Ultimately spurred by this comment by kalina, I think that I've encountered the term before lightly, and I'm able to find multiple instances of its use on StackExchange. In this case, it was used as a verb, but I think that it can also be used as a noun.
What is the definition of this term?
If it is a descriptor, what other types of questions are there, or does this apply to all questions?
Seeding is a (generally derisive) term for asking a (potentially low-quality) question for the sake of having asked the question. The intent is generally not to have the question answered, but to reap some related/tangential benefits from asking instead.
For instance, if I know a game offers a particular feature, and I know that feature will be of interest to people, it might be considered seeding to ask that question to get ahead of the popularity. (How does romance work in Mass Effect 3? Where is the secret cow level in Diablo 3? etc)
A high volume of questions can tend to evoke accusations of seeding, since it is assumed that if you only ask questions in the moment when you want to know the answer, the only reason to ask multiple questions at once is if you are motivated by something other than knowing the answer.
Seeding is a weird term, and a difficult one to apply consistently, since it refers to the intent of the question asker. Thus, one can accuse someone of seeding, but only the person asking the question really knows for sure what their intent is.
In my experience, seeding accusations are usually leveled at established members of the site rather than newcomers. If an new user asks a simple or low quality question, they're viewed as having no expertise. However, an established user asking a simple or low quality question is sometimes assumed to know how to get the answer for themselves, therefore, their motivation must be something other than knowing the answer.
I mentioned seeding as being generally considered a derisive term. However, there are many occasions in which we encourage or condone seeding:
I generally attempt to assume good faith when people are asking questions, and thus unless the offense is clear and egregious, I don't think it worthwhile to accuse people of seeding. I find this to be one area where it's easy to rile up a torch-and-pitchfork wielding mob against a user, and one that is very hard to defend against as the accused.
appears to be - one way to avoid such accusations is to be sure to write detailed questions that make your experience clear. 'What have you tried?' in other words.)
Commented
May 31, 2013 at 14:58
I'm not sure if there is a universally agreed definition of seeding, I'm presenting my own views on the topic here. The main reason to post a question here is because you don't know the answer but really would like to know it. If you post a question and are actually not interested in the answer, that is usually referred to as "seeding".
The motives for seeding can be just reputation gain, or more altruistic to try and help the site to gain more traffic or good content.
One big danger with seeding is that the quality can be low, because you are not actually asking about a problem you face, but something that you guess might attract traffic or votes. Bad seeding is also very noticeable, and gives a bad impression to visitors and answers because it is obivous that the asker doesn't actually care about the answer.
With bad seeding we look more like a content farm that produces content just to get traffic and doesn't actually care about the subject, it just gives a very bad impression to visitors. We want to be a site about actual problems that users have.
Seeding can also lead to a large amount of questions in a very short time, which brings additional problems with it as they displace other content from the frontpage. Only asking questions when you actually encounter the issue in the game automatically spaces out questions appropriately and avoids this issue mostly.
There is a large grey area though, and not all forms of seeding are considered bad here. The worst kind of seeding are bad questions that just try to occupy certain often-asked topics or keywords like the "What is the best build for ..." questions badp mentioned.
There are patterns very close to seeding that I consider beneficial and engage in myself. When playing a newly-released game, I often ask questions directly when I encounter them (alt-tabbing out of the game) without researching them myself. This would be very bad form on SO for example, but I think it is useful for a question-limited site like this where we essentially change our main topic with every new major game. Most resources that exist directly after launch have rather low signal to noise and are often incomplete, compiling good information here serves a useful purpose.
But the important distinction is that I ask only about issues I encountered myself and that I think are relevant to other people that will likely encounter them as well.
Seeding is, generally speaking, asking many questions quickly in a row.
The idea is that if you have a garden and plant some nice seeds in them, they will grow into many plants making the garden more beautiful. However, even if the seeds are top quality, if you plant them haphazardly (too close together) there will be problems; the roots will be concurrently fighting for the same resources, draining the terrain unevenly; the plants will ultimately not grow as tall and high as beautiful as they could've.
Of course there's seeding and there's seeding. This problem emerged one hour after the genesis of our site, when people started asking the same question as fast as possible changing maybe one word in the title. The picture's gone lost to the mists of time, unless Juan can resurrect it, but it looked like this:
I hope you can agree that this is extremely abusive (and dumb). I hope you can also agree that asking a question every few hours is probably fine; you're giving the site plenty of time to look at your questions, vote on them, edit them one by one. Sure, eventually even 1/month for many months gets tiring, but that's a different story.
So, it's obvious that there is a line here between what's okay and what's not okay. You might be asking what is it; I don't know. It depends really on a number of factors:
Your incident last week scores well in some of those metrics and not so well in others. Moderators are human exception handlers; our duty is not to come up with a line (that's left to the community to determine, usually), but to feel whether something is or not beyond the line and enforce, ultimately, what we think is the will of Stack Exchange and the community. I felt that you went overall beyond the line and warned you accordingly.
The lack of a specific line might make our action seem arbitrary and cause frustration in people who enjoy "playing in the grey", but it beats being paralyzed by the lack of a hard rule. If we were only to enforce hard rules, we could easily be replaced by a very small Bash script.
If you don't understand why a moderator thinks why you're going beyond the line, you should at least try and ask why (which you did, but only a few days after the fact), rather than declaring yourself unconvinced and keep going full speed ahead. Unheeded warnings may result in escalation.
