What to do with the “rm -rf” hoax question • Hacker News Board

Re: What to do with the “rm -rf” hoax question

#21

Post by cookiecaper » Sun, Apr 17, 2016, 3:06 PM UTC

This shows the problem with the way Stack Exchange doles out moderation abilities (automatic once you hit a certain karma threshold). You get a lot of people who want to use these newfound powers. That's understandable, for sure. The issue is that in their eagerness to be a good mod and help clean up and get to do some cool moderatory stuff, they get overzealous and it results in hamfisted, overbroad moderation because everyone is looking for a reason to close the question. The higher principle behind the community gets lost in a sea of technicalities.

Stack Exchange could improve their guidance and closure templates to help curb the habit of closing useful stuff all the time, so part of it is an identity issue that SE sites have within themselves, but it's compounded and exacerbated by a lot of fresh faces looking for a reason to stop the discussion so they can click their brand-new "lock thread" button.

Re: What to do with the “rm -rf” hoax question

#22

Post by nevir » Sun, Apr 17, 2016, 3:18 PM UTC

saulr wrote: post #15

tonyle wrote: post #13

Reminds me of this post. Poster created a question and immediately answered it with his own link. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9751207/how-can-i-use-got...

It's not against the rules to answer your own question, as far as I'm aware. If the question is one that other users may ask, and you have an answer, I don't see what's wrong with posting questions and immediately answering them.

It's encouraged, even

Re: What to do with the “rm -rf” hoax question

#23

Post by softawre » Sun, Apr 17, 2016, 3:26 PM UTC

mpdehaan2 wrote: post #12

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #7

Does it matter that it didn't happen, if it could happen? Sounds like a serious issue.

Not so easily. I wrote Ansible, but no longer work on it. There are numerous problems with the hoax. (A) the user skipped --no-preserve-root to the command, if he really wanted to delete /, he would need to try harder on a modern distro, because the rm command would stop the attempt (B) ansible by default fails on undefined variables, meaning it would never execute the command (C) Jinja template variables are actuall…

Hey Michael, weird to see another ININ guy on HN. We never met but I was happy to hear we hired you. Good luck.

Re: What to do with the “rm -rf” hoax question

#24

Post by mediumdeviation » Sun, Apr 17, 2016, 3:31 PM UTC

cookiecaper wrote: post #21

This shows the problem with the way Stack Exchange doles out moderation abilities (automatic once you hit a certain karma threshold). You get a lot of people who want to use these newfound powers. That's understandable, for sure. The issue is that in their eagerness to be a good mod and help clean up and get to do some cool moderatory stuff, they get overzealous and it results in hamfisted, overbroad moderation becau…

This is an extremely popular narrative that seems to pop up every time a Stack Exchange post geta onto the HN or proggit front page.

The problem with this narrative is that it is almost never substantiated. So instead, let me posit an alternative hypothesis, as someone who has gotten his hands dirty on the various Meta sites:

The reason most people feel that SE has a moderation problem is because the moderation process on SE is significantly more transparent than almost any sites out there. And because of this transparency, people find it easier to point blame at these users.

The transparency part I hope is obvious - when a post get moderated on other sites, the full edit history and name of the moderators involved are almost never revealed. The close reasons are in general decided upon by the users themselves. Individual moderation decisions can be contested and debated on the Meta sites, and there are checks on almost every level.

In other words, the moderation process is already fairer than most other sites, where the moderation process is essentially a black box with no means of appeal. But people don't like it because the content which elsewhere would have been swept quietly under the rug is still visible and indexable.

Re: What to do with the “rm -rf” hoax question

#25

Post by gruez » Sun, Apr 17, 2016, 3:32 PM UTC

simula67 wrote: post #5

Kiro wrote: post #2

What was the hoax exactly?

This question http://serverfault.com/questions/587102/monday-morning-mista... was posted to server fault. It has since shown to be a marketing tactic ( http://www.repubblica.it/tecnologia/2016/04/15/news/cancella... ). The author did not delete his server, merely claimed to do so to get attention. Server fault community is now indignant about using their community ( which is for answering real questions ) as a decept…

Can you elaborate on what the marketing tactic was supposed to promote?

