3 ms·

Didn't that backfire anyway? Jerks found other ways to be jerks?

by Ygg2 3y ago

phpisthebest 3y ago
in SO cases they became moderators and/or worked their way into the company in paid positions of authority
aakjsdfajsdfh 3y ago
Yes. The jerks found meta.stackoverflow.com and for a brief period started a campaign of what is off-topic in each very-specific forum in a effort to drive content to their very specific fiefdoms. basically after sub-forums like bicycle, gardening etc which didn't fit at all under the programming forum, they opened up for randoms moderators. But the jerks started to abuse it to create a reddit-like web of overlapping forums. in 2018(?) you could not post anything without a question being closed with "offtopic! to ask about this specific setting on android phones with a blue or green protective case you must do so on xyz.stackoverflow.com. closed."
boxed 3y ago
No. Stackoverflow is, after Wikipedia, the most sane place on the internet. We have our gripes of course, but there really is no contest here.
bnralt 3y ago
One of the fundamental problems with most things on the internet is that there’s unlimited output. A socially dysfunctional shut-in living on the internet is simply going to have a much larger output than someone with a healthy social life that only uses the internet in moderation. Someone who is judicious about their upvotes is going to have a much smaller impact than some who just reflexively upvotes or downvotes everything based on kneejerk reactions. This becomes even more prevalent when you add gatekeepers. Most people don’t have time to be volunteer editors or moderators. Or to park themselves in the new submissions section deciding what should make it to the front page and what should drop off. So of course anti-social nutcases dominate these spaces. That’s how these spaces are structured.
- wavemode 3y ago
  Even assuming equal levels of internet usage, there is also the related problem that unpaid internet moderation naturally selects for narcissists. (And, really, it's the only way the system can work, since the only real currency of the internet is to make someone feel important within a community. It's the only reason sites like Wikipedia and SE can get thousands of hours of free labor from thousands of people.)
- cabalamat 3y ago
  > Someone who is judicious about their upvotes is going to have a much smaller impact than some who just reflexively upvotes or downvotes everything based on kneejerk reactions. It would be very easy for websites to weight upvotes so that one from someone who seldom uses them weighs more.
  - lamontcg 3y ago
    That probably incentivizes selling accounts to bot farms, usually in social media you give more weight to people who have stuck around longer rather than the accounts that have less activity and might be fake.
  - extraduder_ire 3y ago
    I think slashdot did something like that, but limited the amount of total votes you have per day. But that site's a little before my time. Would be nice if you could set the weights on voting yourself, along with other aspects of site moderation/ranking.
marcosdumay 3y ago
It worked for a long while, and things only got bad after a lot of changes from the original rules. Changes were clearly necessary because SO became too large. So, I'm not sure there was an alternative besides staying small. (Maybe that's the answer.)
CobrastanJorji 3y ago
Well, sort of. The "jerks" thing is true in part, but I think the majority of that feel comes from a disconnect between what people want Stack Overflow to be. Many of the contributors (and the founder) want it to be Wikipedia, a place to enter search terms and find your specific problem and its solution, documented exactly once. But many novices get used to finding answers on Stack Overflow, and they quite reasonably see a bunch of questions and answers and decide it's a place to ask for help, which it a thing that looks similar on the surface but is quite different. And so you get a lot of well-meaning answers/moderators closing the majority of what comes in as repetitive noise, because from their perspective it is, and so the majority of people who ask (quite reasonable) questions, especially novice questions, have a terrible experience initially engaging. But yes, ALSO jerks are there.

Didn't that backfire anyway? Jerks found other ways to be jerks?

by Ygg2 3y ago

Didn't that backfire anyway? Jerks found other ways to be jerks?

phpisthebest 3y ago

in SO cases they became moderators and/or worked their way into the company in paid positions of authority

aakjsdfajsdfh 3y ago

Yes. The jerks found meta.stackoverflow.com and for a brief period started a campaign of what is off-topic in each very-specific forum in a effort to drive content to their very specific fiefdoms. basically after sub-forums like bicycle, gardening etc which didn't fit at all under the programming forum, they opened up for randoms moderators. But the jerks started to abuse it to create a reddit-like web of overlapping forums. in 2018(?) you could not post anything without a question being closed with "offtopic! to ask about this specific setting on android phones with a blue or green protective case you must do so on xyz.stackoverflow.com. closed."

boxed 3y ago

No. Stackoverflow is, after Wikipedia, the most sane place on the internet. We have our gripes of course, but there really is no contest here.

bnralt 3y ago

One of the fundamental problems with most things on the internet is that there’s unlimited output. A socially dysfunctional shut-in living on the internet is simply going to have a much larger output than someone with a healthy social life that only uses the internet in moderation. Someone who is judicious about their upvotes is going to have a much smaller impact than some who just reflexively upvotes or downvotes everything based on kneejerk reactions. This becomes even more prevalent when you add gatekeepers. Most people don’t have time to be volunteer editors or moderators. Or to park themselves in the new submissions section deciding what should make it to the front page and what should drop off. So of course anti-social nutcases dominate these spaces. That’s how these spaces are structured.

wavemode 3y ago
Even assuming equal levels of internet usage, there is also the related problem that unpaid internet moderation naturally selects for narcissists. (And, really, it's the only way the system can work, since the only real currency of the internet is to make someone feel important within a community. It's the only reason sites like Wikipedia and SE can get thousands of hours of free labor from thousands of people.)
cabalamat 3y ago
> Someone who is judicious about their upvotes is going to have a much smaller impact than some who just reflexively upvotes or downvotes everything based on kneejerk reactions. It would be very easy for websites to weight upvotes so that one from someone who seldom uses them weighs more.
- lamontcg 3y ago
  That probably incentivizes selling accounts to bot farms, usually in social media you give more weight to people who have stuck around longer rather than the accounts that have less activity and might be fake.
- extraduder_ire 3y ago
  I think slashdot did something like that, but limited the amount of total votes you have per day. But that site's a little before my time. Would be nice if you could set the weights on voting yourself, along with other aspects of site moderation/ranking.

marcosdumay 3y ago

It worked for a long while, and things only got bad after a lot of changes from the original rules. Changes were clearly necessary because SO became too large. So, I'm not sure there was an alternative besides staying small. (Maybe that's the answer.)

CobrastanJorji 3y ago

Well, sort of. The "jerks" thing is true in part, but I think the majority of that feel comes from a disconnect between what people want Stack Overflow to be. Many of the contributors (and the founder) want it to be Wikipedia, a place to enter search terms and find your specific problem and its solution, documented exactly once. But many novices get used to finding answers on Stack Overflow, and they quite reasonably see a bunch of questions and answers and decide it's a place to ask for help, which it a thing that looks similar on the surface but is quite different. And so you get a lot of well-meaning answers/moderators closing the majority of what comes in as repetitive noise, because from their perspective it is, and so the majority of people who ask (quite reasonable) questions, especially novice questions, have a terrible experience initially engaging. But yes, ALSO jerks are there.