7 ms·

> I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems, though it certainly didn't help. SO has had poor moderation from the

by Aurornis 10mo ago

> I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems, though it certainly didn't help. SO has had poor moderation from the beginning. I was an early SO user and I don’t agree with this. The moderation was always there, but from my perspective it wasn’t until the site really pushed into branching out and expanding Stack Exchange across many topics to become a Quora style competitor that the moderation started taking on a life of its own. Stack Overflow moderator drama felt constant in the later 2010s with endless weird drama spilling across Twitter, Reddit, and the moderator’s personal blogs. That’s about the same time period where it felt like the moderation team was more interested in finding reasons to exercise their moderation power than in maintaining an interesting website. Since about 2020 every time I click a Stack Overflow link I estimate there’s a 50/50 chance that the question I clicked on would be marked as off topic or closed or something before anyone could answer it. Between the moderator drama and the constant bait-and-switch feeling of clicking on SO links that didn’t go anywhere the site just felt more exhausting than helpful.

franze 10mo ago
I know the feeling of being happy not being the only one with that same problem (and that somebody bothered to actually ask on SO) and the crushing feeling that the question was closed as off topic (so no reason for me to ask) or marked as duplicate (referencing that is clearly not a duplicate and just showing that the mod took no effort to understand the question)
Shog9 10mo ago
There was definitely a bit of Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy [0] at work. I worked there during a lot of the drama you allude to, and... It sucked, for everyone. But also... For most of SO's history, the vast majority of visitors (and this questions, answers) came in via Google. Not "search engines"; Google. This was pretty much baked in right at the start, and it effectively served as the site's primary user interface for years. And it worked. It worked pretty well! Until it didn't. At some point, Google started surfacing fewer "tried and true" Q&A examples and more unanswered, poorly-answered or moderated examples. This broke the fundamental assumption that sat behind SO's moderation - that curating a smaller set of posts was preferable to encouraging more, and newer. Suddenly, Google wasn't a very good UI for SO anymore. ...and SO didn't really have a fallback. Heck, for a while during this period they actually stopped showing questions on their homepage unless you were already logged in; the core assumption remained that there was a never-ending spring of new people feeding the thing. LLMs weren't the start of the problem, they were the end - the final wake-up call. I don't know that a site like SO can exist without the old Google, the old Internet; it is a product of all that, in the same way that mass-market TV shows were a product of 20th-century broadcast technology, or trade paperbacks of a particular intersection of printing tech and reading habits. [0]: https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
- zahlman 10mo ago
  Oh, hey, Shog, good to see you doing well. It was a heck of a ride, hmm?
  - Shog9 10mo ago
    Yes indeed! Glad to see you over on Codidact; I suspect small, bespoke q&a will be the future of the form, at least after Facebook implodes.
    - zahlman 10mo ago
      Believe me, I'm full of vision (and hope). But it's hard to write stuff when there's so much to write that I can't find a natural starting point, and when the (lack-of-)network effects are so brutal.
- mixmastamyk 10mo ago
  Best answer so far, too bad way down here.
  - MichaelZuo 10mo ago
    It still seems a bit too simplistic… no one imagined that Google could behave less than 100% virtuously in the future? Really?
    - mixmastamyk 10mo ago
      It worked that way for its first ten plus years. Why would it change? Why/How could you plan for an unknown future. Personally I’m horrible at predicting the future, so I don’t blame them.
    - Aurornis 10mo ago
      I don’t think there’s anything virtuous or non-virtuous about it. The internet is a big place and search engines aren’t optimized to produce results according to singular sites’ idiosyncrasies. The obvious flaw in Stack Overflow’s bias toward closing new questions is that over time the best pages are also the oldest and most stale. They even locked questions with enough answers to prevent new content from being added, guaranteeing that they became stale. Yet at the same time they allowed new questions to be asked and indexed by search engines, but didn’t allow new answers to that new content. So the freshest and most recent content was also the worst. I don’t see this as a “Google bad” moment. It’s a failure of Stack Overflow in clinging to their oldest content and building rules that made all new posts frustrating and unhelpful.
rendaw 10mo ago
I asked a question for the first time mid last year. It was a question about "default" sizes in HTML layout calculations, with lots of research and links to relevant parts of the spec. It was immediately closed as off topic, and there were a bunch of extremely vitriolic comments offended that I'd ask such a question on SO. It was briefly reopened weeks (?) later and then I guess closed again and now is deleted, so you can't even view the question any more. I'd long heard of abusive moderation but... experiencing it first hand is something else. Anecdote of one, but I know I'm never going to ask there again. In case anyone's wondering, I ended up asking on the WhatWG or W3C or something github project (via an issue?). The TLDR was rather eye opening, that basically the spec only codifies points of contention for browsers and old behaviors are generally undocumented. With some pointers I figured out the default size behavior through code diving, and it was complex (as in, hard to use) and very unintuitive.
- brabel 10mo ago
  Questions are never really deleted , post a link so people with enough reputation may have a look and maybe resurrect it if the question is really good.
