We Value Quality

Here on RPG.SE, we strive to generally uphold Stack Exchange-wide best practices as the best way to keep a civil, information-rich discussion going in a community - gamers - that is somewhat easily tempted to schism and argument, if every single RPG forum ever is an effective gauge.

Moderation will always turn some people off. But The Trouble With Popularity is that it's not necessarily the best thing long term. We deliberately Optimize for Pearls, Not Sand and value well crafted questions and good answers over raw traffic or popularity.

This doesn't mean we're dying off - even though people are always "certain" this is impacting the growth of our community, our site traffic is doubling every 2 years, so IMO we're certainly not striking the balance so far over that it drives away most folks. But it will drive away some - and that's OK. Stack Exchange is not for everyone. There's nothing wrong with wanting to discuss and argue and brainstorm - but there's dozens of forums and Reddit and whatnot out there to do that. We hold to our unique format to provide a unique value.

But Also Being Nice

But of course, we want to be nice to folks (in fact, Be Nice is our entire site code of conduct), and not drive them away unnecessarily. SE has struggled with this dichotomy over time, see Stack Exchange is not a forum: the role of "niceness" on Q&A sites. The network even had a "Summer of Love" event to try to remind folks to be welcoming and nice in addition to (but not in place of) upholding our quality standards.

Meta.SE posts like Etiquette for posting civil and informative comments help us understand how to better communicate with new users. On our meta we've tried to refine the FAQ, generate pro forma comments as suggestions for people to use when suggesting changes/putting on hold questions or critiquing answers.

We still need to vote to close, downvote, etc. as is merited. But if you have some extra time, please add friendly, detailed comments. Brief comments are often more poorly recieved than no comments, but not everyone has the time to walk a new user through the paces. If you do, we'd appreciate your help in doing so.

TL;DR

In the end - everyone should try to be nice and communicate with some extra "How To Say It At Work" flair. But some people will take downvotes, edits, closes, etc. personally and hate our format. When that happens we have to overcome the Geek Social Fallacies and let them go. We don't want everyone. We want people who will build something that's not like Yahoo Answers, and not like Reddit, and not like RPG.net/ENWorld/Dragonsfoot/TheRPGsite. Our site appears to be super healthy - views/users are growing, new questions/answers are steady, so there doesn't appear to be significant hindrance to our mission. Fine tuning to ease in more newbies would, however, always be appreciated.

We Value Quality

Here on RPG.SE, we strive to generally uphold Stack Exchange-wide best practices as the best way to keep a civil, information-rich discussion going in a community - gamers - that is somewhat easily tempted to schism and argument, if every single RPG forum ever is an effective gauge.

Moderation will always turn some people off. But The Trouble With Popularity is that it's not necessarily the best thing long term. We deliberately Optimize for Pearls, Not Sand and value well crafted questions and good answers over raw traffic or popularity.

This doesn't mean we're dying off - even though people are always "certain" this is impacting the growth of our community, our site traffic is doubling every 2 years, so IMO we're certainly not striking the balance so far over that it drives away most folks. But it will drive away some - and that's OK. Stack Exchange is not for everyone. There's nothing wrong with wanting to discuss and argue and brainstorm - but there's dozens of forums and Reddit and whatnot out there to do that. We hold to our unique format to provide a unique value.

But Also Being Nice

But of course, we want to be nice to folks (in fact, Be Nice is our entire site code of conduct), and not drive them away unnecessarily. SE has struggled with this dichotomy over time, see Stack Exchange is not a forum: the role of "niceness" on Q&A sites. The network even had a "Summer of Love" event to try to remind folks to be welcoming and nice in addition to (but not in place of) upholding our quality standards.

Meta.SE posts like Etiquette for posting civil and informative comments help us understand how to better communicate with new users. On our meta we've tried to refine the FAQ, generate pro forma comments as suggestions for people to use when suggesting changes/putting on hold questions or critiquing answers.

We still need to vote to close, downvote, etc. as is merited. But if you have some extra time, please add friendly, detailed comments. Brief comments are often more poorly recieved than no comments, but not everyone has the time to walk a new user through the paces. If you do, we'd appreciate your help in doing so.

TL;DR

In the end - everyone should try to be nice and communicate with some extra "How To Say It At Work" flair. But some people will take downvotes, edits, closes, etc. personally and hate our format. When that happens we have to overcome the Geek Social Fallacies and let them go. We don't want everyone. We want people who will build something that's not like Yahoo Answers, and not like Reddit, and not like RPG.net/ENWorld/Dragonsfoot/TheRPGsite. Our site appears to be super healthy - views/users are growing, new questions/answers are steady, so there doesn't appear to be significant hindrance to our mission. Fine tuning to ease in more newbies would, however, always be appreciated.

