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I'm Resigning as a Stack Overflow Community Elected Moderator

151 points by trothamel 7y ago

vishym 7y ago
Stack Overflow has really forgotten how to engage with the community and especially so with the community of moderators. These moderators are not getting paid. It is a huge amount of volunteer effort they put as hobby. SO should express a lot of gratitude for these moderators who keep SO in sane condition. But SO has been bringing one policy change after another without getting the full support of this community. I think it started with CoC changes that required everyone to become overly polite which many users and moderators did not really agree with. The recent debate on gendered pronouns has frankly been a real mess done in haste and without transparency. If SO does not fix their ways of engaging with the community, I am afraid more and more moderators are going to leave this place.
- zaphirplane 7y ago
  A moderator on stackoverflow is someone that increases users engagement with stack overflow. That is the reason moderators exist. Having a CoC is a good thing and maybe you think it’s too SJW and maybe others think there are offensive moderators and are leaving the site Personally I think some moderators have confused moderator with area owner and want to run it as they think
pvorb 7y ago
Can somebody please summarize what happened in the SO management? How did SO lead the community in the past? What has changed? This post is lacking some context for outsiders. I have been writing questions and answers for several years, but I've never noticed the the SO management has anything to do with it other than hosting it.
- majjam 7y ago
  I think this previous discussion details the most recent cause of friction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21286074 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21286074
  - curtisblaine 7y ago
    Before even opening the link I knew it was something having to do with the use of pronouns. Sometimes I think we are concentrating on (and fighting over) the wrong problems. Anyway, there's a timeline of the drama directly from Monica: https://cellio.dreamwidth.org/2019/10/05/stack-overflow-fiasco-timeline.html https://cellio.dreamwidth.org/2019/10/05/stack-overflow-fias... > "A queer moderator resigned in anger, with complaints about community managers, other moderators, and the "entrenched power structure", and vague accusations of bigotry" >"a different moderator (henceforth OP) asked a question, tagged "discussion", on the moderators' private Q&A site ("team"): should we require people to use people's preferred pronouns? (Again, the moderator, who is trans, used the term "preferred".) OP self-answered to say, somewhat vehemently, that we absolutely must require this and using wrong pronouns is misgendering. I answered saying that we already have a negative commandment, don't call people what they don't want to be called (like wrong pronouns), which is proper, but this question calls for adding a positive requirement to use specific language and we shouldn't do that. I talked about writing in a gender-neutral way, that we rarely even need third-person-singular pronouns in our discussions, and not using a pronoun at all isn't misgendering. This was the top-voted answer, something like +53/-10 last I saw it. Note: Three different community managers posted answers after I did, and none said my answer was inappropriate in any way. (One disagreed with it, which is fine.)"
good_guy 7y ago
LOL drama alert.
spectramax 7y ago
Why can't the CEO of Stack Overflow comment, engage, apologize and bring everyone together? Isn't that what a leader of a company supposed to do? Instead of sending out your PR minions with callous demeanor, no empathy and staying meek while your company goes into the toilet? If I were running a company of this size, put everything aside and build trust from the users. They built the community in the first place.
- andrewxdiamond 7y ago
  He recently announced he is stepping down https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2019/09/24/announcing-stack-overflows-new-ceo/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2019/09/24/announcing-stack-o...
  - y4mi 7y ago
    Why are people flagging this? I vouched. please voice your issues if there is something wrong with this, as it seems correct and likely plays a role here as well (new CEO might still not be onboarded yet etc)
    - yorwba 7y ago
      It's a new account posting a comment that's mostly just a link. It probably tripped the spam detector and got killed automatically, without anyone flagging it.
      - onlydeadheroes 7y ago
        Then why is y4mi's comment also flagged? There are things you cannot say on HN and they are not even subtle about it. It seems that any hiccup in the glorious people's take over of yet another thing we built is one of the forbidden subjects.
        dang 7y ago
        yorwba is right. andrewxdiamond's comment was autokilled by a software filter that applies to new accounts and is based on past activity by trolls. We review the comments that are killed that way and eventually restore the good ones that haven't been vouched for yet. We also mark the account legit so that its posts will be exempt from the filter in the future. y4mi's comment was probably flagged because "Why are people flagging this" is off topic and is covered, in spirit if not in letter, by the site guideline that asks people not to go on about downvotes on comments. Once the comment was vouched for and unkilled, there was no need to take the thread in that direction. If you see a comment that's killed or flagged and shouldn't be, and vouching doesn't work, you can always email us at hn@ycombinator.com.
rando444 7y ago
>I am not confident that moderators are seen as partners in community building; but rather volunteers to be tightly controlled. This is really the core of the issue IMHO.
ddtaylor 7y ago
