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I find it interesting that the current StackOverflow moderators tend to say "in the past we used to accept too many questions but it was never the goal, so now

by palata 1y ago

I find it interesting that the current StackOverflow moderators tend to say "in the past we used to accept too many questions but it was never the goal, so now we are doing it as it was meant to be". Sure, but in the past, StackOverflow was growing, and now it's dying. Maybe something was better before, when "it was not done correctly"?

goobie 1y ago
AFAICR they've always said these lines about now is about better moderation from the slop. The reality is that the rule of thumb for that moderation was already out of date with advances that preceeded LLMs.. Even with the beginnings of computer aided flows we didn't need to alienate most to get the best content and develop the few. Content can be triaged from someone who may be human to others who may be human and maybe there's value or maybe you just didn't alienate anyone and some people will still climb to making higher levels of content that is worth condensing.
- zahlman 1y ago
  > Even with the beginnings of computer aided flows we didn't need to alienate most to get the best content and develop the few. The large majority of new questions from new accounts are from people who are clearly there only to solve a personal problem, who show no interest in considering the value of their question to third parties, and rarely put any effort into attempting to even diagnose or specify a problem. Even after it became possible for most of these people to get an instant answer from an LLM. Which is actively preferable from the standpoint of Stack Overflow curators. Before LLMs, the point was for them to use a search engine to find an existing question that lets them figure out the problem. But for the Q&A to help such users, they need to apply at least basic problem-solving and debugging skills. (It is explicitly out of scope for the Stack Overflow community to do that for others; and attempting to do this in an answer actively degrades the site for everyone else.) If an LLM can fill in some hypotheses for those users to test, then the LLM is doing what it's best at, and Stack Overflow is doing what it's best at. Stack Overflow is not there to troubleshoot or debug anything for you, nor to reason about a multi-step problem and break it down into its natural logical steps. It's there to give a direct, objective answer to how to do each individual step, and to explain why the specific point of failure in a failing program fails, after you have identified it and made the problem reproducible. So yes, we absolutely do need to "alienate most", because "most" are there for a reason that has absolutely nothing to do with getting the best content.
  - palata 1y ago
    > So yes, we absolutely do need to "alienate most", because "most" are there for a reason that has absolutely nothing to do with getting the best content. How many of the "desirable" contributors did you alienate in the process? I may be naive, but when people say "I have been using SO for 10 years but it has become toxic so I left", it doesn't sound like new accounts asking for their homeworks.
    - zahlman 1y ago
      The people who have been around for 10 years or so who disagree with the basics of question closing policy (or who act without any apparent awareness of it) are even worse than the people seeking a quick fix for their problem. Because they flood the site with inherently low-quality answers to low-quality questions. In doing so, they dilute higher quality content (it becomes harder to find with search engines, because search engines have no way to understand our internal quality rating systems) and incentivize the quick-fix-seekers. Both sides of that are ignoring policy and acting against the site's goal. When people describe something as "toxic" I generally consider this to be content-less without further elaboration. It doesn't concretely describe what is supposedly wrong - it only dramatizes the complaint.
      - palata 1y ago
        > The people who have been around for 10 years or so who disagree with the basics of question closing policy [...] Because they flood the site with inherently low-quality answers to low-quality questions I see that you just don't hear the complaints. I don't hear people who have been around for 10 years or so complaining because they can't answer to low-quality questions.
        zahlman 1y ago
        > I don't hear people who have been around for 10 years or so complaining because they can't answer to low-quality questions. Because they usually can. There aren't enough curators paying attention. Stopping them generally requires three curators to find the same question and act on it before an answer is posted. And the person writing the answer also gets a grace period for in-flight answers. Then when they finally get inconvenienced, they come to the meta site and make perhaps their first attempt in over 10 years to even find out what the policy is. Often they have a bad experience with this, loudly complaining as if they already know the policy while never having made any attempt to learn it, and being surprised to find out they're wrong. Sometimes they even try to make a meta post on the main site.
motorest 1y ago
> Sure, but in the past, StackOverflow was growing, and now it's dying. Maybe something was better before, when "it was not done correctly"? You're presuming that the current volume of questions represent novel, unique posts instead of something you can find over and over again if you do a decent query.
bawolff 1y ago
