5 ms·

The moderators were elected. What should StackOverflow have done, held a vote of no confidence? Given them less power; make moderation more democratic?

by esafak 2y ago

agos 2y ago
maybe set different guidelines for moderation? have some form of meta moderation?
hobs 2y ago
The core problem of SO was the the goal of it (and what made it great) is very much in tension with "I want to ask whatever questions I want." The original idea of SO was building a knowledge repository, and that meant no duplication and pruning it endlessly to make sure it was useful and up to date (which pretty much failed until recently, until its probably far too late) - this core tenet is something the moderators take seriously, and people using the site as questioners (not searchers) absolutely hate. You can see they are trying to experiment (again probably too late) with how to make question asking easier, more friendly, etc - but that sort of cuts against the core original goals of SO and that's why the mods and the users seemed to be always in tension.
- gilleain 2y ago
  Agreed. Some other points of tension in Stack Exchanges: 1) People want to ask homework questions (_eg_ on Biology, Chemistry, etc). I understand why that is not allowed, but that doesn't change people's desire to 'just have an answer, now!'. I guess that AI could really take over this niche. 2) Others want to ask very open-ended 'discussion' questions that require back-and-forth to get to the answer, which may be on the edge of known research. While I do understand why people get frustrated about these things, as you point out - this is not what SO (and SEs) are 'for'.
- esafak 2y ago
  This is an important problem. But most people are readers; that moderation is what made the site a valuable resource. Without it, they would have had to build a powerful search engine. Instead, they did it the old fashioned way, without ML.
- zdragnar 2y ago
  I don't think this is charitable enough to the user's complaints, or even the person you are responding to. If the moderation was effective and limited, people would ultimately be fine with it. What people don't like is having a question closed as "duplicate" even though what it supposedly duplicates is very different, or any of the other myriad complaints. The same story goes for Wikipedia. Moderators have an agenda, act in frequently erroneous ways, and are actively hostile to criticism.
  - hobs 2y ago
    I don't even consider what the user asks - simply that it was rejected and it was a question they wanted to ask - hence "whatever they wanted", and while I agree SO's moderation is overly burdensome (and was a mod myself once more than a decade ago) I don't agree that moderation that's effective and limited having users being "ultimately fine with it" - it totally depends on which users you ask.
- barrkel 2y ago
  > The original idea of SO was building a knowledge repository, and that meant no duplication and pruning it endlessly This is not true as I recall. On Joel and Jeff's podcast, Joel in particular was in favour of having lots of variants of the same question answered repeatedly. His rationale was that if people didn't find the golden original question, there was a reason for that (e.g. it's not a real duplicate, or it's a different frame of thinking about the problem shared by other people), and adding the supposed duplicate would mean that other people who search for it - and would similarly fail to find the golden original - would land on the supposed duplicate. Net win. But this was in tension with cheap karma farmers. SO was structured as a points economy, but in any case anything with points rewards motivates some people to play the game of collecting points. A cheap way of farming points is to ask trivial questions then answer them yourself, or participate in an implicit network of people asking and answering trivial questions. How do you cut that out? Have canonical versions of the trivial questions, redirect people to them while asking, and motivate deduplication.
  - shagie 2y ago
    That tension existed. https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/ > Stackoverflow is sort of like the anti-experts-exchange (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search engine gaming) meets wikipedia meets programming reddit. It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home. Better programming is our goal. The emphasis on "good" is in the original. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/09/15/stack-overflow-launches/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/09/15/stack-overflow-lau... > What kind of questions are appropriate? Well, thanks to the tagging system, we can be rather broad with that. As long as questions are appropriately tagged, I think it’s okay to be off topic as long as what you’re asking about is of interest to people who make software. But it does have to be a question. Stack Overflow isn’t a good place for imponderables, or public service announcements, or vague complaints, or storytelling. --- And then, go to https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1003841/how-do-i-move-the-turtle-in-logo https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1003841/how-do-i-move-th... I would draw your attention to its history and the original version: https://stackoverflow.com/revisions/1003841/1 https://stackoverflow.com/revisions/1003841/1 and the action taken on September 17th, 2011. https://stackoverflow.com/posts/1003841/revisions https://stackoverflow.com/posts/1003841/revisions
- palata 2y ago
  > in tension with "I want to ask whatever questions I want." As I said, I strongly disagree with the idea that my questions were unfit for StackOverflow. Every single time their reason was "duplication", it was not AT ALL a duplicate. Two different questions (sometimes obviously very different) with two different answers. Hell, they closed some of those as duplicate even though I posted both the question and the answer, and the answer was completely different from the one they were pointing to. This is not "I want to ask whatever questions I want". It's bad moderation.
  - zahlman 2y ago