Let's assume for a moment that SO has failed and slowly fades into obscurity. How do we stop this same problem from happening again? Individual Linux distros fail, as do some websites or email servers - but the fundamental underlying protocols make sure no one entity exists that ruins everything. Does anyone know of a good way to do something like that here?
- jayshua 7y ago
  The SO content is licensed under cc by-sa 4.0, so theoretically someone could take it all and start again. Might work with enough of the resigning moderators behind it. But I don't think anyone could get enough of them behind it.
  - CogitoCogito 7y ago
    What I wonder is if the recent LinkedIn ruling implies that SO can’t prevent others from scraping the site. And given that the content is already liberally licenses maybe scrape plus rehost is all that’s needed. Of course there are a lot of technical details that could sink this but I can’t see legal issues hindering it.
    - u02sgb 7y ago
      SO used to offer their database of q&a for download. Has that changed?
      - juki 7y ago
        The data dumps seem to still be available: https://archive.org/details/stackexchange https://archive.org/details/stackexchange
        CogitoCogito 7y ago
        Oh I had no idea. Definitely gained some respect for SO. I guess in this case, the information is at least available in case SO really jumps the shark.
ageofwant 7y ago
In my experience SO has canonical answers for ~95% of all issues already. Sure, it will tick on as new things happen but that will be almost noise with whats already there. I think this reality is not lost on the owners. Mods have volunteered millions of hours of free labor to get SO to where it is today. And now that the corpus is in place their usefulness has come to an end. They are now less of an asset and more a liability to SO corporation. That's how it looks like from the outside anyway.
- joatmon-snoo 7y ago
  Ehhhhh. One of the challenges SO - at least the ones related to code and Linux - have clearly been dealing with over the past few years is that as time passes, the answers to a question change, e g. today it is vastly more common to use systemd for things, and the commands to run (systemctl, journalctl) reflect that.
- oezi 7y ago
  The role of the mods vs. the role of the user is a big question mark to me. In which question has a moderator helped in a relevant sense? For me they always have just been gatekeeping (tags, close votes) which never made sense to me.
  - jacobush 7y ago
    If the mods stopped you would notice. Flamewars, edit wars etc, are kept at bay.
  - MauranKilom 7y ago
    Tags and close votes are handled by normal users (well, those with a bit of rep). Moderators are for the "people stuff" like spam, vandalism, vote fraud, rudeness/harassment and so on. They do not significantly contribute to question closure or tagging.
jasonkester 7y ago
I've seen a few posts come through about the issues the Stack Overflow Community are facing, but it occurs to me that I've never actually come across this Community in all my years using the site. My best guess is that deep down in the meta corners among moderator types, there is some form of interpersonal communication going on, and sometimes there must be difficulties there. But for me, and I assume most of the people who will ever use the site to ask and answer silly JavaScript questions, that's something we're never going to see. I used to answer a lot of questions on Stack Overflow, until eventually it became big enough that the Internet Point Chaser personalities were just too quick on the draw to answer anything and everything. Cool. That was the plan all along I guess. So now I just use it to google the order of arguments in date conversion functions for languages with poor documentation, which I assume is what roughly 100% of the people using the site do. I don't think that aspect of the site will suffer from controversy like this in the long run.
- rgoulter 7y ago
  > I don't think that aspect of the site will suffer from controversy like this in the long run. I think the unstated assumption that needs to be made is that the moderators that remain still do a good enough job of moderating the question so that the user contributions can be valuable. I don't know if the point-chasing ruins the questions I see; but I still see StackOverflow in the search results whenever I'm searching for error messages. Though, I've increasingly found GitHub Issues show up in the results too.
  - oezi 7y ago
    The big question is if moderation on stackoverflow contributes anything really. Closing questions always seemed such a useless thing to me when there already is a good mechanism (downvotes) to signal that a question is 'bad'. Why add a process on top that just prevents people to interact with a question if they want to? I guess that Stackoverflow Inc. realized that the mods don't really contribute something of value.
    - jacobush 7y ago
fierarul 7y ago
What's stopping all these people to group up and start another website? Now it's the perfect moment to announce an URL.
- makapuf 7y ago
  Well it takes more than an url to make stackoverflow. You need a critical mass of content and people in it and a source of revenue, or whatever is needed to support hosting. Also, you need to code and design and support the site. And make it attractive regarding stackoverflow and Google search.
fendy3002 7y ago
Looks like SO execs need to open question on SE at "how to run and manage community site"
- jacquesm 7y ago
  Closed, duplicate.
chx 7y ago
I feel https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/390495/308851 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/390495/308851 is even more important than this one. It's the answer from George Stocker to "What could Stack Exchange Inc do to make moderators who've recently resigned want to stay?"
- pjc50 7y ago
  > Coming up with solutions and sharing them with us is a recipe for disaster, as you've seen. You have a community full of problem solvers. Bring us the problem. Tremendous. Twitter is notorious for this: while you might eventually get through to them that a problem exists and they should do something, they seem never to involve the community in upcoming changes or "fixes" to problems.
