A day in the life of a stackoverflow moderator... • Hacker News Board

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

#41

Post by bandushrew » Mon, Nov 25, 2013, 10:34 PM UTC

md224 wrote: post #37

itafroma wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

it is, on the face of it, a weird thing to say.

given english is his second language, I think it is possible he meant one of two things:

(1) he does not think the question will be helpful to other users

(2) he is embarrassed about having his name attached to it.

my money is on (1), although it still seems mildly weird to me.

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

#42

Post by Permit » Mon, Nov 25, 2013, 10:45 PM UTC

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…

Stack Overflow isn't meant to be a special site where everybody is welcome. Joel Spolsky gave a talk[1] about how the most important function of their home page is its ability to drive much of the traffic away.

You may not agree, but in the eyes of most StackOverflow members, a user who posts "I will change my name to Allah Akbar if you revert my question" is generally considered a negative for the community. It is a feature, not a bug, that people like this are driven away.

Also, you seem to really be twisting the facts when you claim the user wants to delete it because they thought it was a dumb question. I'm not sure if you didn't read the logs, but they cited their primary concern as "ok i got my answers, we can delete this post now, i am not helping google users.".

http://vimeo.com/68200924

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

#43

Post by itafroma » Mon, Nov 25, 2013, 11:43 PM UTC

Permit wrote: post #42

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…

Stack Overflow isn't meant to be a special site where everybody is welcome. Joel Spolsky gave a talk[1] about how the most important function of their home page is its ability to drive much of the traffic away. You may not agree, but in the eyes of most StackOverflow members, a user who posts "I will change my name to Allah Akbar if you revert my question" is generally considered a negative for the community. It is a…

You misunderstand the point of my post: it's not merely that this user was driven away, but that the community moderation has run amok on this post over a simple, and easily resolvable problem. There is no reason why:

1. two high-rep users should've engaged in a rapid-fire edit war with a new user

2. the question deserves a -35 score

I'd also argue that there was no reason the user should've been given a 15-year ban (really, 15 years? Even if one concedes a warning or a short-term ban wasn't enough, a month or even a year wasn't enough either?), but I'll agree to disagree on that.

This should be held as an example of what not to do, because this level of overreaction by the community in moderating a single bad post is what drives people nuts with Stack Exchange. It's not necessary, but because of the way moderation is structured on Stack Exchange, it's so damn easy to do.

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

#44

Post by fryguy » Tue, Nov 26, 2013, 12:54 AM UTC

bandushrew wrote: post #41

md224 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

it is, on the face of it, a weird thing to say. given english is his second language, I think it is possible he meant one of two things: (1) he does not think the question will be helpful to other users (2) he is embarrassed about having his name attached to it. my money is on (1), although it still seems mildly weird to me.

Or 3, he wanted others that searched on Google to suffer as he did.

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

#45

Post by kevando » Tue, Nov 26, 2013, 4:36 AM UTC

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.

And what if I'm just jealous I didn't have SO during my CS days and want to punish the kids a bit? Is that so bad?