25 upvotes, 4 direct replies (showing 4)
View submission: We're back! And We've Brought Updates
To be frank, I think the new question rules really suck.
How do we expect people to approach the discipline for knowledge if we exclude questions for being too broad? Imho it's better to answer the same questions a hundred times than implicitly setting a minimum knowledge of anthropology for even participating in the sub.
Comment by CommodoreCoCo at 28/06/2023 at 19:33 UTC
13 upvotes, 0 direct replies
As mentioned, this is mostly (almost entirely) about making it easier for users to find decent content and for moderators to handle these sorts of questions.
Two considerations went into this.
The first is that these threads simply don't attract answers of value. With years of moderation experience here and at /r/AskHistorians, I know well that the questions least likely to attract invested experts are often those most likely to attract uninformed users who think they might have something to casually add. Even a recent thread like this[1], which *does* specify a time period and would therefore be allowed under the new rule, attracted many answers that were "just my two cents" or "I don't know about the paleolithic, but..."
1: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskAnthropology/comments/13zrptx/where_did_paleolithic_humans_sitsleep/
The second is that most engagement on such posts, especially ones asking about hunter-gatherers or ancient humans without clarification, is knowledgeable users prompting the questioner if they can narrow their question down or explaining that, no, "biologically innate" is not worth asking about. This is tiresome clutter. Pushing it "backstage" saves respondents energy for actually responding and prevents further clutter from building in thread.
The expectation, of course, is that people will be willing to rephrase their question a little bit. If a moderator suggests rephrasing "When did religion begin?" into "What's the earliest evidence for belief in the supernatural?" and a user can't be bothered to follow through, that's on them. It doesn't require all that much anthropological knowledge to specify a continent or country that you are interested in learning about.
It's often the case though that people *do* have something specific in mind when they ask broad questions but feel that they have to ask it in "anthropology speak." They'll have a NatGeo article about the Hadza in their head, but rather than ask "How do communities in Southeast Africa celebrate marriage?" they'll elevate to ask about general human patterns, because that's the public image of what anthropology studies.
Comment by archaeofieldtech at 28/06/2023 at 19:18 UTC
17 upvotes, 1 direct replies
A lot of the vague questions result in really problematic comment sections filled with low quality or racist/sexist answers.
Comment by JoeBiden2016 at 28/06/2023 at 17:58 UTC*
5 upvotes, 2 direct replies
Imho it's better to answer the same questions a hundred times than implicitly setting a minimum knowledge of anthropology for even participating in the sub.
Somehow I doubt you're the one providing the answers. (**edit:** *Just re-read that sentence, and realized it sounds kind of dickish. That wasn't the intent. I just meant what I say below. Sorry if this seemed dismissive of you, that was definitely not the intention.*)
The posters here who provide the expertise on these subjects (including me) are not going to continue to answer the same questions over and over. It's tedious, and more to the point, it ignores the fact that a good answer may have been written for a particular question only a week ago.
Casual posters of questions here rarely bother to search before asking.
And while you may or may not be a regular reader of this sub, u/CommodoreCoCo and many others who read and post here a lot can certainly attest that there are certain types of low effort questions that are posted so often here in one version or another that it really does make more sense to just remove them.
The noise to signal ratio in this sub isn't as bad as in some subs, but reducing it would still allow better questions *and* better answers to get the views that they deserve.
Comment by MrAC_4891 at 28/06/2023 at 18:20 UTC
2 upvotes, 1 direct replies
I don’t need a college degree to use s search function.