Is using the Chat as a form of litmus test for questions a good strategy?

Question

Often times I have questions I'd like to ask on the Workplace, after going through the process of writing the question, I ask myself "wait, would this be a good question to ask?" If the question passes the internal check, but I am still on the fence, I head towards the Water Cooler to prototype the question and get a straw poll of opinions. If I find a response satisfactory, I leave the issue as is. If not, and the question is deemed worthy, I post.

With this said, is this part of the design purpose of the chat function?

Answer 1

Chat can be a good way for a newer user who's not quite sure about scope to get help formulating a question. I've done this at least once on a site where I knew that certain types of questions had to be asked carefully. Using chat doesn't work for brand-new users (who don't yet have 20 rep), but it helps for visitors from other SE communities who already have chat access. I don't know to what extent chat was designed with this use case in mind, but it's certainly supported.

I would hope that more-experienced users would be able to just ask, most of the time. Sure, if there's something particularly tricky about this question, chat can help. If you're previewing most of your questions in chat, though, and you've been active on the site for a while, then it sounds like something's wrong -- some aspect of scope is unclear, we're being inconsistent about something, or whatever. In that case, please bring it up on meta so we can figure out what the problem is.

Finally, as others have said, please don't leave your question in chat. The site exists to build a repository of quality questions and answers. Chat is hard to read (and search) and can't be voted on. You might get your answer there, but if the question is good for the site, we'd really like to have it in the form of a main-site question.

Answer 2

Yes.

For one you have active members of the community there to help refine and get the question into shape before you ask it.

For another you can get some champion votes for your question which help draw attention and helps you solve your problem.

Answer 3

Yes. However, it often happens that some of us with way too much idle time experience answer your question in chat. In that case (assuming the question is deemed a good fit), please go ahead and post the question on the main site. Otherwise, the question and its answers will get lost in the chat and would hardly help anyone else in future.

Answer 4

Yes. Many high-rep users hang out in Chat. Getting their attention likely means that they will answer your question. If high rep users answer your question, it likely attracts more users.

Answer 5

Over on the WorldBuilding Meta stack, there's a Question Sandbox thread, allowing people to post potential questions and get feedback before posting.

It's a good way of looking at how your question looks in print, choosing your tags, and getting some feedback before posting it.

The down-side to using chat is the implicit lack of detail, difficulty of keeping on track, and only one or two people getting engaged with you.

Personally, I'd recommend the sandboxing idea - there's no harm in linking to the sandbox in chat to start the discussion. This has worked pretty well in WorldBuilding for quite some time.

Answer 6

If you have a good on-topic question, you should be posting it to the main site for the benefit of others who may have the same question, if not to get multiple answers and insights which you may not have considered.

If you just ask it in chat (and "leave the issue as is"), very few users will see it and it will be essentially impossible to find by searching.

The intention of chat is most definitely not to take good questions away from the main site.

If you're not sure about the on-topicness of the question, your best bet is to search / ask about the category of the question on Meta - again trying to maximise the number of people benefiting from a post.

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As for using chat to improve your questions: unlike the main site, all messages are equal, and other things may be discussed, so any given message can quickly get lost in the noise / responses and others can't edit what you post (apart from copy-paste edits, which are clunky).

That leads me to conclude that the interface is not particularly well suited to anything more complex than a one-sentence question like:

Would this question be appropriate - ...?
OR
How do I best phrase this - ...?

But these also don't lend themselves to that much improvement - posts are often rewritten entirely to make them more appropriate, and a whole lot more detail may be necessary to really understand what you're trying to ask.

It's usually better to pay attention to actions taken on your questions (such as edits, comments, downvotes and close votes), to seek to understand and learn from these actions and try to ask better questions in future.

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So, yes, if you want to do a QUICK, BRIEF sanity check before posting, you can probably do so in chat.

Quick as in it shouldn't really be an extended back-and-forth to get to figure out whether it's appropriate. Brief as in the actual message should be short.

And of course chat would also make sense for a question that lends itself better to discussion and/or opinion (which would be off topic for the main site).

But don't post your actual on-topic questions as is in chat (without explicitly asking for improvement) - that will lead to answers more than suggested improvements and you'll just be demotivated from posting your question on the main site.

Also, try not to overdo it - if your messages of the above makes up a significant portion of all messages, you should probably tone it down.

Answer 7

Is using the Chat as a form of litmus test for questions a good strategy?

Why bother?

When in doubt, just ask the question. You'll learn quickly if it was a good question to ask or not via the community's response. ("Community" is kind of the basis for all of StackExchange.) And if not, just delete it. No harm. No foul. Even some of the high-rep users on this site delete their questions periodically.

Over time, you'll hone your questioning skills and have a better sense of what makes a "good question".

There's no real problem running it through chat.

But just know that the number of "chatters" is very limited, and while knowledgeable, they certainly cannot represent nor speak for the Workplace community.

Some users spend a lot of time in chat. Others seldom (if ever) venture there - even others with very high rep.

All of this (for me at least) means that it isn't an effective "litmus test". Just my humble opinion.