An experiment on pairing askers with experts in the community

This is pretty much the polar opposite of what's needed.

The entire point of the Stack Exchange model is that we do not operate a help desk or anything else like that - we require an actual question instead and there is no sense of urgency to any given question.

This kind of matching annoys subject-matter experts and curators who are trying to use the site as intended, facilitates "experts" who abuse the system by answering duplicates to get reputation (which degrades the site), and blatantly misinforms everyone about the site's core concept.

I would like to say that I genuinely don't understand how this idea got past the internal thought process of whoever proposed it — never mind whatever internal company review processes. But of course by now I've learned to be far more cynical than that.

This is the sort of result we are apparently getting in the early stages:

My own feature-request is that nobody on staff should be allowed to propose any new site functionality without first demonstrating that they know why the question in the screenshot is completely unacceptable. In detail.

(Also, how does it have seven tags? Are they being suggested automatically? They don't match up very well, either.)

From the question: "Please do not be surprised or concerned if the pairing between you and the asker seems strange or unexpected;"

I'm sorry to inform you that this communication was unsuccessful. I was surprised and concerned.

Please notify us of these experiments in advance.

I am a new user, don't ask me to help one

Okay, I'm not new to Stack Exchange, and I'm a highly active curator elsewhere on the network, but I'm completely inexperienced with respect to Stack Overflow. I have 107 rep: 101 from the association bonus, 6 from suggested edits. I have never voted. I have never posted. I have no watched tags. I've cast a few flags, but those and the edits are the extent of my activity on SO. I made this account for a Call of Cthulhu game (long story) and have no interest in being active on SO beyond reading answers I find via web search.

Yet, I received this pop-up. Multiple times.

I am not an expert. If I were to ask a question, I would be the one who wanted hand-holding. However you're identifying users who might be interested in helping, it must be seriously broken if you're asking people with, again zero posting activity.

I want to touch on a specific comment here, but I think putting it in an answer is likely better. Slate's comment

The team identified that many newer users feel that Stack Overflow can be slow, intimidating, or hard to engage with as an asker.

Now, I will admit that the site can be intimidating; this is a problem. The new chat rooms have attempted to deal with this, however, they've been implemented poorly.

As for hard to engage with as an asker, I'm going to stand on top of that box again and shout the same thing I frequently do:

Staging Ground

The SG is specifically designed for engagement, stop ignoring it exists and not sending users to it that need that support.

Now, there is something that personally I find insulting: "Stack Overflow can be slow". There are no SLA (Service Level Agreements) on SO. There's no requirement that a user read someone's question, let alone take the time to understand it and answer it. The users that contribute answers to the site are volunteers; those that are asking need to understand that. SO isn't a support desk. This is why questions that are well asked, and well researched, often are the ones to get answers first; the user has done the due diligence and given us all the information we need to be able to use our expertise, in our time, to provide an answer.
Unsurprisingly questions that lack details, and research, often take longer because they're not interesting and need work from the volunteers to get all the information; this can be exhausting for the volunteer(s).

If users are giving feedback that the site is slow, then, in my opinion at least one of the following is true:

• The user didn't receive good on-boarding when signing up to the site
• The user isn't the type of user that wants to contribute to the site positively
• The user is here just for someone to do their work; they aren't here to learn from the experience or answer.

If the staff do want to improve speed of answers, and attempt to guarantee answers, then we aren't volunteers any more, and if we're not volunteering, then we're either staff or consultants; that requires payments (I'm not working pro-bono and I'm sure most others won't either).

Even the Moderators on the site are still volunteers; they aren't expected to deal with flags within a certain time scale and they have an agreement with the company. We "common" users have even less of a "relationship".

You tell us to expect a prompt from a user to help them, but you don't actually tell us what you expect us to do afterwards. If we click "Not Interested" then that suggests that we don't get the prompt for that person again, but do we get more for others?

