9 ms·

Stack Overflow Moderation Strike Update

84 points by jlericson 3y ago

spaceheater 3y ago
Is this the consequence of having entitled moderators for years, only now instead of powering over random users they finally turned against their creators?
- jlericson 3y ago
  I don't know why you say "entitled moderators". If you send any time with them, you'll quickly see the vast majority of the job is drudgery. You wouldn't say "entitled janitors" would you?
  - A1d31k 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
    I might say "entitled HOA board members". Their job should be (in theory) pure drudgery. And yet they find it so thrilling when they're measuring the grass on your front lawn with a ruler even though they live in the same neighborhood as you and know that it's rained every day for the past two fucking weeks without even 24 hours in between for it to dry up enough to push the damned mower through it.
    - jlericson 3y ago
      That's . . . not a bad analogy. Only instead of 100 homes (like the condo I lived in with an HOA) imagine thousands of people complaining about their neighbors each day. Sometimes it's the ticky tack lawn nonsense and sometimes it's a leaky water heater flooding the neighbor. (The second happened to my neighbor. Unfortunately, it was my water heater.) Until you understand the scale of what the SO moderators were doing, it's easy to call them "entitled". But I know it's hard to drum up sympathy for mods (or HOA boards).
      - arp242 3y ago
        I feel everyone complaining about Stack Overflow should become a Stack Overflow moderator for a month. I am 100% convinced almost all of them will severely nuance their opinions after that, if not radically change them.
        NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
        Admins routinely interfere in elections to make sure they get the "right kind of moderator". This has happened personally do me, on one of the other SEs.
        arp242 3y ago
        Every single time I've seen this happen it's been for a good reason, but of course I can't comment on your specific case.
        gs17 3y ago
        Then why bother with elections? Be transparent and just appoint them.
        arp242 3y ago
        Because they were clearly unsuitable and this avoids drama. It's not a binary on/off thing.
        NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
        Clearly how? My score was in the tens of thousands, I asked good questions Gave good answers. Strove to avoid downvoting/vtc-ing good questions/answers worded poorly. Tried to participate in the way that leads to the ideal outcomes. How is that "clearly"? What evidence do you have that lets you assert that I was "clearly unsuitable"? If anything, someone like yourself who makes up bullshit and believes it as if it were established fact is the sort they should be trying to avoid allowing to moderate. Which is why I'm guessing you're actually a mod.
    - shagie 3y ago
      When Stack Overflow refers to "moderators" it is referring to the people who have a diamond after their name who were elected as part of a moderator election. These individuals are mostly doing things like stoping fights in comments, locking (not closing) posts that have debates on them, and investigating vote collusion so that people can't boost their rep from an alt (or coworker or spouse). On smaller sites (not everything is Stack Overflow) moderators are often involved in guiding new users as you can read all the posts from a day in a few minutes - for example Academia gets about 7 questions per day (Stack Overflow gets that many each minute). They also often run anti-spam tools. Most actions that close questions (especially as duplicates), edit posts, ask questions in comments are from other community users (not moderators) who have rep from contributing to the site. Again, these are not moderators. Some members of the community have more of an interest to curate it to fit their ideal of what the site should look like (and that's a debate that goes back a long way). It is the diamond moderatos who are going on strike. Some of the community are also further abstaining from doing things (answering questions, closing questions, doing reviews). So the claim that it is the moderators that are going through and checking things and insisting that they are of the right form is misplaced. Moderators are rarely involved in dealing with the quality or content of a post unless that is brought to their attention by other users and there is a substantial problem with it (e.g. the person is posting with every variable name as a vulgarity and rolling back any attempts to edit it).
      - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
        SO mods can sometimes be just as petty and power-abusive as reddit mods, which is annoying to see, and of course there is little recourse.
        shagie 3y ago
        The recourse for a power-abusive SO diamond mod is to contact Stack Overflow the company through the contact us form and explain your grievance. The number of moderators on Stack Overflow (and the rest of Stack Exchange) is significantly less than those on Reddit and the standards that they are held to are much higher, the tools that they are given are much more powerful, and the expectations of their conduct is also much higher than Reddit.
  - john_the_writer 3y ago
