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> The additional level of moderation doesn't seem to have added much value over my time participating. The closest thing I can think of as nice is combining dup

by lambda 8y ago

> The additional level of moderation doesn't seem to have added much value over my time participating. The closest thing I can think of as nice is combining duplicates, though moderators often seem to miss subtle differences between questions and in some cases information gets lost in the end. Generally, the moderation focus often seems legalistic or driven by artificial incentives rather than primarily focused on improving the breadth, depth, and quality of the site as a technical resource. The problem is, they added the review queues, which prompts people to review questions on topics they might know nothing about, and give badges based on how much people review. So people go through those review queues and might be motivated to just get through things quickly without thinking very much about the effect of what they are doing; there is no meta review, no downside to just making hasty decisions that just prevent other people from engaging in useful discussion.

Ajedi32 8y ago
> there is no meta review There is. There are "audit" questions designed to test whether the reviewer is paying attention. If they improperly vote to close a "good" audit question or improperly vote to leave open a "bad" one, they get banned from reviewing for a while.
- lambda 8y ago
  OK, this may be a new feature, since I stopped paying close attention several years back when I got frustrated with the direction the community was going. But I don't think that "audit" questions do much to address my issue. They enforce that someone is paying at least a little bit of attention; but they still emphasize things like voting to close a "bad" question, rather than helping the person asking the question ask a better question. They might help a little bit with people who are just not paying attention at all for questions which are black and white as to whether they are "good" or "bad" (such as blatant spam), but they don't help at all with pushing the "grey area" questions in the right direction. That's the crux of the issue; the community is so focused on just cleaning up bad questions by closing them, rather than working with the person asking to help get them to be able to work better with the community.
  - shagie 8y ago
    There are far too many new questions each day for the people who are capable of mentoring an individual into asking a good question for Stack Overflow to scale. Lets say that it takes 15 minutes in chat to help a person (who wants to be helped in asking a good question rather than getting the answer now). Next, lets apply Sturgeon's law to Stack Overflow. There are 8000 questions a day and 90% of them are crap. Thats 7200 questions that need work. This is 1,800 hours of mentoring per day. The close (and down vote) is such a minimal amount of work that it allows the group within the site that is striving for a particular vision of quality that it allows them to do the most they can. Furthermore, it is not infrequent that a person who provides assistant for trying to unravel a question from getting a "why can't you just help me now?" with assorted vulgarity interspersed. On smaller sites, with a greatly reduced amount of questions per day the group capable of mentoring as well as moderating is able to spend the 15 minutes of time without significantly impacting the time taken to moderate and curate the rest of the questions. With 8000 questions per day, its really hard to look at all of them. As I write this, there are only 16 people who have exhausted their close reviews for the day ( https://stackoverflow.com/review/close/stats https://stackoverflow.com/review/close/stats - only 16 have 40 reviews). That doesn't show the people who are doing new questions, but it does give an idea of how shallow the bench of people who are spending time to moderate the site actually is. Getting more people to help out would be great, but most people aren't doing anything to help. There are also people who believe that up voting a newbie question and saying "welcome to the site" in the comments without improving the question is helpful. The first post review and triage queues are intended for providing this help. You can see that this doesn't always work well ( https://stackoverflow.com/review/first-posts/19570266 https://stackoverflow.com/review/first-posts/19570266 or https://stackoverflow.com/review/first-posts/19569647 https://stackoverflow.com/review/first-posts/19569647 - note the not even trying to fix the grammar of the question or asking for the necessary information or providing help on how to improve the question, just no action needed)
    - lambda 8y ago
      The thing is, bad questions don't really matter in the grand scheme of things. If a question is bad, and it gets no answers, it will just languish. You don't need to do anything about it. Maybe have an auto-close after a week of inactivity or something. It probably doesn't really matter, as long as you actually sort questions by things like score, answer score, etc, so the bad questions just go down to the ends of all of the lists on pages no one ever browses to. Bits are cheap, a few bad questions being present on the site and not closed doesn't really hurt. I don't expect every bad question will lead to a valuable mentorship opportunity. I've certainly encountered my fair share of those that weren't worth spending my time on. Bad answers are more problematic; there's good reason to be vigilent about those. And of course spam, obvious homework, and just completely incomprehensible questions should be closed instantly. What I see is questions which are not phrased well but you can actually work out what they're asking being closed. So by the time I've written up an answer, the question is closed, and my answer is wasted. I can copy my answer elsewhere, and vote to re-open, maybe after editing the question to make it more clear, and it might get re-opened, but then I have to spend a lot more time and attention waiting for that. By closing out questions too aggressively, not only are people putting off newcomers, but also wasting the time of those answering questions. > The first post review and triage queues are intended for providing this help. You can see that this doesn't always work well ( https://stackoverflow.com/review/first-posts/19570266 https://stackoverflow.com/review/first-posts/19570266 or https://stackoverflow.com/review/first-posts/19569647 https://stackoverflow.com/review/first-posts/19569647 - note the not even trying to fix the grammar of the question or asking for the necessary information or providing help on how to improve the question, just no action needed) Yeah, one of the things that really frustrates me about the review process is that they just incentivize taking some quick and easy action, not actually doing the right thing. Effective moderation is not easy, and a very different skill set than answering technical questions, but the rep needed to perform many of these mod duties is just given to those who accrue enough rep.