    > Every single time their reason was "duplication", it was not AT ALL a duplicate. Two different questions (sometimes obviously very different) with two different answers. Please feel free to show concrete examples, and I'd be happy to try to explain the reasoning.
    - palata 2y ago
      Deal. Say I ask "How to do X in settings.gradle?" and it is closed as a duplicate to "How to do X in build.gradle?". I know how to do X in build.gradle, I know it is not the same as doing X in settings.gradle (even if it's is twice the same X), and I know how to do X in settings.gradle (because I just had a need and found a solution without the help of StackOverflow). So I post an answer right away. Can you explain the reasoning, or do you need it more concrete because you're absolutely sure you know better? Because what's clear to me is that those (because it required multiple votes) who closed it as duplicate have no clue how it works. They obviously stopped at "X == X, it's a duplicate". At some point I got into the habit of adding notes like "Note: it is not a duplicate of A because [...] and it is not a duplicate of B because [...]", which honestly made the question worse for those who actually understand it (just for the sake of pleasing those who would close it as duplicate). Spoiler: they closed it as a duplicate of A. But stay happy in your world where you know everything, I'm not coming back anyway.
      - zahlman 2y ago
        To "show a concrete example" I would need a question ID. (As I've explained in other posts, deletion is probably not a problem; deletion on Stack Overflow is normally "soft", and I have the reputation needed to see those posts.) I'm not familiar with Gradle (I think that's a Java build system?), but if I saw what actually happened, I could probably understand well enough.
fiskfiskfisk 2y ago
In my own experience it's not often the elected moderators that are the problem, but those with a golden tag in a specific tag. They're far too eager to close questions because they're the ones culling through a tag often - and then close the question as they quickly think "oh, it's that again". But it often isn't, they just didn't spend enough time to see nuance. And neither do they see that even if _they_ understand that the question linked to is the same thing, there is no way the asker can understand what the similarity is from their knowledge point of view (or why the linked duplicate question is the same question).
- esafak 2y ago
  How do you think they should have handled closing questions, if at all?
  - bombcar 2y ago
    Why close questions? Is there a limit on storage space? dang doesn't go and delete all the infinite failed submissions to HN, after all.
    - zahlman 2y ago
      > Why close questions? Because we're trying to build a searchable reference, such that if you try to look for an existing question, you a) find it; b) find the right question; c) find the best possible version of that question; d) can readily tell that you found what you want. And because we are explicitly not trying to build a discussion forum, social media, "HN but specifically for programming questions", or anything else like that. You might as well ask: why delete newly created pages on Wikipedia, or revert edits to existing pages?
    - shagie 2y ago
      Should all 10,000 questions ( https://stackoverflow.com/questions/linked/218384?lq=1 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/linked/218384?lq=1 ) that are duplicates of https://stackoverflow.com/questions/218384/what-is-a-nullpointerexception-and-how-do-i-fix-it https://stackoverflow.com/questions/218384/what-is-a-nullpoi... be open and still allow people to try to answer each instance of the person's question?
mschuster91 2y ago
There should always be some sort of human to appeal to. Even Wikipedia has it this way at least formally [1], although "office actions" overruling community moderation decisions are extremely rare. [1] https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Policy:Wikimedia_Foundation_Office_Actions_Policy https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Policy:Wikimedia_Found...
- zahlman 2y ago
  There is: you can appeal to the community in general, and most curation (not "moderation"!) was done by agreement between community members in the first place. If you ask a question on Stack Overflow and it gets closed, you are generally expected to edit it to fix the identified problem and submit it for re-evaluation. It gets put in a queue that other users can review; and everyone with close-vote privileges also has reopen-vote privileges, and can come along randomly and evaluate the question anew. If you believe the community has misunderstood something about the question or has misapplied policy, you can ask about it on https://meta.stackoverflow.com https://meta.stackoverflow.com . However, when you come to the meta site, you are generally expected to have a basic understanding of what the policy is and what our goals are (hint: not helping you, personally, make your code work), and to accept that you may have misunderstood something. And you should be prepared for the fact that voting works differently on meta (https://stackoverflow.com/help/whats-meta https://stackoverflow.com/help/whats-meta). People who vote to close your question (or downvote it) are explicitly not required to explain this (again for well considered reasons, largely around the risk of harassment or abuse: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357436 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357436). But usually, if the standard close-reason advice won't be obvious, someone will try to explain. If they think the question is unclear, they'll try to say specifically why they are confused; if it seems to lack focus, they'll highlight the separate problems you're asking about or explain what seems irrelevant; if it "needs debugging details" then they'll explain how your code sample falls short of the https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example standard. If you need an explanation and don't get one, you can again ask on meta. Despite the downvoting, if you're polite and understanding (i.e. don't come in with the mindset that we must have made a mistake or are doing something wrong by having a site that works differently from other sites), we'll be polite and sympathetic, and try to explain as best we can.
