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I don't know who you are. But if you are the creator of this site, you have my respect from the bottom of my heart. Stackoverflow was wonderful when it was sta
by neya 13y ago
I don't know who you are. But if you are the creator of this site, you have my respect from the bottom of my heart.
Stackoverflow was wonderful when it was started the way it was. The moderated content was extremely useful. But later, they decided to screw everything up by doing some stupid things like assigning too much power to moderators.
I always used to assume SO was more like the real world democracy; if something isn't right, you could fix it yourself being an ordinary citizen. However, on SO, that's not the case anymore. There is a moderator on top of the users who decides what's right and what's wrong. And he goes into a 'rage mode ON' by flagging genuinely useful questions as 'inappropriate' or 'not suitable for SO', as he pleases.
How can you challenge his decision? God knows. I've searched round the site to report moderators. Good luck with reporting some rogue moderator. I like the fact that you can flag something offensive easily, but I don't like the fact that it's not as easy for the reverse.
Forget the moderators. Let's say you want to ask something about security with sessions in PHP. Good luck finding answers on SO. Your question will be migrated to some weird subdomain.stakcoverflow.com for which you need a separate account to maintain and collect your badges from scratch, again.
That's why I knew there would be a day when someone would start something like this. Nonconstructive nails it for me. And hopefully for other disappointed SO fans too.
Thanks for creating this.
- maaaats 13y agoIf you don't like that a question was closed, flag to reopen (if you have over 2k rep I believe). If you don't understand why a questions was closed or feel a moderator is abusing powers, create a post on Meta and it will be dealt with. Then the voice of the users will overrule the moderator decision. Not that complicated, really.. I can't say I recognize the situations pictured in your rant.
- albertzeyer 13y agoHave you tried to do this? Reopening usually never happens. Discussions in the comment section is totally useless and wasted time. Discussions on Meta also just repeat that your question is not for SO.
- maaaats 13y agoYes, I have. Reopening almost always happens if a question is wrongly closed when you get a few eyes on it from meta. So that removes the moderator-abuse part. Discussions in comments are of course useless, as it's only you there vs. those that closed the question. As I said, bring it to Meta. If the discussion on Meta repeat that the question is not for SO, then those closing the question probably did the right thing. After all, Meta is the user's voting their opinions.
- recursive 13y agoI've seen this happen many times.
- wodow 13y agoPosting to Meta isn't obvious to anyone unfamiliar with SO/StackExchange.
- maaaats 13y agoWell, if people don't care to get familiar with the site (checking how others use it, reading the faq and rules), it's not weird if their questions get closed..
- pbsdp 13y agoThus creating a closed loop ecosystem that grows increasingly stale.
- belorn 13y agoRequiring familiarization with a system before the power to change things is very very basic. Any open source project require it. I can't directly go and get a patch accepted into the kernel without familiarize myself with the project, the code, and the process of suggesting a patch. I can't request a youtube video to be deleted/undeleted without reading about youtubes process. familiarization is the basic of the basic requirement for doing anything anywhere.
- mkr-hn 13y agoInformation on how to contribute to the kernel--and most big open source projects--is readily available in multiple formats. This is the first I've heard that Stack Overflow has an appeal process. Compare: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=contributing+to+stack+overflow https://duckduckgo.com/?q=contributing+to+stack+overflow https://duckduckgo.com/?q=contributing+to+the+linux+kernel https://duckduckgo.com/?q=contributing+to+the+linux+kernel https://duckduckgo.com/?q=contributing+to+audacity https://duckduckgo.com/?q=contributing+to+audacity https://duckduckgo.com/?q=contributing+to+gnu https://duckduckgo.com/?q=contributing+to+gnu The closest I found to an answer on SO was marked as a duplicate by several people with no link to the previous answer.
- speeder 13y agoActually, SO IS like a real world democracy. Real world democracy frequently end like this... it is a natural evolution of sorts of democracy, and this is known since democracy exists (there are greek texts about the theme)
- T-hawk 13y agoYes, and excellently stated. In any organization, power will be captured by those who are most interested in capturing power. Wikipedia and Stack Overflow are no exceptions.
- pacifika 13y agoThe community becomes to big to be moderated like that. I've seen this happen back in the day for BBSes and the same happens still.
- rmrfrmrf 13y agoI apologize in advance for sounding like an elitist prick, but in my mind, community-driven sites like StackOverflow, Reddit, Wikipedia, are prone to the noise of do-nothing armchair experts (especially in this economy with the unemployment rate) who have nothing better to do than stir philosophical debates over nothing. As a person with a job who actually needs answers rather than reading through pages upon pages of discourse that goes absolutely nowhere, I appreciate StackOverflow's approach to moderation. StackOverflow is a place for specific questions and specific answers, not subjective nonsense questions like "how secure are sessions in PHP?" that, on this "Not Constructive" website, I imagine will be flooded with answers ranging from "PHP SUXXX LOL GO PYTHON" to "In my opinion, sessions are inherently broken blah blah blah". While the moderators may be able to mitigate these issues a little bit, the problem isn't so much with the answers as the question itself, which has no "correct" answer. So, while I can see why people with a lot of free time might want to go to NotConstructive as a diversion, I foresee this site as little more than an informational black hole of back-and-forth BS.
