Clarify that discussion questions should not be answered in the "questions" section.

Perhaps it would behoove you to add a requirement for a question mark in each question.

Hi Vox,

Thanks so much for raising this concern—and for taking the time to highlight those examples. We take the quality of discussions on Khan Academy very seriously, and we’re always working to improve the experience for learners and helpers alike.

I reviewed the posts you shared in your screenshot and agree that many of them don’t follow our guidelines for what should be posted in the question area. We’re currently in the middle of a large-scale cleanup project, starting with our core courses and gradually expanding to others. This should help reduce the volume of non-questions and make it easier for contributors like you to find meaningful posts to respond to.

In the meantime, your help goes a long way. If you come across posts that are off-topic or not actual questions, please continue to flag them. That helps our team identify patterns and keep things running smoothly.

We really appreciate your contributions and your dedication to supporting other learners in the community!

In the last four days I've submitted 565 message reports and three content corrections, so I think I'm doing my part in that area. Somewhat related question: what is the criteria for locked posts? I usually see you somewhere in a question section if anything's locked. It's not an age-based lock, because I've seen 11-year-old posts without locks, as well as 2-year-old posts. Sometimes questions are locked without answers. Although usually those old posters are not still on Khan Academy, some are, and it's certainly nice to be able to provide that answer for any curious learner scrolling through.

Wow, that's a lot of flags! Thanks for your help! I can take a look at your reports specifically when I have a chance.

We've been locking posts as part of the discussion cleanup project. A post gets locked once it has an acceptable answer and has been edited for quality (if needed). This is to help prevent off-topic chatter, duplicate answers, etc. that we tend to see a lot of on the unlocked posts.

Sometimes an answer gets deleted after the post is locked, which is why you may see a locked post with no answer. In this case, feel free to send me a link to the post and I can either unlock it, answer it, or restore a hidden answer.

Hmm. I understand where that's coming from with the post-locking, but sometimes I still think there's something more to add. Should I contact you in those cases as well? Additionally, how should I contact you directly? Through email, pinging you here on the support site, or some other communication method? This support site is somewhat clunky.

I can take a look at your reports specifically when I have a chance.

Don't feel the need to prioritize my reports. Mine aren't especially urgent or anything, I hardly see any "abusive" messages. Just endless... spam...

Perhaps it is because I have only looked so far at some of the more niche discussions, but I rarely see excessive discussion on already-answered posts. Even if they happen, low-quality answers tend to filter down to the bottom, allowing the better answers to show while the worse ones get hidden under the "more answers." The primary concern is new comments clogging the discussion feeds, which really matters for timely assistance.

As I mentioned previously, some sort of restriction preventing messages without question marks from being posted may help some, although I imagine people shortly thereafter will start using the question board to decry the suppression of the non-marked questions.

I suggest you ban emoticons, and consider enforcing some sort of grammar-checker. Extremely short and nonsensical questions should not hit the discussion feed. I think there are some JS libraries that can evaluate to some extent. I might contact Packback (a site I've used in university) to see if they would be willing to share or illuminate you on their discussion analysis algorithms.

Somewhat relatedly (and this probably should be a report), but for some reason the site for Khanmigo, the Khan Academy-affiliated LLM instance, is a blacklisted link.

Consider having trusted users who can post links uninhibited, or having a whitelisted database. External sites are frequently included in lessons, and most of their links would get an answer memory-holed.

I think it would help if there were a basic "Here's how to use Khan Academy" tutorial that went over what the Questions section is for, what the Tips & Thanks section is for, what the Help Center and Support Community are for, and a reference to where to find KA Guidelines.
The guidelines are incredibly difficult to find for the typical KA user, so I doubt most users even realize that the Questions area is not for social chatting.

If the guidelines were more prominent and first-time users were introduced to how KA wants the site to work, I think that would go a long way towards reducing the amount of off-topic posts in Questions.

(Personally, I doubt that just requiring a question mark would do much - it's easy to phrase something in the form of a question, or just add a question mark at the end.  Maybe it would be worth doing if it's simple enough.)

(My views come from my experience spending about 10-30 hours most weeks since January helping users in 6th grade math, Python, and JavaScript.)

The questions area is labelled as such. Nobody who can't or doesn't choose to acknowledge the notion of a "questions" section is reading the guidelines under any circumstances. I suspect most of these spammers are less than 11 or 12 years old. Automated solutions need to be invested in.

Khan Academy already uses some automated filters to try to deal with the most common inappropriate posts.

Facebook and YouTube have far more money to spend on automated solutions than Khan Academy, and their automated comment filters do an awful job, often deleting innocent posts and making conversation extremely difficult.  

Why are you so confident that Khan Academy would be able to make a significant dent in the current situation with more automated solutions?  Are you ok with an automated system that also deletes many innocent posts?

I get responses from 6th graders that they did not know what the guidelines were, that they thought it was ok to chat in Questions, that they did not even know Tips & Thanks existed.  Why are you so sure that there is no point in attempting to give people better information?

"Khan Academy already uses some automated filters to try to deal with the most common inappropriate posts."

And they're not enough. I'm sure it already takes a large dent.

"Facebook and YouTube have far more money to spend on automated solutions than Khan Academy, and their automated comment filters do an awful job, often deleting innocent posts and making conversation extremely difficult."

