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Stack Overflow is forming a moderator council

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Re: Stack Overflow is forming a moderator council

#31

Post by pkamb »

dang wrote: post #30
fourthark wrote: post #23

Buried the lede. In the fourth quarter of 2019, we created a large task force made up of passionate community advocates from across the company to propose solutions to this core problem. The team’s mission is to improve our feedback loop and working relationship with our community. We added a member of our Community team to our leadership team and restructured the organization to invest in Product leadership to build…

We're generally happy to replace bland corporate press release titles, which always bury the lede, with something that gets to the point. But who knows what the point is? "Stack Overflow is forming a moderator council", maybe? Let's try that. It can't be worse than "Scripting the Future of Stack Overflow". Suggestions for better titles are welcome. Try to use representative language from the article if you can find i…

"First blog post of Stack Overflow's new CEO" or similar might help explain why this post is interesting.

Re: Stack Overflow is forming a moderator council

#32

Post by dang »

pkamb wrote: post #31
dang wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're generally happy to replace bland corporate press release titles, which always bury the lede, with something that gets to the point. But who knows what the point is? "Stack Overflow is forming a moderator council", maybe? Let's try that. It can't be worse than "Scripting the Future of Stack Overflow". Suggestions for better titles are welcome. Try to use representative language from the article if you can find i…

"First blog post of Stack Overflow's new CEO" or similar might help explain why this post is interesting.

That's not the goal of titles on HN. If you want to say why a post is interesting, that's great, but put it in a comment in the thread. Which you just did!

Re: Stack Overflow is forming a moderator council

#33

Post by gowld »

sosodev wrote: post #22
dancek wrote: post #10

For those unaware of the context, StackExchange fired a (volunteer) moderator in September causing a wave of moderator resignations. Now in January they fired two Community Managers (ie. employees) and a third CM resigned. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/342039/firing-commu...

I’m not sure how I feel about the ethics of volunteers massively contributing to the growth of a for-profit company. StackExchange wouldn’t be anywhere near as big as they are without its volunteers and yet they only care about their bottom line. Are there any non-profit alternatives?

StackExchange content is published under a liberal language. There's nothing wrong with making money by orchestrator value creation for the general public, at no charge to consumers. Benjamin Franklin called this "doing well by doing good".

Re: Stack Overflow is forming a moderator council

#34

Post by paxys »

sosodev wrote: post #22
dancek wrote: post #10

For those unaware of the context, StackExchange fired a (volunteer) moderator in September causing a wave of moderator resignations. Now in January they fired two Community Managers (ie. employees) and a third CM resigned. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/342039/firing-commu...

I’m not sure how I feel about the ethics of volunteers massively contributing to the growth of a for-profit company. StackExchange wouldn’t be anywhere near as big as they are without its volunteers and yet they only care about their bottom line. Are there any non-profit alternatives?

A lot of times the trade-off for volunteers is having power and influence in important communities (see Reddit, Wikipedia and StackOverflow itself), which they can (and often have) leveraged for money, propagating their own views and suppressing others, or just to get themselves off. So you can't always paint them as exploited.

Re: Stack Overflow is forming a moderator council

#36

Post by fourthark »

dang wrote: post #30
fourthark wrote: post #23

Buried the lede. In the fourth quarter of 2019, we created a large task force made up of passionate community advocates from across the company to propose solutions to this core problem. The team’s mission is to improve our feedback loop and working relationship with our community. We added a member of our Community team to our leadership team and restructured the organization to invest in Product leadership to build…

We're generally happy to replace bland corporate press release titles, which always bury the lede, with something that gets to the point. But who knows what the point is? "Stack Overflow is forming a moderator council", maybe? Let's try that. It can't be worse than "Scripting the Future of Stack Overflow". Suggestions for better titles are welcome. Try to use representative language from the article if you can find i…

I wasn’t looking for a new title, I was just trying to find the story.

But thank you, this title is way more informative!

Re: Stack Overflow is forming a moderator council

#38

Post by rgoulter »

Macha wrote: post #11
tmpz22 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate how hard it would be for a competitor to come into the market now and attempt to build the same knowledge bank StackOverflow can now gatekeep. We've commercialized data hoarding and segregation... is the end game for StackOverflow to become Elsevier for programming?

The knowledge bank itself is available under creative commons. You can download it here (updated quarterly): https://archive.org/details/stackexchange or query it online here: https://data.stackexchange.com/ At least until current leadership kills it. But it was one of the things Jeff and Joel did to convince the community that that was not their goal, and the previous market leader, experts exchange was fresh in peo…

When googling for stuff I've sometimes come across other sites which make use of StackOverflow questions/answers. It feels tacky.

I don't know the chances of another site killing SO/SE the same way SO killed EE.. but I've noticed recently I visit SO less frequently than e.g. GitHub issues.

Re: Stack Overflow is forming a moderator council

#39

Post by NobodyNada »

sosodev wrote: post #22
dancek wrote: post #10

For those unaware of the context, StackExchange fired a (volunteer) moderator in September causing a wave of moderator resignations. Now in January they fired two Community Managers (ie. employees) and a third CM resigned. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/342039/firing-commu...

I’m not sure how I feel about the ethics of volunteers massively contributing to the growth of a for-profit company. StackExchange wouldn’t be anywhere near as big as they are without its volunteers and yet they only care about their bottom line. Are there any non-profit alternatives?

I used to contribute to Stack Overflow (from around 2014-2017). I did it because it was fun — answering questions was like solving programming puzzles, and moderation tasks were rewarding as well. Eventually, I joined a couple teams of users (called SOBotics and Charcoal [1]) where we wrote bots that used the Stack Exchange API to automate moderation tasks. This was an awesome hobby, and my teammates were a group of really awesome people I considered friends.

At that time, even though I knew SO was a for-profit corporation, it really didn’t feel like one. Nearly all of the staff (including the CEO) were regular users (often since long before they were hired) who were well-respected and made great decisions, and a lot of them hung out on Meta and in chat and were a lot of fun to interact with. (That’s why Shog9 and Robert Catarino’s firing is such a big deal: they were among the few remaining staff members who were from this era and still had this level of trust, respect, and friendship with the community).

My participation tapered off in 2018 because I became busy with school, but I still dropped by every now and then, and I kept up with Meta. Around this time was when the company started deteriorating — at first, we started to notice that they had pretty much stalled on improving moderator tooling (leading to serious growing pains and a lot of the “unfriendliness”). Then, they started making a series of bad decisions [2] which hinted that the company no longer understood or cared about their community. For the most part, everyone wrote these off as just mistakes or unfortunate business decisions, but our patience wore thin after repeated violations. The firing of Monica Cellio was the straw that broke the camel’s back — we realized SO was no longer the lightweight, friendly company it used to be, and a lot of high-profile users left as a result [3].

I haven’t looked much into non-profit alternatives, but a bunch of high-profile users have launched a project called Codidact [4]. We’ll see if it takes off — that’s a pretty lofty goal, but they are some pretty impressive people. I don’t plan to go back to SO, but I might join the Codidact project — after all, I was ok SO because of the community, not the corporation.

[0]: https://sobotics.org/

[1]: https://charcoal-se.org

[2]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/331513/258777

[3]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/333965/258777

[4]: https://codidact.org/

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