zabzonk 2y ago
Yes, they WERE elected, by the community (i.e. those asking and answering questions) and did a good job. Then those elected were dumped by the new owners and replaced by a bunch of yes-men. The people voting on closing submissions were not mods (in general) but ordinary users with sufficient rep.
lolinder 2y ago
Look, I'm all for democracy in the real world, but this is a very bad use of democratic processes for a number of reasons: 1. First and foremost, it's not a democracy if your turnout is too low. The 2024 election had voter turnout of 2%, which would be a catastrophic turnout in any real democracy. Either too few knew about the election, too few thought their vote mattered, or too few had any idea how to choose between the options. Any of these reasons requires immediate and pressing attention if a democracy is to be called that. 2. Never having re-elections makes it useless. For it to be a truly democratic process there absolutely needs to be a way to withdraw consent from a moderator who behaves differently than expected. So yeah, a no confidence vote would be an option, or better yet regular elections to hold a position. I'm afraid that the largest problem is that democracy is really just a bad fit for this kind of site. By its nature the only people who are likely to vote in this type of election are a small dedicated core, not the enormous number of users that the site actually serves. A small core of contributors to a community resource invariably seems to develop a sense of "us against the world"—the thin blue line of police lore isn't an isolated thing, it's what happens when people view themselves as lone defenders of something they care about. And just like with police, that can result in a toxic culture that begins to actively degrade the plebian outgroup that they started out serving. I don't have a better answer, but I don't believe democracy is a good fit for moderators on the scale of community that Stack Overflow operates. It's too big to have good turnout, and the problems caused by bad turnout have become catastrophic.
- BOOSTERHIDROGEN 2y ago
  Then the answer is clear; copy paste a lot of dang to moderate. So this is clearly a management faulted no properly choosing a moderator.
- eru 2y ago
  That's part of the reason that as an employer I don't like worker democracy anywhere I work. With the usual model, I can just negotiate directly with management and they can tell me yes or no, and we can make a contract (or be a bit vaguer and make promises). With worker democracy, there's no one I can negotiate with that can tell me anything definitive.
wokwokwok 2y ago
How about making it a site where only people who answer questions can even be eligible to be moderators? What if moderators had to actually have karma from recently answering questions or they lose mod privileges? Wouldn't that be a fresh change. You'd have to actually work to be a mod. ... It shouldn't be controversial. That mods currently make visitors unwelcome is disgrace. :( That SO incentivizes that behavior is ridiculous.
bombcar 2y ago
Slashdot of all places basically solved the moderation problem, with random moderators selected from the pool of "know users" and then others selected to meta moderate.
- malfist 2y ago
  I don't remember slashdot moderation being particularly good. Innovative yes, but not good. I got to be a moderator multiple times while I was a teen. I'm sure I didn't make good decisions.
  - bombcar 2y ago
    It worked surprisingly well long into "popularity" - at least for the purposes of getting spam removed and corralling flame bait away. For a "user-run" site it was pretty advanced at the time - you could choose your level to view at (5 was quick summary of the highlights, -1 if you wanted flamewars about NetBSD), stories were curated enough to prevent slop (at least at the beginning), and metamoderating removed the biggest abuses.
malfist 2y ago
I think you misunderstand how stackoverflow works. Super moderators are elected, but not your regular "moderators". In stack overflow, regular folks you have enough karma are moderators and can cast votes, or initiate voting on moderation action. Enough votes and the action happens. The elected moderators aren't the problem, generally, it's that anyone with a bit of karma can go power tripping and if you get enough of those people on an ever growing platform, they reach a critical mass to stifle anything. So yes, some moderators are elected, and yes moderation is very democratic.
zahlman 2y ago
> The moderators were elected. The overwhelming majority of the actions people complain about in this context (never mind that they don't understand the purpose of those actions or the underlying objectives) are not performed by moderators. They are curation actions taken by members of the community. The rights to do so are awarded based on reputation, in a very poorly thought out and fundamentally broken incentive system; but there are far more people involved than the moderators. You can query by reputation at https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1834631/count-users-with-reputation-of-at-least https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1834631/c... : there are about 29 million total user accounts, 3.3 million which may upvote, 1.1 million which may downvote, 150 thousand which may unilaterally edit posts, 100 thousand which may vote to close questions, 28 thousand which may vote to soft-delete posts (and view soft-deleted posts), 9300 with access to internal site analytics... and twenty-four moderators (https://stackoverflow.com/users?tab=moderators https://stackoverflow.com/users?tab=moderators). Who are not the highest-reputation users. (I have more reputation than over half of them, and I frequently complain about users with over ten times my reputation.)
- palata 2y ago
  > They are curation actions taken by members of the community A community which has, according to the tons of comments here, become toxic.

