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A day in the life of a stackoverflow moderator...

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Re: A day in the life of a stackoverflow moderator...

#31

Post by klodolph »

gorrillamcd wrote: post #26
itafroma wrote: post #12

I think this was supposed to show the crap Stack Overflow power users have to deal with, but I think it more clearly shows some of the worst qualities of the Stack Overflow moderation system. With a large caveat that moderators have the ability to scrub context from a problem question (e.g., comments) and user (e.g., deleting their past submissions), this is what appears to the outside world: * A new user asks what t…

15 years?! I didn't know moderators could set arbitrary dates for a "temporary suspension". A month would be reasonable for a first offense I would think.

Accounts are cheap. Free, in fact. Length of suspension should be related to the severity of the offenses (in this case, vandalism and abusive/offensive speech) and the likelihood to commit additional offenses (in this case, high because the user vandalized the question many times).

Re: A day in the life of a stackoverflow moderator...

#32

Post by Dirlewanger »

aiiane wrote: post #11
kevando wrote: post #9

Amazing post. I feel like CS courses should have requirements that make them take up some of this duty.

Please no. That would be worse than the existing situation; many of the problem cases on SO are CS students.

If anything we need high schools to actually teach how to write effectively and concisely, not fill out a 5 paragraph template for 4 years. Too many kids go into college and coast on writing bullshit and fluff.

Re: A day in the life of a stackoverflow moderator...

#33

Post by klodolph »

iLoch wrote: post #18

I had a moderator change the wording of my writing because they didn't like the way I was doing it, it looked a lot like what was going on here. They revised it such that it partially lost the meaning of what I was saying, but also just didn't come across the way I had intended to write it - so I changed it back. Then they changed it back. Then I changed it back again. Then they changed it back. Finally I changed the…

I doubt it was a moderator that edited your post. Moderators are unlikely to engage in edit wars because it would be easier for them to lock the post.

Your post may have been edited by just another user. Look for a diamond ♦ in the username. The diamond indicates that the user is a moderator. However, any user with 2,000 rep or more can edit posts. There are a lot of 2k rep users on Stack Overflow! Some of them are teenagers (look at the profiles).

Re: A day in the life of a stackoverflow moderator...

#34

Post by [deleted] »

itafroma wrote: post #12

I think this was supposed to show the crap Stack Overflow power users have to deal with, but I think it more clearly shows some of the worst qualities of the Stack Overflow moderation system. With a large caveat that moderators have the ability to scrub context from a problem question (e.g., comments) and user (e.g., deleting their past submissions), this is what appears to the outside world: * A new user asks what t…

[deleted]

Re: A day in the life of a stackoverflow moderator...

#37

Post by md224 »

itafroma wrote: post #21
chrisaycock wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you've described is not at all what happened. > Still thinking it was a dumb question and not knowing how Stack Overflow works, attempts to blank out the question and request deletion. No, the user rewrote his entire post to ok i got my answers, we can delete this post now, i am not helping google users. He then added IF YOU GUYS ROLL BACK AGAIN, I AM CHANGING MY NICK TO " ALLAH AKBAR " AND YOU WILL ALL LOOK LIK…

> The post was unlocked a week later by Stack Overflow's robot ("Community"), automatically. Thanks, corrected. > In fact, I'm willing to wager that the user flagged the question immediately but it took an hour for one of the moderators to get around to it. I would hope so, and I thank you for calling this line out, because I forgot one imporant action. As a moderator yourself, you know that the appropriate action on…

> ok i got my answers, we can delete this post now, i am not helping google users

This is a really weird thing to say. Is this person saying that he/she is so ideologically opposed to Google that they refuse to leave any helpful information in an indexable location anywhere in the entirety of the World Wide Web?

Re: A day in the life of a stackoverflow moderator...

#38

Post by chc »

iLoch wrote: post #18

I had a moderator change the wording of my writing because they didn't like the way I was doing it, it looked a lot like what was going on here. They revised it such that it partially lost the meaning of what I was saying, but also just didn't come across the way I had intended to write it - so I changed it back. Then they changed it back. Then I changed it back again. Then they changed it back. Finally I changed the…

> The mods seem a little power hungry. If you're a SO mod, I'm sure you've got better things to do than correct tiny grammatical quirks that make people who they are - try focusing on the bigger issues.

It was probably another user instead of a mod — Stack Overflow is a weird combination of a forum and a wiki, so people are allowed to fix each other's posts.

Besides that, though, I think you should consider the possibility that you were also in the wrong. Just because their edit lost meaning doesn't mean it didn't also add something useful. Instead of reverting, I think a better approach would have been to add those meaningful aspects back in and call attention to them, since they obviously weren't clear to everyone. If a hard revert was really necessary, you could have just explained why.

Re: A day in the life of a stackoverflow moderator...

#39

Post by MrZongle2 »

This must be the part of the day where the moderators aren't closing useful questions due to subjectivity.

I really wish they could just have a "subjective" flag and let users filter out those posts as they see fit. Some of the closed-subjective material is quite useful, as it contains the hows and whys behind developers choosing a framework or widget or technical solution over another.

Re: A day in the life of a stackoverflow moderator...

#40

Post by denzil_correa »

landr0id wrote: post #30
denzil_correa wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did some analysis and I found out that roughly 1/8 of the delete questions on Stackoverflow are deleted by the author of the question.

Do you know the context of those though? I delete my questions from time-to-time because they're very specific to my setup or they end up being something really basic like a missing semicolon or a typo somewhere.

It would be difficult to measure the context. I discovered that most users(not all) who delete are those who fear -ve votes which in turn effects reputation points i.e. there'd be a higher probability of an author deleting a question if the question has attracted some -ve votes.
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