I think these sorts of things are just an unfortunate side effect of scaling. The bigger you get the more people get lost in the bureaucracy. However if you don't build up the bureaucracy the system collapses under its own popularity. Wikipedia has a similar issue where editing declined around 2007, which is often blamed on stricter enforcement of rules, more complex rules, etc. I think its just a natural stage of growth. You can't be a free for all forever.
- Karrot_Kream 1y ago
  The "good" thing is, they're back to 2009 levels of postings. Now obviously that's what the mods let through but my guess is that traffic to the site is down precipitously as well. They can roll back their bureaucracy and head back to a lean path that worked for them in the past. But I don't really think that's the problem. Reading zahlman's responses in this thread makes me think that the mods fell into the age old trap that's happened since Usenet, IRC, and still happens to this day wherever there's mods: they got tired of doing unpaid labor and instead of deciding to quit decided to become meaner and stricter. The age old mod trip.
  - bookofjoe 1y ago
    Thank goodness dang has so far avoided this path.
  - zahlman 1y ago
    Barely any of the people involved are mods. I said that repeatedly before your post yet you chose to ignore it, despite apparently singling out my posts specifically for consideration. Objectively, people are nicer now. Informal policies turned into a proper Code of Conduct over time and moderators (the actual moderators) take it very seriously. Being strict about this is objectively correct and it has absolutely nothing to do with power tripping. Nobody wants to close and delete questions. They want those questions not to have existed in the first place, or rather to have been asked properly in the first place. The system does not incentivize any of this curation effort; it happens entirely thanklessly and driven purely by intrinsic motivation to produce a specific valuable thing. This is not a matter of "bureaucracy". As far as I can tell there is no issue with site traffic: https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/08/08/insights-into-stack-overflows-traffic/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/08/08/insights-into-stack-ov... https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1901940/ https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1901940/
zahlman 1y ago
>the current StackOverflow moderators Overwhelmingly, the people you're talking about are not moderators. I explained this to someone else a week ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43927665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43927665) and you replied to that comment. > Sure, but in the past, StackOverflow was growing So what? Stack Overflow users get $0.00 for this, whether they're moderators, active curators or just signed up. For users, growing the site isn't the goal. Growing interaction with the site is not the goal. The goal is building a useful artifact (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254770 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254770). This frequently entails removing, closing or duplicating questions, for the same reason that building a useful program frequently entails removing lines of code, deprecating parts of the API, and refactoring. > and now it's dying Why should a reduction in incoming questions mean that it's "dying"? > Maybe something was better before Who do you think should get to decide what's "better" here? More importantly, why? If the YC team decided to prioritize increasing site traffic (and introduce ads to capitalize on that) on HN and maximizing the rate of new submissions, at the expense or ignorance of the quality of the discussion, that would be clearly be bad, right? You'd leave, right? I would. The same principle applies to sites that aren't about having a discussion. Bigger is not better.
- palata 1y ago
  > Overwhelmingly, the people you're talking about are not moderators. I was actually thinking about you. You keep saying everything is great. My observation is that I used to be on SO every day, and I completely stopped contributing even though I would have plenty of stuff to add (more than ever, actually). > Why should a reduction in incoming questions mean that it's "dying"? There is "a reduction", and there is "being back to the amount of questions SO had in 2009 when it launched".
  - zahlman 1y ago
    >You keep saying everything is great. I say it's fine, because it is. I say that a reduction in question volume has advantages in terms of accomplishing the site's goals, because it does. There are many things about the site that I'm unhappy with, mainly to do with initiatives the staff are taking that are also very much not true to the site's goals or purpose. > My observation is that I used to be on SO every day, and I completely stopped contributing even though I would have plenty of stuff to add ... And? > There is "a reduction", and there is "being back to the amount of questions SO had in 2009 when it launched". If the amount of questions went to zero per day I would still not consider this a problem. It would be an opportunity to refine the existing publicly visible questions. As a reminder: there are already more than three times as many of those as there are articles on Wikipedia. You say it's a problem that we don't see thousands more per day like we used to. I say it's a problem that we already have so many; and that if we had perhaps a tenth as many, it would become easier to find what you want.
zahlman 1y ago
>Sure, but in the past, StackOverflow was growing, and now it's dying. Maybe something was better before, when "it was not done correctly"? "Growing" by an utterly irrelevant metric. Popular != good.

