I liked this experiment overall. Primarily from the fact that most of the mentees who entered the chat were better off as compared to their peers (users with 3 or fewer questions, <16 rep),
They received fewer downvotes - as the mentors often ensured MCVE
Their questions were easier to understand - as either the mentees themselves improved the formatting as per mentors' suggestions, or the mentors fixed grammatical issues after the question was posted.
I have a few suggestions for the future iterations,
Ability to Skip
During the experiment, if I was the only person in the chat, I'd be assigned a mentee by default. It doesn't give me the opportunity to decide whether or not I can help someone. It might be a helpful feature for future phases of the project.
Reducing the time required from mentors
On one of the occasions, I had to spend roughly an hour with a mentee - who struggled to understand basic details such as where the edit button was.
I suspect, it would get annoying for anyone if the mentees take too much of their time. Also, there is no polite way of saying, "You are taking too much of my time"!
The mentees are definitely better off, but can we reduce the time the mentors have to invest? Perhaps as Antti Haapala mentions, leaving a set of comments, and moving on?
Allowing Collaboration on the question draft
As Antti Haapala mentions, all we could do is suggest improvements, but could not edit the draft ourselves. The reason was to let the mentees learn by improving the questions themselves, i.e. if the mentors just edited the questions, the menteed may not learn much themselves.
I think this point should be revisited. The mentors could save some of their time if only they could fix minor formatting issues in the draft themselves rather that educating the mentees. I believe most mentees would still learn from that.
Conclusion
I liked the experiment purely because the mentees almost always benefited from the interactions. If I had to, I would participate in the project without any of the above mentioned improvements. But I would really appreciate if it took me lesser time per question.
Another thing that comes to my mind is today's announcement about Question templates (among other things). I feel they could be more effective in improving question quality in comparison to Chat! I understand it is just an idea at the moment, but I like that better than mentorship.