  - fabianholzer 10mo ago
    Why would anyone with an ounce of self-respect try to beg an stranger with enough internet point to look if their question is worthy of being asked? Do you not realize how the proposal must sound to someone who is not already in the SO in-group?
    - brabel 10mo ago
      Hm… as the person was new to SO it’s very possible they don’t understand what a good question looks like and I thought it may be helpful to give feedback on what may have gone wrong… but if you see that as “begging” and you don’t think you need any feedback, you have it all sorted out after all, then yeah it’s a waste of everyone’s time.
      - 10mo ago
noduerme 10mo ago
The moderation definitely got kind of nasty in the last 5 years or so. To the point where you would feel unwelcome for asking a question you had already researched, and felt was perfectly sound to ask. However, that didn't stop millions of people from asking questions every day, it just felt kinda shitty to those of us who spent more time answering, when we actually needed to ask one on a topic we were lacking in. (Speaking as someone who never moderated). My feeling was always that the super mods were people who had too much time on their hands... and the site would've been better without them (speaking in the past tense, now). But I don't think that's what killed it. LLMs scraping all its content and recycling it into bite-sized Gemini or GPT answers - that's what killed it.
- inquirerGeneral 10mo ago
  [dead]
- gn4d 10mo ago
  >it just felt kinda shitty to those of us who spent more time answering, when we actually needed to ask one on a topic we were lacking in. (Speaking as someone who never moderated). Great observation. Just like friendship, open communities psychologically feel as though there should be some balance. Spending free time contributing to something (even if you don't directly expect anything in return with ulterior motives) to benefit others, then getting an anvil dropped on your head when you dare to ask for a morsel in return, was an awful feeling which occurred too often there. The site and moderation, especially since the late 2010s (and especially in 2020 and beyond), became malignantly predatory.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
mvdtnz 10mo ago
Quite frankly you are wrong. Jeff and Joel spoke about their goals for very harsh moderation in their podcast while they were still building SO. The moderation from the very beginning was a direct result of the culture they created and it was completely intentional.
- Aurornis 10mo ago
  Quite frankly you have missed the point of my comment. The late 2010s moderator drama I was talking about was beyond the strict question curation. When StackOverflow expanded into StackExchange and started trying to be another Quora the moderation grew beyond curating technical questions. For years there was needless moderator drama and arguments over how the moderator team should run that were spilling over into social media everywhere.
gn4d 10mo ago
Friend in my group was in the public beta back in '08. We all ended up signing up by the end of '09. I used it off-and-on over the years (have some questions and replies with hundreds of upvotes). Though SO had a rap for having what might seem like harsh replies or moderation, it was often imho just blunt/curt, to the point, and often objectively defensible. I also agree with your timeframe that, in the later 2010s, the site became infected with drama, and moderation suddenly started reaching its tendrils into non-technical areas, when it should not have. And on an ostensibly technical site, no less! I found myself contributing less and less (same with Wikipedia), because I merely wanted to continue honing my craft through learning and contributing technical data with others who shared this same passion... I did not want to have politics shoved in my face, or have every post of mine have to be filtered through an increasingly extreme ideology which had nothing to do with the technical nature of the site. When I had my SO suspended with no warning or recourse for writing "master" in a reply, I knew it was time to leave for good. Most of the admins on the site transformed from technical (yet sometimes brash!) geeks, into political flag-waving and ideology-pushing avatars (including pushing their sexual agendas front and center), and not of the FSF/FLOSS kind, either. These types of dramas have infected nearly everything online, especially since 2020. Even Linus has lost his mind with pushing politics into what should be purely technical areas https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41936049 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41936049 LLMs were a final blow for many reasons, though I think that a huge part of it is that LLMs won't chide you and suspend/ban you for wanting to stick to strictly technical matters. I don't have to pledge allegiance to a particular ideology and pass a purity test before asking technical questions to an LLM.
- nerdbert 10mo ago
  I have been highly active in online technical communities since the usenet days in the 1980s and I have never once found myself in a situation where my opinions on sex or gender were solicited, interrogated, or judged. This really sounds like people were letting their personal flags fly (in avatars or sigs or whatever) and you could not stand to see that because they were not like you. All you have to do is ignore it and look at the content. This reminds me of someone I worked with, who asked me "why does [Colleague 2] have to shove his gay lifestyle in everyone's face?" after that Colleague 2 put a framed holiday photo with his husband on his desk. The person who asked this had a photo with his wife on his desk. He was unable to understand (A) how that is "shoving" his sexual orientation in other people's faces to the exact same degree as Colleague 2's photo was; and (B) that the photo was for Colleague 2's own comfort and solace, and for positive engagement with anyone who wanted to engage in same, and that nobody else was required to dwell on it or give it a second glance.

