Here we go, my next super-long discussion thread. Sorry these are a bit strenuous, but they’re at least something to keep you all busy. ;P
With the Q&A platform we have, our primary purpose is to provide responses to questions people have about Pokémon. This is something we will always focus on and base our policies upon. However, despite this, our rules and quality control don’t always align with this functionality. Some parts of the rules exist for different reasons. These are the things I want to discuss in this post.
Under our current rule system, we ban a lot of different types of questions. Let’s take some of these, for example:
- We don’t allow in-game team questions in the RMT area — they create messy and subjective analyses of Pokémon that are often low quality and unenjoyable to read. Their worth is debatable, also.
- Sometimes we/I take down questions because we (subjectively) believe they’re low-quality or trivial, e.g. ‘What are all the anime episodes Brock appears in?’
- There’s a rule that says not to ask questions that can easily be looked up, since they’re not really producing any new content, and could be regarded as spam if you’re harsh. (Though I can see us doing away with this one quite fine.)
- We don’t allow questions about non-official games, as these are often hard to research, or divert our focus to games our regulars might not play.
There is a commonality between these rules and others. It is that they prioritise the convenience of content to our community over providing answers to people who ask questions — often new users to the site. This goes against the purpose of our site to give responses to people with questions, but it does support the regulars by removing answerable or unenjoyable content.
For me, this is a dilemma of sorts — it blurs the line between content we should and shouldn’t allow. So in short, I want to ask...
When moderating, should we keep questions up to suit the asker or take them down to suit the community?
On this site, I think it would be agreed that we want to simultaneously create a community of regulars who enjoy using this site for its content, and a platform where any person could come and ask a question about Pokémon and get an answer. How do we achieve that, when these things are so often at odds with each other? Is there a side we take, or do we try to make a middle ground?
As things stand, I’d regard us as having a stronger focus on what the community wants. This is a culture that has built up in recent years — you can go back to posts from our early years and find tons of stuff we’d get rid of now. This shows there is workable content we still remove — it merely boils down to our preference.
My main issue with this approach is that it alienates new users who might come to us specifically for this content. It goes against the ideal that anyone can get an answer here, and I guess it restricts our community as well. It’s a question of whether it’s all worth it.
Is this something we should continue? Should we just focus on answering the question, and stop trying to fit everything in our mould of what good content is? Or, should we continue moderating content to suit our own preferences? To put this in different terms, does the experience of the person asking the question matter more than our regulars who’ll answer it?
I understand a lot of this is pedantic, but throughout history a lot of people have come to us confused or disappointed when their in-game team questions (and the like) end up getting hidden — we do take down a lot of them. For that reason I think it’s at least worth entertaining a discussion, in the interest of increasing our appeal as a community going forward.
Any thoughts? I guess that when the forum modification eventually comes to fruition, this topic would bring a more interesting discussion. Would any of the content like I listed above have any place here, now or in the future?
