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Disclaimer: I work in the Q&A team at Stack Overflow. What people don't understand is that SO serves literally all developers. No matter what choices we make t

by sklivvz1971 10y ago

Disclaimer: I work in the Q&A team at Stack Overflow. What people don't understand is that SO serves literally all developers. No matter what choices we make there will be upset people. Do we reduce moderation? Help vampires take over. Do we keep moderation as is? People complain we are too strict (or not enough). Do we allow only English? We are elitist. Do we allow SO in other languages? We are fragmenting the community. After a few years, I've heard it all.

Eupolemos 10y ago
What do you mean by "vampires"? I have an interest in forums, but I'm not familiar with that "category".
- sklivvz1971 10y ago
  People that post a whole program that does not work and ask the community to fix it for them... "Give me teh codez..." etc
  - Eupolemos 10y ago
    Ah, thank you.
- discreditable 10y ago
  Help Vampires are users who incessantly ask simple and/or previously-answered questions and provide nothing of value to the community. Over time, they can drive valuable contributors away. http://slash7.com/2006/12/22/vampires/ http://slash7.com/2006/12/22/vampires/
  - DanBC 10y ago
    And here's the meta discussion: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19665/the-help-vampire-problem http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19665/the-help-vampi...
  - exstudent2 10y ago
    That post (aside from being overly juvenile) is pure speculation and not backed by any sort of data that would suggest that "help vampires" impact the larger community. It's an extremely condescending and unprofessional term to refer to your less experienced users. It really betrays the core problem with the SO staff. They've gone moderation mad and see the user base as the enemy.
    - the8472 10y ago
      They are real. The unwillingness or inability to do some basic research or mental flexibility to adjust generic guidelines to their particular case (maybe 1 step out of 5 needs to be skipped!) combined with their persistence makes them quite frustrating and an outsized time consumption. The guy who only needs a single link to the right tutorial is easy to deal with and makes all sides happy. The guy who asks a question because he didn't even bother to read the 5-page beginner's tutorial (you know because he comes back after 1-2 minutes) where answer somewhere further down... well... after seeing your 50th or 100th of that kind you just want to yell at them. Others expect you to fix their pastebinned code for them and do not take prose for an answer. They don't want to understand what's going on and what they did wrong, they just want you to do it for them.
      - exstudent2 10y ago
        Even if this behavior is real, the term is condescending and I see a ton of speculation about the impact of this type of thing, zero data.
        the8472 10y ago
        > the term is condescending It perfectly encapsulates how those people are perceived. They drain the fun out of helping others. Playing language police is unlikely to gain you any more ears from people who feel drained by the vampires. > ton of speculation about the impact of this type of thing, zero data. Do you expect them to have a positive impact that would increase if moderation were decreased?
StreamBright 10y ago
Absolutely. On the top of that you have very different communities. If you ask a question about something in OCaml or in Javascript your experience will be very different. The only thing I don't like is the new user questions that cannot be answered, usually down voted very fast though.
dandare 10y ago
> No matter what choices we make there will be upset people. Sure, I have no idea what you have to deal with on a daily basis and in the end the content is mostly helpful so you are probably doing it right. But in more than few occasions I have been treated like a dirty beggar/shoplifter/moron/(you name it) for actually asking a question (or answering one)! Yes I need you and yes I owe you a lot - but I don't like you. And I won't root for you when you will be an underdog and when there will be equal alternative I will switch and never look back.
- EpicEng 10y ago
  And I'm sure you'll have the same experience elsewhere. Once a site like SO gets large enough to be really useful to a lot of people you're going to also have to deal with an influx of the type of users you don't like. I don't know how you solve that problem.
  - dandare 10y ago
    It has nothing to do with size. The TSA staff in the post communist country where I come from are jerks and they roll their eyes every time someone makes a mistake. But TSA staff at most large international airports is trained to understand that people will make mistakes no matter what and that their role is not to move trays but to help people. SO simply never prioritised helping people over providing them with correct technical answers so it is only natural that some of the mods beehive like knowitall-bully-jerks.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - marcosdumay 10y ago
    > I don't know how you solve that problem. Not replacing it with a single site, with a single community and centralized moderation can help a lot.
    - EpicEng 10y ago
      But you can't control that, it could only happen organically, and, well, it hasn't.
exstudent2 10y ago
> Do we reduce moderation? Help vampires take over. Every moderator on every site will tell you this; without this narrative they wouldn't exist. Is there any proof that this is the case though? To me SO is super useful with ~20% of great threads killed for being off topic. Voting puts good topic on top, no need for administrator intervention.
- sklivvz1971 10y ago
  On top of what? Help vampires waste answerers time, not readers time. Which is why they vote to close. No one wants to browse 200 lines of code to find the missing semicolon.
  - exstudent2 10y ago
    "Help vampires" aka people with a question that's been answered, are only a problem if you don't have proper search tools to show that a question has already been asked (or answered). If you provide those, and people still ask, maybe their question actually is different. If you provide similar question tools for answerers, let them link to the other question/answers but there's no value in closing the question. That's just hostile and kills the opportunity to generate actual content. Also, let's be real. It's not the marking dupes that's problem it's all the "off topic" closures. Side note: you work at SO and call your users "help vampires". I think that elitist attitude is a huge part of the problem we're discussing here.
    - sklivvz1971 10y ago
      Help vampires: people that ask questions which have no value other than themselves. Duplicate questions are not "help vampires" by any means. This is a good example of that: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/30721824/near-syntax-error http://stackoverflow.com/questions/30721824/near-syntax-erro... Side note: don't pass judgement on stuff or people you don't know. It's quite insulting.
      - exstudent2 10y ago
enraged_camel 10y ago
Subjective moderation is a major problem. You know, some moderator deciding that a question is "off-topic" or "opinion-based" and just closing the thread. It really puts a damper on people's motivation to ask questions or provide answers.