If we click "Review help request" what happens then?
If we then review that help and think "Yes, I can help", what happens next? What is expected of us? Is this one-on-one help, or a link to a question that's been posted, or perhaps a question that just got a bounty? If it is for a question, what's wrong with the custom filter I have set up, that when a new question is posted I get a "1 new question" bar appear. I can see the bountied questions in that filter too. What new functionality is this supplying?

If it is one-to-one mentoring, is this public? If not, why not? If it's private tutoring/support/consultancy, how do I inform the user of my hourly fee? How is payment taken? Who has acts an independent party to validate work has been completed, and I can be paid?

^{I'm not saying that I come here to be paid, but the point is that if I'm giving private advice then that is something I would normally expect payment for; that's consultancy.}

There's a data point y'all aren't collecting in this "test" - the number of people who would choose "Don't ever show me this again in the future."

You came up with a UI that leaves me feeling put on the spot and then only give me the option to demur "right now". Please, if you're going to create UI, do it honestly and give people an easy and obvious way to opt out.

Honesty

Someone has requested your help

Is a lie, pure and simple. No one has requested my help. I've only ever asked questions and I can assure you, even regarding Google Sheets no one should be trusting my ability to answer questions about it.

It is so confusing why you would opt for this phrasing. It's manipulative and insincere and harmful. As others have said, this goes against the concept of the platform and the reasoning why you can't follow or DM users on the network.

Options for how to be truthful:

• "Someone has asked for help with a [tag name] question."
• "Here's a new question in your tags."

Opting out

So, I was already annoyed because of the framing of the UI element and then I was only given the option to say "Yes I can help" or say "Not right now". Where's my "Smash it with a hammer and make sure it never comes back again" option?

I just used the X in the window to make it go away because neither option adequately indicated my PoV. So, please, don't leave out the actions of people just hitting the X rather than choosing one of your two non-options. Seeing the form users here were given to explain why they said "not right now", I'm glad that I did hit the X since I'd be in the situation again of having no way to answer the question that actually meets my needs.

Y'all have got to stop giving users only "kind" feedback options. UX research can not be Pollyanna. If you don't give us the drop down option to indicate that we never want to interact with this feature, you will never get the full understanding of user reactions to your tests. There doesn't even seem to be an "Other" option!

I know y'all are capable and qualified people but you can't hide from bad feedback by only giving people friendly feedback options. Be truly open to honest feedback rather than limiting users to polite reactions.

And, yes, I'm saying it 3-4 times for a reason.

This is unethical; I never consented to being lied to

This experiment entailed Stack Overflow blatantly lying to me:

• "A new user needs help": A lie. No such user exists.

• "We think you would be a great fit": Another lie. The popup was evidently shown indiscriminantly.

• "Someone has requested your help": Really? Me specifically? No, this is another lie. You are trying to emotionally manipulate me.

• The specific question text: Also a lie; while this text may have been harvested from a previous (also possibly unethical) experiment with real people, the question presented to me is not currently relevant to anyone, so the time I spent (multiple minutes) attempting to understand it on a technical level in order to decide if I could answer it was entirely wasted.

This experiment is human subject research and carries with it ethical obligations. By lying to me, you have violated those obligations. Moreover, you have undermined the trust I have in Stack Overflow and my interest in future participation on the site.

I request that you:

1. Immediately stop this unethical experiment.

2. Post an apology in which you acknowledge that you have deliberately lied to your users, and promise not to do so again in the future.

I clicked the "Review help request" and I do not even know what I am looking at:

Transcription:

Someone has requested your help

Debugging an error or bug

i am facing this error Runtime Error

ReferenceError: HTMLElement is not defined

Call Stack 24

Show 14 ignore-listed frame(s) webpack_require .next\server\webpack-runtime.js (33:43) webpack_require .next\server\webpack-runtime.js (33:43) webpack_require .next\server\webpack-runtime.js (33:43) webpack_require .next\server\webpack-runtime.js (33:43) eval ./lib/config.ts rsc)/./lib/config.ts (D:\MyFirst.next\server\app\page.js (121:1) webpack_require .next\server\webpack-runtime.js (33:43) eval ./app/layout.tsx rsc)/./app/layout.tsx (D:\MyFirst.next\server\app\page.js (33:1) Function.webpack_require .next\server\webpack-runtime.js (33:43) This error happened while generating the page. Any console logs will be displayed in the terminal window.

