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We will look into this. Not very different than voting rings on HN or other places. You want vote diversity.

angersock 12y ago
Sure, but my job isn't affected by voting rings on HN, nor does YCombinator justify a totalitarian moderation policy by claiming to be the best google-able SEO-optimized source for whatever it is I'm questioning.
- apetresc 12y ago
  He's agreeing with you. He said they're going to look into [preventing] it.
- jrochkind1 12y ago
  How is your job affected by voting rings on SO? I'm not challenging you, just asking for more clarification because I don't follow and am curious!
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - jghn 12y ago
    An argument could be made that many people are hitting SO multiple times a day in the course of doing their jobs. If the questions and answers are biased by voting rings the results might not be optimal
  - angersock 12y ago
    So, GP suggested that the behavior of people in the chats was to basically rally to close questions, and likened it to voting rings on HN (which are, I believe, algorithmically regulated or at least are supposed to be). My issue is that SO is a dominating first-hit for lots of technical questions, and that by setting themselves into that position they kind of owe it to the community to make sure they don't have jerks (via voting rings or any such analogue) screwing up the quality of their results. For example, I've searched for "what is the best x for y?" or "what are the tradeoffs for x vs y", and had even (a long time ago) contributed answers to similar questions in their game development exchange--however, they (or their users) have decided that there is no value whatsoever in fielding questions of that variety.
aaronchall 12y ago
I'm close to being able to close Python duplicates in a single vote when I get my Python gold badge (9/10 of the way there.) http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/254590/541136 http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/254590/541136 - Also, considering the huge close vote queue, I can see why SO would want to close-close-close (or at least vote-vote-vote). What you really need are more voters voting. Not sure how you get there, though.
- eitland 12y ago
  Careful, this maybe isn't the correct place for telling everybody how easily you can crush them : ) > What you really need are more voters voting. Not sure how you get there, though. I guess a whole lot of the people who could have helped you left long ago because of your fellow moderators. A reasonable first step would be by adjusting the attitude. Maybe part of the problem is we just don't see all those "primarily opinion based" and "ugly discussions" questions that seems to be oh such a serious problem. We definitely see a whole lot of the most useful questions closed, often for technicalities. It doesn't exactly encourage participation, does it? HN somehow seems to be better at dealing with the problems without scaring good community members away. Of course HN has issues as well but so far the moderation team is doing a very good job of keeping politics and promotion away while leaving to the broader community to vote if something is interesting or not.
  - aaronchall 12y ago
    Yes it's definitely difficult to get a foot-hold on the site, now isn't it. Maybe they need a real sort of wiki, or some sort of discussion community built around them. Seems like they started doing that, then killed it. The problem with discussion boards is that it is absolutely painful to dig through a post until you stumble on a solution, and even then, you're in no way sure it's a good solution. They need to harness that opinion/discussion/off-topic-subject energy in a way that doesn't work against their strategy. I think they are losing a lot of opportunity along the way.
    - acjohnson55 12y ago
smackfu 12y ago
Chat rooms are pretty toxic on a discussion site where the majority of users are not on the chat room.
alecco 12y ago
Once I saw a clique of mathematica.SE guys doing vote ring on reddit/r/programming and other places to promote their site. Some of them looked like working for Wolfram itself, based on simple online searches for other forums. It's possible they were just Wolfram fanatics, maybe. They crafted a particular question/answer and submitted and vote brigaded it everywhere. They were quite obvious and denied everything when confronted. After pointing out the obvious ring (same people pushing the same link with similar comments on all sites) they ganged up on me and sent me horrible private messages. This pissed me off and I overreacted, exactly what they wanted... After cooling down, I went to their chat rooms to apologize for my angry replies language and removed comments on reddit. But they never, ever accepted they did any wrongdoing and pat themselves in the back. Oh, and never apologized for their harassment that triggered me in the first place. This is why SO, reddit, HN are slowly getting long time users disenchanted. If you are not part of some virtual gang you are just meat, like a ghetto.
- reitanqild 12y ago
  > This is why SO, reddit, HN are slowly getting long time users disenchanted Can't speak for reddit but I think HN is quite much better than SO. Specifically it seems: * somehow grasping the house rules seems to be easier for people here than on SO. This might be because HN attracts another audience though, I don't know for sure. * maybe because redditism and stupidity is mostly downvoted swiftly? * spam and politics is dealt with before it hits the front page * but contrary to SO moderators the ones on HN don't seem to get a kick out of finding something, anything that can be banned with the correct reading of the guidelines I sometimes see what I consider to be abuse of downvotes but 1.) it doesn't seem to be rings and 2.) downvote abuse is very often corrected by the rest of the members.
  - alecco 12y ago
    According to the mods, it's not them but users clicking the report button. If so, it's abused and any story that is negative for any YC/HN related company, against bad social norms in tech hubs, denouncing anti-privacy issues at Google/Faceboo, talking against celebrities like Bill Gates, or anything about NSA tends to go quickly below the fold and mostly ignored. The ranking system is gamed. I used to come here several times a day, submit stories, try to add interesting comments to discussion (even playing devil's advocate). Now I mostly just skim the front page on slow days and get sad on how concentrated the opinions get.
rbobby 12y ago
An auto-unclose process that examined web logs for direct hits from google might be nice too. And closed question that gets N hits from google probably deserves to be reopened with a special "google wants an answer" tag. I usually (always) search google for my problem de jour. And frequently (enough so I remember) the first stackoverflow result is my exact question... but closed. Probably happens once or twice a month, and usually on something "thorny" (i.e. no clear cut answer... so "primarily opinion based" answers are fine... I can compare the top voted answers and decide for myself).
- m_mueller 12y ago
  Also, are answers to closed questions stored? If not, and there is a new often used unclose workflow, it would be nice to let users still store their answer, to become visible when it becomes unclosed. This would help with the timing issue and would also give mods a way to see 'oh wait, looking at this answer it is actually too interesting to deserve these close votes'.
- shagie 12y ago
  Sometimes I find a two year old post on HN that I want to comment on, but it's "closed" - the reply button is gone. HN should implement that when N hits from Google occur, it bumps it back to the front page and makes it able to be discussed again. More seriously though, Stack Exchanges platform isn't designed to handle opinion polls and endless discussions. You might want to consider asking the question on a site geared to opinions and discussions such as quora or reddit.
z3t4 12y ago
You can make it so that if a closed question gets an answer, the question will only be visible for the one making the question and the one answering the question.

