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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 Commu

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
    I find that weird, the mods also keep flamewars at bay and just in general keeps things civil. If SO manages to drive the unpaid mods away, eventually they will have to start employing scores of mods themselves.
    - zaphirplane 7y ago
      Why ? Is there a shortage of people wanting to be a moderator on stackoverflow ? Maybe some obscure stack exchange areas
      - tomashubelbauer 7y ago
        Someone being eager to be a mod does not mean they'd make for a good mod. Imagine if HN was modded by a new guy every two weeks (eagerness doesn't tend to last and is not a precursor to perseverance in my opinion at least).
        kangnkodos 7y ago
        Most jobs need less prior training than you might expect. A lot can be learned in a short period of time when you are on the job. I haven't seen any statistics, but it looks like only a few well known mods are leaving. So, almost all mods are remaining. There are a little over 600 total moods on StackExchange. Over 20 mods on the StackOverflow part of StackExchange. The announced departures from StackExchange are in the tens. For better or for worse, SO will be able to scrape by with the remaining mods. The only real problem for SO is the lack of trust. I've lost trust in the employees of SO. With every post from a SO employee, it gets worse and worse. Who are the direct competitors of SO, if any? I would like to use a different site, if possible. --- On this page which is updated daily, https://stackexchange.com/about/moderators https://stackexchange.com/about/moderators I count 629 moderators across 173 sites. --- For example, the Wayback machine shows that on December 9, 2018, the moderators on the StackOverflow part of StackExchange were these 26: Michael Myers, Robert Harvey, BoltClock, George Stocker, Brad Larson, ThiefMaster, ChrisF, Flexo, Ry-, Bohemian, meagar, Martijn Pieters, Jon Clements, josliber, Madara Uchiha, TheLostMind, Undo, deceze, Aaron Hall, Bhargav Rao, Andy, Cody Gray, Yvette Colomb, Samuel Liew, Rob, Ed Cottrell Today, I see these 23. If you remove George Stocker, 22: Michael Myers, BoltClock, George Stocker, Brad Larson, ChrisF, Flexo, Ry-, Bohemian, meagar, Martijn Pieters, Jon Clements, josliber, Madara Uchiha, Undo, deceze, Aaron Hall, Bhargav Rao, Andy, Cody Gray, Rob, Baum mit Augen, Jean-François Fabre, Samuel Liew Yes. That's a significant drop, but not enough for the users of StackOverflow to notice a difference.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
shrikant 7y ago
> Internet Point Chaser personalities Wow, thanks for putting a name to something that'd been annoying me for decades! It's so frustrating having to re-calibrate your expectations of the value in a community when this happens to it.
- bartread 7y ago
  I enjoyed "Internet Point Chaser personalities" too, although people who practice this sort of behaviour have always had a name: "karma whores". I first saw that term used on Slashdot, but subsequently also on community sites where points weren't explicitly called karma. I think I might prefer "Internet Point Chaser" though, because it's a bit more lighthearted.
  - 97b683f8 7y ago
    It makes me think Communism could be on par with Capitalism if people started chasing points instead of money. Oh wait ! Anyway another use of Stackoverflow is open source support by open source software authors. I've been using ByteBuddy recently (java bytecode manipulation library) and the doc is very superficial all the more so the library in itself is a gigantic net of classes and dependencies to inject (the problem with DSLs based on object oriented systems is that you're never shown the DSL's full syntax but has to deduce it from the individual bricks). Turns out the author is very active on Stackoverflow and these posts have constituted 95% of the sources I read to learn how to handle this library.
    - simonh 7y ago
      >...chasing points instead of money. Oh wait ! Comrade Xi is way ahead of you. Of course there is a capitalist way to approach the same problem. Free money off vouchers at Doral Resort with every early IRS return.
  - shrikant 7y ago
    I'd always associated the term "karma whores" with people who recycle and repost stuff for the imaginary Internet points. "IPC personalities" would be people who are actually reasonably well-intentioned, but sort of "stalk" the New/Rising equivalent queues (or tags on SO) to be able to "frist ps0t!!1" a reasonable looking (but obvious!) comment or answer. The classic "low brow dismissal" or low hanging fruit humour type comment comes to mind (Correlation is not causation, but will it run Linux, has Netcraft confirmed it, etc.).
jodrellblank 7y ago
You answered questions and enjoy it. Other people answer questions before you get to them and that makes worthy of name calling - losers with silly interests? You then claim the site's plan all along was to attract such people to ruin your experience? And all-but claim the only people who talk to each other must be cave dwellers hiding in the dark corners? Is it any wonder you don't feel engaged, connected, or part of any community when you hold views like that?
- jasonkester 7y ago
  Was this written in response to my post? Did it seem like I think my experience has been ruined in some way? That certainly wasn't my intention. I'm just a bit puzzled, because I can't find anyplace on the website where you could talk to another person in a way that could conceivable use a personal pronoun, and thus run afoul of this particular controversy. As I said, my best guess is that there's a meta discussion forum someplace that moderators can use. Are you implying that it's the main Q&A discussion that is having this issue?
