Does RPG Stack Exchange want to opt out from Hot Network Questions?

Question

What's this? The Hot Network Questions (HNQ) list is that list of random questions from random sites you'll see in the bottom of the sidebar on most site pages. It displays questions that have attracted significant attention measured by an abstract “hotness” score based on how rapidly the question's vote count is accelerating. Since HNQ brings more attention and more votes, it frequently creates a self-perpetuating cycle where hot questions either fall off quickly or stay for days at a time.

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Recent discussions on the network have been re-evaluating the Hot Network Questions feature, including what it does well and all the ways it doesn't work very well. Stack Overflow, Inc., the company that runs the Stack Exchange network, is evaluating ways to modify the feature or retire it to replace it with something else. There are positive things the HNQ theoretically accomplishes but also major problems.

In light of these discussions many communities including our own have been re-assessing their relationship to the feature.

I've reached out to find out if us opting out of the HNQ feature is among our options. It looks like it is an option if the community is on board.

Do we as a community want RPG Stack Exchange to opt out of the Hot Network Questions feature?

Here is what opting out of the HNQ would look like:

• RPG Stack Exchange questions will no longer show up in the Hot Network Questions list.
• The Hot Network Questions list will continue to show up on our site, presenting questions from other sites that are opted in.
• At some point in the future, after the HNQ feature is revised or replaced, we will have the opportunity to assess whether we want to opt back in to the new system or remain opted out. (Honestly I can't promise it will unfold exactly like that—it might wind up that whenever the new thing is released, everyone automatically gets opted in again—but the point is we can probably evaluate whether we want to be in or out of that thing as well.)
• If for some reason being opted out of the HNQ is really not working for us, we can opt back in. This wouldn't happen without community buy-in, just like this change.
• According to site analytics, HNQ accounts for ≤5% of overall site visits, so we do not anticipate an overall significant drop in site visits.
• HNQ is largely responsible for those questions that get answers scoring 100+ in less than a week, so that will probably stop happening. This is a minority of our questions.

There have been requests for feature changes to the HNQ system such as letting diamond moderators remove questions from HNQ, waiting periods and alerts before questions hit HNQ, etc. If these are implemented they'll be part of the new redesigned system we can opt back in to.

Here is the process of what we'll do here in this thread:

1. We'll discuss here whether we want to opt out as a community.
2. After 2 weeks (December 5th), if there is strong community support for opting out and not strong objection, the diamond moderator team will ask the CMs to opt this site out as described above. They will action that request.
3. If there is not strong support, we will not opt out, and nothing will change from as they are now.

No action will be taken before 2 weeks have elapsed (i.e. before December 5th) so as to allow for enough time for discussion and voting.

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Please show whether you are in support or against opting out with answering and/or voting like normal. I'm going to be posting my own answer representing my own position, and I'm going to leave it to others to provide their own positions.

Answer 1

Let's not opt out

The motivation for wanting out is perfectly valid, but I think the benefits of HNQ to tabletop players outweigh the problems that HNQ attracts.

The bad side first

I'm speaking of a trend here, not a universal rule: HNQ questions don't tend to be particularly good. The selection emphasizes scandal over substance, clickbait over clarity. We don't want the users to maximize those, but that's what HNQ rewards. Answers drawn in from outside the network also tend to be bad in quality because of a variety of reasons experienced users usually know to avoid --- such as promoting toxic behavior in tables or assuming that every RPG system either is or works like Dungeons and Dragons.

If it was only about the short-term well-being of our site and nothing else, I would vote to drop out of HNQ. However, I think there's a case to keep it for the visibility, because:

Our visibility helps the hobby as a whole

I had had a longstanding interest in tabletop RPGs through my youth and early adulthood, but never knew the slightest bit of how to play or who to play with. The idea of actually learning to play tabletop RPGs lied dormant in my mind, but emerged to me in 2013, when I was actively using Stackexchange --- where I saw lots of interesting RPG questions in the sidebar. Those questions led me to our site, which I hadn't known even existed before that.