Here on RPG.SE, we strive to generally uphold Stack Exchange-wide best practices as the best way to keep a civil, information-rich discussion going in a community - gamers - that is somewhat easily tempted to schism and argument, if every single RPG forum ever is an effective gauge.

Moderation will always turn some people off. But The Trouble With Popularity is that it's not necessarily the best thing long term. We deliberately Optimize for Pearls, Not Sand and value well crafted questions and good answers over raw traffic or popularity.

This doesn't mean we're dying off - our site traffic is doubling every 2 years, so IMO we're certainly not striking the balance so far over that it drives away most folks. But it will drive away some - and that's OK. Stack Exchange is not for everyone. There's nothing wrong with wanting to discuss and argue and brainstorm - but there's dozens of forums and Reddit and whatnot out there to do that. We hold to our unique format to provide a unique value.

But of course, we want to be nice to folks (in fact, Be Nice is our entire site code of conduct), and not drive them away unnecessarily. SE has struggled with this dichotomy over time, see Stack Exchange is not a forum: the role of "niceness" on Q&A sites. The network even had a "Summer of Love" event to try to remind folks to be welcoming and nice in addition to (but not in place of) upholding our quality standards.

Meta.SE posts like Etiquette for posting civil and informative comments help us understand how to better communicate with new users. On our meta we've tried to refine the FAQ, generate pro forma comments as suggestions for people to use when suggesting changes/putting on hold questions or critiquing answers.

We still need to vote to close, downvote, etc. as is merited. But if you have some extra time, please add friendly, detailed comments. Brief comments are often more poorly recieved than no comments, but not everyone has the time to walk a new user through the paces. If you do, we'd appreciate your help in doing so.

In the end - everyone should try to be nice and communicate with some extra "How To Say It At Work" flair. But some people will take downvotes, edits, closes, etc. personally and hate our format. When that happens we have to overcome the Geek Social Fallacies and let them go.

We Value Quality

Here on RPG.SE, we strive to generally uphold Stack Exchange-wide best practices as the best way to keep a civil, information-rich discussion going in a community - gamers - that is somewhat easily tempted to schism and argument, if every single RPG forum ever is an effective gauge.

Moderation will always turn some people off. But The Trouble With Popularity is that it's not necessarily the best thing long term. We deliberately Optimize for Pearls, Not Sand and value well crafted questions and good answers over raw traffic or popularity.

This doesn't mean we're dying off - even though people are always "certain" this is impacting the growth of our community, our site traffic is doubling every 2 years, so IMO we're certainly not striking the balance so far over that it drives away most folks. But it will drive away some - and that's OK. Stack Exchange is not for everyone. There's nothing wrong with wanting to discuss and argue and brainstorm - but there's dozens of forums and Reddit and whatnot out there to do that. We hold to our unique format to provide a unique value.

But Also Being Nice

But of course, we want to be nice to folks (in fact, Be Nice is our entire site code of conduct), and not drive them away unnecessarily. SE has struggled with this dichotomy over time, see Stack Exchange is not a forum: the role of "niceness" on Q&A sites. The network even had a "Summer of Love" event to try to remind folks to be welcoming and nice in addition to (but not in place of) upholding our quality standards.

Meta.SE posts like Etiquette for posting civil and informative comments help us understand how to better communicate with new users. On our meta we've tried to refine the FAQ, generate pro forma comments as suggestions for people to use when suggesting changes/putting on hold questions or critiquing answers.

We still need to vote to close, downvote, etc. as is merited. But if you have some extra time, please add friendly, detailed comments. Brief comments are often more poorly recieved than no comments, but not everyone has the time to walk a new user through the paces. If you do, we'd appreciate your help in doing so.

TL;DR

In the end - everyone should try to be nice and communicate with some extra "How To Say It At Work" flair. But some people will take downvotes, edits, closes, etc. personally and hate our format. When that happens we have to overcome the Geek Social Fallacies and let them go. We don't want everyone. We want people who will build something that's not like Yahoo Answers, and not like Reddit, and not like RPG.net/ENWorld/Dragonsfoot/TheRPGsite. Our site appears to be super healthy - views/users are growing, new questions/answers are steady, so there doesn't appear to be significant hindrance to our mission. Fine tuning to ease in more newbies would, however, always be appreciated.