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I feel like the moderation culture of Stack Overflow became toxic and counterproductive years ago. It's like the worst parts of Wikipedia, but squared. Just end

by Lazare 3y ago

I feel like the moderation culture of Stack Overflow became toxic and counterproductive years ago. It's like the worst parts of Wikipedia, but squared. Just endless arguments over what is or isn't a duplicate or is or isn't relevant, while every interesting question somehow ends up closed, good answers are downvoted, and spam drifts to the top. I'm sure everyone involved actually wants the site to be useful and pleasant, but somehow the actual result is the exact opposite. That being said, I don't think the culture or moderation has got worse recently, so I suspect the traffic decline is either a change in Google's algorithms or the impact of ChatGPT (or both).

anticodon 3y ago
I think moderation culture changed for a reason. About 8-10 years ago quality of answers started to decline because HR started to source SO for candidates. This created incentive for posting thousands of answers moments after the question is posted that were simply not right. More often than not those wrong answers were upvoted anyway. And HR won't check the quality of answers, they are concerned only with your total score. Once I was researching something and found wrong answer on SO from some junior dev from India. The answer was wrong and it was evident that the author of the answer didn't even fully read the question. Out of curiosity I checked the author's profile and found out that it was a deliberate strategy: e.g. when there's a question about working with files, he'd post an answer with a link to the language page on "open". I politely asked the author in the comments to stop posting wrong or useless answers. Instead, he wrote very aggressive response, opened my profile and downvoted as many of my answers as he could. And there were many similar cases, probably still are.
- suzzer99 3y ago
  Everything went downhill once people had real incentive (like actual money, not just internet cred) to game the system for reputation points. The mods had to come up with ever-evolving layers of rules on top of rules that lowered the answer quality and put up huge barriers for an average user to contribute.
  - quirino 3y ago
    Incentives really make or break this type of website. Often on the internet I find myself thinking "Thank God this [website specific metric] isn't worth anything so people have no reason to game it".
    - anticodon 3y ago
      I think "Internet Karma" systems are inherently flawed. I know one technical website with karma, where one type of users eventually gained majority of the karma capital, downvoted all opposition into such deep negative karma, that they can't write anything anymore, and now there's strictly one point of view in all the articles and comments. Which is aligned with the site owners' point of view, so they have no incentive to change anything. Though everyone notices that quality of articles and comments started to decline once the users with karma majority censored all others out.
      - contravariant 3y ago
        I think hackernews' system is still working. Though that might just be because it is small enough.
        cheschire 3y ago
        HN implements some significant limitations to the model that make it work. Things like not being able to downvote replies, can't edit / delete your replies after certain criteria are met, limited upvoting until a certain amount of contribution, etc. These are constraints that limit the types of people that are interested in remaining here. But HN is by no means "small".
  - rusk 3y ago
    “It was a good measurement, until it became a target”
  - dgb23 3y ago
    Twitter has recently added monetary incentives to create “engagement”. I assume that there will be a decline in quality. It will become an interesting case study.
- itronitron 3y ago
  That matches my experience. I stopped using it in 2015 after trying to solve something with a new framework I was using and finding that all of the answers on SO were just wrong.
- 4gotunameagain 3y ago
  ah, the primordial incompatibility of cultures. Let's not forget that in india it is not considered wrong to "game" the system, even it is considered unethical by western standards. It is not a coincidence all of these tech support scammers are based in india. this brings forth an interesting topic, how do we reconcile cultural differences in online platforms ? Nobody can deny they exist, and they create clashes like the aforementioned one.