I started reading RPG.stackexchange back then and the site gave me significant help in learning to play. It is a significant contributor to the fact that I am an active player of RPGs today. I don't believe I'm the only one who came into gaming through our community. I believe many people still find our hobby through our site. HNQ may account for only a small portion of page hits, but that's not relevant --- the important bit is how many new people find out about our site through HNQ.

In addition to helping people to start playing, RPG.stackexchange presents by and large a real, healthy culture of gaming. That is often not the case with other first contacts to tabletop RPGs --- video games based on RPGs, pop culture depictions of tabletop games and memes often present and reinforce a rigidly antagonistic relationship between the game/GM and the players, and omit things that are usually considered to be absolutely vital for a good RPG game like active dialogue between the players and the GM.

I cannot deny that HNQ does cause us problems, but by attracting new people to our site it helps spread the joy of both playing tabletop games and playing them in a friendly fun manner. I think the problems of HNQ are nothing but a nuisance compared to the benefit of attracting new people in.

Answer 2

We should stay in HNQ.

The arguments against HNQ: untrained users voting out of line with established community norms, new users submitting low-quality answers (especially GS/BS problems), comment argument, and then the inevitable backlash that we moderators sometimes face when new users bump up against this stack's notoriously-tight reading of some otherwise-looser Stackisms.

As a few-year active user and two-year moderator, I'll say I don't see those as serious problems. It seems to me that the structures in place handle them pretty well. You-all are good about downvoting and commenting on poor contributions, you sometimes protect questions, and you're pretty good about flagging things to our attention when it seems like more intervention's needed.

The argument for HNQ: it gets more eyeballs on the site. That's it. And I think that's important. Any community survives based on some mixture of retaining existing members and gaining new ones. Sure, plenty of people may come for an HNQ and never come back. But some will. And might become daily users. And eventually stand for election. And write this meta.

Answer 3

I received though other channels the following from a high-rep active-most-days member; they'd rather not post under their identity for personal reason, and rep-requirements make sock-posting on meta cumbersome.

We shouldn't opt out.

I've thought for a long time that HNQ was damaging to the site. I've always been on the other side of this argument. We get bad answers, upvotes on bad answers, and so on. But then I read nitsua60's and kvirii's answers, and it got me thinking.

See, I found this site through HNQ, too. And I found it during a difficult time in my life, and it helped me through some tough years. The community here has helped me in ways I find difficult to express. I've made friends here, I've learned a lot, and I've gotten a nice sense of accomplishment out of my use of the site. Not only that, this site has made me a better gamer. If I'm being honest, it would be fair to say that it's made me a better person. I look back at some of my earlier interactions with this community and shudder at just how callow I was.

We have a great community here, and it's natural to want to protect it. I know I want to protect it exactly because it's great. The problem is, protecting it by taking away one of the main ways people find it is selfish. Yes, we get a lot of transient vote-and-forget visitors from HNQ. But we get community members too, and we owe it to them to be easy to find.

Answer 4

I like it being there.

As someone who often frequents Stack Overflow for work purposes, I enjoy seeing the occasional interesting thing coming up in HNQ.

Often, as a tabletop player myself, the ones that usually interest me are the mechanical questions. I've learnt quite a lot about edge-cases in D&D, for example, just recently, where something that is usually impossible can be worked around with the right equipment.

Some really interesting events have been put forth by other answers. Before I scrolled down that far I was simply thinking "but why would you do that?" but if the things mentioned in that ticket are a common reality, then I totally get it. It's a real shame - but I get it.

It'd be really nice if RPG could opt out - but individuals could opt back in. That way most of the riff-raff without a specific interest in RPG aren't encouraged to leave their opinionated and untested ideas, but it doesn't impact those with a specific interest.

Answer 5

Yes, we should opt out.

I believe HNQ does little to benefit our site overall, and regularly does significant harm to some of our questions and our site processes.