- ssivark 7y ago
  That answer from George Stocker is an absolutely fantastic portrait of how to lead a community of people. Thanks for sharing.
  - personjerry 7y ago
    They should hire that guy
- wyclif 7y ago
  Why won't SO settle these problems by instituting changes instead of letting this controversy drag on and on, eventually destroying the site?
  - 0-_-0 7y ago
    Because they are convinced that they are doing the right thing.
    - jacobush 7y ago
      ... for the shareholders.
pinche2 7y ago
SE/SO reminds me more and more of how a cult is run. It's no secret that they are ideologically driven, although they kept it under lid until 2015 when they then flipped finger to their own rules and abused the platform for political causes. Since that time it has been going downhill - not that it hasn't had problem before that. But I noticed a significant change in the "vibe" of the community from that point on. The problem is that this can not be easily fixed as it require change of convictions. It's not about community anymore, but political wars intertwined with international agendas (which includes Y Combinator too btw). Personally, I passed the 100k milestone, got my mug and t-shirt and deleted my account.
- MrBuddyCasino 7y ago
  „ It's no secret that they are ideologically driven, although they kept it under lid until 2015 when they then flipped finger to their own rules and abused the platform for political causes.“ Anil Dash?
  - pinche2 7y ago
    I'm not particular aware of Anil Dash's role in this, but what I had in mind was the following: This is the post Joel Spolsky posted, breaking the user rules that stated among other things that political posts where not allowed: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/297859/can-stack-overflow-and-metas-logos-be-changed-temporarily-to-the-loveoverflow/297871#297871 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/297859/can-stack-ov... Then, a couple of years later - https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/342440/time-to-take-a-stand https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/342440/time-to-take... at the same time Sam Altman posted his (since I mentioned Y Combinator, but in fairness, at his own blog): https://blog.samaltman.com/time-to-take-a-stand https://blog.samaltman.com/time-to-take-a-stand These are political, ideological driven posts. Not everyone agrees with the political content; the point being, whether you do or not, this doesn't belong on a site such as SO. And the international agenda I am refering to is in particular United Nations' agenda 2030 which is also rooted in ideology, and is what these companies are working with, directly or indirectly: https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/post2015/transformingourworld https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/post2015/transformingo...
throwaway13337 7y ago
Problems with user created content sites are all the same: The default license is always that the user grants only the site they post to the ability to host the content. It would be nice if the default, by law, was that user created content posted publicly was available for re-hosting. Otherwise, the company would have to ensure the user understands that they are gifting the company future control in a specific way. The result of the current climate is that these companies go against who gave them their power and because of their content arsonal are immune to reprisal. With a default public license enforced by law, we'd see so much more innovation and cooperation of content hosts. The balance of power between content creator and platform would shift. This would essentially solve most problems with Facebook, reddit, stackoverflow, linkedin, and more all at the same times. They'd have to try harder to do right by their users or risk losing them to a competing platform with the same data.
- fabian2k 7y ago
  Content on Stack Overflow is CC-licensed, so anyone can host it somewhere else, if they want to.
  - throwaway13337 7y ago
    I didn't realize. Well then it's a terrific solution for upset moderators. Take their ball and go compete.
    - pinche2 7y ago
      Actually, anyone can download their entire [anonymized] database (or select only some sites) from Archive.org via torrent or directly: https://archive.org/details/stackexchange https://archive.org/details/stackexchange
      - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
        I thought content there was cc-by, how then is it anonymised?
jruz 7y ago
I would like to see GitHub/GitLab adding a section like SO to the repos, slowly it would build more updated content and the repo owners could moderate. I think the amount of centralized knowledge in SO is not good for the web.
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  That knowledge is all licensed Creative Commons, it's not owned by SO. (Although, which Creative Commons license is entirely unclear right now...)
- baby 7y ago
  This. Issues are often used as interactive FAQs and it feels weird to have to go to SO if I don’t want to pollute a project’s issues just to ask a question.
amirathi 7y ago
Can someone please summarize the core issues between SO the company & the community? I see lot of references to policy changes, lack of empathy & such. But would like to know exactly what actions by the company caused this stir.
- jodrellblank 7y ago