by lambda 8y ago

Ajedi32 8y ago

> there is no meta review There is. There are "audit" questions designed to test whether the reviewer is paying attention. If they improperly vote to close a "good" audit question or improperly vote to leave open a "bad" one, they get banned from reviewing for a while.

lambda 8y ago
OK, this may be a new feature, since I stopped paying close attention several years back when I got frustrated with the direction the community was going. But I don't think that "audit" questions do much to address my issue. They enforce that someone is paying at least a little bit of attention; but they still emphasize things like voting to close a "bad" question, rather than helping the person asking the question ask a better question. They might help a little bit with people who are just not paying attention at all for questions which are black and white as to whether they are "good" or "bad" (such as blatant spam), but they don't help at all with pushing the "grey area" questions in the right direction. That's the crux of the issue; the community is so focused on just cleaning up bad questions by closing them, rather than working with the person asking to help get them to be able to work better with the community.
- shagie 8y ago
  There are far too many new questions each day for the people who are capable of mentoring an individual into asking a good question for Stack Overflow to scale. Lets say that it takes 15 minutes in chat to help a person (who wants to be helped in asking a good question rather than getting the answer now). Next, lets apply Sturgeon's law to Stack Overflow. There are 8000 questions a day and 90% of them are crap. Thats 7200 questions that need work. This is 1,800 hours of mentoring per day. The close (and down vote) is such a minimal amount of work that it allows the group within the site that is striving for a particular vision of quality that it allows them to do the most they can. Furthermore, it is not infrequent that a person who provides assistant for trying to unravel a question from getting a "why can't you just help me now?" with assorted vulgarity interspersed. On smaller sites, with a greatly reduced amount of questions per day the group capable of mentoring as well as moderating is able to spend the 15 minutes of time without significantly impacting the time taken to moderate and curate the rest of the questions. With 8000 questions per day, its really hard to look at all of them. As I write this, there are only 16 people who have exhausted their close reviews for the day ( https://stackoverflow.com/review/close/stats https://stackoverflow.com/review/close/stats - only 16 have 40 reviews). That doesn't show the people who are doing new questions, but it does give an idea of how shallow the bench of people who are spending time to moderate the site actually is. Getting more people to help out would be great, but most people aren't doing anything to help. There are also people who believe that up voting a newbie question and saying "welcome to the site" in the comments without improving the question is helpful. The first post review and triage queues are intended for providing this help. You can see that this doesn't always work well ( https://stackoverflow.com/review/first-posts/19570266 https://stackoverflow.com/review/first-posts/19570266 or https://stackoverflow.com/review/first-posts/19569647 https://stackoverflow.com/review/first-posts/19569647 - note the not even trying to fix the grammar of the question or asking for the necessary information or providing help on how to improve the question, just no action needed)
  - lambda 8y ago
    The thing is, bad questions don't really matter in the grand scheme of things. If a question is bad, and it gets no answers, it will just languish. You don't need to do anything about it. Maybe have an auto-close after a week of inactivity or something. It probably doesn't really matter, as long as you actually sort questions by things like score, answer score, etc, so the bad questions just go down to the ends of all of the lists on pages no one ever browses to. Bits are cheap, a few bad questions being present on the site and not closed doesn't really hurt. I don't expect every bad question will lead to a valuable mentorship opportunity. I've certainly encountered my fair share of those that weren't worth spending my time on. Bad answers are more problematic; there's good reason to be vigilent about those. And of course spam, obvious homework, and just completely incomprehensible questions should be closed instantly. What I see is questions which are not phrased well but you can actually work out what they're asking being closed. So by the time I've written up an answer, the question is closed, and my answer is wasted. I can copy my answer elsewhere, and vote to re-open, maybe after editing the question to make it more clear, and it might get re-opened, but then I have to spend a lot more time and attention waiting for that. By closing out questions too aggressively, not only are people putting off newcomers, but also wasting the time of those answering questions. > The first post review and triage queues are intended for providing this help. You can see that this doesn't always work well ( https://stackoverflow.com/review/first-posts/19570266 https://stackoverflow.com/review/first-posts/19570266 or https://stackoverflow.com/review/first-posts/19569647 https://stackoverflow.com/review/first-posts/19569647 - note the not even trying to fix the grammar of the question or asking for the necessary information or providing help on how to improve the question, just no action needed) Yeah, one of the things that really frustrates me about the review process is that they just incentivize taking some quick and easy action, not actually doing the right thing. Effective moderation is not easy, and a very different skill set than answering technical questions, but the rep needed to perform many of these mod duties is just given to those who accrue enough rep.