5

Most of my questions get little to no views or answers. I have seen questions, where I believe are of 'lesser quality' than mine (i.e. Tagging, formatting or asking a relevant question) receive an absurd amount of attention.

Now I understand there is not an answer to all questions, but apart from setting a bounty for a question, there seems to be no method to grab attention to a question.

For users who have amounted tens of thousands of 'reputation points' this could be a good idea, using 50 points to draw in users, but for someone with only a few hundred points (and I know this sight isn't so much about points), it could be seen as silly to relinquish 50 points bounty to a question that may not attract a solid answer.

Here is a list of some of my questions:

I just want to know what sort of improvement(s) need to be made to help qualify these questions a little nicer, and how we can go about generating at least more reviews.

I know some of these may be seen as duplicates, but even then they should be marked as such.

7
  • 6
    Keeping in mind that questions without any answer, upvote, few comments and less than one visit per day are automatically deleted after a while without any warning, regardless of the quality of the question (I find these automatic deletions to be nonsense and a complete disregard to user content meta.softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/a/2459/903).
    – Franck Dernoncourt
    Nov 26, 2016 at 16:37
  • @FranckDernoncourt (rhetorical point) When a question gets little-to-no response, people beg — beg — to let them ask it again. So after a year of apathy towards a question, isn't it better to clear that slate to let someone ask the question anew ... instead of just hoping a long-forgotten post will simply do better later and, potentially, black a better version from being asked?
    – Robert Cartaino
    Nov 29, 2016 at 17:28
  • 5
    @RobertCartaino From the standpoint of the OP who asked the long-forgotten post, the automatic deletion is a pain as 1) there is no warning that the question is deleted 2) if you're not a 10k+ user, it is quite difficult if not impossible to see which questions have been deleted. Asking a question sometimes take over one hour, e.g. meta.stackexchange.com/q/209694/178179 Aside from disrespecting the OP's time and effort, automatic deletion may encourage them not to spend too much time asking questions, since they may get deleted unnoticed and with no possibility to recover them.
    – Franck Dernoncourt
    Nov 29, 2016 at 17:46
  • 2
    @RobertCartaino It shouldn't be too difficult to design a system that allows other users to rewrite and repost a forgotten question, if that's what's the community wants, without having these two downsides (deletion the question with no notice + no possibility to recover the question). Simply adding a notice and extending the list of deleted questions to X years would already be a huge improvement.
    – Franck Dernoncourt
    Nov 29, 2016 at 17:49
  • 4
    @FranckDernoncourt I've long thought (and argued) that hiding deleted content from an author's profile is a huge mistake and is way more of a deterrent (and hugely annoying) than helpful.
    – Robert Cartaino
    Nov 29, 2016 at 17:55
  • 1
    @RobertCartaino I guess we agree then. Who do we need to convince to make it happen? The community consensus also seems opposed to hiding deleted questions: Show all of my question/answers to me even if they are deleted
    – Franck Dernoncourt
    Nov 30, 2016 at 17:59
  • Doesn't editing the question postpone automatic deletions? If a question is important I expect the OP to keep an eye on it. I could not find an answer to this. (I conclude from this question that starting a bounty does not delay deletion).
    – user416
    Dec 21, 2016 at 12:27

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
1

It's always helpful (and encouraged!) if folks can suggest ways to improve an author's posts; but that aside…

Your questions are not receiving unusually low view counts relative to this site. This site often has low view counts on many posts, so low participation rates just seem endemic to this site. In reality, your posts seem to be about on par with the rest of the site.

Anecdotally, I sampled few of the questions you linked above and compared them to site average for questions asked in that same time frame. As you can see (below), you are receiving about the same number of views as other questions asked at that time on this site.

Question Total System Asked Views Average -------- ----- ------- 18 Nov 13 14 15 Nov 37 17 29 Oct 17 12 06 Aug 6 18 09 May 22 31 05 Feb 58 53

2
  • Is the problem, then, that this site is not well-known? I only know of it because SO people will scoff and derisively mention this SE when complained that their "no recommendation" rules make no sense.
    – Liz Av
    Dec 8, 2016 at 1:59
  • By the way, I do like that the Software Recs exists, and I just posted a question that absolutely cannot be rephrased to fit SO. I just feel that for such a universal problem, it doesn't feel to be thought to stand on its own.
    – Liz Av
    Dec 8, 2016 at 2:03
1

I would advise to make your question titles a bit more self-explaining.
Look at a few of your titles:

  • Local “Sandbox” Browser
  • Local 'Instagram' for parenthood
  • iOS Web Application

While these titles might sound clear to you, I did not have any idea what they meant before reading the full question. That's true for most of the questions you listed above, actually.

Solution: Make your titles more explicit, even if that means they get five times longer.

Another general trick: Make your posts more discoverable by search engines, by including relevant keywords. For short questions, you can even paraphrase a bit, that helps make the question extra clear and makes it more findable.

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .