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Anecdata: I've visited SO over 200 times this month. [1] I know many people are upset with moderation over there, but it works and StackOverflow is more popul

by tarr11 10y ago

Anecdata: I've visited SO over 200 times this month. [1] I know many people are upset with moderation over there, but it works and StackOverflow is more popular than ever. It's not a place to have long ponderous discussions - they have always said this. That's what Medium, Quora, blogs are for. If you want to influence the community, than participate, earn enough points and privileges, and be part of the discussion in Meta. [2] [1] https://myactivity.google.com/item?q=stackoverflow.com https://myactivity.google.com/item?q=stackoverflow.com [2] http://meta.stackoverflow.com/ http://meta.stackoverflow.com/

dionidium 10y ago
Their positions on the core tenets are religious in nature. You're not going to change their minds on meta.
- sklivvz1971 10y ago
  I disagree. I am one of the developers and we listen to meta all the time.
- bhandziuk 10y ago
  While I rarely participate in meta discussions I actively read what's happening and it is very frequent that discussions on meta do result in change to the site in general. It is an effective instrument of change and is often very democratic. Somethings get a big NO from the dev team but you can guess that as a dev yourself not everything is doable/the direction the company is going.
blakeyrat 10y ago
The premise that you need to "earn points and privileges" is the part I disagree with, though. I want a Q&A site where I can ask a question and get an answer without having to waste months doing pointless stuff to get some imaginary Internet Pointzzz attached to my name.
- bhandziuk 10y ago
  Posting on Meta is available once you have 5 rep. You start with 1 so getting to 5 means you get one upvote on one question/answer, or you make two accepted edits. Asking a question can be done with 1 rep (i.e. a brand new user) and you can answer questions anonymously. The only thing which requires any rep is commenting at the barrier is 50 points. http://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges http://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges These barriers seem really low. If you think you need to do months of work to participate that's just false. On the other hand if participation to you means access to more of the moderation tools, site diagnostics (view votes of various sorts), etc. you do need to put your time in.
  - blakeyrat 10y ago
    Yeah; but the problem for me is I only ask difficult questions (easy ones I won't need a Q&A site for), and those are impossible to get answered unless you place a "bounty" on them. And you can't place a "bounty" until you earn the imaginary points. I mean, the real problem, that aside, is I disagree with the entire concept of gamification. The entire premise makes for terrible communities full of rules-lawyering assholes who are only there to earn useless points. Wikipedia's turned into that. StackOverflow's turned into that. It's a bad idea, it didn't work, we should give it up.
    - bhandziuk 10y ago
      Where else can you go to have a difficult question answered? But what's the alternative? Gamification encourages many people to participate, free sites with ads mean more people participate too because paying sucks (though the ads on SE are very non-intrusive I find), allowing the (vocal) community to drive the direction of the site encourages a certain type of participation (because a site which heads in a direction the community doesn't support dies). All of these things generally lead to more questions being answered. What would the ideal site be? If the ideal site is not perfect out of the box then how to you improve it without a meta-like structure? How do you support quality content which allows people to be satisfied with the sites content while having moderation that satisfies appropriate participation? Hacker News has moderators, so does Reddit, people complain about them all the time (more so on Reddit). What can we do to be better here? Not to say you have the answers but these are difficult questions and I think SO gets it more right than the rest.

by tarr11 10y ago

dionidium 10y ago

Their positions on the core tenets are religious in nature. You're not going to change their minds on meta.

sklivvz1971 10y ago
I disagree. I am one of the developers and we listen to meta all the time.
bhandziuk 10y ago
While I rarely participate in meta discussions I actively read what's happening and it is very frequent that discussions on meta do result in change to the site in general. It is an effective instrument of change and is often very democratic. Somethings get a big NO from the dev team but you can guess that as a dev yourself not everything is doable/the direction the company is going.

blakeyrat 10y ago

The premise that you need to "earn points and privileges" is the part I disagree with, though. I want a Q&A site where I can ask a question and get an answer without having to waste months doing pointless stuff to get some imaginary Internet Pointzzz attached to my name.

bhandziuk 10y ago
Posting on Meta is available once you have 5 rep. You start with 1 so getting to 5 means you get one upvote on one question/answer, or you make two accepted edits. Asking a question can be done with 1 rep (i.e. a brand new user) and you can answer questions anonymously. The only thing which requires any rep is commenting at the barrier is 50 points. http://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges http://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges These barriers seem really low. If you think you need to do months of work to participate that's just false. On the other hand if participation to you means access to more of the moderation tools, site diagnostics (view votes of various sorts), etc. you do need to put your time in.
- blakeyrat 10y ago
  Yeah; but the problem for me is I only ask difficult questions (easy ones I won't need a Q&A site for), and those are impossible to get answered unless you place a "bounty" on them. And you can't place a "bounty" until you earn the imaginary points. I mean, the real problem, that aside, is I disagree with the entire concept of gamification. The entire premise makes for terrible communities full of rules-lawyering assholes who are only there to earn useless points. Wikipedia's turned into that. StackOverflow's turned into that. It's a bad idea, it didn't work, we should give it up.
  - bhandziuk 10y ago
    Where else can you go to have a difficult question answered? But what's the alternative? Gamification encourages many people to participate, free sites with ads mean more people participate too because paying sucks (though the ads on SE are very non-intrusive I find), allowing the (vocal) community to drive the direction of the site encourages a certain type of participation (because a site which heads in a direction the community doesn't support dies). All of these things generally lead to more questions being answered. What would the ideal site be? If the ideal site is not perfect out of the box then how to you improve it without a meta-like structure? How do you support quality content which allows people to be satisfied with the sites content while having moderation that satisfies appropriate participation? Hacker News has moderators, so does Reddit, people complain about them all the time (more so on Reddit). What can we do to be better here? Not to say you have the answers but these are difficult questions and I think SO gets it more right than the rest.