  - DanHulton 3y ago
    I don't think you do. Your platform should have an explicit and expected code of conduct set up in advance, and people should be held to it. If they cannot, they aren't allowed to use the platform. When it becomes apparent that there are cultural norms that make it difficult or impossible for people from those cultures to use your platform, you re-examine your code of conduct, of course, to make sure you're not unduly excluding people. If you are, you amend the code, you change the platform in ways necessary to support them, and everyone tends to end up better off as a result. But some cultural norms will be antithetical to the point of the platform, like in this case: SO cannot function properly when people attempt to game the system. In those cases, the CoC remains, and people from that culture will either have to adapt to the platform or find (or make) a similar one that works for them. The alternative, as we see here, is that your platform degrades until it's not useful to _anyone,_ this "problem culture" included.
    - Ketan-fullstack 3y ago
      Agree with the first part of your comment. gaming the system is prevalent but not considered ethical in india. HRs won’t allow such candidates for example. So there is no question of amending CoC to make room. There is a difference between something being prevalent and something being culturally accepted. The solution lies in naming and shaming. Making it clear that such people aren’t wanted on these platforms. But i don’t think anyone should chalk this up to “cultural norms” That’s just being unfair to those of us who are just as fed up with this mindset.
      - 3y ago
- berkes 3y ago
  The "opened up and downvoted" rings so true. I've a rather high account. So I can revert mod decisions and sometimes do. E.g. reopen a marked-duplicate that isn't duplicate on closer inspection. I don't do it often (can't be bothered too much) but when I do, I sometimes almost feel the hate radiation over the web. Indeed, people on a rage-tantrum going through all my answers and questions and downvoting those. Lol.
  - lloydatkinson 3y ago
    I also have a similar account and you inspired me to vote to reopen maybe twenty questions in a row. All of them were perfectly good questions closed for stupid reasons.
- SCdF 3y ago
  This incentive was always there, from day one. It was a classic thing to put the most basic answer as possible in as quickly as possible just to get it out the door and then refine it later, because whoever posts the answer first would have theirs shown first presuming no upvotes.
  - netmare 3y ago
    This is exactly the reason I gave up on SO. It was so disappointing to see the "frist!" answer get votes, even when it was factually incorrect. By the time it took me to think and write a half decent phrase the original answer had been edited dozens of times. The site was also eager to interrupt me every time to tell me that an existing answer had been edited. They did everything possible to allow the system to be gamed and, well... they succeeded.
lmm 3y ago
I wonder if it's just finally reached a tipping point of frustration with the moderation. I know I stopped going there years ago. At some point as all the good contributors leave you'd expect to get a snowball / downward spiral, even if the site coasted for years before that.
throwaway277432 3y ago
The exact opposite happened, contrary to this often repeated meme. Both SO and Wikipedia became what they were because of their strict moderation and RTFM-implied attitude. It's what drove professionals like me to the site. I'm just a regular user BTW, but it felt like SO people were my peers. But SO (the company) wanted it to be more accessible, easier for newbies, "nicer", there was a huge uproar over them publicly blasting a moderator over a disagreement on a unilaterally imposed new code of conduct, and recently they even (again unilaterally) effectively reverted the ban on LLM-generated content. This has been going on for years, and moderators have less power than they ever had. Imho this whole thing started much earlier, I think it was 2017 when they tried the SO documentation project and let everyone keep their rep where I first thought they had jumped the shark. The company has been on a bender for the last few years, and high-ish rep users like me just don't see the value in answering anymore. With recent blog posts it seems even more clear that they are on the direct path to enshittification, against their own actual users and moderators. Recently it feels like all the actual professionals have left and what remains are "students" asking low effort questions in bad faith while an army of spambots tries to pounce on these. While this means boosted engagement numbers short-term, it spells death of the site long-term. SO cannot survive on low quality spam, even if other sites (like Reddit) may be able to.