Was this helpful?

1 2

1/1

Next.js 15.2.4

javascript reactjs next.js node.js solidity css react-query

Is the "1 2" and "1/1" part of what the user wrote or something the system gives me? I am not sure.

The "Advance beginner" link does nothing, as far as I can tell.

One potential problem with this proposal is that it may encourage help vampires and their enablers.

Many of the rules and procedures we use on the Q&A pages are designed to deflect and discourage help vampires. We expect questions to be focused and have sufficient detail to be answerable with a clear finite answer. We don't want to get into a never-ending discussion with someone who ultimately wants us to do all their work for them.

Things are a bit more relaxed in the chat rooms. We understand that people may need assistance in formulating a coherent question, and that can require some discussion. But we still have limits to what's feasible and reasonable. Virtually every chat room has rules discouraging askers from targeting an individual. That's to stop help vampires from latching onto their chosen target and pestering them indefinitely.

I'm not saying that this proposal will definitely encourage help vampires, but it will certainly attract them, and you will need mechanisms to detect and deal with them.

answered May 27, 2025 at 19:28

As someone interested in helping others on the platform (that's one of the reasons I hang out here), my usual approach is to search for questions or tags where I believe I can contribute. This pop-up will be a source of annoyance and disruption and rather than encouraging participation, could push me further away from helping. A pop-up interrupting my workflow would be a significant deterrent.

Although I don't see much value at all in experimenting with "hand-picking" questions for me to answer, if you must experiment with this, I would suggest alternative approaches that would be less intrusive while still bringing relevant questions to my attention:

• Push the posts that system identifies as a good match for my expertise to the top of the Home page or Questions page.

• Add a dedicated section at the top of the Home page, perhaps just below the new homepage widgets (which I have them hidden).

These alternatives might still be somewhat annoying, but significantly less disruptive than a pop-up. The goal should be to make it easier for willing helpers to find opportunities, not to interrupt them with intrusive notifications.

answered May 27, 2025 at 22:44

I get the impression I belong to the intended audience for this feature: a casual user who would contribute more if more-actively prompted.

This is my first meta interaction, apart from some sporadic upvotes, I am also an on-again-off-again SO-user, mostly reading, very rarely contributing. As such I may bring a different perspective from the other replies so far.

I'd argue this feature a success in getting me to potentially offer my help.

Everything after that first click alienated and frustrated me:

• the UI creates unclear expectations. I was assuming some kind of one-on-one chat, directly live. Instead "match is not available at this time"..
• the question I was shown (the "competent" psql one) had me, even as a non-regular, looking for the "close duplicate" button, but the only UI options are deeper into the funnel ("yes I can help", or give up completely). That feels guilt-trippy. For a site living of volunteer engagement, that is a risky game to play with my goodwill.
• re: goodwill: I had hoped for an intermediate choice: I have expended some of my limited "f*s-to-give" by reading and parsing the question. My judgement was that I don't feel like engaging fully for such a low-effort question, but would gladly do a "low effort" nudge in the right direction: categorise/label that question as "duplicate", and even look up the canonical psql "create first user" answer. A polite "RTFM (link)" or "redirect to staging ground" should be a valid flow, to make my sunk cost matter without complete abort ("bankruptcy"). (I can tolerate some annoyance if it at least improves the collective)
• for any kind of acceptance from me, this feature needs a penalty system for lazy askers, similar to how one can sacrifice rep by down voting.
• I would NOT want to sacrifice rep for such downvotes: The balance of giving-taking is different for a prompt actively targeting me, vs reading a "random" question, thus I expect a rebuf to cost me less/nothing.
• everything up to here, I was completely "faked out", fully believing I was interacting with a legitimate feature (and frustrated by the low quality of it, not a good look in prod!), then came the sinking realisation that this was an experiment. I would have expected a VERY prominent link to this meta-post at the TOP of the popup, no later than two clicks in. I get making the original prompt "real" for data accuracy, but getting as far as feedback window at the "we aren't collecting.. at this time", without first disclosing the experiment is unethical.
• re: low quality implementation: it may be "only" a data gathering exercise, but you were doing it in the real production system, on real users. "move fast and break things" also breaks trust! I'll leave it up to you if the gathered data was worth it..