  AFAIK, and I don't want to go trying to find Meta threads to support all this, but these summarise my feelings after reading quite a few over the past year or two: StackExchange (SE) announced that users must start being polite and welcoming to beginners and new users, trying to address the perception of hostility and unfriendliness. Generally coming from a well intentioned place, but without good plans for how that would work, except declaring "be nice" and hoping that would do it. There is a break of opinions between "a new user should have a welcoming experience" (both sides - company and users - agree) and "there is an endless flood of 'give me the codez' and homework questions and spam, we're wading through the garbage to your company benefit, and now we get criticism that we aren't doing your dirty work with a smile on top, please acknowledge" (many users agree, the company refuses to engage), and "blunt technical answers are not impolite" (company refuses to engage). SE's unresponsive stonewalling or ignoring questions and suggestions annoys users. When mods complained about the lack of support from SE, e.g. long standing requests for moderator tools with better UIs, or more guidance from SE employees, SE ignored them. SE announced that they were retroactively relicensing all content. When people objected, questioned the legality, asked for clarification of specifics, SE ignored and did not answer. It appears they have done this once before, and did not engage then either, but this time might be more serious. When there was an increasing number of people sharing their bad experiences with SE around the internet, SE more or less blamed the users, and when the users suggested ideas to improve SE in various ways around this (e.g. changes to the flow of onboarding new users, which SE was trialing on some sites), SE ignored and didn't engage. SE rolled out a new Code of Conduct and insisted everyone will respect people's pronouns[1]. Long standing, well respected, polite, moderator Monica Cellio stopped being a moderator in uncertain conditions, but AFAIK she tried to use gender-neutral language when someone's gender was known, and SE steamrollered her for it. As a result of her loss of moderator status, several other moderators have either stepped down in protest, or signed an open letter revealing many complaints about how SE has been interacting with moderators - or not interacting - in the private mod/company chatroom which normal users can't see. Many times through these arguments, an SE employee or two has put out some corporate fluff feelgood non-answer which ignores all raised issues and restates some platitudes or fiat-idealism, which users have taken as worse than silence and/or an insult. There is a general feeling/suspicion/conspiracy theory that SE is setting itself up to be sold for huge piles of cash, and is trying to stamp out rudeness, appear welcoming, "clear up" licensing concerns, shrug off squeaky-wheel users, and absolutely not say anything controversial, and that SE either has no coherent leadership and direction for the future, or has one they know the users will object to and are therefore silent about it. Involved in this, although I don't have any idea how closely involved, is SE's spread from purely technical topics to a much wider range of sites covering politics, religion, hobbies and more general interests. [1] https://stackoverflow.com/conduct https://stackoverflow.com/conduct says "Be inclusive and respectful. [..] Prefer gender-neutral language when uncertain." and "No bigotry. [..] Use stated pronouns (when known)." ---- Edit: One of many rant/complaint posts full of links you can dive into: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333965/firing-mods-and-forced-relicensing-is-stack-exchange-still-interested-in-cooper https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333965/firing-mods-... which leads to things I missed - the forming and firing of a team to engage with developers in 2017, the redesign of sites making them "worse" while ignoring the user feedback, a single Tweet leading to taking a site off the hot questions list an dropping 80% of its traffic without announcing anything to the site users ("Stack Exchange cared more about how they're perceived by a single person on Twitter than what effect making a change like that would have on a site, and didn't care enough about the community to even let the general IPS community know about the change"), and the statement from employees "Stack Overflow Employees have panic attacks and nightmares when they know they will need to post something to Meta" where the company defended themselves by moving somewhere they don't have to hear the (overly personal) criticism at all.
mscasts 7y ago
The problem isn't really the site or the admins, it's mainly the community and moderators. They almost instantly lock new questions if they're not very specific, they are hostile and they're elitist. If you haven't researched your qustion for hours before, be prepared to get a lot of downvotes for your ignorance. I used to post somewhat regularly on SO, I never post anything anymore since there is no idea because the community and moderators are too unfriendly. The site itself is very nice though and many answers are still very good.
- SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
  > If you haven't researched your qustion for hours before Is this not the point though? I generally spend hours chipping away at a problem until I'll resort to asking StackOverflow. There's no point wasting everyone's time if the information is already out there.
  - Kaiyou 7y ago
    Why not, though? There are enough helpful point-chasers out there who will gladly help you save time.
ykevinator 7y ago
How do you resign from something you're not paid for? So preys on needy people and turns them into jerks (moderators) who put down people seeking help and add net negative value. Kind of like flaggers on yc.
ykevinator 7y ago
Good riddance, find another place to put people down and get paid in magic beans while the boss gets paid in cash ( I will never understand people who get paid in self esteem to work for profitable companies).
0xdead 7y ago
As a person who has been a user of StackOverflow for years and still unaware of what these "Community Elected Moderators" are, can someone explain what's the role of these guys exactly?
- MauranKilom 7y ago
  Their job is to stay on top of the usual exceptional behavior you will find on the internet: Spam, vandalism, rudeness/harassment, vote manipulation, sockpuppetry, user bans, ban disputes and so on. Contrary to popular belief, moderators have no special impact on questions getting closed (or downvoted) - that's handled by the "normal" users.
Simulacra 7y ago
I think this is a good thing, a fresh start for the community.