    Well.. If a janitor were to come by my desk mid day and say. "That's not how you use a trash can. You must follow a prescribed format for putting things in the trash. I have decided that you are not allowed to use the trash can for 10 days. If I see that you have a co-worker, and they attempt to put trash in like you, I will also restrict their trash privileges for 10 days." Then yes I would call the entitled. No matter how drudgy a job is. If you squash people learning, because they can't live up to your standards, you're entitled.
    - sfn42 3y ago
      Well your question was apparently so uniquely bad that they recognized it and correctly identified the duplicate by your coworker. So maybe you're just salty because they were right.
    - arp242 3y ago
      Stack Overflow was never intended to solve every single programming question out there, or to help every single person trying to learn. You also can't show up to ballet lessons and start swing dancing.
minihat 3y ago
I used to use SO all the time while coding. Now I use GPT-4 instead. Those of you who anticipate continuing to use SO: why?
- mr_toad 3y ago
  Because I want to learn to fish, not have fish delivered to me. My last hit on SO was a search for “.gitignore wildcard”. What’s GTP-4 going to do with a two word prompt?
  - jlericson 3y ago
    I agree with the first sentence, but unfortunately ChatGPT does a pretty good job with that particular two word prompt.
  - npsomaratna 3y ago
    Made me curious, so I tried that exact prompt in the GPT-4 playground. Response: A wildcard in .gitignore file is a special character used to match multiple file names or patterns. The most commonly used wildcards are: 1. `*`: This wildcard matches any number of characters in a single path component. For example, `*.txt` would ignore all files with a .txt extension. 2. `?`: This wildcard matches any one character in a single path component. For example, `file?.txt` would ignore files like "file1.txt" and "file2.txt" but not "file12.txt". 3. `**`: This wildcard is used to match any number of characters across multiple path components. For example, `**/build/` would ignore all files and folders named "build" at any level in the project structure. Examples: - `*.log`: Will ignore all files with a .log extension - `**/.DS_Store`: Will ignore all .DS_Store files in every folder - `build/`: Will ignore the "build" folder on top level directory - `/*/temp/`: Will ignore any "temp" folder at the second level of the directory structure (ignores sibling/temp, parent/child/temp but not sibling/child/temp) For more information, you can refer to the official git documentation on gitignore: https://git-scm.com/docs/gitignore
    - JoelEinbinder 3y ago
      This is slightly wrong. build/ will ignore the build directory at every level. /build will ignore the build directory at the top level. I also have no idea what it’s trying to communicate with its /*/temp/ examples
lakomen 3y ago
Idk how often I've deleted my account there. Super toxic place. Some guy has a bad day and can act like an asshole because he has more points and knows people there. SO gives people with points the power to bully others. When you protest you get collectively downvoted to the point that you a temporary banned, for asking a valid question. For instance the last interaction there, someone closed my question as duplicate, but it wasn't a duplicate, so I asked in Meta how I can find out who closed my question, because I wanted to explain to them why it's not a duplicate. That question on meta got 30+ downvotes and the question on SO got them as well including passive aggressive comments like "do you know the answer now". What is this 3rd grade mentality? And because of that people use alt accounts to farm points. They use other accounts to ask questions, and answer them with their main account. Or let their buddies ask and they answer and the other way around. SO is a terrible place nowadays. It used to be a very good place a very long time ago, had its ups and downs, but nowadays it's just a toxic shitfest
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  That's my impression exactly. I was thinking "junior high" rather than "3rd grade" but yeah. Hollywood could get a good script for a sequel to Mean Girls just by watching those people.
- donmcronald 3y ago
  I’ve never had much of a problem. However, I occasionally find a question that matches my problem exactly, but closed as a duplicate with a link to a question that’s similar, but not the same :-(
- jacobrussell 3y ago
  This is why a major value prop for ChatGPT is it's like Stack Overflow but it will always be nice to you :)
  - wordcloudsare 3y ago
    ChatGPT is mostly wrong though, so not helpful if you actually want to solve a problem. It's entertaining though
rurban 3y ago
Is this the first time that the often criticized SE company is holding up to the users, whilst the moderators went on to strike the company and its users? As I see it, the mods want to continue on their ChatGPT removals and bans, the company is against that and wants a lighter approach.
ATHERALIZAIR 3y ago
def int2binary(num): lis=[] while True: if num==0 or num==1: lis.append(num) break lis.append(num%2) num=num//2 lis.reverse() num='' for i in lis: num+str(i) return num print('Number\t\tBinary Form') for i in range (100,1001): print(i,int2binary(i),sep='\t\t')