Summarising: Well done, you succeeded in activating your intended audience, and then frustrated it with ghastly implementation and botched messaging. One step forward, three steps back.

P.S. I do appreciate the interaction and input by the team in this meta. I just wish half of that effort doing post-factum damage control had been expended before deploying this experiment.

Edit to add: for context: as a casual user, I wasn't aware of the "staging ground". I learned about it from this thread. From the representations here about it, it sounds like the "team working on first contributions" (thanks for explaining, @slate) should improve that M:1 funnel instead of (badly) trialing a 1:1 funnel. (perhaps actively promoting "there's a staging question matching your expertise"?)

I ran into this, and had a rather bad UX experience on my very first instance. For context, I only realized it was data-gathering after putting together my feedback, because nothing clued me into it being a fake-door test for data gathering: it used the standard design elements, had no clear introduction, and simply asked me using the same wording I'd expect from a trial of a fully-launched matching feature.

• The question has nothing to do with my background or interests. I mostly answer Rust/C++ these days, used to answer a ton of Java stuff, and have never used Postgres in my life aside from maybe one or two hackathon projects years ago. Based on this meta post, I'm aware this is irrelevant and wouldn't apply had I had an opportunity to read the messaging.
• However... there's a bizarre link that says nothing other than "competent". It's so out of place and under-described it's unsettling, which is not a term I use with UX feedback often.
  • Is it an action (despite being a link rather than a button)? Does clicking it give feedback that I'm competent? That the person asking the question as competent?
  • Why does it say "competent" (a substantial judgment of technical strengths) rather than a rep count, activity level, or tag activity? What automation is making the decision, and how does it distinguish someone with no tag-relevant experience, someone branching out, someone working in their own tag, or a new user that's never registered on SO prior to today, but has years of software experience?
  • Is it an indication that the user asking is deemed competent by some automation? That I'm deemed competent by that automation?
  • What if I don't use Postgres and want to mark myself as not competent at the topic of this question?
  • Why does it not say who it applies to? I have no idea whether it's judging me generically, judging the asker generically, judging me contextually, or judging the asker contextually.
  • The URL (upon hovering) is simply the page with an empty fragment, i.e. stackoverflow.com/questions/123456# (where 123456 is the question ID of the original page I was on when the popup showed up). Where was it supposed to take me?
• My instinct with this post is to go and edit the post, or send it to a review queue. Again, understood that this is potentially not possible given the experiment setup, in hindsight.
• Why does "yes, I can help" look like a button, in the sense of a thing that causes an action to occur, rather than just navigation?
  • If I click it, is the user getting a notification that someone is coming to help? Am I about to be sent into a chat room? Am I committing to answer somehow?
  • If it's just navigating me to the question, why not a link?
  • Again, understood in hindsight, but I'd still like to highlight the experience that happens when this isn't communicated to users properly.

From the staff comments on these question and various answers here, it appears you're trying this experiment based on feedback from new users who consider the site "slow" to respond.

Have you considered that maybe, just maybe, this is in part due to Stack Exchange Inc.'s legacy of driving established curators away from the platform with half-assed experiments like this one?

Or that the company's focus on user acquisition, without any regards to user quality, has resulted in large numbers of junk questions that curators have to wade through before they find one that that is actually answerable?