franze 10mo ago

I know the feeling of being happy not being the only one with that same problem (and that somebody bothered to actually ask on SO) and the crushing feeling that the question was closed as off topic (so no reason for me to ask) or marked as duplicate (referencing that is clearly not a duplicate and just showing that the mod took no effort to understand the question)

Shog9 10mo ago

There was definitely a bit of Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy [0] at work. I worked there during a lot of the drama you allude to, and... It sucked, for everyone. But also... For most of SO's history, the vast majority of visitors (and this questions, answers) came in via Google. Not "search engines"; Google. This was pretty much baked in right at the start, and it effectively served as the site's primary user interface for years. And it worked. It worked pretty well! Until it didn't. At some point, Google started surfacing fewer "tried and true" Q&A examples and more unanswered, poorly-answered or moderated examples. This broke the fundamental assumption that sat behind SO's moderation - that curating a smaller set of posts was preferable to encouraging more, and newer. Suddenly, Google wasn't a very good UI for SO anymore. ...and SO didn't really have a fallback. Heck, for a while during this period they actually stopped showing questions on their homepage unless you were already logged in; the core assumption remained that there was a never-ending spring of new people feeding the thing. LLMs weren't the start of the problem, they were the end - the final wake-up call. I don't know that a site like SO can exist without the old Google, the old Internet; it is a product of all that, in the same way that mass-market TV shows were a product of 20th-century broadcast technology, or trade paperbacks of a particular intersection of printing tech and reading habits. [0]: https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html

zahlman 10mo ago
Oh, hey, Shog, good to see you doing well. It was a heck of a ride, hmm?
- Shog9 10mo ago
  Yes indeed! Glad to see you over on Codidact; I suspect small, bespoke q&a will be the future of the form, at least after Facebook implodes.
  - zahlman 10mo ago
    Believe me, I'm full of vision (and hope). But it's hard to write stuff when there's so much to write that I can't find a natural starting point, and when the (lack-of-)network effects are so brutal.
mixmastamyk 10mo ago
Best answer so far, too bad way down here.
- MichaelZuo 10mo ago
  It still seems a bit too simplistic… no one imagined that Google could behave less than 100% virtuously in the future? Really?
  - mixmastamyk 10mo ago
    It worked that way for its first ten plus years. Why would it change? Why/How could you plan for an unknown future. Personally I’m horrible at predicting the future, so I don’t blame them.
  - Aurornis 10mo ago
    I don’t think there’s anything virtuous or non-virtuous about it. The internet is a big place and search engines aren’t optimized to produce results according to singular sites’ idiosyncrasies. The obvious flaw in Stack Overflow’s bias toward closing new questions is that over time the best pages are also the oldest and most stale. They even locked questions with enough answers to prevent new content from being added, guaranteeing that they became stale. Yet at the same time they allowed new questions to be asked and indexed by search engines, but didn’t allow new answers to that new content. So the freshest and most recent content was also the worst. I don’t see this as a “Google bad” moment. It’s a failure of Stack Overflow in clinging to their oldest content and building rules that made all new posts frustrating and unhelpful.

rendaw 10mo ago

I asked a question for the first time mid last year. It was a question about "default" sizes in HTML layout calculations, with lots of research and links to relevant parts of the spec. It was immediately closed as off topic, and there were a bunch of extremely vitriolic comments offended that I'd ask such a question on SO. It was briefly reopened weeks (?) later and then I guess closed again and now is deleted, so you can't even view the question any more. I'd long heard of abusive moderation but... experiencing it first hand is something else. Anecdote of one, but I know I'm never going to ask there again. In case anyone's wondering, I ended up asking on the WhatWG or W3C or something github project (via an issue?). The TLDR was rather eye opening, that basically the spec only codifies points of contention for browsers and old behaviors are generally undocumented. With some pointers I figured out the default size behavior through code diving, and it was complex (as in, hard to use) and very unintuitive.

