4 ms·

I have been on SO for over 10 years (not a community moderator; just have the standard moderation powers auto-enabled based on 25k+ rep). I have seen many commu

by _cs2017_ 6y ago

I have been on SO for over 10 years (not a community moderator; just have the standard moderation powers auto-enabled based on 25k+ rep). I have seen many community moderators who are extremely disrespectful to helpful users, and exhibit the degree of zealous devotion to some abstract rules that would make Chairman Mao smile. My weak attempts to prevent them from bullying users have utterly failed. It's not an easy problem to solve. SO could simply let community moderators vote out the jerks from among them. That would work great, if only the vast majority of community moderators were kind, considerate, thoughtful people. However, just like with certain other professions, the moderator role tends to appeal either to super-altruists, or to power hungry fanatics. Sadly, the world has a lot more of the latter than the former. And even more so than with reddit (where at least there's some competition between different communitiies), there's only one SO. Also, the intrinsic importance of historical content on SO is a huge barrier to any competiition. So it's not like users can vote with their feet. So even if SO management wanted to fix the problem, what could they do? (That's assuming the SO management isn't happy with the current moderation style in the first place!) (Community moderators = diamond moderators are the only ones, besides SO employees of course, who can delete user comments.)

umvi 6y ago
I feel like this happened to me recently. I encountered a C++ question that I felt I could contribute an answer to, but it had been closed 10 years earlier. I opened a meta thread about it, and a helpful high rep user reopened it, only for a bunch of even higher rep users to come in and ruthlessly shut everything down, including deleting the answer I submitted. I've never seen a community so hostile toward someone trying to add value. Maybe I really was in the wrong here for trying to reopen that question; you can read the whole thread and judge for yourself: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/405099/reopen-c-argument-parsing/405101 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/405099/reopen-c-arg...
- singularity2001 6y ago
  you were not in the wrong.
singularity2001 6y ago
>>> let the community vote out the jerks from among them. this is the perfect idea: make each moderation step transparent and attributable. allow voting down every wrong 'duplicate' decision and every moderator that closed questions for no good reason.
ryathal 6y ago
A big part of the problem is the relatively hidden Meta site where the real power lies. The Meta users are often disconnected from the reality at hand. In a lot of ways it's similar to the non-coding architect problem.

umvi 6y ago

I feel like this happened to me recently. I encountered a C++ question that I felt I could contribute an answer to, but it had been closed 10 years earlier. I opened a meta thread about it, and a helpful high rep user reopened it, only for a bunch of even higher rep users to come in and ruthlessly shut everything down, including deleting the answer I submitted. I've never seen a community so hostile toward someone trying to add value. Maybe I really was in the wrong here for trying to reopen that question; you can read the whole thread and judge for yourself: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/405099/reopen-c-argument-parsing/405101 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/405099/reopen-c-arg...

singularity2001 6y ago
you were not in the wrong.

singularity2001 6y ago

>>> let the community vote out the jerks from among them. this is the perfect idea: make each moderation step transparent and attributable. allow voting down every wrong 'duplicate' decision and every moderator that closed questions for no good reason.

ryathal 6y ago

A big part of the problem is the relatively hidden Meta site where the real power lies. The Meta users are often disconnected from the reality at hand. In a lot of ways it's similar to the non-coding architect problem.