  - MauranKilom 7y ago
    Moderators are uniquely affected by the policy (and moreso its weirdly phrased FAQ) because they have to enforce it. It's fine if you don't think you'll have to care yourself, but they inevitably have to.
  - jodrellblank 7y ago
    Was this written in response to my post? Did it seem like I think my experience has been ruined in some way? Yes, and yes, it reads as "I was engaged until Internet Point Chasing Dweebs came along and took my fun away. Cool - sarcastically said, not cool at all, I'm smarting and resent the change. I guess I was a fool to think it would last and rationalise that it was a plan I should have seen and then chastise myself for not seeing it; I will pick myself up and get over it while pretending I'm not bothered at all, and leave those idiots to their stupid trivial JavaScript". I can't find anyplace on the website where you could talk to another person in a way that could conceivable use a personal pronoun Monica Cellio particularly is involved in Workplace.stackexchange a site where people post interpersonal questions about their workplace, and there are many comments and replies on posts and answers which have references such as "In Alice's reply, she focuses on the legal side, but I'd like to draw attention to power dynamic between blah blah", or "I'm not sure this applies, OP said she is in Canada which has different expectations about blah blah", and often with regular posters discussing the question in amongst comments and their replies. There's also actual discussion forums (Slack-style web chatrooms) e.g. https://chat.stackoverflow.com/ https://chat.stackoverflow.com/ which is where long comment chains get moderator-moved to for more realtime he-said/she-said discussions. I believe many chatrooms per stackexchange sub-site. Plus moderator private chat / moderator to company chat. As I said, my best guess is that there's a meta discussion forum someplace that moderators can use. There is a meta site for every StackExchange site, yes. e.g. https://meta.superuser.com/ https://meta.superuser.com/ for SuperUser, and then there's meta.stackexchange.com for an overall meta-meta site.
Arnt 7y ago
It's not that deep down... I answer quite a few question that are tagged with one low-traffic tag. Four or five people provide 90% of the answers with that tag (I've never counted exactly) and the same handful have done that for several years now. Would you be surprised if that handful of people got to know each other, in a semi-distant, pseudonymous way?
goatinaboat 7y ago
until eventually it became big enough that the Internet Point Chaser personalities were just too quick on the draw SO was explicitly designed to attract those personalities to author all its content. Now it has the content they have served their purpose and this is the transitional stage where they are purged. If I had to guess I would say they were just not a profitable demographic for SO to advertise to. If you are an expert with your own network do you need SO’s job board, for example. They are trying to pivot to sell low-end services to newbies who are attracted to the site by the aforementioned content. But how long can they sustain that with no new worthwhile content?
blub 7y ago
I think you might have a point :) Many (most?) of us were too surprised by the stupidity of the pronoun wars to notice the deeper lesson - building a "community" of non-paid volunteers on the online property of a for-profit company is asking to be stabbed in the back whenever that volunteering effort is no longer deemed necessary. And I have to agree with you, I don't think Stack overflow will lose anything of value if all those moderator volunteers resign or are removed. Maybe it's different for other stack exchange subomains, but SO moderation can be easily codified as a set of rules and outsourced. The saddest part is the whining from the moderators. These people actually thought they had a real relationship with the company and that they had rights... that's mindbogglingly naive. :-(
- ohduran 7y ago
  > mindbogglingly naive. Absolutely. What drives the attention of the execs at Stack Exchange is first and foremost Stack Overflow. Everything else seems like a liability to me, specially sites like Mi Yodeya and Christianity, where sensibilities are much shallower. Just think how unwelcoming the community of SO is sometimes... and their just talking about code! Religion SE sites must be hell IMO. So what's the demand, really? A better community? Creating a new site? SE derives its absolute value from the questions already answered. Community could have mattered in the beginning (you're trying to scale) but now? who cares? "I already have what I needed from you guys" is what execs are thinking.
  - l4o 7y ago
    If I remember correctly, stack overflow is CC BY-SA, so were we to make a new site we could just migrate large portions of the existing content.
    - james-skemp 7y ago
      Which, interestingly enough, was another issue before the Code of Conduct changes. In particular, community members were asking about SE changing from CC BY-SA 3.0 to 4.0, and what legal implications that had. I rarely check meta, but it appears to have warmed up the distrust. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333089/stack-exchange-and-stack-overflow-have-moved-to-cc-by-sa-4-0 https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333089/stack-exchan...