The moderators were elected. What should StackOverflow have done, held a vote of no confidence? Given them less power; make moderation more democratic?

by esafak 2y ago

The moderators were elected. What should StackOverflow have done, held a vote of no confidence? Given them less power; make moderation more democratic?

agos 2y ago

maybe set different guidelines for moderation? have some form of meta moderation?

hobs 2y ago

The core problem of SO was the the goal of it (and what made it great) is very much in tension with "I want to ask whatever questions I want." The original idea of SO was building a knowledge repository, and that meant no duplication and pruning it endlessly to make sure it was useful and up to date (which pretty much failed until recently, until its probably far too late) - this core tenet is something the moderators take seriously, and people using the site as questioners (not searchers) absolutely hate. You can see they are trying to experiment (again probably too late) with how to make question asking easier, more friendly, etc - but that sort of cuts against the core original goals of SO and that's why the mods and the users seemed to be always in tension.

gilleain 2y ago
Agreed. Some other points of tension in Stack Exchanges: 1) People want to ask homework questions (_eg_ on Biology, Chemistry, etc). I understand why that is not allowed, but that doesn't change people's desire to 'just have an answer, now!'. I guess that AI could really take over this niche. 2) Others want to ask very open-ended 'discussion' questions that require back-and-forth to get to the answer, which may be on the edge of known research. While I do understand why people get frustrated about these things, as you point out - this is not what SO (and SEs) are 'for'.
esafak 2y ago
This is an important problem. But most people are readers; that moderation is what made the site a valuable resource. Without it, they would have had to build a powerful search engine. Instead, they did it the old fashioned way, without ML.
zdragnar 2y ago
I don't think this is charitable enough to the user's complaints, or even the person you are responding to. If the moderation was effective and limited, people would ultimately be fine with it. What people don't like is having a question closed as "duplicate" even though what it supposedly duplicates is very different, or any of the other myriad complaints. The same story goes for Wikipedia. Moderators have an agenda, act in frequently erroneous ways, and are actively hostile to criticism.
- hobs 2y ago
  I don't even consider what the user asks - simply that it was rejected and it was a question they wanted to ask - hence "whatever they wanted", and while I agree SO's moderation is overly burdensome (and was a mod myself once more than a decade ago) I don't agree that moderation that's effective and limited having users being "ultimately fine with it" - it totally depends on which users you ask.
barrkel 2y ago
> The original idea of SO was building a knowledge repository, and that meant no duplication and pruning it endlessly This is not true as I recall. On Joel and Jeff's podcast, Joel in particular was in favour of having lots of variants of the same question answered repeatedly. His rationale was that if people didn't find the golden original question, there was a reason for that (e.g. it's not a real duplicate, or it's a different frame of thinking about the problem shared by other people), and adding the supposed duplicate would mean that other people who search for it - and would similarly fail to find the golden original - would land on the supposed duplicate. Net win. But this was in tension with cheap karma farmers. SO was structured as a points economy, but in any case anything with points rewards motivates some people to play the game of collecting points. A cheap way of farming points is to ask trivial questions then answer them yourself, or participate in an implicit network of people asking and answering trivial questions. How do you cut that out? Have canonical versions of the trivial questions, redirect people to them while asking, and motivate deduplication.
