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What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

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Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#491

Post by ggregoire »

sackfield wrote: post #427

One thing I wonder, if you look at the comments here it is clear the moderation and the general hostility of the site was a big reason why a lot of people left or didn't engage with it. Yet, I can't recall SO doing anything about this, and its confusing to me why. Was it: a) They don't acknowledge this was a problem. b) They are unwilling to tackle this problem. c) They are unable to tackle this problem. I'd love to…

Might be a vocal minority. I used to visit SO every day, several times a day, for like 10+ years, got so much value from it and would not have changed anything to the site. "AI Overview" in Google completely killed it tho and I don't really see what they could do about it other than completely change the site into something else. RIP.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#492

Post by chuckadams »

zahlman wrote: post #466
jay_kyburz wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The gamification was a key reason the site became popular, but as the site grew, the rules and game mechanics did not evolve. An edit that made a response worse should have knocked the mod down so that they were unable to mod any more. The quality of the edit should have been determined by the original author. "Did this edit make your question better?" Moderators should have been ranked and scored based on their abil…

> An edit that made a response worse should have knocked the mod down so that they were unable to mod any more. Literally everyone on the site is permitted to propose an edit, and everyone with at least 2000 reputation can make unilateral edits. The proposals are approved by a 2 out of 3 majority of random unilateral-edit-privileged users. None of this is considered "moderation" and is not done by "mods". Of millions…

> The overwhelming majority of people who came to the site wanted the site to be something that it was fundamentally not trying to be

Message received I guess, seeing as how the overwhelming majority left.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#493

Post by jerrac »

My perspective: Stack Overflow was started to be a documentation site, but was implemented as a Q/A site. And that doomed it from the start.

If someone wants to get help, and they end up on Stack Overflow, the structure looks like a Q/A site, and they treat it that way. The people "in the know" then accuse them of being "bad" for posting a question to a documentation site. Combine that with the gamification, and it had to turn into the toxic mess that it did.

When I first heard of the gamification method of moderation, I thought it was a really good idea. But, over the years, it has proven to be a means to enforce an echo chamber, rather than a way to filter out bad posts. I have yet to find a site (HN included), where that isn't true.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#494

Post by [deleted] »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #435
webnrrd2k wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re: quis custodiet ipsos custodes... Slashdot has a meta-moderation setup where random users (with at least a minimum tenure and rating on the site) would get to vote on the quality of the moderation for randomly selected posts. I still think that this has a lot of potential for improving moderation, even if it's just used as a way of ferriting out problematic moderation.

Yeah, I really like Slashdot's approach to both regular and meta moderation. I don't understand why it never caught on elsewhere.

[deleted]

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#495

Post by DrewADesign »

zahlman wrote: post #464
kstrauser wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I reverted nearly every single edit to my answers other than obvious typos. If I’d have meant something other than what I said, I’d have said it. You want to see your own words on the page? Write an answer of your own. Lordy, that use to piss me off most fiercely. I don’t want someone else’s words attributed to me.

It is taken very seriously in Stack Overflow editing policy that edits are not supposed to go against the author's apparent intent. But it does involve removing a lot of things that you might want the answer to say, but don't meet the guidelines for what answers are supposed to contain. When you join the site, you agree to Terms and Conditions that, among other things, grant a Creative Commons license to the communit…

But the points system was fundamentally inextricable from the site’s operation, and the officiousness and arrogance it rewarded meant it could never be as good as anybody hoped it would be. The people making the content decisions were often misguided, and vastly less qualified than the authors they meddled with… but were rewarded for their actions all the same.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#496

Post by DrewADesign »

Chris_Newton wrote: post #437
CoastalCoder wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I really like Slashdot's approach to both regular and meta moderation. I don't understand why it never caught on elsewhere.

The big downside of the moderation system on Slashdot is that you can’t both participate in a discussion and moderate at the same time. I want people who are interested and well informed on a subject doing both in the same discussion! Meta-moderation was an interesting idea, though they seemed to have stopped promoting it much by the time I stopped posting there often. I’m not convinced it’s as effective as having a…

> The big downside of the moderation system on Slashdot is that you can’t both participate in a discussion and moderate at the same time. I want people who are interested and well informed on a subject doing both in the same discussion!

I get that, but moderation points carried a lot more weight than they do most places because a randomly code chosen subset of users would only get like 5 points… so you had to choose carefully where you used them. Since it wasn’t super common to get mod points, it’s not like you were limited often.

And the users on that site, frankly, could be downright feral in its heyday, let alone now. I think it needed more structure, not less. If there was even one person that would clean up the garbage, maybe the discussion would be civil enough to allow that. They can’t even be arsed to remove swastika ascii art half the time. That’s what happens when you address fundamentally human problems with purely technical solutions.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#498

Post by DrewADesign »

zahlman wrote: post #460
DrewADesign wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their rules, (I believe unintentionally) give iron-fisted fiefdom rulers a toolbox of justifications to control and alienate under the guise of protecting the quality of the site data. I honestly don’t even think most of the control freak mods could objectively judge the propriety of their actions because it was all encouraged by the rules. (And I do not think this was universal among the mods, but it was certainly e…

> Their rules, (I believe unintentionally) give iron-fisted fiefdom rulers a toolbox of justifications to control and alienate under the guise of protecting the quality of the site data. That isn't what happens. I know many, many people believe it to be what happens, but I know from years of seeing the process on the inside that it's absolutely not what happens in the overwhelming majority of cases. The "quality of t…

Mod vs non-mod-user-with-edit-privileges is a semantic difference from a user perspective. Nobody gives a shit what the internal labeling system looks like or hierarchy among the people with edit privileges. I’m not going to litigate my case in front of a clique of other officious hall monitors just for the privilege of making that site better. I don’t care if it was against the rules for me to be annoyed by their obnoxiousness, or what their exact role was in the organizational structure. I tried, but it ended up being a completely obnoxious experience because of a user with advanced privileges, and so you lost me.

I was the only one with formal education and a professional background consistently answering, and frankly, that site needed my expertise a hell of a lot more than I needed to share it— and they failed to provide a reasonable forum to do that despite being its sole purpose. If the point system actually represented expertise, it might have worked. I’m fine with being scrutinized by a peer or superior… But it didn’t go down like that.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#499

Post by dalyons »

zahlman wrote: post #474
xeromal wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who came into the industry in college, the problem with SO was simply that it was too hard to ask a question. They were up your ass about minutia that really didn't matter. Good riddance and can't wait to visit the site and see an EOL static page.

> As someone who came into the industry in college, the problem with SO was simply that it was too hard to ask a question. That's because you were intended to use the site like GP describes, and not by asking simply because you want to know something. > They were up your ass about minutia that really didn't matter. What you consider "minutia" were critically important, because the entire point was to optimize for GP'…

and how did that work out? the site is dead now because of it

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#500

Post by cindyllm »

DrewADesign wrote: post #498
zahlman wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Their rules, (I believe unintentionally) give iron-fisted fiefdom rulers a toolbox of justifications to control and alienate under the guise of protecting the quality of the site data. That isn't what happens. I know many, many people believe it to be what happens, but I know from years of seeing the process on the inside that it's absolutely not what happens in the overwhelming majority of cases. The "quality of t…

Mod vs non-mod-user-with-edit-privileges is a semantic difference from a user perspective. Nobody gives a shit what the internal labeling system looks like or hierarchy among the people with edit privileges. I’m not going to litigate my case in front of a clique of other officious hall monitors just for the privilege of making that site better. I don’t care if it was against the rules for me to be annoyed by their ob…

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