I notice a lot of people talking about moderation on SO. It reminds me of the moderation on HN. It's all focused on one of two things: being "nice", or being "i

I notice a lot of people talking about moderation on SO. It reminds me of the moderation on HN. It's all focused on one of two things: being "nice", or being "interesting". Which is really bizarre. It's not reasonable to expect people to act in an artificial way. People are emotional, and usually not all that smart or interesting. We're monkeys with hats. Just because you can train a monkey to paint a picture does not mean it won't fling poo at you. SO wants to keep some beginner questions, but also keep the really complicated questions, and you have to do some homework, but really most questions are okay, and you shouldn't ask a question again, and you have to be nice, ... These are so many subjective rules that serve to make everything "look" a certain way. It's almost like playing a game. Ah, you didn't say please and thank you! You lose five points. In a world where not everyone agrees with you or behaves the way you want, I wonder what the goal of this particular game is? I guess what I'm driving at is how thinking you can just make up a list of rules of how humans should behave and expect it to go okay, is maybe not the best idea. It's like expecting that you can write some shell scripts that tell a computer how to work, and it will always work that way. Bad news: computers don't always follow simple rules, and neither do humans. Moderators are the equivalent of health checks that go around restarting things that died. That may be fine for your massively scaled enterprise application, but humans have something computer programs don't have: feelings. Which brings up a completely unrelated question: In the future, when computers have emotions, will server automation be considered equivalent to chicken farms? Yes, we're killing all these living creatures after they have a meager existence in cramped spaces, but have you tasted this amazing chicken cordon bleu? (Inb4 flagged for "incendiary topic: animal rights")