- shagie 2y ago
  That tension existed. https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/ > Stackoverflow is sort of like the anti-experts-exchange (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search engine gaming) meets wikipedia meets programming reddit. It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home. Better programming is our goal. The emphasis on "good" is in the original. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/09/15/stack-overflow-launches/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/09/15/stack-overflow-lau... > What kind of questions are appropriate? Well, thanks to the tagging system, we can be rather broad with that. As long as questions are appropriately tagged, I think it’s okay to be off topic as long as what you’re asking about is of interest to people who make software. But it does have to be a question. Stack Overflow isn’t a good place for imponderables, or public service announcements, or vague complaints, or storytelling. --- And then, go to https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1003841/how-do-i-move-the-turtle-in-logo https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1003841/how-do-i-move-th... I would draw your attention to its history and the original version: https://stackoverflow.com/revisions/1003841/1 https://stackoverflow.com/revisions/1003841/1 and the action taken on September 17th, 2011. https://stackoverflow.com/posts/1003841/revisions https://stackoverflow.com/posts/1003841/revisions
palata 2y ago
> in tension with "I want to ask whatever questions I want." As I said, I strongly disagree with the idea that my questions were unfit for StackOverflow. Every single time their reason was "duplication", it was not AT ALL a duplicate. Two different questions (sometimes obviously very different) with two different answers. Hell, they closed some of those as duplicate even though I posted both the question and the answer, and the answer was completely different from the one they were pointing to. This is not "I want to ask whatever questions I want". It's bad moderation.
- zahlman 2y ago
  > Every single time their reason was "duplication", it was not AT ALL a duplicate. Two different questions (sometimes obviously very different) with two different answers. Please feel free to show concrete examples, and I'd be happy to try to explain the reasoning.
  - palata 2y ago
    Deal. Say I ask "How to do X in settings.gradle?" and it is closed as a duplicate to "How to do X in build.gradle?". I know how to do X in build.gradle, I know it is not the same as doing X in settings.gradle (even if it's is twice the same X), and I know how to do X in settings.gradle (because I just had a need and found a solution without the help of StackOverflow). So I post an answer right away. Can you explain the reasoning, or do you need it more concrete because you're absolutely sure you know better? Because what's clear to me is that those (because it required multiple votes) who closed it as duplicate have no clue how it works. They obviously stopped at "X == X, it's a duplicate". At some point I got into the habit of adding notes like "Note: it is not a duplicate of A because [...] and it is not a duplicate of B because [...]", which honestly made the question worse for those who actually understand it (just for the sake of pleasing those who would close it as duplicate). Spoiler: they closed it as a duplicate of A. But stay happy in your world where you know everything, I'm not coming back anyway.
    - zahlman 2y ago
      To "show a concrete example" I would need a question ID. (As I've explained in other posts, deletion is probably not a problem; deletion on Stack Overflow is normally "soft", and I have the reputation needed to see those posts.) I'm not familiar with Gradle (I think that's a Java build system?), but if I saw what actually happened, I could probably understand well enough.

