Why is Stackexchange Academia so unwelcoming to new users?

Question

For a site about academia and helping users out with academic related questions, I have tried posting 6-7 times on that forum and each time have had my questions flagged as off topic or too specific. Despite me specifically stating I was looking for general direction and not specifics. I have had one user on that site, solar mike or something, following me around and flagging everything as off topic. I have also asked several times that if it's formatted poorly or too general, that I would appreciate being pointed to a more appropriate forum. Instead of helping out with that, just get a yellow "put on hold" notification from Stackexchange.

Before I came to stack exchange, I had heard a lot of negativity about it from Reddit users. How the site was over the top with toxicity, removes everything for being a duplicate, locking threads, etc. I wanted to see for myself, and at least in my experience, it seems to be true. Example: https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/8ewwjc/is_it_just_me_or_is_stack_overflow_an_incredibly/

TL;DR: Why do Stackexchange Academia users act with such hostility?

Answer 1

Having read through your questions, it appears that you are misunderstanding the purpose of this website. Academia.SE is a place for academics to discuss academia, in general. There are many concepts that are common to all academics—dealing with grants, working with administrators, getting stuck in research, teaching, etc.—that newcomers (or even veterans) have difficulty dealing with. This site acts as a forum for discussion on those types of topics.

However, no one on this site really knows each other. As such, any time people are asking questions very specific to them—what types of courses should I take based on my specific goals, how can I improve on my specific resume, how can I personally be more competitive for X—we can never help them sufficiently. As such, those questions are routinely closed as "too specific".

I fully appreciate that there is nuance here, as the distinction between "how do I get a good letter" and "how can I improve my application" are sometimes subtle. This is often frustrating for newcomers... you're not the first to have a closed question of this type. That said, since we really can't answer these questions, for the health of the overall community we close them.

I'm sorry your experience has been so negative, but hopefully this will help you understand how this site can be useful in your academic life.

Answer 2

The other answers try to explain why your posts were closed as "off topic", but I want to address other parts of your question:

I have had one user on that site, solar mike or something, following me around and flagging everything as off topic.

I understand that it can feel like you're being targeted when the same name appears over and over on the list of those who voted to close your post. But if there's a user who votes on many posts, you'll see their name a lot - not because you're being followed, just because they're a frequent voter

I have also asked several times that if it's formatted poorly or too general, that I would appreciate being pointed to a more appropriate forum.

Users of this site may not know a more appropriate forum to direct you to. They're frequent users of Academia Stack Exchange, they don't necessarily know what's in scope and out of scope on sites that are not Academia Stack Exchange. It's kind of like if the item you wanted was out of stock at a store, and you asked a store employee, "Excuse me, but if you can't sell me this item, can you at least tell me what other store nearby has it in stock?"

Answer 3

It is not really the people but rather the tools we have and the expectations of new users. The Stack Exchange system is unabashedly a question and answer site and not a discussion forum. The system works great when a user asks a question that fits the format well. When a question is a poor fit, it gets put on hold. The hope is that while it is on hold the person who asked and other community members will work together to make the question a better fit. The problem is that we don't have particularly effective tools to help a new user understand what makes a good question different from a bad question.

From the new users perspective, you have a question and the experienced users are shutting you down. That is obviously going to feel hostile. From the experienced users perspective, if the question is not a good fit, it needs to be shut down to keep the signal-to-noise ratio high. Sometimes they just shut it down, but often, they will try and point you in the correct direction. That direction is often read the help and a bunch of questions to try and learn what makes a good question. As hard as it might be to see, we are not trying to be hostile. We have a good idea about what works and what does not work.

In regards to your questions, I see three problems. The first is that the answers need to apply to lots of people and not just you, second we like questions to have "right answers", and third the right answer for your questions depends entirely on you.

