Preemptive protection

Question

This post is sort of a follow up to Alecos' meta post.

Already 12 hours after it was posted, it was likely from the answers and votes that the post

"People pathologically hoard so much cash that they impoverish the entire nation"

would go 'hot'. The title of the question is very 'buzzworthy' in that it has words wich evoke strong emotions. Also the topic is a popular one, pretty much everyone has an opinion on the subject. The question itself (how to explain something to an aunt) does not necessarily require economics, so we would probably get a lot of answers. But right now there are some answers that I consider to be of low quality or false which have upvotes probably based on sympathetic social views.

Protecting questions, making it impossible for new users (with less than 11 rep) to post answers would solve this problem. Users with 5k rep can protect questions after they had been posted for 24 hours, not sooner. (I don't know why.) Unfortunately 24 hours is a long time, we get a lot of answers. After 24 hours we still get a lot of laymen who vote on the question, making the final vote tally reflect the popular and not the expert opinion. Surely it is very elitist of me, but I find this bad. I also think it conflicts with the purpose of SE.

Are there any suggestions on how to deal with this?

Answer 1

Looking at it now, protecting the question was great. Thanks for doing that. It doesn't really do any harm but does raise the bar a fair bit.

I'm in favor of suggesting edits when a question is too full of emotional content. If it invites subjective answers, it should be closed (see a related meta question here: What is the proper approach and place for normative statements on Economics SE?).

However, I don't think that all "hot politico-economic" content should be removed. With regard to the question at hand, I personally feel fine with the wording but it's probably on the upper end of what I might consider acceptable. I think there is value in confronting head-on the "hot" topic questions that people might have---and that includes, to some degree, maintaining the original language that they use.

Like you pointed out, it seems like the challenge is making sure that the correct answers get voted to the top. On that point, I don't think there's a good answer to it. It seems like a problem that occurs site-wide: Improving the System to Deal with Bad Answers

I think protecting questions is a good start to solving the issue, though. Here is a link to a meta post with guidelines for protecting a question: What is a “protected” question?

Answer 2

We could try preemptively editing out the 'hot politico-economic' content of questions. E.g. the title of the particular question would become "does hoarding cash have negative effects on the economy". This is much more boring, but much less emotional. By sacrificing reach it would improve question and answer quality.