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Mod vs non-mod-user-with-edit-privileges is a semantic difference from a user perspective. Nobody gives a shit what the internal labeling system looks like or h

Mod vs non-mod-user-with-edit-privileges is a semantic difference from a user perspective. Nobody gives a shit what the internal labeling system looks like or hierarchy among the people with edit privileges. I’m not going to litigate my case in front of a clique of other officious hall monitors just for the privilege of making that site better. I don’t care if it was against the rules for me to be annoyed by their obnoxiousness, or what their exact role was in the organizational structure. I tried, but it ended up being a completely obnoxious experience because of a user with advanced privileges, and so you lost me. I was the only one with formal education and a professional background consistently answering, and frankly, that site needed my expertise a hell of a lot more than I needed to share it— and they failed to provide a reasonable forum to do that despite being its sole purpose. If the point system actually represented expertise, it might have worked. I’m fine with being scrutinized by a peer or superior… But it didn’t go down like that.

cindyllm 3mo ago
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zahlman 3mo ago
> Mod vs non-mod-user-with-edit-privileges is a semantic difference from a user perspective. If your lack of interest in how the existing community works is that profound, then you could hardly be said to have a good-faith interest in joining the community in the first place. Which means you're actually upset that the site doesn't provide the service you expected it to. Sites are not required to provide services simply because the people who arrive there believe that's the service the site provides. If you're sticking around to keep answering questions, and it's because you think the place has a cool concept behind it and you want to become part of something, you owe it to yourself to make sure you understand what the "something" is. And you owe it to the other people there to accept that you are only one voice out of N in deciding that. > and they failed to provide a reasonable forum to do that despite being its sole purpose That is emphatically not what the purpose was. See for example https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92107 https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92107 . The point system was a broken mess. But it was not intended to represent what you appear to mean by "expertise"; it was intended to represent trust and engagement. By answering questions, you obtained reputation which granted you privileges, which you were expected to use to maintain the site according to the site's objectives. This includes, notably, filtering questions according to what helps build the site as a useful reference for users of search engines, which is the real motivating force behind the standard question-closure reasons (even if it took a while to achieve consensus on that, and to decide how to phrase it all). And to refrain from answering questions which should be closed, because that acts counter to the site's objective. The design was specifically intended to ensure that you get scrutinized by peers or superiors — in the domain of using the site properly and working towards its goal, not in the domain of the subject matter where you have expertise. I agree that the reputation system utterly failed in effecting this.
- DrewADesign 3mo ago
  You’re trying to lawyer your way around this very plain fact: in the minds of the vast majority of people who knew about it, it was a site to ask questions about relatively obscure topics, and for knowledgeable people to answer them to disseminate their knowledge. You make it sound like users were supposed to consider using the site as their primary goal, and consider the subject at hand as secondary. If you read what people were saying here in good faith (or really what damn near everyone outside of that insular community has said about it for like a decade and a half) you’d realize that you are in the extreme minority. You can cite all the governance concepts rules you want, but you can’t make users care about something they don’t, and that’s the problem. There was a group of people operating the site like the site itself was the reason it was popular. It was popular because it had a lot of information people wanted, like Wikipedia is. And there are a hundred billion ways it could have pimped its best questions to Google without having the layer of obnoxious, arrogant people playing question police. Yes, the points system was a mess because of the way it made people behave. You can’t look at it in a vacuum or pretend the negative behavioral consequences were somehow different from the purer intentions of the site. When someone that has permission to change what you say and they abuse that, it doesn’t matter if there’s some justification in the site concept — we’re just going to be bothered by the bothersome people, and tell other people about how annoying the experience was. It could have have been structured to prioritize stewarding people’s knowledge, like Wikipedia, but it wasn’t. There could have been a much greater barrier to being able to meddle with other people’s words but there wasn’t. They could have chosen to not reward people for doing exactly that, but they didn’t. Instead, in interface and in the audience of privileged users it attracted, it prioritized gamification, popularity, the ‘erm aactually’ guys that were way out of their depth, and a whole bunch of other shit that everyone else rolled their eyes at. It was successful in spite of the obnoxious governance and self-important pseudo stewardship of other people’s knowledge, not because of it. If SO was even vaguely still relevant to the conversation, I’d still be telling people that it’s time for a big ego deflation and giant reality check. But it’s not relevant. If preponderance of users were really enamored with the community and governance and rules and site structure and all of that shit, rather than it simple having information on obscure topics and issues where you could get a question answered by someone who knew what they were talking about, then everybody wouldn’t have jumped ship literally the moment they had an alternative. Wikipedia didn’t lose anywhere close to that about amount of traffic. Search results are also barely relevant these days, comparatively, but I’ll bet the people there now are just as overzealous about policing questions for the same justifications.