Sure, but my job isn't affected by voting rings on HN, nor does YCombinator justify a totalitarian moderation policy by claiming to be the best google-able SEO-optimized source for whatever it is I'm questioning.

apetresc 12y ago
He's agreeing with you. He said they're going to look into [preventing] it.
jrochkind1 12y ago
How is your job affected by voting rings on SO? I'm not challenging you, just asking for more clarification because I don't follow and am curious!
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- jghn 12y ago
  An argument could be made that many people are hitting SO multiple times a day in the course of doing their jobs. If the questions and answers are biased by voting rings the results might not be optimal
- angersock 12y ago
  So, GP suggested that the behavior of people in the chats was to basically rally to close questions, and likened it to voting rings on HN (which are, I believe, algorithmically regulated or at least are supposed to be). My issue is that SO is a dominating first-hit for lots of technical questions, and that by setting themselves into that position they kind of owe it to the community to make sure they don't have jerks (via voting rings or any such analogue) screwing up the quality of their results. For example, I've searched for "what is the best x for y?" or "what are the tradeoffs for x vs y", and had even (a long time ago) contributed answers to similar questions in their game development exchange--however, they (or their users) have decided that there is no value whatsoever in fielding questions of that variety.

aaronchall 12y ago

I'm close to being able to close Python duplicates in a single vote when I get my Python gold badge (9/10 of the way there.) http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/254590/541136 http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/254590/541136 - Also, considering the huge close vote queue, I can see why SO would want to close-close-close (or at least vote-vote-vote). What you really need are more voters voting. Not sure how you get there, though.