by palata 1y ago

goobie 1y ago

AFAICR they've always said these lines about now is about better moderation from the slop. The reality is that the rule of thumb for that moderation was already out of date with advances that preceeded LLMs.. Even with the beginnings of computer aided flows we didn't need to alienate most to get the best content and develop the few. Content can be triaged from someone who may be human to others who may be human and maybe there's value or maybe you just didn't alienate anyone and some people will still climb to making higher levels of content that is worth condensing.

zahlman 1y ago
> Even with the beginnings of computer aided flows we didn't need to alienate most to get the best content and develop the few. The large majority of new questions from new accounts are from people who are clearly there only to solve a personal problem, who show no interest in considering the value of their question to third parties, and rarely put any effort into attempting to even diagnose or specify a problem. Even after it became possible for most of these people to get an instant answer from an LLM. Which is actively preferable from the standpoint of Stack Overflow curators. Before LLMs, the point was for them to use a search engine to find an existing question that lets them figure out the problem. But for the Q&A to help such users, they need to apply at least basic problem-solving and debugging skills. (It is explicitly out of scope for the Stack Overflow community to do that for others; and attempting to do this in an answer actively degrades the site for everyone else.) If an LLM can fill in some hypotheses for those users to test, then the LLM is doing what it's best at, and Stack Overflow is doing what it's best at. Stack Overflow is not there to troubleshoot or debug anything for you, nor to reason about a multi-step problem and break it down into its natural logical steps. It's there to give a direct, objective answer to how to do each individual step, and to explain why the specific point of failure in a failing program fails, after you have identified it and made the problem reproducible. So yes, we absolutely do need to "alienate most", because "most" are there for a reason that has absolutely nothing to do with getting the best content.
- palata 1y ago
  > So yes, we absolutely do need to "alienate most", because "most" are there for a reason that has absolutely nothing to do with getting the best content. How many of the "desirable" contributors did you alienate in the process? I may be naive, but when people say "I have been using SO for 10 years but it has become toxic so I left", it doesn't sound like new accounts asking for their homeworks.
  - zahlman 1y ago
    The people who have been around for 10 years or so who disagree with the basics of question closing policy (or who act without any apparent awareness of it) are even worse than the people seeking a quick fix for their problem. Because they flood the site with inherently low-quality answers to low-quality questions. In doing so, they dilute higher quality content (it becomes harder to find with search engines, because search engines have no way to understand our internal quality rating systems) and incentivize the quick-fix-seekers. Both sides of that are ignoring policy and acting against the site's goal. When people describe something as "toxic" I generally consider this to be content-less without further elaboration. It doesn't concretely describe what is supposedly wrong - it only dramatizes the complaint.
    - palata 1y ago
      > The people who have been around for 10 years or so who disagree with the basics of question closing policy [...] Because they flood the site with inherently low-quality answers to low-quality questions I see that you just don't hear the complaints. I don't hear people who have been around for 10 years or so complaining because they can't answer to low-quality questions.
      - zahlman 1y ago
        > I don't hear people who have been around for 10 years or so complaining because they can't answer to low-quality questions. Because they usually can. There aren't enough curators paying attention. Stopping them generally requires three curators to find the same question and act on it before an answer is posted. And the person writing the answer also gets a grace period for in-flight answers. Then when they finally get inconvenienced, they come to the meta site and make perhaps their first attempt in over 10 years to even find out what the policy is. Often they have a bad experience with this, loudly complaining as if they already know the policy while never having made any attempt to learn it, and being surprised to find out they're wrong. Sometimes they even try to make a meta post on the main site.

motorest 1y ago

> Sure, but in the past, StackOverflow was growing, and now it's dying. Maybe something was better before, when "it was not done correctly"? You're presuming that the current volume of questions represent novel, unique posts instead of something you can find over and over again if you do a decent query.

bawolff 1y ago

I think these sorts of things are just an unfortunate side effect of scaling. The bigger you get the more people get lost in the bureaucracy. However if you don't build up the bureaucracy the system collapses under its own popularity. Wikipedia has a similar issue where editing declined around 2007, which is often blamed on stricter enforcement of rules, more complex rules, etc. I think its just a natural stage of growth. You can't be a free for all forever.