- eitland 13y agoI often find very much useful information in closed questions on stackoverflow. What annoys me is karma-farming questions.
- mkr-hn 13y agoI imagine something like the Ask* subreddits (with smart, but firm moderation) for programming would be good: http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience Moderation is strictest at the root, and you can collapse all the trees with a link near the comment form. However, the discussion is the best part. It's where smart people share their knowledge, and other smart people add on to what was said or offer different takes. But you can stick to the root for the Stack Overflow style straight answers.
- nostraspamus 13y agoBefore assuming it's just going to be things like "PHP SUXXX LOL GO PYTHON" check out some of the questions that have been closed. Here's one I came across this morning on open source face recognition libraries: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/953714/face-recognition-library http://stackoverflow.com/questions/953714/face-recognition-l... The original question was asked in June of 2009. It was marked as "protected" in June of 2010. Then it was closed as off topic in April 2013. While it may be true that the question itself is not framed particularly well, the answers are really useful, including one from November, 2011 that was posted more than two years after the original question. If the original question was considered off topic in 2013, then it was presumably also off topic in 2009 when it was originally asked. If it had been marked that way at that time, some very useful answers would never have appeared.
- cruise02 13y agoMost of what you say here is just nonsense. 1. In the vast majority of cases, if you see something not right on Stack Overflow you can fix it yourself. Anyone at all, regardless of reputation, can suggest an edit to any post. 2. You can challenge moderator decisions on Meta Stack Overflow, which is linked at the top of every single page on the site. (Or, if you have enough reputation, you can just vote counter to most moderator decisions directly on the site. It is democratic.) 3. There are over 1,600 questions about security with sessions in PHP on Stack Overflow. http://stackoverflow.com/search?q=[php]+security+sessions+is%3Aquestion http://stackoverflow.com/search?q=[php]+security+sessions+is...
- viraptor 13y agoI have top disagree on point 2. One a question is deleted by a moderator you can only bring it up in meta. You can't vote to undelete anymore (maybe other moderators can?). For anyone who has powers gained through the points, mod's deletion is final. And that's sometimes very annoying since those deletions require only one person. No voting, no double checking. Delete-happy mods can definitely abuse it.
- cruise02 13y agoThat's why I said you can vote counter to most moderator decisions. That's the one thing that only another moderator (or employees of Stack Exchange, who oversee moderators) can reverse. And no, "delete happy" mods cannot abuse it. There is oversight by other moderators and the Community Team at SE.
- viraptor 13y agoI've seen enough questions killed that way that yes - I consider it easy to abuse. It happens all the time but if it happens to someone else's question it's not worth my time/energy to raise the issue on meta. The lack of balance here is what makes it really annoying to fight.
- cruise02 13y ago
- ysbi 13y agoThere's so much nonsense in these few lines, I don't even know where to start disputing it... For one, you can certainly fix things on SO. (I hváve a third or a fifth of the power necessary to kill or resurrect and question.) Further, moderators do not flag. That's utterly wrong. Moderators react to flags – and they mostly do nothing more. And the place to challenge them is rather easy to find: it's on httP://meta.stackoverflow.com. Now, I am not saying that all your problems would be solved when you post there (nor even indeed that I would agree with you that they are problems), but if you've been around for as long as you seem to imply and you still haven't found meta, then I will have to presume that there must be something wrong – on your end. Also, there already is a place to make all those discussions, and you can even do them in realtime. It's the SO chat, and it's been there for years, with a link to it from every single page. (Note: Chatrooms are generally more relaxed than SO proper, but that doesn't mean they'll all be what you want them to be. Many of the older ones have acquired quite their own culture, and if you happen to burst through the door and trample over that, you might find yourself among a group of people who resent you having come in.) Finally, there is not close-reason "not constructive" anymore. It's gone. Now, don't get me wrong. I am the first to admit that some things are in dire need of improvement on SO, and it has turned me off enough that I likely haven't even given a dozen answers last year. But any critique should still be well-founded, or it will be ill-received.
- fusiongyro 13y agoI disliked S.O. for a long time, but the more I use it the better I like it. "The prisoner falls in love with his chains" as Dijkstra said. I only recently ran into the rogue moderator problem, in the Prolog section. If you don't know Prolog you really won't be able to tell whether there's enough information there or not. It's a real issue, and the appeal process is long and unpleasant.
- RP_Joe 13y ago>But later, they decided to screw everything up by doing some stupid things like assigning too much power to moderators. I couldn't agree more! Joel, are you listening?