A Stack Exchange Experiment
I ran the experiment on two different stack exchange sites. I never engaged in any Stack Exchange sites before and the only times I went on one to read up stuff was a redirection from Google. The multitude and variety of centers of interest on there is impressive. I decided to engage on two of them: Sports and Interpersonal Skills. The intro tour made it really clear that the site was solely an inquiry-answer platform, not an exchange one for chatting back and forth. Known
The day following Christmas is known in England as the “Boxing Day”; in the football world the “boxing day” is what separates the English Premier League from all other as matches are played all throughout the festive period, jammed in short intervals of 2 to 3 days between fixtures, with the 26th December featuring many derbies. It may be obvious to some where the term “boxing day” originated from but to foreign followers of English Football, not so much. I did have an idea; however I wanted to test the waters of the Sports Stack Exchange website. I asked the question below:
I wanted to keep it simple, short, since the posts I saw on there had a similar style. I knew I could have gotten an easy answer from simply looking it up on Google, but I wanted to test how lenient moderators were with a question that despite showing a lack of effort, seemed reasonable to be asked on a sports platform with the #football and #englishpremierleague tags. When I returned on there a few hours later, expecting some answers and maybe upvotes, I was disheartened to find 1 downvote and already a suggestion by a high-ranked moderator to put the question on hold for being off-topic. That stung a little bit. The moderator’s reason however, was that, the question looked to pertain more to the realm of English Language stack exchange (see below). His explanation did not satisfy me but I decided not to engage further. Five days later, the post had been viewed 21 times and received another downvote. A quick look around at the other questions asked on the site made me realize that the site was not really active…so there was no point in engaging further.
The IPS Family
The second step of my investigation looked at engaging on the “Interpersonal Skills site. A quick overview was enough to see that people wrote lengthy and detailed questions equally answered in lengthy and detailed fashion. I used the opportunity of new year celebrations being a current happening to ask a question related to gift giving in a relationship. I detailed the scenario as much as I could, and asked three questions in the end, of which the main one was well formulated. The accompanying two were the following :
- “How do I approach the situation?”
- Is it that I am fearing to break something in our relationship?
These ended up being edited out by a moderator within 10 minutes. In this case, however, the moderator offered me to re-edit and re-add those questions to my post if I wished.
It felt really good to see that the post was sparking comments and discussion within its first few hours of being up. Within 24 hours, I had garnered 5 upvotes and someone even offered a long answer to my problem, bringing up things that I least suspected about love, one that got 10 upvotes. Needless to say, my reputation rating went up from 1 to 36, whereas it had stalled on the Sports One. People were sympathetic to a personal problem I was exposing to them and one of the first comments even read: “Welcome to the IPS Family”. That honestly made me feel like if I one day have a real inquiry, I ought to come back to this site one way or another.
I am going to engage back into the discussion it generated and see where it takes us. The reputation system point, however, is very enticing to keep us in it. What even impressed me more was that some of the moderators that commented on my post, also commented on a dozen other posts, all of whom were new, in the same day. This made me wonder how much time those anonymous individuals had on hand and question what real benefits they reaped from helping people online throughout their entire day without even being sure those were real or made-up questions. The level of depth of knowledge in some Stack sites was wowing, especially ones that had a technical component to them. It was a nice experiment and really showed me how online communities have fabricated this entire ecosystem where random individuals are both the content creators and moderators, similar to Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody recounts on the power that lies behind those thousands of connected screens.