Karrot_Kream 1y ago
The "good" thing is, they're back to 2009 levels of postings. Now obviously that's what the mods let through but my guess is that traffic to the site is down precipitously as well. They can roll back their bureaucracy and head back to a lean path that worked for them in the past. But I don't really think that's the problem. Reading zahlman's responses in this thread makes me think that the mods fell into the age old trap that's happened since Usenet, IRC, and still happens to this day wherever there's mods: they got tired of doing unpaid labor and instead of deciding to quit decided to become meaner and stricter. The age old mod trip.
- bookofjoe 1y ago
  Thank goodness dang has so far avoided this path.
- zahlman 1y ago
  Barely any of the people involved are mods. I said that repeatedly before your post yet you chose to ignore it, despite apparently singling out my posts specifically for consideration. Objectively, people are nicer now. Informal policies turned into a proper Code of Conduct over time and moderators (the actual moderators) take it very seriously. Being strict about this is objectively correct and it has absolutely nothing to do with power tripping. Nobody wants to close and delete questions. They want those questions not to have existed in the first place, or rather to have been asked properly in the first place. The system does not incentivize any of this curation effort; it happens entirely thanklessly and driven purely by intrinsic motivation to produce a specific valuable thing. This is not a matter of "bureaucracy". As far as I can tell there is no issue with site traffic: https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/08/08/insights-into-stack-overflows-traffic/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/08/08/insights-into-stack-ov... https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1901940/ https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1901940/

zahlman 1y ago

>the current StackOverflow moderators Overwhelmingly, the people you're talking about are not moderators. I explained this to someone else a week ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43927665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43927665) and you replied to that comment. > Sure, but in the past, StackOverflow was growing So what? Stack Overflow users get $0.00 for this, whether they're moderators, active curators or just signed up. For users, growing the site isn't the goal. Growing interaction with the site is not the goal. The goal is building a useful artifact (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254770 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254770). This frequently entails removing, closing or duplicating questions, for the same reason that building a useful program frequently entails removing lines of code, deprecating parts of the API, and refactoring. > and now it's dying Why should a reduction in incoming questions mean that it's "dying"? > Maybe something was better before Who do you think should get to decide what's "better" here? More importantly, why? If the YC team decided to prioritize increasing site traffic (and introduce ads to capitalize on that) on HN and maximizing the rate of new submissions, at the expense or ignorance of the quality of the discussion, that would be clearly be bad, right? You'd leave, right? I would. The same principle applies to sites that aren't about having a discussion. Bigger is not better.

palata 1y ago
> Overwhelmingly, the people you're talking about are not moderators. I was actually thinking about you. You keep saying everything is great. My observation is that I used to be on SO every day, and I completely stopped contributing even though I would have plenty of stuff to add (more than ever, actually). > Why should a reduction in incoming questions mean that it's "dying"? There is "a reduction", and there is "being back to the amount of questions SO had in 2009 when it launched".
- zahlman 1y ago
  >You keep saying everything is great. I say it's fine, because it is. I say that a reduction in question volume has advantages in terms of accomplishing the site's goals, because it does. There are many things about the site that I'm unhappy with, mainly to do with initiatives the staff are taking that are also very much not true to the site's goals or purpose. > My observation is that I used to be on SO every day, and I completely stopped contributing even though I would have plenty of stuff to add ... And? > There is "a reduction", and there is "being back to the amount of questions SO had in 2009 when it launched". If the amount of questions went to zero per day I would still not consider this a problem. It would be an opportunity to refine the existing publicly visible questions. As a reminder: there are already more than three times as many of those as there are articles on Wikipedia. You say it's a problem that we don't see thousands more per day like we used to. I say it's a problem that we already have so many; and that if we had perhaps a tenth as many, it would become easier to find what you want.

zahlman 1y ago

>Sure, but in the past, StackOverflow was growing, and now it's dying. Maybe something was better before, when "it was not done correctly"? "Growing" by an utterly irrelevant metric. Popular != good.