5 ms·

I was promoted to one of those "mod" type people who reviews new answers, first posts, etc, a few years back. I can tell you that I quit in the last 6 months.

I was promoted to one of those "mod" type people who reviews new answers, first posts, etc, a few years back. I can tell you that I quit in the last 6 months. All new answers are answers on questions from first time posters, answering questions that have good solid answers from 8+ years ago (mostly 10 years), and it is pretty obvious, they are just doing it to get points. The question/answer is not something that has changed in the last 8+ years, they are just doing it to get reputation or whatever. Most good solid questions...I just do not see too many today. I am not saying this is the reason for the decline, but there is a deluge of posts answering very old questions with a slight modification of an old answer. I quit putting effort into it, as it was just non-productive.

kibwen 3y ago
I recall that about ten years ago there were reports that edits to Wikipedia were slowing precipitously. People wondered if this meant the imminent death of Wikipedia. With the benefit of hindsight, it seems more plausible that Wikipedia had merely shifted from its adolescent phase to its mature phase, and that all the low-hanging fruit had simply been harvested. If we look at the stats, Wikipedia's edit velocity maxed out in early 2007 (37 days per 10M edits), then fell to half that in late 2014 (73 days per 10M edits), and has actually increased a fair bit since then: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Time_Between_Edits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Time_Between_Edits It's entirely possible that the same is happening to SO.
robomartin 3y ago
I wonder if this might be partly because they have not made an effort to make their software be more intelligent about surfacing answers to questions as well as evaluating answers. I would think that, at some point, it isn't necessarily the fault of the question authors or those responding. One of the things I say with some frequency is that all failures are engineering problems. Blaming the users/customers, in the end, fails to take advantage of an opportunity to improve the product, learn from mistakes and improve process.
smashed 3y ago
Thanks for your work as a mod. While I understand it's a lot of work, and some (most?) might be posting low quality answers, my main problem with stack overflow has been exactly that over time, the top answer becomes stale. The question is still relevant, but the best practice or library, platform whatever changed... That is a problem the stack overflow model has a hard time adapting too.. and it just gets worst over time..
- readingnews 3y ago
  From my purview, and again I am a tiny data point of one, the new answers to old questions are really: Original accepted upvoted to +20 answer: "Take Y and drive it into X, grep output for Z and place in AZ for processing with the -kombucha switch" Answer posted yesterday by "NewUserXX123", a first post: "Take A and drive it into B, grep output for C and place it in DD for processing with the -kombucha switch" It gets pretty tiring responding with a custom comment and downvoting, only to have "NewUserXX123" then cuss you out in a DM about how you are a total @!#$%()&!@$%.
  - technion 3y ago
    That's going to depend on your domain, because most fronted d questions I come across end in "there is a jquery plugin for that" which don't help modern sites without jquery.
smeagull 3y ago
> answering questions that have good solid answers from 8+ years ago (mostly 10 years), I hit upon those useless answers all the time. I have no need to know about solutions that might have worked a decade ago and are obsolete. Stack Overflow is useless now.
- ourmandave 3y ago
  Yeah, except for those of us working on old software that still runs the business.
  - DangitBobby 3y ago
    I find Stack Overflow answers don't usually indicate which versions of software the solution was good for. Is that not your experience?
brodouevencode 3y ago
> and it is pretty obvious, they are just doing it to get points Gamifying reputation was one of the worst things we've done. I was part of this in previous positions and after a while it became apparent that it brought out the worst in people. There are better ways of incentivizing usage rather than stupid internet points.
- woleium 3y ago
  I'm not sure if up voting this comment is appropriate, but I wholeheartedly agree
  - brodouevencode 3y ago
    Please don’t
- glaucon 3y ago
  >Gamifying reputation was one of the worst things Agreed and I don't know this for sure but the points lust, it seems to me, is not limited to questioners and answers, some of the behaviour I've seen from mods seems to be driven by that too. Just to repeat, I don't know that because I don't know what gets you points but the behaviour is hard to understand otherwise. I had a question where I had finished with a one word sentence "Thanks." . A mod had removed that part of the question, when I looked at their record they had an awful lot of edits which consisted of similar, tiny, non-substantive changes. It did make me wonder about their motivation. Anyway, yes, imho gamification not a good idea.
  - jodrellblank 3y ago
    > "I had a question where I had finished with a one word sentence "Thanks." . A mod had removed that part of the question, when I looked at their record they had an awful lot of edits which consisted of similar, tiny, non-substantive changes. It did make me wonder about their motivation." https://stackoverflow.com/help/behavior https://stackoverflow.com/help/behavior "Do not use signature, taglines, greetings, thanks, or other chitchat. "Every post you make is already “signed” with your standard user card, which links directly back to your user page. Your user page belongs to you, so fill it with information about your interests, links to stuff you’ve worked on, or whatever else you like!" "Thanks and other statements of appreciation are unnecessary, and, like other chitchat, should not be included." "If you use signatures, taglines, greetings, thanks, or other chitchat, they will be removed to reduce noise in the questions and answers." ---- Removing it doesn't get the editor any points, they are spending their time cleaning up your question to site standards for no reward at all. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/260776/should-i-remove-fluff-like-greetings-signatures-thanks-etc-when-editin https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/260776/should-i-rem...
ourmandave 3y ago
At least they let you sort by most recent answer date now. Some really old questions (circa 2009) have the answer to the latest version, that required scrolling through multiple pages.
agosta 3y ago
I hear your point and thank you for your service as one. That said, how much do we think this is more attributed to the existence of coding AIs like Co-pilot or ChatGPT. I hardly use stack overflow anymore thanks to OpenAI
qqtt 3y ago
Why was there such a heavy handed approach to moderation in the first place though? Why not let the community ask the same question over and over again, and let the answers naturally shift with the time? I'm just not sure what value there was to have a team of people volunteer their time to making sure there were absolutely zero duplicated questions/answers? What problem is that solving? If anything, it is adding problems by not letting the content naturally evolve in time. If people want to assess the quality of answers, it's better to have multiple data points, and SO could have invested those resources in algorithmically linking similar questions and making it easy to navigate by both answer reputation and time. Along similarly lines, it seems best to tackle the people trying to game the system algorithmically as well - if content is word for word duplicate, that's a problem which can be solved by computers instead of people (similar text is a solved problem). It seems the only use case for moderators on SO is for removing truly inappropriate content - it's wild to me that moderators were spending significant amounts of time actually removing technical questions and answers. It reminds me a bit of reddit moderation, where reddit communities enforce these non-sensical rules and by extension require hugely heavy handed moderation to 'curate' their communities. Like, the headphones subreddit disallows pictures of headphones in boxes. Why? If the community is interested in headphones, what's the difference if it's a box or not? It's not like if you take it out of the box the headphones look different than any picture you can find on the internet. Seems like many of the problems of moderation are artificial rules endlessly being enforced by real people which ends up just being pseudo 'make busy' work.
- appplication 3y ago
  When it comes to software, it’s even less sensical to have one archival correct answer, given that software evolves over time, and what was an acceptable or necessary workaround 5-10 years ago could be a complete anti pattern today. It would more sense to establish lineage. Lock older questions from more answers after some point in time, and instead of closing and linking to original, do it the other way. Keep new questions open and link to past variations. Then in the old threads indicate newer guidance may exist and link forward.
- Spooky23 3y ago
  They talked about it in the Stack Exchange podcast years ago. IIRC, the vision of the perfect question was one with a canonical answer. They didn’t want to be Quora. I think that concept made and makes a lot of sense, but doesn’t capture the “meta” issues surrounding how you litigate the form of the question, especially as questions get more nuanced.
throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
I couldn't figure out how to gain any points other than answering my own question, but I needed points to contribute in any way. It's like SO is set up to be difficult to use. I can't imagine why anyone keeps using it.