Facebook and YouTube are casual platforms. Khan Academy is not. You should not be able to post a question consisting of a sentence fragment and 4 misspelled words. That shouldn't happen at all. Packback's algorithms could bring that to effectively zero, if you required the standard composition results that were expected of us. Now, considering that there are younger people on here (who should be 13+, not 8), I would be okay with some leniency, but that particular algorithm can be tuned.

"Why are you so confident that Khan Academy would be able to make a significant dent in the current situation with more automated solutions?  Are you ok with an automated system that also deletes many innocent posts?"

As I have said previously, I have seen these algorithms in action. They work. They're never implemented on social media sites because social media sites are not professional environments with strict prescription of conduct. It was recently suggested by a staff member that a post of mine was hidden because I used the word "arrogant." Grammar and spelling-based restrictions will certainly reduce the number of 8-year-olds typing gibberish on their keyboards.

Regarding "innocent" post deletion, one solution to that would be some indication that what you're about to post is inadequate, and how. This is Packback's system. It will also tutorialize the guidelines without making it an unpleasant endeavor that people encounter as they join the site and never interact with again.

"I get responses from 6th graders that they did not know what the guidelines were, that they thought it was ok to chat in Questions, that they did not even know Tips & Thanks existed.  Why are you so sure that there is no point in attempting to give people better information?"

You answered your own question. They are not curious enough to find the Tips and Thanks and you think they're going to read and fully understand the Guidelines? The information is there. What's lacking is common sense and reading comprehension. I will agree that they should make the guidelines more prominent for the people that aren't on the answer-er side of the discussion boards. A side panel may be helpful to the few that care.

You may be correct that many users would still ignore the guidelines.  I'm glad you agree that they should be more prominent - there is no link to them anywhere that a Learner would go unless they go to the Questions queue or here to the Support Community.

I will try to ask more clearly, how much money and/or staff time (including training) do you think it would it take for Khan Academy to implement what you are talking about? 

They have a tiny staff and small revenue.  I asked for a simple correction to an HTML/CSS video transcript over 2 months ago that they have not had time to do, despite the issue that "em" was written as "M" in a video about "em", meaning deaf learners might be completely confused.  

You may be correct that many users would still ignore the guidelines.  I'm glad you agree that they should be more prominent - there is no link to them anywhere that a Learner would go unless they go to the Questions queue or here to the Support Community.

Honestly, never really occurred to me that this was the case. I guess I've just been on Khan Academy for so long (11 years) I don't see it through the eyes of a traditional learner.

I will try to ask more clearly, how much money and/or staff time (including training) do you think it would it take for Khan Academy to implement what you are talking about? 

I don't know. What I do know is that I've spent the last 5 days flagging about 900 posts because of this inadequacy that they are repeatedly saying they are trying to address in a systemic manner. I am providing options and suggestions that they might not have thought of (Packback's a pretty niche platform), not demanding that they implement these solutions. If it's too much of a cost in man-hours or licensing fees, that's an unfortunate reality that they must contend with. But I'm not staff; I don't make those decisions.

Make that 1,600 flags. Evan Lewis

The EngageNY discussion boards are comically awful. I have a 30 second long video of scrolling through the entire questions section on one article, with a majority of the "questions" flagged. I want to know how an innocent mention of a certain block game is blocked in a 5 paragraph answer (I tested this myself), but a four word answer with the word "idiot" is not. Nor is "skibidi rizz" nor "chicken jockey" nor is "vote this up" nor are various examples of keyboard mashing.

https://youtu.be/jn1dWEPwCto

Thanks for sharing all of this Vox Moduli!

We do use some automated filters that help to identify spam and low quality posts based on a number of criteria. The vast majority of these posts are never published to the site. We've updated these filters recently and have seen improvements in low-quality detection, but these updates do not apply retroactively which is why there's still many low-quality posts visible. That's what the discussion cleanup project aims to address.

Unfortunately, creating a programmatic way to identify low-quality posts is not an easy process, which is why there's still plenty of things that slip through. I've experimented with using AI-models to aid in the post detection process, but that performance was still mediocre given the complexity and the amount of context required for the models to make good decisions. For example, detecting if the post is relevant to the video or detecting duplicate posts is not easy.

It can also be difficult to balance the tradeoffs with how strict the filters are. For example, we may want to encourage good spelling, punctuation, etc. but we also want to ensure that our international learners and non-native English speakers are still able to receive the support that they need---both conflicting goals.

I think part of the issue here is behavior modeling---users see poor discussion behavior and then copy that behavior. In the courses that have been cleaned up, we've seen substantial reductions in the amount of new low-quality content, so this does seem to be working! Flagging may not always seem helpful, but it really does go a long way in helping us remove low-quality content and improve community behavior more generally.

If you notice any particular new patterns or trends, please share them with me! I'm always happy to take a closer look and can often update our filters if needed to help catch these types of posts.

I saw that there was a sign-up sheet a while back to be a moderator. Like us, students can be the moderators. Is that still avaible? If so, can I join?

Hi!

So on this page, there is a post with 102 comments, and I keep getting notifications from it. I would love it if this could get taken down. The people who are doing it are saying that they are going to continue this post until they get down to 0.  I have no idea why this hasn't been taken down yet, but it needs to be.