XBOX内测系统新功能到来 竞技场现在更好用了

Question

I know there's a core group of about 5-15 of us who are constantly janitoring questions, but shouldn't we be doing more to encourage others to ask questions (even if they're crap) or help others?

Like looking at the new tab today, there's only... What? 8 questions that have been newly asked, and 11 questions (including the new ones) that were asked, answered or edited.
Other days hover around that number or are fewer. Also, for context: I don't have access to site analytics yet.

It's kinda hard to gain rep or help, if we aren't getting requests for help or are shutting out people from getting help because of quality issues?

This is a good start, for example?

Or is there a self-sabotaging memo that I missed?

Answer 1

I've said some of this before in chat and I think it's worth expanding on in a more permanent place. I believe the main contributor to the decline in this site's activity over the last several years is the rise in strong alternatives, particularly game wikis, Discord servers, and subreddits.

Game wikis satisfy this site's mission of being a repository of knowledge about a game, without needing to go through the ask a question/wait for an answer process to populate it. In addition, a wiki often has complete information, which makes them a better first stop when looking for general knowledge, and they are often more consistently searchable. For example, if you are looking for information about a particular item in a game, this site might have it if someone else happens to have asked about it before, and you can probably find it if you search right. But if you know that the wiki has all of the information about every item, then you know for sure that you can find what you are looking for by going there.

Discord is on the other end of the spectrum. It's a terrible long-term information repository, and it can't be easily searched, but you can often go there to get a personal answer to your specific question very quickly. Many game Discord servers have a continuously ongoing conversation among whoever is online, so if you pop in and ask a question, you know people will see it immediately. In addition, many game Discord servers often have devs actively online, which gives you an opportunity to get authoritative information that can be hard to get elsewhere.

Game subreddits occupy somewhat of a middle ground. The search is not great, and questions don't get answered quickly, but questions do often get answered, and a lot of games have a lot of active discussion. You can often learn quite a bit of information about a game just from reading the discussions other people have about it.

What all three of these things have in common is that they are all communities for individual games. If you're a fan of a particular game and you want to engage with a community, you will find more people who share your particular interest in a community specifically for that game than in a community for gaming in general. I think all of that leaves this site in the awkward position of not having a lot to offer its target audience that they can't get more easily elsewhere, as a simple result of the nature of the site.

Answer 2

There are at least two issues at hand.

The first is that the site, objectively, is seeing a decline as a whole. Arguing about the reasons is kinda worthless in this context, so I won't annoy you with ranting about AI, the company increasing drift from the users' wishes for the site and so on. Just remember that even SO isn't getting the same numbers from the "golden age".

The second is this site's scope. Even when the site was new, I sometimes wondered why I would come here instead of going to GameFaqs. GameFaqs alone covers most of my needs. Then, in the recent years, game-specific wikis have started providing easier access to info. While before I had to look through a text document to find some info about the new Souls game, now the info I need is in its own category on the wiki.

This leaves this site without a real purpose.

Recently I started to notice that questions generally fall into three categories:

• artificial questions created by a small subset of users, that could be easily answered by either looking at the game's own tutorial or doing a quick Google search. Usually these come "en masse" by the same user who post about 4-6 questions at the same time (usually getting on my nerves when they self-post an answer that is a screenshot of an in-game tooltip). This I mostly ignore or even downvote.

• actual question about things that aren't explained clearly even on the game wikis. These are intriguing, but the issue is that often the lack of information from other sources is precisely because there is no actual answer - no one knows how things really work.

• obscure trivia/lore. When this is not an artificial question just to farm rep ("who was the first game character to wear red shoes?") they can be quite interesting. Point is that they are also very hard to answer most of the time due to the obscurity of the topics they touch.

Basically, it is a Catch-22 issue. Easy questions that can be easily answered are worthless and just replicate info that you can easily find elsewhere in a better format. But interesting questions that you wouldn't find anywhere else... won't be answered here either.

I DON'T need to come to the site to know if "Re-entering the cabin in Cool, Cool Mountain lets you retry the penguin race". I would love someone to be able to prove if It is possible to access the real ending of Alien Syndrome on Game Gear without "cheats", or tell me what the special conditions needed to display the "Story Continues In Mega Man Legends" card are, or why a texture from Mario 64 ended up in a cave in Ocarina of Time... but those aren't going to be answered.

I think that the solution is providing some info that isn't readily available elsewhere, but I don't have a clear idea about what that would be.

As a joke, in chat, I suggested that a certain user could make a self-answer guide about "what games to buy to play the full Neptunia series and what are the differences in the remakes", since the titles differ between remakes (Neptunia, Rebirth and Reverse should be the same game... or so I think). Maybe that could be a type of info that could be useful and isn't already covered elsewhere?

Answer 3

The monthly question seems like a steady downfall after mid 2016 (so AI it's not to blame here, which isn't the case for Stackoverflow), similar to Android Enthusiasts and Information Security, so it's likely just other platform becoming more popular or SE format no longer fit people's expectation for gaming question (not all suffer, Christianity seems to chug along at their usual pace)

Answer 4

We also haven't really had any new users join the site and really start participating regularly.

The only new users I'm aware of that have really meshed are me, who joined 289 days ago (not that I'm counting), Alex (who hasn't asked or answered since March (no flame)), Pilzkopf, and Themoonisacheese (who both contribute more often). They all joined 9 months ago. See the problem?

We won't be able to stay afloat if we aren't getting new, dedicated users regularly. Most of the participants on this site have been here for a long time - it’s rare that people stick around, especially if their first post is downvoted, ignored, or closed.

Additionally, many people don’t vote on either questions or answers. Any question you visit will have way more views than interactions - interestingly, the more famous a question is views-wise, the more skewed the vote-to-views ratio is.

The only thing we can really do proactively to boost numbers is advertising on social media and/or in friend groups. You have friends that play games? Direct them here! Want to make a post on r/gaming - actually, I think that's probably against subreddit rules (self-advertising). Maybe in Discord servers? Point is, to stay alive we have to actively try for it outside of our community. We can't only do things internally and expect to remain afloat.

Answer 5

Speaking as somebody who's been trying to really participate in this community for the last ten years or so, on and off with different accounts as I forget the passwords for the previous ones, the biggest barrier for me has always been a lack of really specialized power-users that are really good at specific subjects.

Say, if I post a Star Wars question on Sci-Fi stack exchange, no matter how obscure, I know there's four or five people that will have a sourced answer for me. And they're good questions that I know have answers out there somewhere in an ocean of fandom wikis, so invoking those power users makes sense and plays to Stack Exchange's strengths. I see no such users here, at least in any of the questions I've tried to ask. And what I'm personally pretty good at (The Doom franchise, boomer shooters, arcade world records via Twin Galaxies or Aurcade, Devil May Cry, Resident Evil, Silent Hill) don't get any interesting questions.

As for the solution: I propose monthly topic challenges like Literature or Movies & TV has, roughly corresponding to popular game genres/franchises that we don't have a lot of coverage on to pull people in through the HNQ. Say, offer a meta callout for the best question/answer relating to the Grand Theft Auto franchise. Or the best Q/A for arcade games. Something like that.