kibwen 3y ago

I recall that about ten years ago there were reports that edits to Wikipedia were slowing precipitously. People wondered if this meant the imminent death of Wikipedia. With the benefit of hindsight, it seems more plausible that Wikipedia had merely shifted from its adolescent phase to its mature phase, and that all the low-hanging fruit had simply been harvested. If we look at the stats, Wikipedia's edit velocity maxed out in early 2007 (37 days per 10M edits), then fell to half that in late 2014 (73 days per 10M edits), and has actually increased a fair bit since then: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Time_Between_Edits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Time_Between_Edits It's entirely possible that the same is happening to SO.

robomartin 3y ago

I wonder if this might be partly because they have not made an effort to make their software be more intelligent about surfacing answers to questions as well as evaluating answers. I would think that, at some point, it isn't necessarily the fault of the question authors or those responding. One of the things I say with some frequency is that all failures are engineering problems. Blaming the users/customers, in the end, fails to take advantage of an opportunity to improve the product, learn from mistakes and improve process.

smashed 3y ago

Thanks for your work as a mod. While I understand it's a lot of work, and some (most?) might be posting low quality answers, my main problem with stack overflow has been exactly that over time, the top answer becomes stale. The question is still relevant, but the best practice or library, platform whatever changed... That is a problem the stack overflow model has a hard time adapting too.. and it just gets worst over time..

readingnews 3y ago
From my purview, and again I am a tiny data point of one, the new answers to old questions are really: Original accepted upvoted to +20 answer: "Take Y and drive it into X, grep output for Z and place in AZ for processing with the -kombucha switch" Answer posted yesterday by "NewUserXX123", a first post: "Take A and drive it into B, grep output for C and place it in DD for processing with the -kombucha switch" It gets pretty tiring responding with a custom comment and downvoting, only to have "NewUserXX123" then cuss you out in a DM about how you are a total @!#$%()&!@$%.
- technion 3y ago
  That's going to depend on your domain, because most fronted d questions I come across end in "there is a jquery plugin for that" which don't help modern sites without jquery.

