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It seems that we have more problems with hot network questions than most sites. When a question goes hot, we tend to get a flood of votes and low quality answers from users who aren't familiar with the site.

For evidence of the issue with low quality answers, notice how most questions that hit the HNQ have several deleted answers at the bottom of the page...

Would it be possible, or prudent, to automatically protect questions when they hit the hot network questions list?

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  • Doesn't this same thing happen on Parenting and Workplace? I know we have an abnormally high ratio of HNQ to questions asked, but it was my understanding that this is just par for the course with the blessing and curse that is HNQ.
    – scohe001
    Jun 6, 2018 at 16:54
  • I'd be curious to see if there truly is a connection between high-scoring answers that don't meet the site's standards (especially since the back-it-up enforcement) and the number of these votes that are coming from relatively new users. Do you have any examples? I'd imagine there are tools that allow you to see these metrics, once you get a really high rep?
    – user8671
    Jun 7, 2018 at 7:03
  • Seems like this isn't likely to happen, but remember that everyone is completely free to write a custom mod flag to ask for a question to be protected.
    – curiousdannii
    Jun 29, 2018 at 2:44
  • @curiousdannii Tried that a few times, the flag queue is usually too long to be effective.
    – apaul
    Jun 29, 2018 at 3:05

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I vote no because everyone needs to start somewhere. HNQ tends to attract low quality answers, but some new users post great answers on HNQ. If we protected all HNQ automatically, we would prevent any new users from providing answers to some of our most interesting questions and prevent them from easily joining our community, as HNQ are the questions that usually attract people here in the first place.

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