Why was a question manually removed from hot network questions?

Question

Yesterday I’ve run into a post and decided to give a pretty long answer to it.

My purpose was to post a thorough answer that could attract attention of many people who are not otherwise generally interested in physics . I was very glad for the question becoming hot network post, but today, about 3 hours ago, a moderator removed the post from hot network questions

• It doesn’t appear to be off-topic or duplicate, since it wasn’t closed
• Both the question and my answer got some upvotes and no downvotes

May I kindly ask, why should that post have been removed from HNQ?

• Post link
• Post revisions

Answer 1

I agree with the points previously made in the existing two answers, but I also recognize that you had useful and important motivations that should be given the right place to help the site grow.

Specifically, what is one to do when one sees...

• a question that just got on the HNQ list,
• which is on-topic, though maybe a bit marginally so,
• which is low-quality and liable to rub a large fraction of site users the wrong way, but which nevertheless
• offers a nice opportunity to write a clear and useful answer that will be a useful resource for the wider audience of the HNQ list?

The answer is simple: fix the question. If there are close-votes on it, edit it to address them and remove the concerns, and similarly so if there are problems voiced in the comments. If it looks low-grade, or homework-y, or engineering-y, or too "thin", or too poorly researched by the OP themselves, then fix those problems.

This is sometimes tricky, as it can end up requiring significant edits that could end up changing the original intent of the OP, or (more often) removing parts of it. This is ultimately a judgement call, but particularly when the parts that you are removing are the parts that make the question liable to downvotes or close-votes (which for the question at hand includes the engingeering-y parts with explicit code, and so on), I would say it is justified.

When doing this kind of surgery, it is often good to leave a courtesy comment explaining to OP that you have edited the post in ways that change the meaning, that they have the option to roll-back, and including a justified recommendation of why your version is better.

But, ultimately, looking at your posted answer, it certainly looks to have consumed quite a significant chunk of time and effort. For a low-quality starter question like the current one, I think it is reasonable to expect you to spend at least a small fraction of that effort on improving the question if you want to champion it, and particularly if you want to argue that it should act as a representative of the site to the wider SE audience that sees the HNQ listings.

Answer 2

The “Hot Network Questions” system is an automated algorithm based on views, votes, and perhaps some other secret sauces. From this chatbot output you can see that most HNQs on Physics are first promoted when they have just a couple of upvotes. Students of physics and statistics will recognize that the timing of the first few upvotes will be susceptible to shot noise, and may not accurately predict the timing of upvotes as a question is viewed by more people.

The effect of the HNQ is therefore to show questions on the site quasi-randomly to two different audiences. The “hot” questions are shown to everyone who browses the SE network, while the much larger volume of “cold” questions is shown to users who choose to visit Physics specifically. These two groups of users have different ideas about what sorts of questions best represent the character of our community. We have the ability to remove questions from the “hot” list in order to privilege the opinions of our regular users.

The question you have linked here is okay. When the first accelerometer-equipped laptops appeared, the condition $|a|\approx0$ was used as a trigger to move the read heads away from the hard disks, which made them much more likely to survive being dropped than laptops without accelerometers. That application is kind of an “aha” moment the first time you see it; it might have warranted a patent. It’s less important now that solid-state storage is more affordable, because phones and laptops now have fewer moving parts to break when they suddenly decelerate upon hitting the floor, but it’s still interesting.

But your linked question isn’t a great question. A person who has spent a month in a physics class should have learned that an object in free-fall has zero acceleration. We get a lot of questions on our site from people who have been studying physics for about a month and are working through the process of kinematics. And that takes us to the difference between the two communities.

What makes our community work are its regular users: people who are interested in browsing the list of new questions, recognizing questions where they have some unique insight, and writing great answers. We have a great community here, with frequent and prolific contributors who have deep knowledge in their domains and a knack for explaining their deep knowledge clearly. But like any community, there is some amount of churn. People have life changes and move on. New people find the site and get interested enough to join. And if a new user with deep domain knowledge were to happen upon our site and see a front page full of freshman-physics questions, they might reasonably decide to move on past us. Teaching freshman physics is an interesting and valuable experience, but doing freshman physics homework is an experience with diminishing returns.

Your linked answer is a good one. It represents a lot of work, and has a lot of upvotes. Compare with the score distributions for our prolific answerers: our users who write more than a dozen answers per month tend to average a score of +2 or +3. The decision to exclude your post from our partially-curated list of “hot” questions is about the question, not about the answer. The question of “hotness” is different from the question of on-topic-ness (addressed by closure) and also different from the question of usefulness (addressed by votes). You shouldn’t interpret it as a criticism.

Answer 3

I removed it from the HNQ queue because the post seems like a hybrid between 2 (admittedly commonly asked) questions on Phys.SE:

1. A technical hardware/software question about how to use an electronic device to measure acceleration.

2. A homework-like question about elementary kinematics/projectile motion.

This does not seem like the kind of post that should be promoted in the HNQ queue. At the time of my action the post had already attracted 2 close-votes from the community.

Answer 4

@rob's and Qmechanic's answers highlight an important issue, how to best keep who happy?

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I wrote the following comment under @EmilioPisanty's answer before deleting it seeing the other answers and seeing that educational accelerometry is persona non grata here because it might scare away "the good users"

Also, a large fraction of the planet is not rich with fancy laboratory equipment and can benefit from teaching physics with cell phones whenever possible. See for example ProfRob's How come a mobile phone signal is blocked by aluminium foil, but Wi-Fi gets through? (thought that's not because Prof.R is poor) I fear catering to the potentially vocal rubbable few at the expense of less rich people benefitting from a great physics teaching opportunity might be revisited, i.e. I think the question is on-topic and should not have been closed.

I love physics and though I love Stack Exchange, have asked 5,000+ questions among a variety of sites and have 500+ HNQ's and have no problem asking Physics-related questions in sites like Chemistry, Astronomy, and Matter Modeling SE. But I find Physics SE's ambience (for lack of a better word) just too oppressive, and I think I know the reason why this has happened and was probably deemed necessary at the moment:

Physics SE is too big!

See this answer to How to Help the Physics.SE grow (member-wise)? Qualitatively as well as Quantitatively.

The reason there is constant hand-wringing and gnashing of teeth is that there are too many extremes that folks here are trying to keep happy at the same time.

I'm convinced there is a optimum range of sizes of Stack Exchange sites (measured by question rate, site scope and user base volume) and sites like Stack Overflow and Physics SE are substantially larger than the optimum size for site happiness.

It's time to stop thinking that bigger = better always, and this site needs to grow to improve.

Instead I recommend that some serious consideration be made to splitting the site and opening that discussion up to the community by the moderation team posting an exploratory question.

There are several axes along which the cleavage can take place, and an exploratory question in meta by the moderation team can ask the community to think about that.

Don't be scared; please consider giving it a try!