The Unfriendly Robot: Automatically flagging unwelcoming comments
stackoverflow.blog
The Unfriendly Robot: Automatically flagging unwelcoming comments
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Re: The Unfriendly Robot: Automatically flagging unwelcoming comments
#2Stack Overflow had a great thing for a long, long time. Once upon a time, the Stack Overflow karma score actually reflected one's domain knowledge and community spirit. But, as with anything that becomes successful and measures success comparatively, it attracted the attentions of people who are competitive, smart and a little ruthless. The score itself became the goal for these people, not the actual content.
Unfortunately, via the powers granted through its reputation system, it also rewarded these smart, competitive, a little ruthless people with tools to restrict and control content that others produce. So smart, competitive, a bit ruthless people control content for the rest of us, who just want to ask and answer questions about tech.
So, a sincere good luck with techno-solutions to a deep-seated, cultural problem over there. I sincerely hope it works. It would be nice to have the old Stack Overflow back.
Re: The Unfriendly Robot: Automatically flagging unwelcoming comments
#3The worst part for me is when you ask a hard question and rather than admitting they don't know the answer they decide to close it because they think they have got you on a technicality about the validity of the question.
Or a similar variation, it's a hard problem, and they don't know, so they assume you are a complete idiot and ask you to verify things that were implicit in the question. Like, you said you did X and Y, and it's almost impossible to do those things without doing A and B first, but they give you this patronizing tone saying you should have done A and B first.
Here's another one: you write a decent answer to a question. Someone with a massive score comes along behind you an hour later and takes your answer and elaborates on it a bit. They get the upvote and check, you get a zero. The reason they got the points was because they spend all day gaming Stack Overflow and are happy to take advantage of any way to steal points and so have a high reputation.
I really feel like their data science team is not trying hard enough to find the dyed-in-the-wool pathological sons of bitches that are on Stack Overflow. There are plenty of them on there.
Re: The Unfriendly Robot: Automatically flagging unwelcoming comments
#4The worst part for me is when you ask a hard question and rather than admitting they don't know the answer they decide to close it because they think they have got you on a technicality about the validity of the question. Or a similar variation, it's a hard problem, and they don't know, so they assume you are a complete idiot and ask you to verify things that were implicit in the question. Like, you said you did X an…
The problem is the pathological users ARE the active, participating userbase, the site is built on their input to cater to them and their desires.
Its the same reason that online communities almost inevitably degrade over time, they optimize for the most active, loudest users above everything else, which is not necessarily the path to a better community.
Re: The Unfriendly Robot: Automatically flagging unwelcoming comments
#5Stack Overflow had a great thing for a long, long time. Once upon a time, the Stack Overflow karma score actually reflected one's domain knowledge and community spirit. But, as with anything that becomes successful and measures success comparatively, it attracted the attentions of people who are competitive, smart and a little ruthless. The score itself became the goal for these people, not the actual content. Unfort…
Yep, plenty of ways to be sarcastic, hostile and smarmy without triggering some neural net.
Re: The Unfriendly Robot: Automatically flagging unwelcoming comments
#6When Stack Overflow started, I tried to contribute but never succeeded, there was some kind of chicken-egg issue that prevented any answer to get through, I don't really remember what it was, just gave up since I wasn't interested in karmas enough to jump through those hoops.
So it became a read-only resource for me, fair enough. Now most of the useful information I find is decorated with comments from some moderator or contributor talking shit about the question or the answer. Somehow I feel the unfriendliness directed towards me, as if I should feel ashamed to want the wrong answer to the wrong question. Then I read the first sentence of this article:
We all want Stack Overflow to be a welcoming and friendly place.
I do, actually. But not sure about all.
Re: The Unfriendly Robot: Automatically flagging unwelcoming comments
#7Stack Overflow had a great thing for a long, long time. Once upon a time, the Stack Overflow karma score actually reflected one's domain knowledge and community spirit. But, as with anything that becomes successful and measures success comparatively, it attracted the attentions of people who are competitive, smart and a little ruthless. The score itself became the goal for these people, not the actual content. Unfort…
Yep, plenty of ways to be sarcastic, hostile and smarmy without triggering some neural net.
I had the same thought, but I think this except from the post assuaged some of those concerns:
"We want to make clear here that even though the current version of the robot appears to be performing amazingly well, our human flaggers are just as important as ever. The only reason the robot is able to do as well as it’s doing is because of the 100,000+ flags that humans have raised and moderators have handled. The robot is a way to find things that look like things humans have flagged before, but we don’t think it can identify truly novel modes of unfriendliness. Only the humans in our system can do that. So if you see unfriendliness in the comments, please flag it. You’re helping to make Stack Overflow better."
Re: The Unfriendly Robot: Automatically flagging unwelcoming comments
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, plenty of ways to be sarcastic, hostile and smarmy without triggering some neural net.
I had the same thought, but I think this except from the post assuaged some of those concerns: "We want to make clear here that even though the current version of the robot appears to be performing amazingly well, our human flaggers are just as important as ever. The only reason the robot is able to do as well as it’s doing is because of the 100,000+ flags that humans have raised and moderators have handled. The robo…
Unfriendly comments are the least of their problems. The fundamental problem is their broken reputation system.
Questions are outright closed by people with a high enough karma even if it is outside of their knowledge domain. People who leave helpful feedback after a downvote will receive a retaliatory downvote in turn. People with massive karma will receive upvotes even if their answer is not a good one. To boost karma, it's better to be first than good, in general. New questions are closed and redirected to old questions with outdated answers. Non-native English writers get downvoted for grammatical errors, even if the question is fine. One downvote will result in more, as the mob piles on. Bringing up any of these issues in their "meta" results in downvotes.
So, Stack Overflow will focus on its moderation system and "unfriendly comments" while its entire system encourages a kind of arbitrariness that is itself unfriendly.
Re: The Unfriendly Robot: Automatically flagging unwelcoming comments
#9While I find Stack Overflow very useful, I find it's model very restrictive.
Sometimes you can get more insight on how to solve a problem from a discussion than from an answer. Why and when can be as important as how.
Also, if people dislike your question, even it obeys the rules, it gets down voted. They can dislike your question because they dislike the problem you are going to solve or the way you are trying to do it.
Some comments instead of being related to the question at hand, suggest that you shouldn't solve your problem but instead do things another way. Which can be fine, but doesn't fit well the site format because it doesn't allow discussions.
However, I don't see alternatives. You can ask on reddit but there are not many people willing to answer.
Re: The Unfriendly Robot: Automatically flagging unwelcoming comments
#10More robo-flagging of human interaction based on the faulty axiom that you are somehow in control of how someone else perceives something. They even admit that malice isn't intended.
> The problem is the tone the reader experiences. Most of the time, it doesn’t appear that commenters are actively trying to make their comment condescending, dismissive, or any of the other subtle variations of unwelcoming we see. These are people earnestly trying to help others, even if their tone is off.
What tone the reader experiences and how they deal with it is entirely up to them. I am fine with on a site that abusive language is flagged, but something that is perceived to be unfriendly by a robot. This is just folly.
I certainly won't be contributing anymore. I don't want to be on a site that has a robot flagging human interaction.
EDIT: Abusive language filters usually don't work that well. I put in someone's real name into a system and the system flagged it for "abuse" their surname was "Cummings".
Also the term "faggots" (which in the UK is a meal you can buy in the supermarket) has been censored on social platforms.
https://www.rt.com/uk/468436-google-censors-faggots-peas/
Because guess what the context in which you are using a word is important. So most of theses places can't get abusive filtering right. They won't get this right either.