- smcl 10y ago
  Nearly every SO issue I've viewed over the last few months has been closed as "off-topic" or some other "not welcome here" reason (I don't know what they are). I was joking about it with friends and they said the same. It makes me think of the wikipedia "deletionists" and I wonder what kind of contributions they would be happy with.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
shkkmo 10y ago
I'm not impressed by this response to some very valid criticisms. > No matter what choices we make there will be upset people. Of course no matter what you do, people will complain. This doesn't this this a valid reason to dismiss criticism out of hand without engaging with the complaints. The correct response is to look for ways to address the very real problems that are being brought up in a way that increases the value the site provides to as many of your users as possible. > Do we allow only english? Do we allow SO in other languages? Make questions and answers be done in english to avoid fragmentation, but perhaps you need a community translation service to translate valuable questions and answers to other languages to increase the availability of this knowledge to those who don't speak english? > Do we reduce moderation? Do we keep moderation as is? Perhaps you can introduce a mechanism to sideline 'help vampire' questions, but still allow new users to build up reputation (currently very hard) by assisting with or improving those questions. Many of SO's problems do not have simple or easy solutions, that doesn't mean that it isn't worthwhile to look for them.
- sklivvz1971 10y ago
  I am not dismissing anything, and I am, instead quite worried. I am sorry that you had the wrong impression. What I meant to say is that handling such a large site is like playing whack-a-mole. Seeing problems popping up is not a symptom of decline. Is a symptom of size.
  - shkkmo 10y ago
    Ah, thanks for the clarification. The site itself may not be in decline, but I am worried it may head the same direction as Wikipedia (successful, but losing active contributors.)
  - WhitneyLand 10y ago
    I hope you're learning some lessons here. When addressing a group of your users who have concerns: 1) Never start out saying "What you don't understand is...". Instead try "Here are some of the challenges we face..." 2) Never say "Im sorry you had the wrong impression...". Instead try "I'm sorry if I miscommunicated..." I know you are not the PR guy. And it's nice you are here because people do appreciate staff commenting. Just trying to help you get a better reaction.
ak217 10y ago
The truth is that you've managed to piss off and alienate a lot of people in pursuit of... something, and when a new community platform gains critical mass, we will take the content and jump ship happily. To change this, you could try publicly acknowledging the issues, encouraging people (especially moderators) to be less pedantic and nicer, and rolling back some of the most egregious abuse by the little Q&A tyrants.
- gotofritz 10y ago
  I don't know what you are on about. I am not pissed off with SO, nor do I know anyone who is, and I certainly have no intention to go somewhere else, especially since there is no saying the same problems will not occur there
  - kaffeemitsahne 10y ago
    Some people in this thread are saying SO's issues are inevitable in a community of that scale, but is it really true? Is it inevitable that two different questions with different answers will be marked duplicates of each other, for example?
    - gotofritz 10y ago
      I don't see the problem, since you can jump to the other question, it means all new answers will only happen in one place. Sure it can be improved, but it's not something that bothers me in practice TBH
      - reitanqild 10y ago
        It seems to me you aree providing a perfect example here: From what I can see you did not read the post you answered to (Is it inevitable that two different questions with different answers will be marked duplicates of each other, for example?), yet you hand out the answer like the ones we criticise for rubber stamping "duplicate" etc.
ddebernardy 10y ago
You may have heard it all, but what SO has chiefly achieved IMO is to drive users who regularly answer questions away from the site. If you've a moment to check the data, I'd be curious to see the % of users who answer 5x more questions than they ask, and the same for 10x, 25x, 50x, and 100x. Then look at what their respective activity is in terms of answers provided over time per individual and overall. I'd be surprised if these numbers haven't each dropped significantly in the past 5 years, except perhaps the overall/total activity of high answer:question ratio (but then I'd expect the answer:question ratio to have materially dropped).
user5994461 10y ago
> Disclaimer: I work in the Q&A team at Stack Overflow. In that case, I have a serious question for you: What's your plan for refreshing the site on the long term? Lemme explain. The "community" is actively closing new questions as "duplicate" if anything similar is already present. At the same time, the old answer (that all duplicates are redirecting to) is often locked down for various reasons. The blocking prevents to update or add new answers. Currently, many major questions are redirecting to one of the first answers from 3-6 years ago, when the site was relatively new. The provided answers are rotting over time. How do you intend to prevent that?
- sklivvz1971 10y ago
  > How do you intend to prevent that? Very very few posts are actually uneditable at all, and editing is open to all users (some need approval). If a post is locked and outdated it's likely that the question was locked because it was the kind of question that does not provide long-lasting answers (for example a software recommendation list).
  - twblalock 10y ago
    That solution clearly isn't working. You need to come up with something better, or SO is going to become a graveyard of programming best practices from the year 2012.
  - Mithaldu 10y ago
    > editing is open to all users (some need approval). Technically true, factually false, since correctness of an edit does not trump "spirit of the poster".
  - winteriscoming 10y ago
    Given that a voting system is in place, why not let the duplicate stay open and just mark it as a duplicate and link it to the other thread? People who don't like the new thread can down vote it and people who do want to contribute meaningful replies can still do and be upvoted if it adds value. I don't see how this might affect SEO in any bad way than the current scheme does.
Mithaldu 10y ago
You could at the very least make it your mission statement to provide correct answers, and remind all of your moderators of this, instead of having them maintain the "spirit of the poster" on answers that are wrong and on locked questions.
- shagie 10y ago
  Alas, all attempts at answering a question are deemed valuable by some contingent of the active user and diamond moderation base. Correct has nothing to do with it. There is no mechanism for removal of incorrect answers other than the person being too embarrassed having it still visible and deleting it. One has to hope that the best and correct answers get up voted.
sedatk 10y ago
Do you mean it's only a matter of preference rather than limited resources?

