone posted the following to Meta a while back: What is the Goal of "Hot Network Questions"? This was one of those questions where the question had a lot more upvotes than any of the answers. My theory is that this place is more like Facebook and Twitter than the admins care to admit, and the only goal of Hot Network Questions is to keep people entertained, thereby keeping them on the site, thereby showing them more ads, thereby making a profit. Whatever the reason, they're there, they're probably not going away anytime soon, and while pontificating is fun it's probably not going to change anything.

Answer 2

I don't believe an objective answer to this question is possible. The system does not track information about hotness points, questions on the HNQ list, or the use of the HNQ sidebar: Add an audit log to record when particular question enters and leaves hot list

A number of times, one of our question has been featured on the HNQ list that I thought was neither representative of our community nor a particularly good question. This has happened enough that I proposed a feature be to prevent question from being added to the HNQ list: Allow mods or gold tag badge holders to prevent question from being on hot network questions list

Without the data, I am not sure how to quantify the affects on our community of these "bad" questions being featured on the HNQ list. I think that there have been "good" questions featured and that publicizing our good side is a good thing. What I would like to see is more of our good questions make the HNQ list.

Answer 3

On meta.SE I proposed a mechanism to opt-out specific questions, either by smarter algorithms that watch out for polemical questions or by moderation tools. (I will link to this question there.)

The "hot" questions algorithm should use logic to avoid controversial questions

I am upvoting your question to reflect my view that there are problems with HNQ but I would rather work toward salvaging the feature.

Truthfully though - I think there are bigger "respect" problems on SE and I do not think the umbrella community can escape developing better tools to deal with these problems. HNQ woes are a bit more on the "symptom" side of the scale. I am brooding putting together a larger post on this topic but naturally such a thing must be done very carefully :) but for now you may keep this sentiment in mind.

Answer 4

Obviously personal anecdotes aren't a good way to make rules, but I can say without a doubt that I only found Academia SE through the hot network questions sidebar.

I was only ever engaged on Stack Overflow, which I think is a fairly typical gateway to Stack Exchange in general. In fact, it seems to me computer science, and fields that make a lot of use of computer science, are very heavily represented on Academia in proportion to other fields. This observation would fit that hypothesis.

So, I feel like it's a pretty solid positive despite the increased moderation necessary on the questions that become sacrificial lambs by ending up there. After all, closing the community off from the influence of "outsiders" doesn't sound like a desirable thing to do. Maybe the question can be addressed by improving moderation tools on protected questions?

Answer 5

While I agree with the existing answers on and in particular that there should be some mechanism to avoid problematic HNQs, I would like to mention another advantage of HNQs:

They allow good posts (questions as well as answers) to get more attention than they normally would, which in turn results in upvotes and badges. And at the end of the day, this is one of the central mechanisms of Stack Exchange: You get to know how many people found your contributions helpful and are rewarded (with reputation, badges, and sometimes hats). When a post of mine gets massively upvoted due to being a HNQ or an answer to an HNQ, this does not only mean reputation and badges but also (well, at least most of the time) that a large audience learnt something from my contribution, be it some hard information or a way to look at things. And that’s extremely rewarding and motivating.