151 points by trothamel 7y ago

Stack Overflow has really forgotten how to engage with the community and especially so with the community of moderators. These moderators are not getting paid. It is a huge amount of volunteer effort they put as hobby. SO should express a lot of gratitude for these moderators who keep SO in sane condition. But SO has been bringing one policy change after another without getting the full support of this community. I think it started with CoC changes that required everyone to become overly polite which many users and moderators did not really agree with. The recent debate on gendered pronouns has frankly been a real mess done in haste and without transparency. If SO does not fix their ways of engaging with the community, I am afraid more and more moderators are going to leave this place.

zaphirplane 7y ago
A moderator on stackoverflow is someone that increases users engagement with stack overflow. That is the reason moderators exist. Having a CoC is a good thing and maybe you think it’s too SJW and maybe others think there are offensive moderators and are leaving the site Personally I think some moderators have confused moderator with area owner and want to run it as they think

pvorb 7y ago

Can somebody please summarize what happened in the SO management? How did SO lead the community in the past? What has changed? This post is lacking some context for outsiders. I have been writing questions and answers for several years, but I've never noticed the the SO management has anything to do with it other than hosting it.

majjam 7y ago
I think this previous discussion details the most recent cause of friction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21286074 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21286074
- curtisblaine 7y ago
  Before even opening the link I knew it was something having to do with the use of pronouns. Sometimes I think we are concentrating on (and fighting over) the wrong problems. Anyway, there's a timeline of the drama directly from Monica: https://cellio.dreamwidth.org/2019/10/05/stack-overflow-fiasco-timeline.html https://cellio.dreamwidth.org/2019/10/05/stack-overflow-fias... > "A queer moderator resigned in anger, with complaints about community managers, other moderators, and the "entrenched power structure", and vague accusations of bigotry" >"a different moderator (henceforth OP) asked a question, tagged "discussion", on the moderators' private Q&A site ("team"): should we require people to use people's preferred pronouns? (Again, the moderator, who is trans, used the term "preferred".) OP self-answered to say, somewhat vehemently, that we absolutely must require this and using wrong pronouns is misgendering. I answered saying that we already have a negative commandment, don't call people what they don't want to be called (like wrong pronouns), which is proper, but this question calls for adding a positive requirement to use specific language and we shouldn't do that. I talked about writing in a gender-neutral way, that we rarely even need third-person-singular pronouns in our discussions, and not using a pronoun at all isn't misgendering. This was the top-voted answer, something like +53/-10 last I saw it. Note: Three different community managers posted answers after I did, and none said my answer was inappropriate in any way. (One disagreed with it, which is fine.)"

good_guy 7y ago

LOL drama alert.

spectramax 7y ago

Why can't the CEO of Stack Overflow comment, engage, apologize and bring everyone together? Isn't that what a leader of a company supposed to do? Instead of sending out your PR minions with callous demeanor, no empathy and staying meek while your company goes into the toilet? If I were running a company of this size, put everything aside and build trust from the users. They built the community in the first place.

andrewxdiamond 7y ago
He recently announced he is stepping down https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2019/09/24/announcing-stack-overflows-new-ceo/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2019/09/24/announcing-stack-o...
- y4mi 7y ago
  Why are people flagging this? I vouched. please voice your issues if there is something wrong with this, as it seems correct and likely plays a role here as well (new CEO might still not be onboarded yet etc)
  - yorwba 7y ago
    It's a new account posting a comment that's mostly just a link. It probably tripped the spam detector and got killed automatically, without anyone flagging it.
    - onlydeadheroes 7y ago
      Then why is y4mi's comment also flagged? There are things you cannot say on HN and they are not even subtle about it. It seems that any hiccup in the glorious people's take over of yet another thing we built is one of the forbidden subjects.
      - dang 7y ago
        yorwba is right. andrewxdiamond's comment was autokilled by a software filter that applies to new accounts and is based on past activity by trolls. We review the comments that are killed that way and eventually restore the good ones that haven't been vouched for yet. We also mark the account legit so that its posts will be exempt from the filter in the future. y4mi's comment was probably flagged because "Why are people flagging this" is off topic and is covered, in spirit if not in letter, by the site guideline that asks people not to go on about downvotes on comments. Once the comment was vouched for and unkilled, there was no need to take the thread in that direction. If you see a comment that's killed or flagged and shouldn't be, and vouching doesn't work, you can always email us at hn@ycombinator.com.

rando444 7y ago

>I am not confident that moderators are seen as partners in community building; but rather volunteers to be tightly controlled. This is really the core of the issue IMHO.