Stack Overflow is a site for professional and enthusiast programmers, not help vampires, and the company's continued attempts to capture the latter crowd are as unfortunate as they are doomed. Those vampires will never be good users on Stack Overflow and they are best served by LLMs - LLMs that you helped to train with data from this site's users. Consequences, huh?

If you want to fix Stack Overflow, stop wasting development time on poorly implemented experiments to try to onboard vampires, and start spending that time on delivering features the community has requested for years. By doing so you'll build back the nonexistent trust between company and curators, cut down on the volume of crap questions, and thus attract new users who want to be part of the Stack Overflow vision.

I rather suspect however that given the Stack Exchange Inc.'s past actions, the necessary thoughtful and deliberate effort over a long period to work towards the aforementioned goal will never happen, because all the company's so-called management cares about is Line Goes Up. And as long as they continue to ignore the fundamental purpose of Stack Overflow, and continue to ignore their own failures, things are not going to improve. It doesn't matter how many experiments you try, as long as they are predicated on false assumptions and wishful thinking they are never going to work.

I feel like the options are way too binary.

Image of the experiment as shown on my account

It would be nice to have a "Ask for more information" button, because when I see this post, my entire body screams "Please provide a minimal, reproducible example", but all I can do is either say "Yes, I can help" or "No, I can't help right now", but what I'd like to say is "I could help if you provided more information, but can't help otherwise."

Also, bug, why are there 7 tags? I thought the limit was 5.

And what's that "Advance beginner" label?

This kind of error message doesn't help, too:

"Match is currently not available" tells me literally nothing about the error, and since this post doesn't show up in the "Featured on Meta" panel, I had to manually go on Meta to see if an experiment was happening. Maybe put a link to this question instead?

Please do not be surprised or concerned if the pairing between you and the asker seems strange or unexpected; we do not expect the pairings to be exceptionally accurate at this stage of development.

Well, that pairing is indeed terrible. While I have answered some JS questions in the past, I have never answered NextJS/ReactJS questions. Framework tags should be prioritized over programming language tags: if I know ReactJS, I likely know JS, but if I know JS, I don't necessarely know ReactJS. Same goes for any framework and implementation of anything.

"Someone has requested your help"

This implies someone has requested specifically for MY help, not someone else's. Does that mean askers will be able to choose who they want to get help from? I suppose not, so you might want to change this wording to remove that "your".

The popup to decline the help request presumes I'm "unable" to help.
I'm able, but I don't want to.

It also doesn't have an option to state that the request was completely unanswerable.
A request can be a clear error dump, but completely lack the required code.

We are evaluating a conceptual feature of the platform that would seek to pair askers and available experts in the community in a live session format. Beginning today, we are running an experiment to determine whether it is feasible to develop a feature that could match experts to askers based on experts’ on-platform behavior (such as watched tags)

When a user responds to the request for help, will their respond, be visible to all users? Will their response be moderated by the community? Will the community be allowed to downvote or upvote the response the user received? If the response is private, then the entire concept of the experiment is flawed, since it violated the entire purpose of the Stack Overflow community.

You will see this prompt when you are matched with an asker’s request for help. The prompt will be shown to you up to a maximum of five times, or until you submit a response (including “I can’t help right now”).

You should make it clear that for the purposes of this experiment, the prompts are based on sample data, and are not actual users questions. It would be helpful if you provided or explained what the source of this sample data is.

Please do not be surprised or concerned if the pairing between you and the asker seems strange or unexpected; we do not expect the pairings to be exceptionally accurate at this stage of development.

You should make it clear that little to no development time has happened. In a response to a comment of mine you indicate no development time, but this quoted statement, suggests some development time actually has happened.

My biggest concern with this experiment is the entire concept of 1:1 help, the very first thought I had when I saw this experiment, was Stack Exchange was introducing the same user payment system that Quora has. Which of course is made possible by becoming a subscriber to Quora, and users who mark their contributions as requiring a subscription, are then paid for their submissions. I just don't want to see "exclusive content from specific curators" in the future.