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
  I find that weird, the mods also keep flamewars at bay and just in general keeps things civil. If SO manages to drive the unpaid mods away, eventually they will have to start employing scores of mods themselves.
  - zaphirplane 7y ago
    Why ? Is there a shortage of people wanting to be a moderator on stackoverflow ? Maybe some obscure stack exchange areas
    - tomashubelbauer 7y ago
      Someone being eager to be a mod does not mean they'd make for a good mod. Imagine if HN was modded by a new guy every two weeks (eagerness doesn't tend to last and is not a precursor to perseverance in my opinion at least).
      - kangnkodos 7y ago
        Most jobs need less prior training than you might expect. A lot can be learned in a short period of time when you are on the job. I haven't seen any statistics, but it looks like only a few well known mods are leaving. So, almost all mods are remaining. There are a little over 600 total moods on StackExchange. Over 20 mods on the StackOverflow part of StackExchange. The announced departures from StackExchange are in the tens. For better or for worse, SO will be able to scrape by with the remaining mods. The only real problem for SO is the lack of trust. I've lost trust in the employees of SO. With every post from a SO employee, it gets worse and worse. Who are the direct competitors of SO, if any? I would like to use a different site, if possible. --- On this page which is updated daily, https://stackexchange.com/about/moderators https://stackexchange.com/about/moderators I count 629 moderators across 173 sites. --- For example, the Wayback machine shows that on December 9, 2018, the moderators on the StackOverflow part of StackExchange were these 26: Michael Myers, Robert Harvey, BoltClock, George Stocker, Brad Larson, ThiefMaster, ChrisF, Flexo, Ry-, Bohemian, meagar, Martijn Pieters, Jon Clements, josliber, Madara Uchiha, TheLostMind, Undo, deceze, Aaron Hall, Bhargav Rao, Andy, Cody Gray, Yvette Colomb, Samuel Liew, Rob, Ed Cottrell Today, I see these 23. If you remove George Stocker, 22: Michael Myers, BoltClock, George Stocker, Brad Larson, ChrisF, Flexo, Ry-, Bohemian, meagar, Martijn Pieters, Jon Clements, josliber, Madara Uchiha, Undo, deceze, Aaron Hall, Bhargav Rao, Andy, Cody Gray, Rob, Baum mit Augen, Jean-François Fabre, Samuel Liew Yes. That's a significant drop, but not enough for the users of StackOverflow to notice a difference.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

shrikant 7y ago

> Internet Point Chaser personalities Wow, thanks for putting a name to something that'd been annoying me for decades! It's so frustrating having to re-calibrate your expectations of the value in a community when this happens to it.

bartread 7y ago
I enjoyed "Internet Point Chaser personalities" too, although people who practice this sort of behaviour have always had a name: "karma whores". I first saw that term used on Slashdot, but subsequently also on community sites where points weren't explicitly called karma. I think I might prefer "Internet Point Chaser" though, because it's a bit more lighthearted.
- 97b683f8 7y ago
  It makes me think Communism could be on par with Capitalism if people started chasing points instead of money. Oh wait ! Anyway another use of Stackoverflow is open source support by open source software authors. I've been using ByteBuddy recently (java bytecode manipulation library) and the doc is very superficial all the more so the library in itself is a gigantic net of classes and dependencies to inject (the problem with DSLs based on object oriented systems is that you're never shown the DSL's full syntax but has to deduce it from the individual bricks). Turns out the author is very active on Stackoverflow and these posts have constituted 95% of the sources I read to learn how to handle this library.
  - simonh 7y ago
    >...chasing points instead of money. Oh wait ! Comrade Xi is way ahead of you. Of course there is a capitalist way to approach the same problem. Free money off vouchers at Doral Resort with every early IRS return.
- shrikant 7y ago
  I'd always associated the term "karma whores" with people who recycle and repost stuff for the imaginary Internet points. "IPC personalities" would be people who are actually reasonably well-intentioned, but sort of "stalk" the New/Rising equivalent queues (or tags on SO) to be able to "frist ps0t!!1" a reasonable looking (but obvious!) comment or answer. The classic "low brow dismissal" or low hanging fruit humour type comment comes to mind (Correlation is not causation, but will it run Linux, has Netcraft confirmed it, etc.).

jodrellblank 7y ago

You answered questions and enjoy it. Other people answer questions before you get to them and that makes worthy of name calling - losers with silly interests? You then claim the site's plan all along was to attract such people to ruin your experience? And all-but claim the only people who talk to each other must be cave dwellers hiding in the dark corners? Is it any wonder you don't feel engaged, connected, or part of any community when you hold views like that?