brabel 10mo ago
Questions are never really deleted , post a link so people with enough reputation may have a look and maybe resurrect it if the question is really good.
- fabianholzer 10mo ago
  Why would anyone with an ounce of self-respect try to beg an stranger with enough internet point to look if their question is worthy of being asked? Do you not realize how the proposal must sound to someone who is not already in the SO in-group?
  - brabel 10mo ago
    Hm… as the person was new to SO it’s very possible they don’t understand what a good question looks like and I thought it may be helpful to give feedback on what may have gone wrong… but if you see that as “begging” and you don’t think you need any feedback, you have it all sorted out after all, then yeah it’s a waste of everyone’s time.
    - 10mo ago

noduerme 10mo ago

The moderation definitely got kind of nasty in the last 5 years or so. To the point where you would feel unwelcome for asking a question you had already researched, and felt was perfectly sound to ask. However, that didn't stop millions of people from asking questions every day, it just felt kinda shitty to those of us who spent more time answering, when we actually needed to ask one on a topic we were lacking in. (Speaking as someone who never moderated). My feeling was always that the super mods were people who had too much time on their hands... and the site would've been better without them (speaking in the past tense, now). But I don't think that's what killed it. LLMs scraping all its content and recycling it into bite-sized Gemini or GPT answers - that's what killed it.

inquirerGeneral 10mo ago
[dead]
gn4d 10mo ago
>it just felt kinda shitty to those of us who spent more time answering, when we actually needed to ask one on a topic we were lacking in. (Speaking as someone who never moderated). Great observation. Just like friendship, open communities psychologically feel as though there should be some balance. Spending free time contributing to something (even if you don't directly expect anything in return with ulterior motives) to benefit others, then getting an anvil dropped on your head when you dare to ask for a morsel in return, was an awful feeling which occurred too often there. The site and moderation, especially since the late 2010s (and especially in 2020 and beyond), became malignantly predatory.

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

mvdtnz 10mo ago

Quite frankly you are wrong. Jeff and Joel spoke about their goals for very harsh moderation in their podcast while they were still building SO. The moderation from the very beginning was a direct result of the culture they created and it was completely intentional.

Aurornis 10mo ago
Quite frankly you have missed the point of my comment. The late 2010s moderator drama I was talking about was beyond the strict question curation. When StackOverflow expanded into StackExchange and started trying to be another Quora the moderation grew beyond curating technical questions. For years there was needless moderator drama and arguments over how the moderator team should run that were spilling over into social media everywhere.

gn4d 10mo ago

Friend in my group was in the public beta back in '08. We all ended up signing up by the end of '09. I used it off-and-on over the years (have some questions and replies with hundreds of upvotes). Though SO had a rap for having what might seem like harsh replies or moderation, it was often imho just blunt/curt, to the point, and often objectively defensible. I also agree with your timeframe that, in the later 2010s, the site became infected with drama, and moderation suddenly started reaching its tendrils into non-technical areas, when it should not have. And on an ostensibly technical site, no less! I found myself contributing less and less (same with Wikipedia), because I merely wanted to continue honing my craft through learning and contributing technical data with others who shared this same passion... I did not want to have politics shoved in my face, or have every post of mine have to be filtered through an increasingly extreme ideology which had nothing to do with the technical nature of the site. When I had my SO suspended with no warning or recourse for writing "master" in a reply, I knew it was time to leave for good. Most of the admins on the site transformed from technical (yet sometimes brash!) geeks, into political flag-waving and ideology-pushing avatars (including pushing their sexual agendas front and center), and not of the FSF/FLOSS kind, either. These types of dramas have infected nearly everything online, especially since 2020. Even Linus has lost his mind with pushing politics into what should be purely technical areas https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41936049 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41936049 LLMs were a final blow for many reasons, though I think that a huge part of it is that LLMs won't chide you and suspend/ban you for wanting to stick to strictly technical matters. I don't have to pledge allegiance to a particular ideology and pass a purity test before asking technical questions to an LLM.

nerdbert 10mo ago
I have been highly active in online technical communities since the usenet days in the 1980s and I have never once found myself in a situation where my opinions on sex or gender were solicited, interrogated, or judged. This really sounds like people were letting their personal flags fly (in avatars or sigs or whatever) and you could not stand to see that because they were not like you. All you have to do is ignore it and look at the content. This reminds me of someone I worked with, who asked me "why does [Colleague 2] have to shove his gay lifestyle in everyone's face?" after that Colleague 2 put a framed holiday photo with his husband on his desk. The person who asked this had a photo with his wife on his desk. He was unable to understand (A) how that is "shoving" his sexual orientation in other people's faces to the exact same degree as Colleague 2's photo was; and (B) that the photo was for Colleague 2's own comfort and solace, and for positive engagement with anyone who wanted to engage in same, and that nobody else was required to dwell on it or give it a second glance.