cindyllm 3mo ago

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zahlman 3mo ago

> Mod vs non-mod-user-with-edit-privileges is a semantic difference from a user perspective. If your lack of interest in how the existing community works is that profound, then you could hardly be said to have a good-faith interest in joining the community in the first place. Which means you're actually upset that the site doesn't provide the service you expected it to. Sites are not required to provide services simply because the people who arrive there believe that's the service the site provides. If you're sticking around to keep answering questions, and it's because you think the place has a cool concept behind it and you want to become part of something, you owe it to yourself to make sure you understand what the "something" is. And you owe it to the other people there to accept that you are only one voice out of N in deciding that. > and they failed to provide a reasonable forum to do that despite being its sole purpose That is emphatically not what the purpose was. See for example https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92107 https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92107 . The point system was a broken mess. But it was not intended to represent what you appear to mean by "expertise"; it was intended to represent trust and engagement. By answering questions, you obtained reputation which granted you privileges, which you were expected to use to maintain the site according to the site's objectives. This includes, notably, filtering questions according to what helps build the site as a useful reference for users of search engines, which is the real motivating force behind the standard question-closure reasons (even if it took a while to achieve consensus on that, and to decide how to phrase it all). And to refrain from answering questions which should be closed, because that acts counter to the site's objective. The design was specifically intended to ensure that you get scrutinized by peers or superiors — in the domain of using the site properly and working towards its goal, not in the domain of the subject matter where you have expertise. I agree that the reputation system utterly failed in effecting this.

DrewADesign 3mo ago
You’re trying to lawyer your way around this very plain fact: in the minds of the vast majority of people who knew about it, it was a site to ask questions about relatively obscure topics, and for knowledgeable people to answer them to disseminate their knowledge. You make it sound like users were supposed to consider using the site as their primary goal, and consider the subject at hand as secondary. If you read what people were saying here in good faith (or really what damn near everyone outside of that insular community has said about it for like a decade and a half) you’d realize that you are in the extreme minority. You can cite all the governance concepts rules you want, but you can’t make users care about something they don’t, and that’s the problem. There was a group of people operating the site like the site itself was the reason it was popular. It was popular because it had a lot of information people wanted, like Wikipedia is. And there are a hundred billion ways it could have pimped its best questions to Google without having the layer of obnoxious, arrogant people playing question police. Yes, the points system was a mess because of the way it made people behave. You can’t look at it in a vacuum or pretend the negative behavioral consequences were somehow different from the purer intentions of the site. When someone that has permission to change what you say and they abuse that, it doesn’t matter if there’s some justification in the site concept — we’re just going to be bothered by the bothersome people, and tell other people about how annoying the experience was. It could have have been structured to prioritize stewarding people’s knowledge, like Wikipedia, but it wasn’t. There could have been a much greater barrier to being able to meddle with other people’s words but there wasn’t. They could have chosen to not reward people for doing exactly that, but they didn’t. Instead, in interface and in the audience of privileged users it attracted, it prioritized gamification, popularity, the ‘erm aactually’ guys that were way out of their depth, and a whole bunch of other shit that everyone else rolled their eyes at. It was successful in spite of the obnoxious governance and self-important pseudo stewardship of other people’s knowledge, not because of it. If SO was even vaguely still relevant to the conversation, I’d still be telling people that it’s time for a big ego deflation and giant reality check. But it’s not relevant. If preponderance of users were really enamored with the community and governance and rules and site structure and all of that shit, rather than it simple having information on obscure topics and issues where you could get a question answered by someone who knew what they were talking about, then everybody wouldn’t have jumped ship literally the moment they had an alternative. Wikipedia didn’t lose anywhere close to that about amount of traffic. Search results are also barely relevant these days, comparatively, but I’ll bet the people there now are just as overzealous about policing questions for the same justifications.