ddtaylor 7y ago

Let's assume for a moment that SO has failed and slowly fades into obscurity. How do we stop this same problem from happening again? Individual Linux distros fail, as do some websites or email servers - but the fundamental underlying protocols make sure no one entity exists that ruins everything. Does anyone know of a good way to do something like that here?

jayshua 7y ago
The SO content is licensed under cc by-sa 4.0, so theoretically someone could take it all and start again. Might work with enough of the resigning moderators behind it. But I don't think anyone could get enough of them behind it.
- CogitoCogito 7y ago
  What I wonder is if the recent LinkedIn ruling implies that SO can’t prevent others from scraping the site. And given that the content is already liberally licenses maybe scrape plus rehost is all that’s needed. Of course there are a lot of technical details that could sink this but I can’t see legal issues hindering it.
  - u02sgb 7y ago
    SO used to offer their database of q&a for download. Has that changed?
    - juki 7y ago
      The data dumps seem to still be available: https://archive.org/details/stackexchange https://archive.org/details/stackexchange
      - CogitoCogito 7y ago
        Oh I had no idea. Definitely gained some respect for SO. I guess in this case, the information is at least available in case SO really jumps the shark.

ageofwant 7y ago

In my experience SO has canonical answers for ~95% of all issues already. Sure, it will tick on as new things happen but that will be almost noise with whats already there. I think this reality is not lost on the owners. Mods have volunteered millions of hours of free labor to get SO to where it is today. And now that the corpus is in place their usefulness has come to an end. They are now less of an asset and more a liability to SO corporation. That's how it looks like from the outside anyway.

joatmon-snoo 7y ago
Ehhhhh. One of the challenges SO - at least the ones related to code and Linux - have clearly been dealing with over the past few years is that as time passes, the answers to a question change, e g. today it is vastly more common to use systemd for things, and the commands to run (systemctl, journalctl) reflect that.
oezi 7y ago
The role of the mods vs. the role of the user is a big question mark to me. In which question has a moderator helped in a relevant sense? For me they always have just been gatekeeping (tags, close votes) which never made sense to me.
- jacobush 7y ago
  If the mods stopped you would notice. Flamewars, edit wars etc, are kept at bay.
- MauranKilom 7y ago
  Tags and close votes are handled by normal users (well, those with a bit of rep). Moderators are for the "people stuff" like spam, vandalism, vote fraud, rudeness/harassment and so on. They do not significantly contribute to question closure or tagging.

jasonkester 7y ago

I've seen a few posts come through about the issues the Stack Overflow Community are facing, but it occurs to me that I've never actually come across this Community in all my years using the site. My best guess is that deep down in the meta corners among moderator types, there is some form of interpersonal communication going on, and sometimes there must be difficulties there. But for me, and I assume most of the people who will ever use the site to ask and answer silly JavaScript questions, that's something we're never going to see. I used to answer a lot of questions on Stack Overflow, until eventually it became big enough that the Internet Point Chaser personalities were just too quick on the draw to answer anything and everything. Cool. That was the plan all along I guess. So now I just use it to google the order of arguments in date conversion functions for languages with poor documentation, which I assume is what roughly 100% of the people using the site do. I don't think that aspect of the site will suffer from controversy like this in the long run.

rgoulter 7y ago
> I don't think that aspect of the site will suffer from controversy like this in the long run. I think the unstated assumption that needs to be made is that the moderators that remain still do a good enough job of moderating the question so that the user contributions can be valuable. I don't know if the point-chasing ruins the questions I see; but I still see StackOverflow in the search results whenever I'm searching for error messages. Though, I've increasingly found GitHub Issues show up in the results too.
- oezi 7y ago
  The big question is if moderation on stackoverflow contributes anything really. Closing questions always seemed such a useless thing to me when there already is a good mechanism (downvotes) to signal that a question is 'bad'. Why add a process on top that just prevents people to interact with a question if they want to? I guess that Stackoverflow Inc. realized that the mods don't really contribute something of value.
  - jacobush 7y ago

fierarul 7y ago

What's stopping all these people to group up and start another website? Now it's the perfect moment to announce an URL.

makapuf 7y ago
Well it takes more than an url to make stackoverflow. You need a critical mass of content and people in it and a source of revenue, or whatever is needed to support hosting. Also, you need to code and design and support the site. And make it attractive regarding stackoverflow and Google search.

fendy3002 7y ago

Looks like SO execs need to open question on SE at "how to run and manage community site"

jacquesm 7y ago
Closed, duplicate.

chx 7y ago

I feel https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/390495/308851 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/390495/308851 is even more important than this one. It's the answer from George Stocker to "What could Stack Exchange Inc do to make moderators who've recently resigned want to stay?"