84 points by jlericson 3y ago

Is this the consequence of having entitled moderators for years, only now instead of powering over random users they finally turned against their creators?

jlericson 3y ago
I don't know why you say "entitled moderators". If you send any time with them, you'll quickly see the vast majority of the job is drudgery. You wouldn't say "entitled janitors" would you?
- A1d31k 3y ago
  [flagged]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
  I might say "entitled HOA board members". Their job should be (in theory) pure drudgery. And yet they find it so thrilling when they're measuring the grass on your front lawn with a ruler even though they live in the same neighborhood as you and know that it's rained every day for the past two fucking weeks without even 24 hours in between for it to dry up enough to push the damned mower through it.
  - jlericson 3y ago
    That's . . . not a bad analogy. Only instead of 100 homes (like the condo I lived in with an HOA) imagine thousands of people complaining about their neighbors each day. Sometimes it's the ticky tack lawn nonsense and sometimes it's a leaky water heater flooding the neighbor. (The second happened to my neighbor. Unfortunately, it was my water heater.) Until you understand the scale of what the SO moderators were doing, it's easy to call them "entitled". But I know it's hard to drum up sympathy for mods (or HOA boards).
    - arp242 3y ago
      I feel everyone complaining about Stack Overflow should become a Stack Overflow moderator for a month. I am 100% convinced almost all of them will severely nuance their opinions after that, if not radically change them.
      - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
        Admins routinely interfere in elections to make sure they get the "right kind of moderator". This has happened personally do me, on one of the other SEs.
        arp242 3y ago
        Every single time I've seen this happen it's been for a good reason, but of course I can't comment on your specific case.
        gs17 3y ago
        Then why bother with elections? Be transparent and just appoint them.
        arp242 3y ago
        Because they were clearly unsuitable and this avoids drama. It's not a binary on/off thing.
        NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
        Clearly how? My score was in the tens of thousands, I asked good questions Gave good answers. Strove to avoid downvoting/vtc-ing good questions/answers worded poorly. Tried to participate in the way that leads to the ideal outcomes. How is that "clearly"? What evidence do you have that lets you assert that I was "clearly unsuitable"? If anything, someone like yourself who makes up bullshit and believes it as if it were established fact is the sort they should be trying to avoid allowing to moderate. Which is why I'm guessing you're actually a mod.
  - shagie 3y ago
    When Stack Overflow refers to "moderators" it is referring to the people who have a diamond after their name who were elected as part of a moderator election. These individuals are mostly doing things like stoping fights in comments, locking (not closing) posts that have debates on them, and investigating vote collusion so that people can't boost their rep from an alt (or coworker or spouse). On smaller sites (not everything is Stack Overflow) moderators are often involved in guiding new users as you can read all the posts from a day in a few minutes - for example Academia gets about 7 questions per day (Stack Overflow gets that many each minute). They also often run anti-spam tools. Most actions that close questions (especially as duplicates), edit posts, ask questions in comments are from other community users (not moderators) who have rep from contributing to the site. Again, these are not moderators. Some members of the community have more of an interest to curate it to fit their ideal of what the site should look like (and that's a debate that goes back a long way). It is the diamond moderatos who are going on strike. Some of the community are also further abstaining from doing things (answering questions, closing questions, doing reviews). So the claim that it is the moderators that are going through and checking things and insisting that they are of the right form is misplaced. Moderators are rarely involved in dealing with the quality or content of a post unless that is brought to their attention by other users and there is a substantial problem with it (e.g. the person is posting with every variable name as a vulgarity and rolling back any attempts to edit it).
    - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
      SO mods can sometimes be just as petty and power-abusive as reddit mods, which is annoying to see, and of course there is little recourse.
      - shagie 3y ago
        The recourse for a power-abusive SO diamond mod is to contact Stack Overflow the company through the contact us form and explain your grievance. The number of moderators on Stack Overflow (and the rest of Stack Exchange) is significantly less than those on Reddit and the standards that they are held to are much higher, the tools that they are given are much more powerful, and the expectations of their conduct is also much higher than Reddit.
- john_the_writer 3y ago
  Well.. If a janitor were to come by my desk mid day and say. "That's not how you use a trash can. You must follow a prescribed format for putting things in the trash. I have decided that you are not allowed to use the trash can for 10 days. If I see that you have a co-worker, and they attempt to put trash in like you, I will also restrict their trash privileges for 10 days." Then yes I would call the entitled. No matter how drudgy a job is. If you squash people learning, because they can't live up to your standards, you're entitled.
  - sfn42 3y ago
    Well your question was apparently so uniquely bad that they recognized it and correctly identified the duplicate by your coworker. So maybe you're just salty because they were right.
  - arp242 3y ago
    Stack Overflow was never intended to solve every single programming question out there, or to help every single person trying to learn. You also can't show up to ballet lessons and start swing dancing.

