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#1: Initial revision by user avatar Peter Taylor‭ · 2021-12-03T22:53:14Z (almost 3 years ago)
Certainly low quality content is an issue. Being brutally honest, if I understood the rôle of moderator as being a ruthless dictator who pursues quality above all else I would delete 95% of the questions. But to put that in context, it's also true for most maths fora. I recently saw someone mention a combinatorics subreddit, so I had a look to see whether there was anything interesting, and it appeared to be entirely people asking for someone else to do their (trivial) homework. I didn't see a single interesting question.

The two maths sites I participate in which avoid this problem are MathOverflow (which does so by virtue of having a specific scope of "research-level questions only" and closing questions which fall outside that scope) and projecteuler.chat, which (aside from requests for clarification on the puzzles) gets a new question every several months. (Again, for context, that's mainly because most of the discussion in Project Euler is in the puzzle-specific threads which are only unlocked by solving the puzzle).

The root cause is fairly easy to see: because mathematics is so fundamental, it's compulsory in most (all?) education systems across the world, so there are many people who are taught it badly and seek sources other than their teachers either to do their homework so that they can get past what they see as a pointless hurdle, or (in the best case) to clarify the things they don't understand and their teacher is unable to communicate in a way which works for them.

I think that getting interesting questions is more important than clobbering uninteresting ones, but it's also harder. I've deliberately brought my questions here rather than to the fora where they originated (my self-answered question comes from something I sketched on projecteuler.chat, and the question about triangle centre lines was provoked by a question on MathOverflow), but I don't have many questions which I could post without spoiling Project Euler puzzles.