Eupolemos 10y ago

What do you mean by "vampires"? I have an interest in forums, but I'm not familiar with that "category".

sklivvz1971 10y ago
People that post a whole program that does not work and ask the community to fix it for them... "Give me teh codez..." etc
- Eupolemos 10y ago
  Ah, thank you.
discreditable 10y ago
Help Vampires are users who incessantly ask simple and/or previously-answered questions and provide nothing of value to the community. Over time, they can drive valuable contributors away. http://slash7.com/2006/12/22/vampires/ http://slash7.com/2006/12/22/vampires/
- DanBC 10y ago
  And here's the meta discussion: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19665/the-help-vampire-problem http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19665/the-help-vampi...
- exstudent2 10y ago
  That post (aside from being overly juvenile) is pure speculation and not backed by any sort of data that would suggest that "help vampires" impact the larger community. It's an extremely condescending and unprofessional term to refer to your less experienced users. It really betrays the core problem with the SO staff. They've gone moderation mad and see the user base as the enemy.
  - the8472 10y ago
    They are real. The unwillingness or inability to do some basic research or mental flexibility to adjust generic guidelines to their particular case (maybe 1 step out of 5 needs to be skipped!) combined with their persistence makes them quite frustrating and an outsized time consumption. The guy who only needs a single link to the right tutorial is easy to deal with and makes all sides happy. The guy who asks a question because he didn't even bother to read the 5-page beginner's tutorial (you know because he comes back after 1-2 minutes) where answer somewhere further down... well... after seeing your 50th or 100th of that kind you just want to yell at them. Others expect you to fix their pastebinned code for them and do not take prose for an answer. They don't want to understand what's going on and what they did wrong, they just want you to do it for them.
    - exstudent2 10y ago
      Even if this behavior is real, the term is condescending and I see a ton of speculation about the impact of this type of thing, zero data.
      - the8472 10y ago
        > the term is condescending It perfectly encapsulates how those people are perceived. They drain the fun out of helping others. Playing language police is unlikely to gain you any more ears from people who feel drained by the vampires. > ton of speculation about the impact of this type of thing, zero data. Do you expect them to have a positive impact that would increase if moderation were decreased?

