Congratulations, GAG. You fucked it up!
It's one thing to ask people about what you should improve, but doing actually something useful out of that information is a completely different story. And you failed in hard doing so.
I could write a page about what's wrong with private opinions or the new notifications too, but I wanna focus on closing questions because it's by far the worst. Now....
What's wrong with it?
First, lets take a look at the reasoning behind this:
The most voted option on that poll question was "Content". And this new feature is all about making content on GirlsAskGuys more useful for a lot more people.
Starting today, all questions will be closed when you select at least one Most Helpful Opinion (you'll be able to select the second one later) or when they are inactive for 48 hours (no new opinions, replies or poll votes).
This will allow us and the community to focus on the open questions that still need attention and those helpful answers you generously provide. Closed Questions can't receive new opinions or poll votes, but you'll still be able to like or reply to an opinion.
To guarantee that we'll have opinions on every question, we also decided to change how the limits of asking questions work. Now you will have a limit of open questions according to your XPER level. Once you reach that limit, you'll need to close a question selecting MHO or wait until we close it for you.
I think it fails completely it's purpose and this is why:
- It's annoying!
For the people who should help but also those who ask the questions.
You can't tell people what questions they should like and answer. They want to answer questions from people they like and follow, about topics they are interested in and questions which are fun for them to answer. Taking some of those away won't make people gain interest in questions they didn't care about before. You piss people off by doing so and they will simply answer less questions instead.
If I go by myself and assume it's similar for many other people, then you achieve the exact opposite of what you wanted. I usually check the questions of my followers first and seeing that some of them are already closed kills my motivation to answer many other ones I care less about completely. I had been more active during my exams before the update than now on my holidays after the changes. Well done.
But there is more. Guess how much fun it is to write a giant answer just to see the question got closed in the meantime. You are right...not much fun at all.
Now, how are question askers affected by this? Your reason for this change is so the community "can focus on open questions which still need attention". But why do you automatically close them after only 48hrs of inactivity if the QA hasn't selected MHO yet? No MHO means that the QA still wants to hear different opinions, or maybe hasn't received the right (or any) answer yet. To get your question closed even though you are still waiting for answers is annoying. Having to close your question because you have a more important one even though you still needed answers on the old one isn't great either.
- Questions become even more repetitive!
Questions were already highly repetitive and it will become only worse now. Guess what people will do when their question gets closed automatically? Exactly, they will ask it again. And thanks to that short limit of only 48 hours, it will now happen even more quickly than before. Answering or just seeing over and over again the same type of questions gets boring and if questions get reposted, they will take away the focus from the other ones....not what you intended to do.
- It's poorly implemented!
I'm not generally saying that the idea of closing questions is crap, but....it kinda is, at least how it's done right now.
The 48 hour limit is way too short, at least for new questions. And why has the number of replies no effect on this? Why can't guys answer anymore if only the MHO for girls got selected? Why do closed questions still clutter my feeds? Give us at least a filter to hide them!
Why is there no warning that your question gets closed when selecting MHO? That would be important especially for new users. Why don't question updates interrupt the timer? A bump in the feed is often enough to get the thing started. Why are closed questions recommended? etc.
Did anyone actually put more than 5 minutes into this before deciding to implement it? Or at least checked it before pushing the updated out? I highly doubt it.
How to fix this shit.
You better fix it because people fucking hate it. Probably even more than the removal of the downvote button.
Just one of many polls. You were insightful with the downvotes, you should it be on this one too.
There are 2 ways:
- Remove it completely.
Just go back to how it was before. Try something else, there are other ways which might be better. Why don't you give questions which haven't gotten any replies after 24hrs a free bump in the feed? Or give the users the possibility to bump their question themselves once or twice.
Work with XP bonuses , send out the MHO warning sooner or come up with something completely else....just do something which doesn't massively affects how people use this site, because you will most likely piss them off.
- Rework the whole thing.
Start from scratch and rethink everything. But to give you a couple of ideas...:
- Make an exception for new questions. At least double the time for them. Or make the time depend on the number of replies in general.
- Warn people if the question is about to get closed soon. A small icon so people don't start writing a wall of text and a message for the QA.
- Make updates break that timer (going by your myTake about the update I assume that it doesn't).
- Don't close the whole question if MHO hasn't been selected for both. There's a reason why the second one hasn't been selected yet.
- Give the people more control over it. Let them decide if they wanna close it but reward them with XP if they do so. Or let them keep it open for XP when choosing MHO.
- Let people choose themselves how long a poll is open.
- Clean the feed and give us filters.
- Don't recommend closed questions (why do I even have to list this?).
etc.
Just to name a few ideas and things I'd like to see changed. That's what I come up with after 5 minutes of thinking about it. Imagine how awesome it could be after a day of brainstorming from a couple of talented guys like you.
One last thing...
Stop these fucking useless updates! There are so many things you could improve on this site without pissing people off but this is now already the second big update in a short period of time which people didn't like at all. The last one you took almost completely back step by step and going by the feedback you should do the same with this one too.
Don't you think there is something going wrong? You can never please everyone and there will always be people that don't like it but you shouldn't get a backlash like this.
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P.S.
- I forgot half of what I wanted to say.
- You actually made me write a myTake with this update with this update. But that's probably the only positive thing about it.
- I'm sorry for my terrible English.
- I know there are already 1-2 myTakes about this topic but I don't care.
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