fiskfiskfisk 2y ago

In my own experience it's not often the elected moderators that are the problem, but those with a golden tag in a specific tag. They're far too eager to close questions because they're the ones culling through a tag often - and then close the question as they quickly think "oh, it's that again". But it often isn't, they just didn't spend enough time to see nuance. And neither do they see that even if _they_ understand that the question linked to is the same thing, there is no way the asker can understand what the similarity is from their knowledge point of view (or why the linked duplicate question is the same question).

esafak 2y ago
How do you think they should have handled closing questions, if at all?
- bombcar 2y ago
  Why close questions? Is there a limit on storage space? dang doesn't go and delete all the infinite failed submissions to HN, after all.
  - zahlman 2y ago
    > Why close questions? Because we're trying to build a searchable reference, such that if you try to look for an existing question, you a) find it; b) find the right question; c) find the best possible version of that question; d) can readily tell that you found what you want. And because we are explicitly not trying to build a discussion forum, social media, "HN but specifically for programming questions", or anything else like that. You might as well ask: why delete newly created pages on Wikipedia, or revert edits to existing pages?
  - shagie 2y ago
    Should all 10,000 questions ( https://stackoverflow.com/questions/linked/218384?lq=1 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/linked/218384?lq=1 ) that are duplicates of https://stackoverflow.com/questions/218384/what-is-a-nullpointerexception-and-how-do-i-fix-it https://stackoverflow.com/questions/218384/what-is-a-nullpoi... be open and still allow people to try to answer each instance of the person's question?

mschuster91 2y ago

There should always be some sort of human to appeal to. Even Wikipedia has it this way at least formally [1], although "office actions" overruling community moderation decisions are extremely rare. [1] https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Policy:Wikimedia_Foundation_Office_Actions_Policy https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Policy:Wikimedia_Found...

zahlman 2y ago
There is: you can appeal to the community in general, and most curation (not "moderation"!) was done by agreement between community members in the first place. If you ask a question on Stack Overflow and it gets closed, you are generally expected to edit it to fix the identified problem and submit it for re-evaluation. It gets put in a queue that other users can review; and everyone with close-vote privileges also has reopen-vote privileges, and can come along randomly and evaluate the question anew. If you believe the community has misunderstood something about the question or has misapplied policy, you can ask about it on https://meta.stackoverflow.com https://meta.stackoverflow.com . However, when you come to the meta site, you are generally expected to have a basic understanding of what the policy is and what our goals are (hint: not helping you, personally, make your code work), and to accept that you may have misunderstood something. And you should be prepared for the fact that voting works differently on meta (https://stackoverflow.com/help/whats-meta https://stackoverflow.com/help/whats-meta). People who vote to close your question (or downvote it) are explicitly not required to explain this (again for well considered reasons, largely around the risk of harassment or abuse: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357436 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357436). But usually, if the standard close-reason advice won't be obvious, someone will try to explain. If they think the question is unclear, they'll try to say specifically why they are confused; if it seems to lack focus, they'll highlight the separate problems you're asking about or explain what seems irrelevant; if it "needs debugging details" then they'll explain how your code sample falls short of the https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example standard. If you need an explanation and don't get one, you can again ask on meta. Despite the downvoting, if you're polite and understanding (i.e. don't come in with the mindset that we must have made a mistake or are doing something wrong by having a site that works differently from other sites), we'll be polite and sympathetic, and try to explain as best we can.

zabzonk 2y ago

Yes, they WERE elected, by the community (i.e. those asking and answering questions) and did a good job. Then those elected were dumped by the new owners and replaced by a bunch of yes-men. The people voting on closing submissions were not mods (in general) but ordinary users with sufficient rep.