pjc50 7y ago
> Coming up with solutions and sharing them with us is a recipe for disaster, as you've seen. You have a community full of problem solvers. Bring us the problem. Tremendous. Twitter is notorious for this: while you might eventually get through to them that a problem exists and they should do something, they seem never to involve the community in upcoming changes or "fixes" to problems.
ssivark 7y ago
That answer from George Stocker is an absolutely fantastic portrait of how to lead a community of people. Thanks for sharing.
- personjerry 7y ago
  They should hire that guy
wyclif 7y ago
Why won't SO settle these problems by instituting changes instead of letting this controversy drag on and on, eventually destroying the site?
- 0-_-0 7y ago
  Because they are convinced that they are doing the right thing.
  - jacobush 7y ago
    ... for the shareholders.

pinche2 7y ago

SE/SO reminds me more and more of how a cult is run. It's no secret that they are ideologically driven, although they kept it under lid until 2015 when they then flipped finger to their own rules and abused the platform for political causes. Since that time it has been going downhill - not that it hasn't had problem before that. But I noticed a significant change in the "vibe" of the community from that point on. The problem is that this can not be easily fixed as it require change of convictions. It's not about community anymore, but political wars intertwined with international agendas (which includes Y Combinator too btw). Personally, I passed the 100k milestone, got my mug and t-shirt and deleted my account.

MrBuddyCasino 7y ago
„ It's no secret that they are ideologically driven, although they kept it under lid until 2015 when they then flipped finger to their own rules and abused the platform for political causes.“ Anil Dash?
- pinche2 7y ago
  I'm not particular aware of Anil Dash's role in this, but what I had in mind was the following: This is the post Joel Spolsky posted, breaking the user rules that stated among other things that political posts where not allowed: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/297859/can-stack-overflow-and-metas-logos-be-changed-temporarily-to-the-loveoverflow/297871#297871 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/297859/can-stack-ov... Then, a couple of years later - https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/342440/time-to-take-a-stand https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/342440/time-to-take... at the same time Sam Altman posted his (since I mentioned Y Combinator, but in fairness, at his own blog): https://blog.samaltman.com/time-to-take-a-stand https://blog.samaltman.com/time-to-take-a-stand These are political, ideological driven posts. Not everyone agrees with the political content; the point being, whether you do or not, this doesn't belong on a site such as SO. And the international agenda I am refering to is in particular United Nations' agenda 2030 which is also rooted in ideology, and is what these companies are working with, directly or indirectly: https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/post2015/transformingourworld https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/post2015/transformingo...

throwaway13337 7y ago

Problems with user created content sites are all the same: The default license is always that the user grants only the site they post to the ability to host the content. It would be nice if the default, by law, was that user created content posted publicly was available for re-hosting. Otherwise, the company would have to ensure the user understands that they are gifting the company future control in a specific way. The result of the current climate is that these companies go against who gave them their power and because of their content arsonal are immune to reprisal. With a default public license enforced by law, we'd see so much more innovation and cooperation of content hosts. The balance of power between content creator and platform would shift. This would essentially solve most problems with Facebook, reddit, stackoverflow, linkedin, and more all at the same times. They'd have to try harder to do right by their users or risk losing them to a competing platform with the same data.

fabian2k 7y ago
Content on Stack Overflow is CC-licensed, so anyone can host it somewhere else, if they want to.
- throwaway13337 7y ago
  I didn't realize. Well then it's a terrific solution for upset moderators. Take their ball and go compete.
  - pinche2 7y ago
    Actually, anyone can download their entire [anonymized] database (or select only some sites) from Archive.org via torrent or directly: https://archive.org/details/stackexchange https://archive.org/details/stackexchange
    - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
      I thought content there was cc-by, how then is it anonymised?

jruz 7y ago

I would like to see GitHub/GitLab adding a section like SO to the repos, slowly it would build more updated content and the repo owners could moderate. I think the amount of centralized knowledge in SO is not good for the web.

Wowfunhappy 7y ago
That knowledge is all licensed Creative Commons, it's not owned by SO. (Although, which Creative Commons license is entirely unclear right now...)
baby 7y ago
This. Issues are often used as interactive FAQs and it feels weird to have to go to SO if I don’t want to pollute a project’s issues just to ask a question.

amirathi 7y ago

Can someone please summarize the core issues between SO the company & the community? I see lot of references to policy changes, lack of empathy & such. But would like to know exactly what actions by the company caused this stir.

