Why do threads with engineering and science question get buried? It seems the thread is no more than two days old but gets buried.Well other threads make its way to the top.
Thread like.
Where are the super secret weapons? Future guns and body armor for the military
I’m frustrated when that happens, but it’s just the nature of asking a public message board for a factual answer for scientific question There are a small number of people who may know the answer or who can figure it out. If they aren’t around or don’t feel like answering, other threads which are more opinion-based rise to the top.
One way to help a question along is to do a bit of research yourself. Adding an additional data point or two may stimulate the discussion along. If nothing else, it moves the thread to the top and gives it a better chance to be seen by an expert in that area.
Because they’re of interest to a narrow few of the users here, and a narrower set of those have useful comments, answers and observations to make.
So the more general threads tend to float above them.
You can subscribe to threads and keep them handy even though the traffic in them might be low. Or you can get really, really interested in movie trivia, the JFK assassination and ebola (to name three high-popularity topics in recent days).
As noted, it’s just what happens when threads rise to the top based on newest responses (rather than, say, being ordered alphabetically or by date of first posting.) Threads about specific branches of science or technology tend to have fewer responders, so tend to disappear into the stack. Similarly, I suspect, a thread about some obscure question in Finnish grammar, or the love poetry of Amonhotep II. So it’s not just science/technology, it’s obscurity/popularity.
ASIDE: Alphabetic ordering would be terrible, since then everyone would start to name their threads to get more attention, and we’d have things like “AAAAAAmonhotep II’s love poetry.”
Where are the super secret weapons?
09-30-2014 - 10-10-2014, resurrected by sweat209 10-16-2014
What’s the upper limit on the size of land-animals?
09-04-2014 - 09-06-2014, resurrected by sweat209 10-02-2014 - 10-05-2014
Future technological innovations
09-02-2002 (!) - 09-07-2002, resurrected by sweat209 10-05-2014 - 10-06-2014
I’d say the first 2 threads did fairly well. As I see it, if the question was asked and answered then it’s ok if it dies. It is indexed by google after all. If there is quality information to add, do so. If there is an aspect of the question unanswered, clarify with an eye towards diplomacy, courtesy and realism.
As it happens, I read the first 2 threads when they came out. Also the Star Wars hovercraft question (though I quickly bailed on that one). So there’s an audience for some of this stuff.
Also and apropos nothing, I sometimes dive into page 2 or 3 of GQ to see if there are any threads that haven’t been adequately addressed.
As has been said, fewer people have information on technical subjects, and those who don’t may not even have an opinion. The more technical a question, the less likely people are to keep bumping it. It may be answered definitively after only a few posts.
However, the threads you cite are not particularly good examples of threads that got “buried.” The first one had 75 replies and was active for more than 10 days; the second had 52 replies and was active for 11 days; the third had 45 posts and was active for 12 years (well, 11 posts and 2 days after you zombified it), the fourth had 78 posts and was active for 12 days. None of these can be considered threads that didn’t get a good response.
I do note that you were the last poster in several of those threads. We might also consider the hypothesis that you are a thread-killer.
A lot of those threads seem to be all over place. May be new threads with better phrase questions may be better.The readers may be reading those threads and not know what the question is. Some of those threads read like a story than question.So the reader may be confused what is the question.
Actually, the more narrow and focused the question is, the more likely the thread is going to be fully answered in a few posts and thus get buried. It’s exactly speculative threads like “Where are the super secret weapons” and “Future technological innovations” that will have a lot of people posting opinions and thus go on for longer.
As I said, the threads you linked to are relatively long for GQ threads. Only 13 of the 81 threads active in the past 2 days in GQ are longer than 50 post. The longer threads are usually the ones that have vaguer topics or ones on which many people post opinions.
But you seem to think that the longer a thread is, the better. That’s not really the purpose of GQ, which is to answer questions. If you just want to have a long conversation about some topic IMHO is better.
In my experience, they tend to be all-or-nothing, in that someone either knows the answer, and posts it very early, or nobody knows, and the thread just fades away.
Opinion-based polls tend to live a lot longer, because they either get a lot of opinions, or they generate arguments.
Well, you could tag each thread with [SCIENCE] to make 'em easier to find. But then others may complain that the forums are getting over-cluttered with [SCIENCE] threads.
(I keed, I keed…)
That’s what I assumed, and it seems to make sense. Complicated and technical questions need answers from people with knowledge and there just aren’t as many of those
For what it’s worth, the longest thread I ever originated started when I asked, during the last Winter Olympics, why downhill skiiers tried to spend as little time in the air as possible. It seemed to me that they would move faster through the air than on the snow. 201 posts later, the thread had become (to me) a jungle of vectors of force, constant acceleration, coefficients of friction and a host of other physics concepts that I am far too innumerate to understand. One poster, Chessic Sense, did kindly offer to explain it to me via PM, but at that point it would have been throwing pearls before swine. More to the point, the thread was soon dominated by three or four physics-minded posters who carried out a vigorous debate that was no doubt fascinating to them, but might as well have been Greek to drooling cretins like me.