StreamBright 10y ago

Absolutely. On the top of that you have very different communities. If you ask a question about something in OCaml or in Javascript your experience will be very different. The only thing I don't like is the new user questions that cannot be answered, usually down voted very fast though.

dandare 10y ago

> No matter what choices we make there will be upset people. Sure, I have no idea what you have to deal with on a daily basis and in the end the content is mostly helpful so you are probably doing it right. But in more than few occasions I have been treated like a dirty beggar/shoplifter/moron/(you name it) for actually asking a question (or answering one)! Yes I need you and yes I owe you a lot - but I don't like you. And I won't root for you when you will be an underdog and when there will be equal alternative I will switch and never look back.

EpicEng 10y ago
And I'm sure you'll have the same experience elsewhere. Once a site like SO gets large enough to be really useful to a lot of people you're going to also have to deal with an influx of the type of users you don't like. I don't know how you solve that problem.
- dandare 10y ago
  It has nothing to do with size. The TSA staff in the post communist country where I come from are jerks and they roll their eyes every time someone makes a mistake. But TSA staff at most large international airports is trained to understand that people will make mistakes no matter what and that their role is not to move trays but to help people. SO simply never prioritised helping people over providing them with correct technical answers so it is only natural that some of the mods beehive like knowitall-bully-jerks.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- marcosdumay 10y ago
  > I don't know how you solve that problem. Not replacing it with a single site, with a single community and centralized moderation can help a lot.
  - EpicEng 10y ago
    But you can't control that, it could only happen organically, and, well, it hasn't.

exstudent2 10y ago

> Do we reduce moderation? Help vampires take over. Every moderator on every site will tell you this; without this narrative they wouldn't exist. Is there any proof that this is the case though? To me SO is super useful with ~20% of great threads killed for being off topic. Voting puts good topic on top, no need for administrator intervention.

sklivvz1971 10y ago
On top of what? Help vampires waste answerers time, not readers time. Which is why they vote to close. No one wants to browse 200 lines of code to find the missing semicolon.
- exstudent2 10y ago
  "Help vampires" aka people with a question that's been answered, are only a problem if you don't have proper search tools to show that a question has already been asked (or answered). If you provide those, and people still ask, maybe their question actually is different. If you provide similar question tools for answerers, let them link to the other question/answers but there's no value in closing the question. That's just hostile and kills the opportunity to generate actual content. Also, let's be real. It's not the marking dupes that's problem it's all the "off topic" closures. Side note: you work at SO and call your users "help vampires". I think that elitist attitude is a huge part of the problem we're discussing here.
  - sklivvz1971 10y ago
    Help vampires: people that ask questions which have no value other than themselves. Duplicate questions are not "help vampires" by any means. This is a good example of that: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/30721824/near-syntax-error http://stackoverflow.com/questions/30721824/near-syntax-erro... Side note: don't pass judgement on stuff or people you don't know. It's quite insulting.
    - exstudent2 10y ago

enraged_camel 10y ago

Subjective moderation is a major problem. You know, some moderator deciding that a question is "off-topic" or "opinion-based" and just closing the thread. It really puts a damper on people's motivation to ask questions or provide answers.

smcl 10y ago
Nearly every SO issue I've viewed over the last few months has been closed as "off-topic" or some other "not welcome here" reason (I don't know what they are). I was joking about it with friends and they said the same. It makes me think of the wikipedia "deletionists" and I wonder what kind of contributions they would be happy with.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

shkkmo 10y ago

I'm not impressed by this response to some very valid criticisms. > No matter what choices we make there will be upset people. Of course no matter what you do, people will complain. This doesn't this this a valid reason to dismiss criticism out of hand without engaging with the complaints. The correct response is to look for ways to address the very real problems that are being brought up in a way that increases the value the site provides to as many of your users as possible. > Do we allow only english? Do we allow SO in other languages? Make questions and answers be done in english to avoid fragmentation, but perhaps you need a community translation service to translate valuable questions and answers to other languages to increase the availability of this knowledge to those who don't speak english? > Do we reduce moderation? Do we keep moderation as is? Perhaps you can introduce a mechanism to sideline 'help vampire' questions, but still allow new users to build up reputation (currently very hard) by assisting with or improving those questions. Many of SO's problems do not have simple or easy solutions, that doesn't mean that it isn't worthwhile to look for them.