jodrellblank 7y ago
AFAIK, and I don't want to go trying to find Meta threads to support all this, but these summarise my feelings after reading quite a few over the past year or two: StackExchange (SE) announced that users must start being polite and welcoming to beginners and new users, trying to address the perception of hostility and unfriendliness. Generally coming from a well intentioned place, but without good plans for how that would work, except declaring "be nice" and hoping that would do it. There is a break of opinions between "a new user should have a welcoming experience" (both sides - company and users - agree) and "there is an endless flood of 'give me the codez' and homework questions and spam, we're wading through the garbage to your company benefit, and now we get criticism that we aren't doing your dirty work with a smile on top, please acknowledge" (many users agree, the company refuses to engage), and "blunt technical answers are not impolite" (company refuses to engage). SE's unresponsive stonewalling or ignoring questions and suggestions annoys users. When mods complained about the lack of support from SE, e.g. long standing requests for moderator tools with better UIs, or more guidance from SE employees, SE ignored them. SE announced that they were retroactively relicensing all content. When people objected, questioned the legality, asked for clarification of specifics, SE ignored and did not answer. It appears they have done this once before, and did not engage then either, but this time might be more serious. When there was an increasing number of people sharing their bad experiences with SE around the internet, SE more or less blamed the users, and when the users suggested ideas to improve SE in various ways around this (e.g. changes to the flow of onboarding new users, which SE was trialing on some sites), SE ignored and didn't engage. SE rolled out a new Code of Conduct and insisted everyone will respect people's pronouns[1]. Long standing, well respected, polite, moderator Monica Cellio stopped being a moderator in uncertain conditions, but AFAIK she tried to use gender-neutral language when someone's gender was known, and SE steamrollered her for it. As a result of her loss of moderator status, several other moderators have either stepped down in protest, or signed an open letter revealing many complaints about how SE has been interacting with moderators - or not interacting - in the private mod/company chatroom which normal users can't see. Many times through these arguments, an SE employee or two has put out some corporate fluff feelgood non-answer which ignores all raised issues and restates some platitudes or fiat-idealism, which users have taken as worse than silence and/or an insult. There is a general feeling/suspicion/conspiracy theory that SE is setting itself up to be sold for huge piles of cash, and is trying to stamp out rudeness, appear welcoming, "clear up" licensing concerns, shrug off squeaky-wheel users, and absolutely not say anything controversial, and that SE either has no coherent leadership and direction for the future, or has one they know the users will object to and are therefore silent about it. Involved in this, although I don't have any idea how closely involved, is SE's spread from purely technical topics to a much wider range of sites covering politics, religion, hobbies and more general interests. [1] https://stackoverflow.com/conduct https://stackoverflow.com/conduct says "Be inclusive and respectful. [..] Prefer gender-neutral language when uncertain." and "No bigotry. [..] Use stated pronouns (when known)." ---- Edit: One of many rant/complaint posts full of links you can dive into: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333965/firing-mods-and-forced-relicensing-is-stack-exchange-still-interested-in-cooper https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333965/firing-mods-... which leads to things I missed - the forming and firing of a team to engage with developers in 2017, the redesign of sites making them "worse" while ignoring the user feedback, a single Tweet leading to taking a site off the hot questions list an dropping 80% of its traffic without announcing anything to the site users ("Stack Exchange cared more about how they're perceived by a single person on Twitter than what effect making a change like that would have on a site, and didn't care enough about the community to even let the general IPS community know about the change"), and the statement from employees "Stack Overflow Employees have panic attacks and nightmares when they know they will need to post something to Meta" where the company defended themselves by moving somewhere they don't have to hear the (overly personal) criticism at all.

mscasts 7y ago

The problem isn't really the site or the admins, it's mainly the community and moderators. They almost instantly lock new questions if they're not very specific, they are hostile and they're elitist. If you haven't researched your qustion for hours before, be prepared to get a lot of downvotes for your ignorance. I used to post somewhat regularly on SO, I never post anything anymore since there is no idea because the community and moderators are too unfriendly. The site itself is very nice though and many answers are still very good.

SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
> If you haven't researched your qustion for hours before Is this not the point though? I generally spend hours chipping away at a problem until I'll resort to asking StackOverflow. There's no point wasting everyone's time if the information is already out there.
- Kaiyou 7y ago
  Why not, though? There are enough helpful point-chasers out there who will gladly help you save time.

ykevinator 7y ago

How do you resign from something you're not paid for? So preys on needy people and turns them into jerks (moderators) who put down people seeking help and add net negative value. Kind of like flaggers on yc.

ykevinator 7y ago

Good riddance, find another place to put people down and get paid in magic beans while the boss gets paid in cash ( I will never understand people who get paid in self esteem to work for profitable companies).

0xdead 7y ago

As a person who has been a user of StackOverflow for years and still unaware of what these "Community Elected Moderators" are, can someone explain what's the role of these guys exactly?

MauranKilom 7y ago
Their job is to stay on top of the usual exceptional behavior you will find on the internet: Spam, vandalism, rudeness/harassment, vote manipulation, sockpuppetry, user bans, ban disputes and so on. Contrary to popular belief, moderators have no special impact on questions getting closed (or downvoted) - that's handled by the "normal" users.

Simulacra 7y ago

I think this is a good thing, a fresh start for the community.