A large number of Stack Exchange mods resigning over new policies • Hacker News Board

Re: A large number of Stack Exchange mods resigning over new policies

#81

Post by cy_hauser » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 12:58 PM UTC

latk wrote: post #17

jmkni wrote: post #5

Spotted this on the hot question list, totally out of the loop on the latest SE drama, can somebody fill me in?

There is a perpetual tension between those who want SE to be helping everyone, and those who want to curate a helpful resource. People involved with community moderation aspects tend to fall into the latter group. For the last half decade or so SE has progressively abandoned this latter group, leading to a lot of pent-up frustration. Some changes SE has made are sensible (e.g. striving to be more welcoming and more i…

>> There is a perpetual tension between those who want SE to be helping everyone, and those who want to curate a helpful resource.

I never understood this. Why have one or the other instead of both. All questions funnel in on a "everyone" area for a particular type of question. (Junior people can moderate those to gain experience if the senior mods don't want to. This will give them experience, insight, etc.) Even the most repetitive and/or superficial homework question can be answered and not closed as duplicate. (Or at least pointed to the duplicates but not closed until the questioner has accepted a duplicate as an acceptable answer.)

When "good quality" appear or new/unique questions and answers appear they can be refined and moved over into a curated persistent section for future reference. The senior mods can take over at this point to make sure the reference Q&A are as they like.

I always hated that "closed as duplicate" reply especially if I'd already seen the supposed duplicates and didn't think they applied. This approach would allow those to be answered by new people or ignored if nobody wanted to answer.

Re: A large number of Stack Exchange mods resigning over new policies

#82

Post by pjc50 » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 12:59 PM UTC

MrStonedOne wrote: post #29

This is natural selection at work. Stack Exchange has become a frustrating site to use. "Closed as duplicate: different and unrelated question" reopen further explaining the question and how its not related "Closed as duplicate: the first question that was immediately closed with no replies" OR! Google around, find SE link on issue, everybody is arguing about why the user wants to do it that why, convinces them to do…

StackExchange needs a sibling forum.

I know forums are in opposition to everything that SE stands for, but for quite a lot of cases the questioner would benefit more from a back-and-forth, or open-ended discussion, and then at the end of the process if it's been refined then turn it into a question. If not, then let the thread auto-close and maybe even expire into deletion.

Also, any SE equivalent needs to understand the power dynamic between questioners and answerers, and what motivates people to put in the huge volunteer effort on which it's built.

Re: A large number of Stack Exchange mods resigning over new policies

#83

Post by Aeolun » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 1:00 PM UTC

squeaky-clean wrote: post #57

MrStonedOne wrote: post #29

This is natural selection at work. Stack Exchange has become a frustrating site to use. "Closed as duplicate: different and unrelated question" reopen further explaining the question and how its not related "Closed as duplicate: the first question that was immediately closed with no replies" OR! Google around, find SE link on issue, everybody is arguing about why the user wants to do it that why, convinces them to do…

I deleted my account when I had a notification that a 5 year old question of mine was edited to remove a "thanks for any help" at the end. This was after the blog post stating SE had an unfriendliness problem and they would stop doing things like that. Edit: Wow speaking of edits, am I reading this right that Jeff Atwood himself edited the title to remove the word "stealing"?

It seems he does not enjoy being called a thief?

Re: A large number of Stack Exchange mods resigning over new policies

#84

Post by apacheCamel » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 1:01 PM UTC

cujo wrote: post #72

MrStonedOne wrote: post #29

This is natural selection at work. Stack Exchange has become a frustrating site to use. "Closed as duplicate: different and unrelated question" reopen further explaining the question and how its not related "Closed as duplicate: the first question that was immediately closed with no replies" OR! Google around, find SE link on issue, everybody is arguing about why the user wants to do it that why, convinces them to do…

Funny thing, I frequent a few of the SE sites, and the only ones that have this problem are the tech ones.

I feel like there is a lot to be said about this. It could be that a large portion of the tech sector is living up to the stereotypical "arrogant/egotistical/know-it-all" label that we get hit with quite often.

Re: A large number of Stack Exchange mods resigning over new policies

#85

Post by syshum » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 1:02 PM UTC

johannes1234321 wrote: post #27

ianai wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that acceptable? People need to be paid for working.

Volunteering is a common concept in many communities. We have volunteer fire fighters, volunteer paramedics, volunteer librarians, volunteer social worker, volunteer ... Some of these in fields, and sometimes even in close alignment to payed people. In the context of SO there is a community producing Creative Commons (while there was recently a license change making the company less trustworthy) contents to help peop…

Wikipedia and Mozilla were at one time mainly Non-Profits that people volunteered at for the same reason people volunteer at other non-profits, to benefit wider society

Both are turning more and more to be more profit-seeking, (Mozilla more than Wikipedia ) and it is tarnishing their reputations

SE has always been a for-profit business, this makes Volunteering more like Free Labor and less like "doing something good for humanity".

