5
$\begingroup$

In light of the ongoing garbage flood, I am curious whether the following would be possible to institute (and/or a good idea):

  • When a new/unregistered (or under-X-rep.) account posts an answer or question, it does not become public for 24 hours (or some other period of time).

  • During that time period, the post is viewable by sufficiently-high-rep users on some queue so that anyone with the opportunity can do some spam filtering.

I think that making it harder for garbage posts to become visible might deter trolls, at least to a certain extent. (But maybe I'm optimistic.)

$\endgroup$
11
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ Probably it is worth mentioning that there are some related review queues low quality posts, first answers and first questions. AFAICT several of the troll posts were posted from unregistered account - here is a previous discussion: Should MathOverflow require registration to ask a question?. (It seems that MO users were against requiring registration at the time.) A recent post related to this issue: Why is the site being flooded with junk right now? What is being done about it? $\endgroup$
    – Martin Sleziak
    Commented Jul 8 at 4:51
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ Maybe the tags (new-users) and (review-system) would be suitable here? $\endgroup$
    – Martin Sleziak
    Commented Jul 8 at 4:52
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ @MartinSleziak I think this is independent of the registration question; posts from unregistered users could also be subject to the same delay. $\endgroup$
    – Noah Schweber
    Commented Jul 8 at 5:02
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ A natural question is whether this shouldn't be placed on Meta Stack Exchange rather than here - since it would influence the whole network, not only this site. (At the same time, I understand that this was motivated by a problem on MO. And, as you suggested already in the question, it is unclear whether this would actually help.) $\endgroup$
    – Martin Sleziak
    Commented Jul 8 at 6:25
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ @MartinSleziak Why would this influence the whole network? (At least my intention was MO-specific.) $\endgroup$
    – Noah Schweber
    Commented Jul 8 at 6:40
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ I highly doubt that SE would implement a review queue specific for a single site. (Yes, I am aware that on SO the reviews work differently - but that is a rather specific case.) A question for somebody more familiar with SO: Isn't the suggestion here at least vaguely similar to triage - which exists on SO? $\endgroup$
    – Martin Sleziak
    Commented Jul 8 at 7:02
  • 7
    $\begingroup$ An older suggestion (from this meta) in a somewhat similar spirit: Should posts sitting in the "First posts of new users" review queue be hidden from view until they have been approved? $\endgroup$
    – Martin Sleziak
    Commented Jul 8 at 8:10
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ @NoahSchweber changing the mechanisms like if questions appear, restrictions on new users etc are pretty core functionalities. MO can run userscripts, but I don't know if they can have such major effects. $\endgroup$
    – David Roberts Mod
    Commented Jul 9 at 0:03
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ Maybe you could add the (discussion) tag - so that the question would be eligible for the community bulletin and perhaps that would improve your chances to get some feedback from MO users. $\endgroup$
    – Martin Sleziak
    Commented Jul 9 at 7:38
  • 2
    $\begingroup$ I'm sympathetic to new approaches for how to deal with all this junk, as it does feel to me that the amount of junk is increasing a lot lately. However, asking established users to deal with the junk in some sense does not fix the problem, because established users are the main users of the site and this does not make their experience better. $\endgroup$
    – Sam Hopkins
    Commented Jul 9 at 16:48
  • 2
    $\begingroup$ Maybe we should implement some AI to detect and instanuke detected troll posts... ;^). More seriously, the best way to kill trolls is to starve them, and unfortunately any troll who sees this post will immediately be nourished by it. By this I mean, if we collectively agreed to respond to these posts with no real effort, no comments etc., just downvote, close vote, go on about your day, this would stop within a week. The more we put energy into our response, the more trolls will feel and feed off that energy to be continually entertained by their trolling. (teenage experience speaking :P) $\endgroup$
    – Alec Rhea
    Commented Jul 12 at 23:18

0

Reset to default

You must log in to answer this question.