Survey, personal, and opinion questions. How to get the benefits without the downsides? Adding a community section.

(You can skip to the bottom for a tl;dr)

Today I saw a new user posting a question, "Founders: what's on your desk right now?"

This is the type of question would have been removed when we were on the Stack Exchange platform, because it has no definitive answer, it's a survey question, and it's generally fluffy / slice-of-life rather than practical. But I see this kind of question all the time on places like AskReddit, where people just want to hear stories from the community.

I'm torn, because on the one hand, these kind of questions can be fun, drive engagement, and increase the sense of community. On the other hand, because they're a path to easy reputation points, the amount of questions like these can proliferate and drive down visibility for practical questions by founders that actually need help, and overall reduce the substantive value of the site.

Impact on BrightJourney's Reputation System

There have been other survey questions lately, and other non-definitive-answer opinion questions:

• List all the tools you're using this week for your startup
• Technical founders: what tools would lessen your productivity if they didn't exist?
• What is your average time schedule as an entrepreneur?
• Setting unrealistic deadlines to push your team harder?
• What are your company's top 3 expenses?
• Should you focus on your strengths or improve your weaknesses?

Some of these have actual value. But it's worth thinking about what they do to the reputation system, and what we want reputation to represent. Answers on questions like these often get upvoted on a who-has-the-longest-list or first-to-answer basis, not based on anything that objectively demonstrates more expertise in the domain.

High reputation on a StackExchange site is actually a really good indicator that you know a lot about the subject; questions like these on our current system will degrade any credibility we may hope the reputation system can provide for our members. Do we want that? Do we want reputation on BrightJourney to just be a participation / popularity tally?

A Lack of Guidelines in General

I looked around and realized that we don't have any guidelines posted. No set of expectations about types of questions, subjects of questions, or what's allowed in answers. There's nothing to discourage people from posting questions about opening restaurants, their personal resume, tech industry commentary, or getting help with their market research. I'm not saying these are bad questions, just that I think we should ask if they're good questions for the kind of site we want to build, and good examples of the participants we want to attract.

And that we should think about what are some basic guidelines that can help keep us focused on the site's mission without discouraging the type of people we want participating.

A possible solution: a community section

I really hated the 'meta' section of Answers.OnStartups. It was all (when I looked) nitpicking about rules minutiae; very uninteresting to the majority of participants, and unfortunately where a lot of the discussions took place that caused the over-moderation of the site without many people other than the nit-pickers having a say in it. There's a need for a place where meta-like questions can go (Roadmap is filling it for now), but if it's exclusively those type of questions, it decreases input dramatically.

I'd suggest a 'community' section instead. A place for discussion about the site itself, yes, but also a place for non-substantive, community-survey and opinion type questions to go into. Maybe even a place to post about your personal projects, something I see communities like /r/startups moderating well and getting a lot of value out of. Separated from the main site's reputation system, so people can post and answer all the fun, fluffy questions they want without degrading the value of participation in the main, expertise-focused area.

I'd love to hear other's thoughts on this.

tl;dr: Survey / personal opinion questions are getting posted, and may take over the site and prevent BrightJourney reputation from ever being a valuable metric of expertise. We have no guidelines about appropriate questions, and should consider what kind of participants we want to attract. Instead of banning questions without a definitive answer, why don't we create a community section that doesn't impact karma, but can be used for meta-discussion, community surveys, and feedback on personal projects?