Source: What are paid subscriptions on Quora?

These are my thoughts and my opinions as I read the description of this experiment. The fact my first thought, is that this experiment was about users having an official unofficial way, to lock their contributions behind a payment is a problem with the experiment not necessary a problem with my opinion of the experiment itself.

In the 3 decades I have been on the internet, the death of every community I have been a member of, happened the moment that the contributions of the users generating the contributions were allowed to offer 1:1 help preventing other users from assisting in the moderation of those contributions.

There will always be a small minority who will offer their help, no matter what the quality of the question that was asked, allowing the entire community to be flooded with contributions that cannot be answered. I see this experiment at an attempt to address the concerns of that small minority, even though, they have not actually generated contributions that benefited anyone.

A crucial point in offering FREE help is being able to do so when it is convenient for the person offering the help. It makes no sense to be convenient for the person asking for help and expecting to receive it for free in the optimal time for them!

If you ask for help and need immediate action from an expert, PAY the expert. And this business model already exists, it is called freelancing. Convert SO into a freelancing platform then.

Notice: the following assumes that the button will launch some sort of live chat. Technically, this is not confirmed, but since most users assumed it and the company never retorted it seems a reasonable guess.

I think my comment on the question already makes clear how I feel about this (or at last they did. Cleanup can be very convenient at times). Looks like the "SO is not a dating site" line has aged as milk...

That said, I will leave you with a smol side question.

Considering that people WILL abuse this feature to harass others... Hopefully you have already plans in place about how to log the private conversations, right? Otherwise how do you plan to solve any "They were offensive" claim users may raise? I know that everything that is posted on the chat is already traced, but you may want to make explicit notice that "private chat" between two users would be logged too. You may even need to revise the TOS for sake of transparency.

And while we are at it... those conversations would surely look tasty to our hungry LLM friends... you surely didn't plan to feed them those, right?

A while ago, the company posted this diagram.

Back then I asked if Stack Exchange planning to force users to ask their questions to an LLM. This was dismissed and my question ridiculed because apparently I was just predicting impossible things and surely that was not the plan. Some suggested I was bad for even thinking that the company could do that.

Now some more time has passed and more predictably divisive experiments have been forced on us. So, let me revise that theory now...

Let's suppose the company added an AI live agent button (or maybe just launch the feature "by default") on the question asking interface.

Now, the user can live chat with the Stack Overflow Agent (powered by Prosus AI Magic) before even asking the question. Then, if they can't get a working answer they get a button "Chat with an helpdesk employee user". Does this start to look familiar? All the magic of a live agent chatbot backed by a real human team to handle whatever the bot can't but without the cost of actually humans operator to forward the unsolved tickets to. The dream of any IT consultancy company.

Is this closer to the actual plan? Did I guess right this time? Do I win something??...

.. You know, instead of keeping me and the entire userbase guessing... wouldn't be better to disclose WHAT an experiment is aiming to do before the experiment starts? Do we really have to believe that the company has no idea right now about what will happen after you agree on that button? If that the case.. I suggest next time you to find that answer before experimenting something that you already know will cause discord and backslash. Otherwise... don't you think that maybe that would be a quite relevant info to add to this (late) announcement???

This isn't a test to gather data how many people would be willing to partake in such initiative/feature - it's a test whether surprised users can actually find their way through some new modals (while hitting dead ends in many scenarios) to try to find an answer that conveys their thoughts.

If you wanted to gather some data, you could simply ask that question: "Would you be interested in getting question recommendations/questions from other users? Yes/No + explain" (or, better yet, ask beforehand for feedback on MSO?)