jasonkester 7y ago
Was this written in response to my post? Did it seem like I think my experience has been ruined in some way? That certainly wasn't my intention. I'm just a bit puzzled, because I can't find anyplace on the website where you could talk to another person in a way that could conceivable use a personal pronoun, and thus run afoul of this particular controversy. As I said, my best guess is that there's a meta discussion forum someplace that moderators can use. Are you implying that it's the main Q&A discussion that is having this issue?
- MauranKilom 7y ago
  Moderators are uniquely affected by the policy (and moreso its weirdly phrased FAQ) because they have to enforce it. It's fine if you don't think you'll have to care yourself, but they inevitably have to.
- jodrellblank 7y ago
  Was this written in response to my post? Did it seem like I think my experience has been ruined in some way? Yes, and yes, it reads as "I was engaged until Internet Point Chasing Dweebs came along and took my fun away. Cool - sarcastically said, not cool at all, I'm smarting and resent the change. I guess I was a fool to think it would last and rationalise that it was a plan I should have seen and then chastise myself for not seeing it; I will pick myself up and get over it while pretending I'm not bothered at all, and leave those idiots to their stupid trivial JavaScript". I can't find anyplace on the website where you could talk to another person in a way that could conceivable use a personal pronoun Monica Cellio particularly is involved in Workplace.stackexchange a site where people post interpersonal questions about their workplace, and there are many comments and replies on posts and answers which have references such as "In Alice's reply, she focuses on the legal side, but I'd like to draw attention to power dynamic between blah blah", or "I'm not sure this applies, OP said she is in Canada which has different expectations about blah blah", and often with regular posters discussing the question in amongst comments and their replies. There's also actual discussion forums (Slack-style web chatrooms) e.g. https://chat.stackoverflow.com/ https://chat.stackoverflow.com/ which is where long comment chains get moderator-moved to for more realtime he-said/she-said discussions. I believe many chatrooms per stackexchange sub-site. Plus moderator private chat / moderator to company chat. As I said, my best guess is that there's a meta discussion forum someplace that moderators can use. There is a meta site for every StackExchange site, yes. e.g. https://meta.superuser.com/ https://meta.superuser.com/ for SuperUser, and then there's meta.stackexchange.com for an overall meta-meta site.

Arnt 7y ago

It's not that deep down... I answer quite a few question that are tagged with one low-traffic tag. Four or five people provide 90% of the answers with that tag (I've never counted exactly) and the same handful have done that for several years now. Would you be surprised if that handful of people got to know each other, in a semi-distant, pseudonymous way?

goatinaboat 7y ago

until eventually it became big enough that the Internet Point Chaser personalities were just too quick on the draw SO was explicitly designed to attract those personalities to author all its content. Now it has the content they have served their purpose and this is the transitional stage where they are purged. If I had to guess I would say they were just not a profitable demographic for SO to advertise to. If you are an expert with your own network do you need SO’s job board, for example. They are trying to pivot to sell low-end services to newbies who are attracted to the site by the aforementioned content. But how long can they sustain that with no new worthwhile content?

blub 7y ago

I think you might have a point :) Many (most?) of us were too surprised by the stupidity of the pronoun wars to notice the deeper lesson - building a "community" of non-paid volunteers on the online property of a for-profit company is asking to be stabbed in the back whenever that volunteering effort is no longer deemed necessary. And I have to agree with you, I don't think Stack overflow will lose anything of value if all those moderator volunteers resign or are removed. Maybe it's different for other stack exchange subomains, but SO moderation can be easily codified as a set of rules and outsourced. The saddest part is the whining from the moderators. These people actually thought they had a real relationship with the company and that they had rights... that's mindbogglingly naive. :-(

ohduran 7y ago
> mindbogglingly naive. Absolutely. What drives the attention of the execs at Stack Exchange is first and foremost Stack Overflow. Everything else seems like a liability to me, specially sites like Mi Yodeya and Christianity, where sensibilities are much shallower. Just think how unwelcoming the community of SO is sometimes... and their just talking about code! Religion SE sites must be hell IMO. So what's the demand, really? A better community? Creating a new site? SE derives its absolute value from the questions already answered. Community could have mattered in the beginning (you're trying to scale) but now? who cares? "I already have what I needed from you guys" is what execs are thinking.
- l4o 7y ago
  If I remember correctly, stack overflow is CC BY-SA, so were we to make a new site we could just migrate large portions of the existing content.
  - james-skemp 7y ago
    Which, interestingly enough, was another issue before the Code of Conduct changes. In particular, community members were asking about SE changing from CC BY-SA 3.0 to 4.0, and what legal implications that had. I rarely check meta, but it appears to have warmed up the distrust. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333089/stack-exchange-and-stack-overflow-have-moved-to-cc-by-sa-4-0 https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333089/stack-exchan...