- throwaway290 3y ago
  Agreed. If anything, the problem of SO is that it's not evolving strict measures fast enough to stay relevant. There's a constant stream of duplicate and low effort junk that gets only stronger over time, and obviously there are not enough people to moderate all of it. The original idea is great, but like any other place it needed to evolve barriers as userbase skyrockets and it mostly failed to do that so far.
  - shagie 3y ago
    > There's a constant stream of duplicate and low effort junk that gets only stronger over time, There's a question on meta from a decade ago about what the Roomba (automatic deletion scripts) should be deleting. One of the answers had a bit of point in time information: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/262077 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/262077 > How much traffic do the questions that get duped to something bring? Especially the (currently) 410 questions linked to the Java NPE question. The Java NPE question is https://stackoverflow.com/q/218384 https://stackoverflow.com/q/218384 It now has 10,339 linked to it. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/linked/218384?lq=1 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/linked/218384?lq=1 That makes it harder to find the original source, more difficult for google to chase, and clusters results. > The original idea is great, but like any other place it needed to evolve barriers as userbase skyrockets and it mostly failed to do that so far. Which upper management has been working against by encouraging a reduction of those barriers, disincentivizing people from moderating and curating, and trying to grow engagement from people asking questions.
baby 3y ago
I think it depends on communities
Joeri 3y ago
The moderation culture is why I stopped engaging with stackoverflow and software.stackexchange. I noticed two problems. The first is marking so many interesting questions and answers as off-topic or opinion-based, which vastly reduced the scope of interesting content, and discouraged daily visiting to learn instead of just using the site as a reference through google. Relying on google to feed you users is a fool's gambit. Websites need to create recurring visitors, and they do that by providing something that engages. Stackoverflow and software.SE's moderation policies made it far less engaging as they grew more heavy-handed. This left the sites open to changes in google's algorithm affecting their traffic. The second major problem is duplicate policing and a lack of staleness policies. By not allowing the same question to be asked again it meant that the content of the network has grown gradually more and more stale. Even my own old answers are now often wrong because they are simply outdated. Stackoverflow is filled with questions in the style "what is the right way to use technology X to do Y", and the right answer to that changes every 2 or 3 years, when technology X gets an update or when new insights in how to best do Y are formed. I tried updating a few here and there, when I saw people engaging with wrong answers, but overall the blame is on stackoverflow and its moderators for not working out a more effective mechanism to get rid of stale answers and letting new users answer old questions with answers that have a shot at rising to the top. This also means that as top-voted answers grow more and more stale there is a tipping point where google no longer sees the site as a useful resource and starts lowering it in the ranking, and this is what seems has happened.
sznio 3y ago
I'd blame Google - at least for the initial drop. When you look at the "new visits" chart you can see that the drop happens in May, 6 months before ChatGPT.
SCdF 3y ago
I was in the beta of stack overflow (my numerical id is <2000): it was always toxic and counterproductive, and I stopped seriously using it a year or so into its life (this may have been before it left beta, I don't remember). It is still the best place to find a lot of answers (though their piece of the pie is rapidly shrinking), but participating in the system was never fun.
vehementi 3y ago
Maybe SO can have like super moderators / admin employees that are summonable by paying XXX score and they can bring the hammer down on problem answers and punish the toxic moderators etc.