For example, what classes should you take to prepare for a PhD in Political Science depends on obviously what classes a particular department requires, but more importantly on what classes you have taken, what you enjoy and what your specific goals are. In order to give you a good answer, we really need to know you. That of course means the answer is not useful to anyone else. If instead we give you a generic answer, then we are not really accomplishing our goal of providing high quality answers. The odds are the answer would just be excepts about admission requirements and required courses pulled from a few Political Science departments websites. Again, this does not help you or anyone. So instead of wasting our time and your time, we put the question on hold.

We are a site about academia in general but not the specifics of individual fields. There are specialist sites on the SE network where you can sometimes get helpful information (e.g., Biology and Physics), but there isn't one for Political Science. This means that the SE system doesn't really have a place for questions about Political Science. If you can frame your questions to be more field agnostic, while still asking what you want, it might help.

Answer 4

In my experience, the issue is that new users have not read, understood, and followed the information on this page:

https://academia.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic

Flagging your question is not actually hostile. It's just following the local customs.

As for Solar Mike following you around, I'm sure he reads every question posted here and flags all the ones that should be flagged.

Finally, if you don't enjoy the content of this site, go elsewhere. This thing is basically a computer game, it's not really important. Personally, I do not even bother playing to win.

Answer 5

First, I am aware that I am the fourth moderator to answer your question. This probably happens because only we can easily see all your deleted posts. It is not our intention to pile up on you or similar. I am also aware that some of my points may be a bit redundant to the existing answers, but I want to keep the whole story in one place.

We close questions for the following reasons (amongst others that are not relevant to your case):

• You ask multiple, distinct questions at once. This can usually be solved by reducing your post to one question. While other platforms tend to accept or even encourage questions being asked this way, I fail to see how this is an advantage.

• It is unclear what you are asking. In this case you can solve this by clarifying your question. There is no point in pointing you to other sites here, because we would first have to understand your issue and if we don’t, there is no reason to expect that others will.

• You ask for the recommendation, comparison, or evaluation of individual courses. We call this a shopping question, and the linked FAQ explains why we do not like them. You may find other platforms that accept these questions, but beware that the answers may be wrong since they are usually only based on the experience of a single person choosing a single path in life (which is one of the reasons why we disallow such questions).

• Questions that depend on your indvidual history and preferences. Similar to shopping questions, you may find somebody who will give you an answer, but beware that giving you a useful answer requires somebody to familiarise themselves intensively with your specifics – which takes more time than most people are willing to spend for a stranger on the Internet. At the very least, this requires an intensive back and forth with you, which a question-and-answer platform is not suited for. For the career questions you have, the best person to ask is probably a professor at your alma mater, because they are somewhat familiar with your target field, already know your undergraduate programme, and know at least know you a bit.

• Duplicates of canonical questions. We use canonical questions to cover up some general information about basic topics that come up a lot and where we got tired of providing the same answer again and again with little variation. Sometimes it can happen that we close as a duplicate of a canonical question, because we cannot figure out from your question whether you know the basics. If you completely understood the canonical question, use it as a starting point for your question, in particular by showing us that it did not solve your problem.

One of the points I am trying to make here is that while we may be able to point you to another platform which accepts your question indiscriminately, what you want may not be what you need. From another point of view, if we thought that asking these questions anywhere on the Internet would be a good idea, we would probably not have closed them in the first place.

Another problem is that you appear to be treating question closure like whack-a-mole (with you being the mole): Once your question is closed or somebody comments that it should be closed in its current form, you delete it – instead of trying to edit the question to address the problems mentioned in the problems. You then post a question that often has the same problems, but is different in other respects, introducing new problems.

For example, your very first question (“How can I get some idea of how qualified I am to do a PhD in International Relations”) can be turned into a good one if you remove the surplus questions and streamline the convoluted details a bit. However, it never came to this since you deleted the question after a comment that guided you to get to know the site and improve your question and that your question might be closed (it never received a single close vote).

Finally, our users have been giving you a lot of helpful advice on how to improve your question and links to FAQs what question we close and why – which you mostly ignored. For example, we were advising you several times that your posts are difficult to understand due to being convoluted; yet you self-assess your most recent question to be rambling.