sklivvz1971 10y ago
I am not dismissing anything, and I am, instead quite worried. I am sorry that you had the wrong impression. What I meant to say is that handling such a large site is like playing whack-a-mole. Seeing problems popping up is not a symptom of decline. Is a symptom of size.
- shkkmo 10y ago
  Ah, thanks for the clarification. The site itself may not be in decline, but I am worried it may head the same direction as Wikipedia (successful, but losing active contributors.)
- WhitneyLand 10y ago
  I hope you're learning some lessons here. When addressing a group of your users who have concerns: 1) Never start out saying "What you don't understand is...". Instead try "Here are some of the challenges we face..." 2) Never say "Im sorry you had the wrong impression...". Instead try "I'm sorry if I miscommunicated..." I know you are not the PR guy. And it's nice you are here because people do appreciate staff commenting. Just trying to help you get a better reaction.

ak217 10y ago

The truth is that you've managed to piss off and alienate a lot of people in pursuit of... something, and when a new community platform gains critical mass, we will take the content and jump ship happily. To change this, you could try publicly acknowledging the issues, encouraging people (especially moderators) to be less pedantic and nicer, and rolling back some of the most egregious abuse by the little Q&A tyrants.

gotofritz 10y ago
I don't know what you are on about. I am not pissed off with SO, nor do I know anyone who is, and I certainly have no intention to go somewhere else, especially since there is no saying the same problems will not occur there
- kaffeemitsahne 10y ago
  Some people in this thread are saying SO's issues are inevitable in a community of that scale, but is it really true? Is it inevitable that two different questions with different answers will be marked duplicates of each other, for example?
  - gotofritz 10y ago
    I don't see the problem, since you can jump to the other question, it means all new answers will only happen in one place. Sure it can be improved, but it's not something that bothers me in practice TBH
    - reitanqild 10y ago
      It seems to me you aree providing a perfect example here: From what I can see you did not read the post you answered to (Is it inevitable that two different questions with different answers will be marked duplicates of each other, for example?), yet you hand out the answer like the ones we criticise for rubber stamping "duplicate" etc.

ddebernardy 10y ago

You may have heard it all, but what SO has chiefly achieved IMO is to drive users who regularly answer questions away from the site. If you've a moment to check the data, I'd be curious to see the % of users who answer 5x more questions than they ask, and the same for 10x, 25x, 50x, and 100x. Then look at what their respective activity is in terms of answers provided over time per individual and overall. I'd be surprised if these numbers haven't each dropped significantly in the past 5 years, except perhaps the overall/total activity of high answer:question ratio (but then I'd expect the answer:question ratio to have materially dropped).

user5994461 10y ago

> Disclaimer: I work in the Q&A team at Stack Overflow. In that case, I have a serious question for you: What's your plan for refreshing the site on the long term? Lemme explain. The "community" is actively closing new questions as "duplicate" if anything similar is already present. At the same time, the old answer (that all duplicates are redirecting to) is often locked down for various reasons. The blocking prevents to update or add new answers. Currently, many major questions are redirecting to one of the first answers from 3-6 years ago, when the site was relatively new. The provided answers are rotting over time. How do you intend to prevent that?

sklivvz1971 10y ago
> How do you intend to prevent that? Very very few posts are actually uneditable at all, and editing is open to all users (some need approval). If a post is locked and outdated it's likely that the question was locked because it was the kind of question that does not provide long-lasting answers (for example a software recommendation list).
- twblalock 10y ago
  That solution clearly isn't working. You need to come up with something better, or SO is going to become a graveyard of programming best practices from the year 2012.
- Mithaldu 10y ago
  > editing is open to all users (some need approval). Technically true, factually false, since correctness of an edit does not trump "spirit of the poster".
- winteriscoming 10y ago
  Given that a voting system is in place, why not let the duplicate stay open and just mark it as a duplicate and link it to the other thread? People who don't like the new thread can down vote it and people who do want to contribute meaningful replies can still do and be upvoted if it adds value. I don't see how this might affect SEO in any bad way than the current scheme does.

Mithaldu 10y ago

You could at the very least make it your mission statement to provide correct answers, and remind all of your moderators of this, instead of having them maintain the "spirit of the poster" on answers that are wrong and on locked questions.

shagie 10y ago
Alas, all attempts at answering a question are deemed valuable by some contingent of the active user and diamond moderation base. Correct has nothing to do with it. There is no mechanism for removal of incorrect answers other than the person being too embarrassed having it still visible and deleting it. One has to hope that the best and correct answers get up voted.

sedatk 10y ago

Do you mean it's only a matter of preference rather than limited resources?