Re: What to do with the “rm -rf” hoax question

#26

Post by 746F7475 » Sun, Apr 17, 2016, 3:43 PM UTC

simula67 wrote: post #5

Kiro wrote: post #2

What was the hoax exactly?

This question http://serverfault.com/questions/587102/monday-morning-mista... was posted to server fault. It has since shown to be a marketing tactic ( http://www.repubblica.it/tecnologia/2016/04/15/news/cancella... ). The author did not delete his server, merely claimed to do so to get attention. Server fault community is now indignant about using their community ( which is for answering real questions ) as a decept…

So were they trying to promote the hosting platform or what? I doubt Ubuntu 12.04 needs marketing at this point.

Re: What to do with the “rm -rf” hoax question

#27

Post by kazinator » Sun, Apr 17, 2016, 3:46 PM UTC

It's not a "hoax" in any sense. Just a plain lie. A hoax has to be fairly large-scale and affect a lot of people (negatively). The original question contained no hyper-links at all. (Ironically, one was inserted by subsequent editors).

The question is plausible. I once deleted a /lib directory due to a misspelled variable in a script! Recovery consisted of copying libs from another installation of the same OS.

ServerFault appears to complaining that the question is generating traffic --- to ServerFault!?

If we look at the user's account, it's clean. Only through a LinkedIn reference do we see that "bleemboy" is Marco Marsala. Like, what fraction of visitors are clicking through all that?

Re: What to do with the “rm -rf” hoax question

#28

Post by andrelaszlo » Sun, Apr 17, 2016, 3:53 PM UTC

brador wrote: post #11

A question was asked, a problem was posed, and it got helpful replies and answers for someone looking for a solution. It's origin should not matter.

It was originally closed as a duplicate, the other question had more detail and mentioned the --no-preserve-root flag.

Now it has also been merged with this question. The helpful replies are still there, but the incentive to use the Stack Exchange sites for other purposes is reduced. I think this was a nice solution in this case.

Re: What to do with the “rm -rf” hoax question

#29

Post by twic » Sun, Apr 17, 2016, 3:53 PM UTC

nevir wrote: post #22

saulr wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not against the rules to answer your own question, as far as I'm aware. If the question is one that other users may ask, and you have an answer, I don't see what's wrong with posting questions and immediately answering them.

It's encouraged, even

Can I answer my own question?

Yes! Stack Exchange has always explicitly encouraged users to answer their own questions. If you have a question that you already know the answer to, and you would like to document that knowledge in public so that others (including yourself) can find it later, it's perfectly okay to ask and answer your own question on a Stack Exchange site.

http://stackoverflow.com/help/self-answer

Re: What to do with the “rm -rf” hoax question

#30

Post by cookiecaper » Sun, Apr 17, 2016, 3:58 PM UTC

mediumdeviation wrote: post #24

cookiecaper wrote: post #21

This shows the problem with the way Stack Exchange doles out moderation abilities (automatic once you hit a certain karma threshold). You get a lot of people who want to use these newfound powers. That's understandable, for sure. The issue is that in their eagerness to be a good mod and help clean up and get to do some cool moderatory stuff, they get overzealous and it results in hamfisted, overbroad moderation becau…

This is an extremely popular narrative that seems to pop up every time a Stack Exchange post geta onto the HN or proggit front page. The problem with this narrative is that it is almost never substantiated. So instead, let me posit an alternative hypothesis, as someone who has gotten his hands dirty on the various Meta sites: The reason most people feel that SE has a moderation problem is because the moderation proce…

I disagree. Most other forums do not lock or hide useful threads that are popular, gaining substantive replies, and generating meaningful discussion. In the more traditional moderation perspective, moderators have incentive to keep active discussions alive, because they're usually considered staff and they want to generate traffic. With StackExchange, there is no vested interest from the moderating audience, they just want to click buttons; there is little or no incentive to ask about the macro-level effects a moderation action may have on the site.