Generally speaking, I do not believe For-Profit business should be allowed to seek Volunteers for their labor, this includes SE, Reddit, etc

If a business model can not pay for labor, then it needs to be a Non-profit Foundation, not a for-profit business

Re: A large number of Stack Exchange mods resigning over new policies

#86

Post by falsedan » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 1:03 PM UTC

aedron wrote: post #47

mellosouls wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the linked post Jeff Atwood is in the comments moaning about the title.

I believe it was also Jeff Atwood who, for the longest time, could not fathom why people did not like being forced to use OpenID to log into Stack Overflow. Like, he could literally not fathom it and agonized in blog posts over his own inability to understand people (he was quite honest about it). Even though they caved on this point, to this day Stack Overflow actively fights new users trying to get in and participa…

Jeff seems to have a lot of trouble empathising with users, especially when they want something that clashes with whatever he has discovered is the 'right' solution. See blocklists in discourse, why people join unions, &c.

Re: A large number of Stack Exchange mods resigning over new policies

#87

Post by jjoonathan » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 1:05 PM UTC

ceejayoz wrote: post #50

rusk wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, the good old "X/Y Problem" [0] Doesn't matter if Y is non-negotiable, or if I've purposely constrained Y, to get a specific answer for a specific technology. How infuriating for a "Questions and Answers" site, to be told when you're asking a question, that the question you're asking is wrong, and that "you should instead have asked ..." I swear to god, the SO mods are the dumbest, most priggish, humourless be…

About 90% of the time it is an XY problem, though. A couple clarifying questions and it turns out the OP really needed something much simpler. For example, people who insist they can’t use a Laravel package because of “performance”, but it turns out they just don’t know how the composer autoloader works.

Maybe you frequent a different sample of questions / answers than I do, because by my estimation it's 10% XY-problem and 90% XY-problem-problem.

Re: A large number of Stack Exchange mods resigning over new policies

#88

Post by Jun8 » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 1:06 PM UTC

ForHackernews wrote: post #73

Jun8 wrote: post #56

My understanding is that the train of events that resulted in mod Monica Cellio’s demodding from SE started with a gender-related complaint tweet ( https://medium.com/@cellio/dear-stack-overflow-we-need-to-ta... ). Companies are now very sensitive to this pattern, esp. true for SE due to the ongoing changes there.

> esp. true for SE due to the ongoing changes there For the benefit of those of us who don't closely follow Stack Overflow meta-drama, can you explain what this is alluding to?

Recent change in management discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21062191 was widely interpreted as getting ready for SE to be sold. At this point any sort of bad publicity would be shunned, especially. of the “it’s not a welcoming community” kind.

Re: A large number of Stack Exchange mods resigning over new policies

#89

Post by crispyambulance » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 1:06 PM UTC

latk wrote: post #17

jmkni wrote: post #5

Spotted this on the hot question list, totally out of the loop on the latest SE drama, can somebody fill me in?

There is a perpetual tension between those who want SE to be helping everyone, and those who want to curate a helpful resource. People involved with community moderation aspects tend to fall into the latter group. For the last half decade or so SE has progressively abandoned this latter group, leading to a lot of pent-up frustration. Some changes SE has made are sensible (e.g. striving to be more welcoming and more i…

    > There is a perpetual tension between those who want SE to be helping everyone, and those who want to curate a helpful resource. ...

This is the core issue and it's really hard to perceive unless you've watched stackexchange sites evolve over the years. There's a sizeable contingent of folks who truly believe in "the mission" of stackexchange and have uncanny strict interpretations of the rules as expressed in the FAQ's. In their minds, it's OK to downvote, close, mark-as-dupe or otherwise harshly dismiss contributions from others, especially new folks, that do not adhere to the strict interpretation of the rules. This is _especially_ evident (and wrong) in sites that feature intrinsically subjective subject matter like Workplace.

The thing is the "curator" people feel really strongly about what they're doing. Obviously, I am on the side of at least trying to help everyone even if that means "the rules" get bent.

Let's not blow this out of proportion. It's NOT "a firing" No one lost their livelihood.

Re: A large number of Stack Exchange mods resigning over new policies

#90

Post by vonmoltke » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 1:07 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #75

MrStonedOne wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as there isn't a push to fix it and prevent it and stop it, and coach around it, the issue doesn't get solved. That sounds like defeatist attitude. Stack Exchange could add a rule forbidding asking why or adding answers that have caveats the question asker already said in op were unacceptable and deal with part of the issue They could also add a system to review, rate, and appeal moderator actions, and penali…

> Stack Exchange could add a rule forbidding asking why .. that would make the outcome significantly more frustrating, as the only way to discover the real requirements is then to post an answer which the questioner regards as wrong.

SE is a collection of question answering sites, not requirements-gathering sites. The network has a borderline-psychotic devotion to the Q&A format. In that light, just answer the question that was presented. Identifying the "real requirements" is out of scope unless the question itself makes no sense.