Over on the MSE discussion, Monica Cellio has higlighted that the HNQ feature optimises for controversy, not quality. I'll quote:

Sensationalist questions draw lots of rapid response, which feeds the HNQ algorithm, and then once it's on HNQ it gets even more rapid response, which keeps it there (and also distorts Q&A on that site).

From anecdotal experience, HNQ entries seem to fall into one of two categories:

1. Interesting mechanical questions. The first group mostly falls off after a few hours and doesn't get much traction and voting.
2. Subjective social questions.

It's this second group where the optimisation for quality hits us and hurts us. Difficult, controversial good subjective social questions need to be handled with care. They need our careful community evaluation, our expert answerers, and a crowd of highly knowledgeable, experienced RPG players to vote on what their experience and gut tells them will and won't work or be a good idea. They also need diligent community voting and curation to enforce that Good Subjective principles are being followed, including downvoting those that don't follow them. There also needs to be a possibility that latecoming answers will be able to compete with first-comers, overcoming the fastest gun problem.

However, once these questions hit HNQ, all of that goes out the window. We as a community become completely unable to provide any of that. It's been my consistent experience that such questions instead get a sudden influx of dozens of voters with plausibly no experience whatsoever in RPGs. They upvote answers in exponential proportion to whatever the scores already were, including if it's poor advice, amplifying the fastest gun and drowning out competing underdogs completely. This tide of upvotes overwhelms the community's ability to downvote answers not following Good Subjective.

This does an enormous disservice to everyone. It means people asking these questions don't get answers as judged by a community of knowledgeable experts with an avid interest in RPG gameplay. It means we are unable to enforce our community mechanisms of quality control properly: the community's capacity to downvote poor advice or answers that don't conform to Good Subjective is lower than HNQ capacity to upvote, and the nuclear option of deleting a post is something diamond moderators rarely do.

I really want us to be able to handle social questions without HNQ.

Opting out means that when a social question comes along, we won't get tides of upvotes. We'll get much more space to enforce our quality mechanisms, question posts, actually have meaningful downvoting, be able to provide more careful consideration and upvote late answers to outscore questions that came hours or a day earlier, like we do with mostly everything else.

I want to be able to provide that same experience with social questions that we provide for everything else, but HNQ throws that out of whack.

HNQ is bad for us, let's opt out.

Answer 6

I Think HNQ Should Remain

For reasons that echo other answers: I think the pros outweigh the cons

Pro: It's good advertising for this stack inside the overall stack ecology. It is, in fact, how I found the site. (You are free to consider that a con, but I don't....) Although it's only prompted me to become and remain active on this stack, it's led to me taking a larger interest in several others and when my free time expands, I expect to be active in others.

Honestly, I scoffed at the site itself when HNQs first brought it to my attention. But after seeing several good questions, with good answers-- and finally one which I thought I could answer well-- that my mind was changed.

Pro: To a lesser degree, it may introduce people to the hobby. (I've been gaming for over 30 years, so this one isn't personal to me.)

Con: Occasionally we get trollish dogpiles.

But-- and this is key-- nothing the community and the mod teams have been unable to deal with. If I had metric evidence that this was becoming worse, in a way or at a rate that threatened to overwhelm the site, this would loom larger in my mind. But I don't, so it doesn't.

My considered opinion is that publicity is a double-edged blade, but that the community does a good job of sharpening the dulling the right edges.

A Modest Proposal

If that's all I had, I would vote accordingly but silently.

However, would it be useful/possible to auto-tag questions which become HNQs (either at that moment or after they leave that status) so that readers see that they were, in fact, HNQs?

(Indeed-- are they already? I took a quick glance at an active HNQ and they seem not to be.)

The idea is that if some subset of HNQs are troll-attractors, it might be useful to make people aware of this when they read through after the fact, and let that inform their responses. I am ambivalent about this idea-- I can probably be persuaded it's a good idea, a bad idea, or just a useless idea-- but I put in the public light for consideration.