by Lazare 3y ago

anticodon 3y ago

I think moderation culture changed for a reason. About 8-10 years ago quality of answers started to decline because HR started to source SO for candidates. This created incentive for posting thousands of answers moments after the question is posted that were simply not right. More often than not those wrong answers were upvoted anyway. And HR won't check the quality of answers, they are concerned only with your total score. Once I was researching something and found wrong answer on SO from some junior dev from India. The answer was wrong and it was evident that the author of the answer didn't even fully read the question. Out of curiosity I checked the author's profile and found out that it was a deliberate strategy: e.g. when there's a question about working with files, he'd post an answer with a link to the language page on "open". I politely asked the author in the comments to stop posting wrong or useless answers. Instead, he wrote very aggressive response, opened my profile and downvoted as many of my answers as he could. And there were many similar cases, probably still are.

suzzer99 3y ago
Everything went downhill once people had real incentive (like actual money, not just internet cred) to game the system for reputation points. The mods had to come up with ever-evolving layers of rules on top of rules that lowered the answer quality and put up huge barriers for an average user to contribute.
- quirino 3y ago
  Incentives really make or break this type of website. Often on the internet I find myself thinking "Thank God this [website specific metric] isn't worth anything so people have no reason to game it".
  - anticodon 3y ago
    I think "Internet Karma" systems are inherently flawed. I know one technical website with karma, where one type of users eventually gained majority of the karma capital, downvoted all opposition into such deep negative karma, that they can't write anything anymore, and now there's strictly one point of view in all the articles and comments. Which is aligned with the site owners' point of view, so they have no incentive to change anything. Though everyone notices that quality of articles and comments started to decline once the users with karma majority censored all others out.
    - contravariant 3y ago
      I think hackernews' system is still working. Though that might just be because it is small enough.
      - cheschire 3y ago
        HN implements some significant limitations to the model that make it work. Things like not being able to downvote replies, can't edit / delete your replies after certain criteria are met, limited upvoting until a certain amount of contribution, etc. These are constraints that limit the types of people that are interested in remaining here. But HN is by no means "small".
- rusk 3y ago
  “It was a good measurement, until it became a target”
- dgb23 3y ago
  Twitter has recently added monetary incentives to create “engagement”. I assume that there will be a decline in quality. It will become an interesting case study.
itronitron 3y ago
That matches my experience. I stopped using it in 2015 after trying to solve something with a new framework I was using and finding that all of the answers on SO were just wrong.
4gotunameagain 3y ago
ah, the primordial incompatibility of cultures. Let's not forget that in india it is not considered wrong to "game" the system, even it is considered unethical by western standards. It is not a coincidence all of these tech support scammers are based in india. this brings forth an interesting topic, how do we reconcile cultural differences in online platforms ? Nobody can deny they exist, and they create clashes like the aforementioned one.
- DanHulton 3y ago
  I don't think you do. Your platform should have an explicit and expected code of conduct set up in advance, and people should be held to it. If they cannot, they aren't allowed to use the platform. When it becomes apparent that there are cultural norms that make it difficult or impossible for people from those cultures to use your platform, you re-examine your code of conduct, of course, to make sure you're not unduly excluding people. If you are, you amend the code, you change the platform in ways necessary to support them, and everyone tends to end up better off as a result. But some cultural norms will be antithetical to the point of the platform, like in this case: SO cannot function properly when people attempt to game the system. In those cases, the CoC remains, and people from that culture will either have to adapt to the platform or find (or make) a similar one that works for them. The alternative, as we see here, is that your platform degrades until it's not useful to _anyone,_ this "problem culture" included.
  - Ketan-fullstack 3y ago
    Agree with the first part of your comment. gaming the system is prevalent but not considered ethical in india. HRs won’t allow such candidates for example. So there is no question of amending CoC to make room. There is a difference between something being prevalent and something being culturally accepted. The solution lies in naming and shaming. Making it clear that such people aren’t wanted on these platforms. But i don’t think anyone should chalk this up to “cultural norms” That’s just being unfair to those of us who are just as fed up with this mindset.
    - 3y ago
berkes 3y ago
The "opened up and downvoted" rings so true. I've a rather high account. So I can revert mod decisions and sometimes do. E.g. reopen a marked-duplicate that isn't duplicate on closer inspection. I don't do it often (can't be bothered too much) but when I do, I sometimes almost feel the hate radiation over the web. Indeed, people on a rage-tantrum going through all my answers and questions and downvoting those. Lol.
- lloydatkinson 3y ago
  I also have a similar account and you inspired me to vote to reopen maybe twenty questions in a row. All of them were perfectly good questions closed for stupid reasons.
SCdF 3y ago
This incentive was always there, from day one. It was a classic thing to put the most basic answer as possible in as quickly as possible just to get it out the door and then refine it later, because whoever posts the answer first would have theirs shown first presuming no upvotes.
- netmare 3y ago
  This is exactly the reason I gave up on SO. It was so disappointing to see the "frist!" answer get votes, even when it was factually incorrect. By the time it took me to think and write a half decent phrase the original answer had been edited dozens of times. The site was also eager to interrupt me every time to tell me that an existing answer had been edited. They did everything possible to allow the system to be gamed and, well... they succeeded.

lmm 3y ago

I wonder if it's just finally reached a tipping point of frustration with the moderation. I know I stopped going there years ago. At some point as all the good contributors leave you'd expect to get a snowball / downward spiral, even if the site coasted for years before that.