eitland 12y ago
Careful, this maybe isn't the correct place for telling everybody how easily you can crush them : ) > What you really need are more voters voting. Not sure how you get there, though. I guess a whole lot of the people who could have helped you left long ago because of your fellow moderators. A reasonable first step would be by adjusting the attitude. Maybe part of the problem is we just don't see all those "primarily opinion based" and "ugly discussions" questions that seems to be oh such a serious problem. We definitely see a whole lot of the most useful questions closed, often for technicalities. It doesn't exactly encourage participation, does it? HN somehow seems to be better at dealing with the problems without scaring good community members away. Of course HN has issues as well but so far the moderation team is doing a very good job of keeping politics and promotion away while leaving to the broader community to vote if something is interesting or not.
- aaronchall 12y ago
  Yes it's definitely difficult to get a foot-hold on the site, now isn't it. Maybe they need a real sort of wiki, or some sort of discussion community built around them. Seems like they started doing that, then killed it. The problem with discussion boards is that it is absolutely painful to dig through a post until you stumble on a solution, and even then, you're in no way sure it's a good solution. They need to harness that opinion/discussion/off-topic-subject energy in a way that doesn't work against their strategy. I think they are losing a lot of opportunity along the way.
  - acjohnson55 12y ago

smackfu 12y ago

Chat rooms are pretty toxic on a discussion site where the majority of users are not on the chat room.

alecco 12y ago

Once I saw a clique of mathematica.SE guys doing vote ring on reddit/r/programming and other places to promote their site. Some of them looked like working for Wolfram itself, based on simple online searches for other forums. It's possible they were just Wolfram fanatics, maybe. They crafted a particular question/answer and submitted and vote brigaded it everywhere. They were quite obvious and denied everything when confronted. After pointing out the obvious ring (same people pushing the same link with similar comments on all sites) they ganged up on me and sent me horrible private messages. This pissed me off and I overreacted, exactly what they wanted... After cooling down, I went to their chat rooms to apologize for my angry replies language and removed comments on reddit. But they never, ever accepted they did any wrongdoing and pat themselves in the back. Oh, and never apologized for their harassment that triggered me in the first place. This is why SO, reddit, HN are slowly getting long time users disenchanted. If you are not part of some virtual gang you are just meat, like a ghetto.

reitanqild 12y ago
> This is why SO, reddit, HN are slowly getting long time users disenchanted Can't speak for reddit but I think HN is quite much better than SO. Specifically it seems: * somehow grasping the house rules seems to be easier for people here than on SO. This might be because HN attracts another audience though, I don't know for sure. * maybe because redditism and stupidity is mostly downvoted swiftly? * spam and politics is dealt with before it hits the front page * but contrary to SO moderators the ones on HN don't seem to get a kick out of finding something, anything that can be banned with the correct reading of the guidelines I sometimes see what I consider to be abuse of downvotes but 1.) it doesn't seem to be rings and 2.) downvote abuse is very often corrected by the rest of the members.
- alecco 12y ago
  According to the mods, it's not them but users clicking the report button. If so, it's abused and any story that is negative for any YC/HN related company, against bad social norms in tech hubs, denouncing anti-privacy issues at Google/Faceboo, talking against celebrities like Bill Gates, or anything about NSA tends to go quickly below the fold and mostly ignored. The ranking system is gamed. I used to come here several times a day, submit stories, try to add interesting comments to discussion (even playing devil's advocate). Now I mostly just skim the front page on slow days and get sad on how concentrated the opinions get.

rbobby 12y ago

An auto-unclose process that examined web logs for direct hits from google might be nice too. And closed question that gets N hits from google probably deserves to be reopened with a special "google wants an answer" tag. I usually (always) search google for my problem de jour. And frequently (enough so I remember) the first stackoverflow result is my exact question... but closed. Probably happens once or twice a month, and usually on something "thorny" (i.e. no clear cut answer... so "primarily opinion based" answers are fine... I can compare the top voted answers and decide for myself).

m_mueller 12y ago
Also, are answers to closed questions stored? If not, and there is a new often used unclose workflow, it would be nice to let users still store their answer, to become visible when it becomes unclosed. This would help with the timing issue and would also give mods a way to see 'oh wait, looking at this answer it is actually too interesting to deserve these close votes'.
shagie 12y ago
Sometimes I find a two year old post on HN that I want to comment on, but it's "closed" - the reply button is gone. HN should implement that when N hits from Google occur, it bumps it back to the front page and makes it able to be discussed again. More seriously though, Stack Exchanges platform isn't designed to handle opinion polls and endless discussions. You might want to consider asking the question on a site geared to opinions and discussions such as quora or reddit.

z3t4 12y ago

You can make it so that if a closed question gets an answer, the question will only be visible for the one making the question and the one answering the question.