lolinder 2y ago

Look, I'm all for democracy in the real world, but this is a very bad use of democratic processes for a number of reasons: 1. First and foremost, it's not a democracy if your turnout is too low. The 2024 election had voter turnout of 2%, which would be a catastrophic turnout in any real democracy. Either too few knew about the election, too few thought their vote mattered, or too few had any idea how to choose between the options. Any of these reasons requires immediate and pressing attention if a democracy is to be called that. 2. Never having re-elections makes it useless. For it to be a truly democratic process there absolutely needs to be a way to withdraw consent from a moderator who behaves differently than expected. So yeah, a no confidence vote would be an option, or better yet regular elections to hold a position. I'm afraid that the largest problem is that democracy is really just a bad fit for this kind of site. By its nature the only people who are likely to vote in this type of election are a small dedicated core, not the enormous number of users that the site actually serves. A small core of contributors to a community resource invariably seems to develop a sense of "us against the world"—the thin blue line of police lore isn't an isolated thing, it's what happens when people view themselves as lone defenders of something they care about. And just like with police, that can result in a toxic culture that begins to actively degrade the plebian outgroup that they started out serving. I don't have a better answer, but I don't believe democracy is a good fit for moderators on the scale of community that Stack Overflow operates. It's too big to have good turnout, and the problems caused by bad turnout have become catastrophic.

BOOSTERHIDROGEN 2y ago
Then the answer is clear; copy paste a lot of dang to moderate. So this is clearly a management faulted no properly choosing a moderator.
eru 2y ago
That's part of the reason that as an employer I don't like worker democracy anywhere I work. With the usual model, I can just negotiate directly with management and they can tell me yes or no, and we can make a contract (or be a bit vaguer and make promises). With worker democracy, there's no one I can negotiate with that can tell me anything definitive.

wokwokwok 2y ago

How about making it a site where only people who answer questions can even be eligible to be moderators? What if moderators had to actually have karma from recently answering questions or they lose mod privileges? Wouldn't that be a fresh change. You'd have to actually work to be a mod. ... It shouldn't be controversial. That mods currently make visitors unwelcome is disgrace. :( That SO incentivizes that behavior is ridiculous.

bombcar 2y ago

Slashdot of all places basically solved the moderation problem, with random moderators selected from the pool of "know users" and then others selected to meta moderate.

malfist 2y ago
I don't remember slashdot moderation being particularly good. Innovative yes, but not good. I got to be a moderator multiple times while I was a teen. I'm sure I didn't make good decisions.
- bombcar 2y ago
  It worked surprisingly well long into "popularity" - at least for the purposes of getting spam removed and corralling flame bait away. For a "user-run" site it was pretty advanced at the time - you could choose your level to view at (5 was quick summary of the highlights, -1 if you wanted flamewars about NetBSD), stories were curated enough to prevent slop (at least at the beginning), and metamoderating removed the biggest abuses.

malfist 2y ago

I think you misunderstand how stackoverflow works. Super moderators are elected, but not your regular "moderators". In stack overflow, regular folks you have enough karma are moderators and can cast votes, or initiate voting on moderation action. Enough votes and the action happens. The elected moderators aren't the problem, generally, it's that anyone with a bit of karma can go power tripping and if you get enough of those people on an ever growing platform, they reach a critical mass to stifle anything. So yes, some moderators are elected, and yes moderation is very democratic.

zahlman 2y ago

> The moderators were elected. The overwhelming majority of the actions people complain about in this context (never mind that they don't understand the purpose of those actions or the underlying objectives) are not performed by moderators. They are curation actions taken by members of the community. The rights to do so are awarded based on reputation, in a very poorly thought out and fundamentally broken incentive system; but there are far more people involved than the moderators. You can query by reputation at https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1834631/count-users-with-reputation-of-at-least https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1834631/c... : there are about 29 million total user accounts, 3.3 million which may upvote, 1.1 million which may downvote, 150 thousand which may unilaterally edit posts, 100 thousand which may vote to close questions, 28 thousand which may vote to soft-delete posts (and view soft-deleted posts), 9300 with access to internal site analytics... and twenty-four moderators (https://stackoverflow.com/users?tab=moderators https://stackoverflow.com/users?tab=moderators). Who are not the highest-reputation users. (I have more reputation than over half of them, and I frequently complain about users with over ten times my reputation.)

palata 2y ago
> They are curation actions taken by members of the community A community which has, according to the tons of comments here, become toxic.