minihat 3y ago

I used to use SO all the time while coding. Now I use GPT-4 instead. Those of you who anticipate continuing to use SO: why?

mr_toad 3y ago
Because I want to learn to fish, not have fish delivered to me. My last hit on SO was a search for “.gitignore wildcard”. What’s GTP-4 going to do with a two word prompt?
- jlericson 3y ago
  I agree with the first sentence, but unfortunately ChatGPT does a pretty good job with that particular two word prompt.
- npsomaratna 3y ago
  Made me curious, so I tried that exact prompt in the GPT-4 playground. Response: A wildcard in .gitignore file is a special character used to match multiple file names or patterns. The most commonly used wildcards are: 1. `*`: This wildcard matches any number of characters in a single path component. For example, `*.txt` would ignore all files with a .txt extension. 2. `?`: This wildcard matches any one character in a single path component. For example, `file?.txt` would ignore files like "file1.txt" and "file2.txt" but not "file12.txt". 3. `**`: This wildcard is used to match any number of characters across multiple path components. For example, `**/build/` would ignore all files and folders named "build" at any level in the project structure. Examples: - `*.log`: Will ignore all files with a .log extension - `**/.DS_Store`: Will ignore all .DS_Store files in every folder - `build/`: Will ignore the "build" folder on top level directory - `/*/temp/`: Will ignore any "temp" folder at the second level of the directory structure (ignores sibling/temp, parent/child/temp but not sibling/child/temp) For more information, you can refer to the official git documentation on gitignore: https://git-scm.com/docs/gitignore
  - JoelEinbinder 3y ago
    This is slightly wrong. build/ will ignore the build directory at every level. /build will ignore the build directory at the top level. I also have no idea what it’s trying to communicate with its /*/temp/ examples

lakomen 3y ago

Idk how often I've deleted my account there. Super toxic place. Some guy has a bad day and can act like an asshole because he has more points and knows people there. SO gives people with points the power to bully others. When you protest you get collectively downvoted to the point that you a temporary banned, for asking a valid question. For instance the last interaction there, someone closed my question as duplicate, but it wasn't a duplicate, so I asked in Meta how I can find out who closed my question, because I wanted to explain to them why it's not a duplicate. That question on meta got 30+ downvotes and the question on SO got them as well including passive aggressive comments like "do you know the answer now". What is this 3rd grade mentality? And because of that people use alt accounts to farm points. They use other accounts to ask questions, and answer them with their main account. Or let their buddies ask and they answer and the other way around. SO is a terrible place nowadays. It used to be a very good place a very long time ago, had its ups and downs, but nowadays it's just a toxic shitfest

AlbertCory 3y ago
That's my impression exactly. I was thinking "junior high" rather than "3rd grade" but yeah. Hollywood could get a good script for a sequel to Mean Girls just by watching those people.
donmcronald 3y ago
I’ve never had much of a problem. However, I occasionally find a question that matches my problem exactly, but closed as a duplicate with a link to a question that’s similar, but not the same :-(
jacobrussell 3y ago
This is why a major value prop for ChatGPT is it's like Stack Overflow but it will always be nice to you :)
- wordcloudsare 3y ago
  ChatGPT is mostly wrong though, so not helpful if you actually want to solve a problem. It's entertaining though

rurban 3y ago

Is this the first time that the often criticized SE company is holding up to the users, whilst the moderators went on to strike the company and its users? As I see it, the mods want to continue on their ChatGPT removals and bans, the company is against that and wants a lighter approach.

ATHERALIZAIR 3y ago

def int2binary(num): lis=[] while True: if num==0 or num==1: lis.append(num) break lis.append(num%2) num=num//2 lis.reverse() num='' for i in lis: num+str(i) return num print('Number\t\tBinary Form') for i in range (100,1001): print(i,int2binary(i),sep='\t\t')