throwaway277432 3y ago

The exact opposite happened, contrary to this often repeated meme. Both SO and Wikipedia became what they were because of their strict moderation and RTFM-implied attitude. It's what drove professionals like me to the site. I'm just a regular user BTW, but it felt like SO people were my peers. But SO (the company) wanted it to be more accessible, easier for newbies, "nicer", there was a huge uproar over them publicly blasting a moderator over a disagreement on a unilaterally imposed new code of conduct, and recently they even (again unilaterally) effectively reverted the ban on LLM-generated content. This has been going on for years, and moderators have less power than they ever had. Imho this whole thing started much earlier, I think it was 2017 when they tried the SO documentation project and let everyone keep their rep where I first thought they had jumped the shark. The company has been on a bender for the last few years, and high-ish rep users like me just don't see the value in answering anymore. With recent blog posts it seems even more clear that they are on the direct path to enshittification, against their own actual users and moderators. Recently it feels like all the actual professionals have left and what remains are "students" asking low effort questions in bad faith while an army of spambots tries to pounce on these. While this means boosted engagement numbers short-term, it spells death of the site long-term. SO cannot survive on low quality spam, even if other sites (like Reddit) may be able to.

throwaway290 3y ago
Agreed. If anything, the problem of SO is that it's not evolving strict measures fast enough to stay relevant. There's a constant stream of duplicate and low effort junk that gets only stronger over time, and obviously there are not enough people to moderate all of it. The original idea is great, but like any other place it needed to evolve barriers as userbase skyrockets and it mostly failed to do that so far.
- shagie 3y ago
  > There's a constant stream of duplicate and low effort junk that gets only stronger over time, There's a question on meta from a decade ago about what the Roomba (automatic deletion scripts) should be deleting. One of the answers had a bit of point in time information: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/262077 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/262077 > How much traffic do the questions that get duped to something bring? Especially the (currently) 410 questions linked to the Java NPE question. The Java NPE question is https://stackoverflow.com/q/218384 https://stackoverflow.com/q/218384 It now has 10,339 linked to it. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/linked/218384?lq=1 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/linked/218384?lq=1 That makes it harder to find the original source, more difficult for google to chase, and clusters results. > The original idea is great, but like any other place it needed to evolve barriers as userbase skyrockets and it mostly failed to do that so far. Which upper management has been working against by encouraging a reduction of those barriers, disincentivizing people from moderating and curating, and trying to grow engagement from people asking questions.

baby 3y ago

I think it depends on communities

Joeri 3y ago

The moderation culture is why I stopped engaging with stackoverflow and software.stackexchange. I noticed two problems. The first is marking so many interesting questions and answers as off-topic or opinion-based, which vastly reduced the scope of interesting content, and discouraged daily visiting to learn instead of just using the site as a reference through google. Relying on google to feed you users is a fool's gambit. Websites need to create recurring visitors, and they do that by providing something that engages. Stackoverflow and software.SE's moderation policies made it far less engaging as they grew more heavy-handed. This left the sites open to changes in google's algorithm affecting their traffic. The second major problem is duplicate policing and a lack of staleness policies. By not allowing the same question to be asked again it meant that the content of the network has grown gradually more and more stale. Even my own old answers are now often wrong because they are simply outdated. Stackoverflow is filled with questions in the style "what is the right way to use technology X to do Y", and the right answer to that changes every 2 or 3 years, when technology X gets an update or when new insights in how to best do Y are formed. I tried updating a few here and there, when I saw people engaging with wrong answers, but overall the blame is on stackoverflow and its moderators for not working out a more effective mechanism to get rid of stale answers and letting new users answer old questions with answers that have a shot at rising to the top. This also means that as top-voted answers grow more and more stale there is a tipping point where google no longer sees the site as a useful resource and starts lowering it in the ranking, and this is what seems has happened.

sznio 3y ago

I'd blame Google - at least for the initial drop. When you look at the "new visits" chart you can see that the drop happens in May, 6 months before ChatGPT.

SCdF 3y ago

I was in the beta of stack overflow (my numerical id is <2000): it was always toxic and counterproductive, and I stopped seriously using it a year or so into its life (this may have been before it left beta, I don't remember). It is still the best place to find a lot of answers (though their piece of the pie is rapidly shrinking), but participating in the system was never fun.

vehementi 3y ago

Maybe SO can have like super moderators / admin employees that are summonable by paying XXX score and they can bring the hammer down on problem answers and punish the toxic moderators etc.