smeagull 3y ago

> answering questions that have good solid answers from 8+ years ago (mostly 10 years), I hit upon those useless answers all the time. I have no need to know about solutions that might have worked a decade ago and are obsolete. Stack Overflow is useless now.

ourmandave 3y ago
Yeah, except for those of us working on old software that still runs the business.
- DangitBobby 3y ago
  I find Stack Overflow answers don't usually indicate which versions of software the solution was good for. Is that not your experience?

brodouevencode 3y ago

> and it is pretty obvious, they are just doing it to get points Gamifying reputation was one of the worst things we've done. I was part of this in previous positions and after a while it became apparent that it brought out the worst in people. There are better ways of incentivizing usage rather than stupid internet points.

woleium 3y ago
I'm not sure if up voting this comment is appropriate, but I wholeheartedly agree
- brodouevencode 3y ago
  Please don’t
glaucon 3y ago
>Gamifying reputation was one of the worst things Agreed and I don't know this for sure but the points lust, it seems to me, is not limited to questioners and answers, some of the behaviour I've seen from mods seems to be driven by that too. Just to repeat, I don't know that because I don't know what gets you points but the behaviour is hard to understand otherwise. I had a question where I had finished with a one word sentence "Thanks." . A mod had removed that part of the question, when I looked at their record they had an awful lot of edits which consisted of similar, tiny, non-substantive changes. It did make me wonder about their motivation. Anyway, yes, imho gamification not a good idea.
- jodrellblank 3y ago
  > "I had a question where I had finished with a one word sentence "Thanks." . A mod had removed that part of the question, when I looked at their record they had an awful lot of edits which consisted of similar, tiny, non-substantive changes. It did make me wonder about their motivation." https://stackoverflow.com/help/behavior https://stackoverflow.com/help/behavior "Do not use signature, taglines, greetings, thanks, or other chitchat. "Every post you make is already “signed” with your standard user card, which links directly back to your user page. Your user page belongs to you, so fill it with information about your interests, links to stuff you’ve worked on, or whatever else you like!" "Thanks and other statements of appreciation are unnecessary, and, like other chitchat, should not be included." "If you use signatures, taglines, greetings, thanks, or other chitchat, they will be removed to reduce noise in the questions and answers." ---- Removing it doesn't get the editor any points, they are spending their time cleaning up your question to site standards for no reward at all. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/260776/should-i-remove-fluff-like-greetings-signatures-thanks-etc-when-editin https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/260776/should-i-rem...

ourmandave 3y ago

At least they let you sort by most recent answer date now. Some really old questions (circa 2009) have the answer to the latest version, that required scrolling through multiple pages.

agosta 3y ago

I hear your point and thank you for your service as one. That said, how much do we think this is more attributed to the existence of coding AIs like Co-pilot or ChatGPT. I hardly use stack overflow anymore thanks to OpenAI

qqtt 3y ago

Why was there such a heavy handed approach to moderation in the first place though? Why not let the community ask the same question over and over again, and let the answers naturally shift with the time? I'm just not sure what value there was to have a team of people volunteer their time to making sure there were absolutely zero duplicated questions/answers? What problem is that solving? If anything, it is adding problems by not letting the content naturally evolve in time. If people want to assess the quality of answers, it's better to have multiple data points, and SO could have invested those resources in algorithmically linking similar questions and making it easy to navigate by both answer reputation and time. Along similarly lines, it seems best to tackle the people trying to game the system algorithmically as well - if content is word for word duplicate, that's a problem which can be solved by computers instead of people (similar text is a solved problem). It seems the only use case for moderators on SO is for removing truly inappropriate content - it's wild to me that moderators were spending significant amounts of time actually removing technical questions and answers. It reminds me a bit of reddit moderation, where reddit communities enforce these non-sensical rules and by extension require hugely heavy handed moderation to 'curate' their communities. Like, the headphones subreddit disallows pictures of headphones in boxes. Why? If the community is interested in headphones, what's the difference if it's a box or not? It's not like if you take it out of the box the headphones look different than any picture you can find on the internet. Seems like many of the problems of moderation are artificial rules endlessly being enforced by real people which ends up just being pseudo 'make busy' work.

appplication 3y ago
When it comes to software, it’s even less sensical to have one archival correct answer, given that software evolves over time, and what was an acceptable or necessary workaround 5-10 years ago could be a complete anti pattern today. It would more sense to establish lineage. Lock older questions from more answers after some point in time, and instead of closing and linking to original, do it the other way. Keep new questions open and link to past variations. Then in the old threads indicate newer guidance may exist and link forward.
Spooky23 3y ago
They talked about it in the Stack Exchange podcast years ago. IIRC, the vision of the perfect question was one with a canonical answer. They didn’t want to be Quora. I think that concept made and makes a lot of sense, but doesn’t capture the “meta” issues surrounding how you litigate the form of the question, especially as questions get more nuanced.

throwawaaarrgh 3y ago

I couldn't figure out how to gain any points other than answering my own question, but I needed points to contribute in any way. It's like SO is set up to be difficult to use. I can't imagine why anyone keeps using it.