The pop-ups that are presented to us do not convey this - they try to imitate a real feature, so that's how I treated them; and they are so lacking (as others said - for example there is no option to ask for clarifications, MRE, or do anything else) that the only thing I know after interacting with them is that this feature is broken (whatever it's supposed to be). I know that it isn't completely implemented, but it should be working at all - so if you can't make something like that you should settle on a simpler form.

We're completely clueless about how this whole process is supposed to work: what would happen before somebody is presented such request, what happens after that - nothing. And even without such knowledge there are many serious concerns.

There is a vast difference between people choosing to answer a question, and being prompted to answer a question. Regardless of how politely you phrase it, this approach feels like you want users to be free on-call tech support (Or, a human LLM)

If this wasn't a live interaction and was more of a: "We found a question that you might find interesting" prompt for appropriate recent unanswered questions, I would find it more palatable, but in its current state this feels gross.

answered May 28, 2025 at 5:47

Zeus

1,1375 silver badges3 bronze badges

It seems to be that there aren't actual people here now that needed our help. In that way the experiment is lying a bit and that will have some ethical implications. I understand that experimenting this way can give more unbiased information, instead of for example asking: "If there was somebody asking for you to look at his content now, would you want to do that or know about it?", but people partaking in that experiment may feel a bit tricked.

As for the matter itself: do not always all people, who ask something, need the help of others? Where is the difference to somebody asking a question and somebody asking a question and requesting you to look at his/her question immediately? I would not want to prefer one over the other. They all need help. Just because some may scream louder than others doesn't mean their concern is more important.

As for live help for example (if this was one of the goals), there are some quite good chatbots out there, which scale much better than humans in the live help area. It never worked in the past (we had some kind of mentoring approach in the late 2010s) and prospects look very low. See the Stack Overflow Mentorship Research Project back then in 2017.

But of course I would not want to take anything away. If for example you want to allow askers and experts to register for this, match them somehow then create chats that are linked on question pages for example, who am I to speak against it. I wouldn't take part myself but those who want that, should definitely do that. It's already possible now with personal chat rooms and maybe just needs a bit of extra tooling.

I am one of the answerers complained about in other answers here as being more interested in helping people than in developing the vaunted repository of high-quality questions and answers. I'm someone who often feels that OP's are having a bad experience when SO seems more interested in helping itself than in helping them. I not infrequently get into unpopular debates here on meta about how to treat marginal questions that I think deserve answers. But despite all that, I still feel that this idea of pairing askers up with likely experts is a terrible, awful, very bad idea.

Whenever I've make the choice to give freely of my time to help someone, it's because I made that choice. I saw their question, I felt it was a good question, I felt they deserved an answer. If it isn't or they don't, I ignore the question and move on, without regret.

Any hint that I alone am somehow obligated to answer a question that someone else has selected for me just completely demolishes the whole proposition. Sure, maybe there's a button that says "No, I can't help this person right now", but I have to make an active choice to push that button, and that sows doubt and seeds of guilt: what if, now, nobody answers the poor fool's question? Maybe I was too hasty in clicking "no"?

There may be ways of making SO more welcoming to askers with marginal questions, but this isn't it.

From the question

You will see this prompt when you are matched with an asker’s request for help.

What is a request for help ? How is it different from a question ?

Somewhere, Sander's answer, I think, it was mentioned that you have used a "fake door" to collect requests for help, but these requests look like they are being confused with questions. One difference is that the request for help uses seven tags instead of five. Also, they have other attributes not used in questions, like something that looks like some sort of difficulty or required expertise grading. How is this grade determined?

Related

• Thom A's answer

bugstatus-completed

I would like to already report a bug on the feedback form: the “additional comments” field is mandatory when it seems it should not be:

Congrat, we think you will be a great fit to help a user ... Are you interesting in learning more?

May be.. it depends on what topic that other question have... But there is no information about the question's topic in the first dialog!

You ask me to decide, but provide none information for doing that decition.

I have opened the link - the question is about SQL, where my knowledge is less than OP's one.

What is advantage of that form e.g. against the home page? At home page I at least see the questions' titles and tags.