5 ms·
A day in the life of a stackoverflow moderator...
- kunai 13y agoLet's just hope this doesn't get renamed to "Revisions" by some misanthropic, overzealous HN invisimod.
- kbar13 13y agokunai your posts aren't showing up jk
- plus- 13y agoThe diff algorithm is a bit weird
- gecko 13y agoIt's trying to do word-by-word diffing, since English isn't code, but, unlike Word and other tools that attempt to do that, it doesn't have e.g. cursor movement history to make the editing sane. Thus, that's what you get. This is a similar problem to what you have on other diff programs, by the way. Any sane diff tool will give you an equivalent diff to any other one, and it'll give you an equivalent minimal diff as well, but the human friendliness of the diff varies widely on the algorithms selected. The best tools I've seen use some source awareness to give you a diff that can pick up that e.g. you removed an "if" guard and then unintendented its child block. The worst do a greedy linear scan to make their patches. Most tools I use (especially ones based on a recursive algorithm) are in the middle.
- ThomW 13y agoWhat kind of jerk has his question answered by the Stackoverflow community, then insist it be pulled so others don't benefit?
- pothibo 13y agoRevision #8 is insane... I don't understand what goes through his head
- praptak 13y agoThe user clearly believes it is his duty to prevent Google from unfairly benefitting from the existence of the question.
- gorrillamcd 13y agoWhat he fails to realize is that the site that just helped him depends on Google for a large portion of their traffic (and thus, revenue).
- denzil_correa 13y agoI did some analysis and I found out that roughly 1/8 of the delete questions on Stackoverflow are deleted by the author of the question.
- landr0id 13y agoDo you know the context of those though? I delete my questions from time-to-time because they're very specific to my setup or they end up being something really basic like a missing semicolon or a typo somewhere.
- denzil_correa 13y agoIt would be difficult to measure the context. I discovered that most users(not all) who delete are those who fear -ve votes which in turn effects reputation points i.e. there'd be a higher probability of an author deleting a question if the question has attracted some -ve votes.
- bronsoja 13y agoI like how the latest revision is a cleanup edit that introduces another typo.
- gcb1 13y agoits probably an attempt at a "reddit roll"
- gorrillamcd 13y agoI like this user. He seems fun to mess with. :)
- kevando 13y agoAmazing post. I feel like CS courses should have requirements that make them take up some of this duty.
- kevando 13y ago> Amazing post. I feel like CS courses should have requirements that make them take up some of this duty. This is amazing post. I believe CS courses should require students to help moderate Stackoverflow.com posts.
- aiiane 13y agoPlease no. That would be worse than the existing situation; many of the problem cases on SO are CS students.
- Dirlewanger 13y agoIf anything we need high schools to actually teach how to write effectively and concisely, not fill out a 5 paragraph template for 4 years. Too many kids go into college and coast on writing bullshit and fluff.
- kevando 13y agoAnd what if I'm just jealous I didn't have SO during my CS days and want to punish the kids a bit? Is that so bad?
- deviltry 13y agoSimple FizzBuzz test would suffice imo.
- itafroma 13y agoI think this was supposed to show the crap Stack Overflow power users have to deal with, but I think it more clearly shows some of the worst qualities of the Stack Overflow moderation system. With a large caveat that moderators have the ability to scrub context from a problem question (e.g., comments) and user (e.g., deleting their past submissions), this is what appears to the outside world: * A new user asks what they think is a dumb question. * They get an answer. Still thinking it was a dumb question and not knowing how Stack Overflow works, attempts to blank out the question and request deletion. * A user with 22k rep (i.e., a power user) goes in and rolls back the question. * The asker rolls back the rollback. At this point, the appropriate thing to do is flag the question for a moderator (important addendum: and move on). That doesn't happen. Instead: * The power user—who really should know better—gets into a petty rollback war with the asker, and the question gets reverted 15 times in 5 minutes before another power user steps in and reverts it. * The roll back wars stop, but an hour later a diamond moderator steps in and locks the question anyway. (Correction: I originally said it was unlocked 45 minutes later, but child comments correctly point out it was unlocked automatically a week later). * The asker, who by all appearances has asked a single question, gets banned for 15 years.[1] * The question, while not the best question ever, is decent enough and gets interesting answers but somehow gets a -35 score (edit: now down to -41 in the 20 minutes since I posted this comment), making it one of the worst questions on the site.[2] The comments[3] speculate that it was due to the edit war. So much for voting on a question instead of the person. It's stuff like this that drives people up the wall when it comes to Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange, and it happens way too easily (I know I slipped into it a few times during my time as a Stack Exchange power user). [1]: http://stackoverflow.com/users/2398036/user2398036 http://stackoverflow.com/users/2398036/user2398036 [2]: The questions page, when sorted by votes, only goes to -27 on page 410,195: http://stackoverflow.com/questions?page=410195&sort=votes http://stackoverflow.com/questions?page=410195&sort=votes [3]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16630713/is-it-true-in-python-that-you-can-import-specific-functions-from-a-module-unlike#comment29684251_16630713 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16630713/is-it-true-in-py...
- tommmmmm 13y agoIt was unlocked a week later.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- iLoch 13y agoI had a moderator change the wording of my writing because they didn't like the way I was doing it, it looked a lot like what was going on here. They revised it such that it partially lost the meaning of what I was saying, but also just didn't come across the way I had intended to write it - so I changed it back. Then they changed it back. Then I changed it back again. Then they changed it back. Finally I changed the post back to my own wording, and I guess the moderator said "fuck it" because the changes stopped. The mods seem a little power hungry. If you're a SO mod, I'm sure you've got better things to do than correct tiny grammatical quirks that make people who they are - try focusing on the bigger issues. Edit: Ahh, mine wasn't quite this dramatic - I didn't notice how many revisions there were. This is hilarious and sad.
- klodolph 13y agoI doubt it was a moderator that edited your post. Moderators are unlikely to engage in edit wars because it would be easier for them to lock the post. Your post may have been edited by just another user. Look for a diamond ♦ in the username. The diamond indicates that the user is a moderator. However, any user with 2,000 rep or more can edit posts. There are a lot of 2k rep users on Stack Overflow! Some of them are teenagers (look at the profiles).
- chc 13y ago> The mods seem a little power hungry. If you're a SO mod, I'm sure you've got better things to do than correct tiny grammatical quirks that make people who they are - try focusing on the bigger issues. It was probably another user instead of a mod — Stack Overflow is a weird combination of a forum and a wiki, so people are allowed to fix each other's posts. Besides that, though, I think you should consider the possibility that you were also in the wrong. Just because their edit lost meaning doesn't mean it didn't also add something useful. Instead of reverting, I think a better approach would have been to add those meaningful aspects back in and call attention to them, since they obviously weren't clear to everyone. If a hard revert was really necessary, you could have just explained why.
- denzil_correa 13y agoIf you want to read answers from the Stackoverflow moderators(or Diamond users as they are called) you might want to check the discussion on meta.stackoverflow. http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/166623/what-is-a-day-in-the-life-of-a-stack-overflow-moderator-like http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/166623/what-is-a-day...
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- calgaryeng 13y agoLife of a stackoverflow moderator - closed as off topic :)
- MrZongle2 13y agoThis must be the part of the day where the moderators aren't closing useful questions due to subjectivity. I really wish they could just have a "subjective" flag and let users filter out those posts as they see fit. Some of the closed-subjective material is quite useful, as it contains the hows and whys behind developers choosing a framework or widget or technical solution over another.