I've joined a number of online forums through the years, and I've always ended up leaving them due to a spiral of "tone gets rough / the good people leave".
I'm still in this one, but I guess we'll see how long it lasts here. Seems different somehow, but they all do in the beginning.
What are some innovations in solving the asshole/quality spiral? There's lots of takes on moderation, but what are some interesting ones?
The quality has not noticeably gone down. There are a lot less technical articles now than I feel like there used to be, but that might very well just be because I've gotten more technical, and now everything seems like an opinion.
I think it's because HN is actually willing to defend itself. We used to have days where everybody would ONLY submit articles about some obscure programming language (although I have forgotten which one it was...not arc, I don't think...scala maybe? I think it started with an S).
We don't seem to do that anymore, but I think the culture is still there. People are willing to tell you to leave if you're not a good member. That's really important.
But IMHO, the saving grace is the fact that HN is not built to grow. Growth is what ruins every online community. There are still plenty of small communities have have been going fine for years or even decades because they didn't experience explosive growth. As soon as you have something like Twitter with massive investment and market expectations, you know the community is done for. To Twitter's credit though, the mechanic of following individuals does scale much better than a forum though. Subreddits were also a good idea that allows some community while scaling. But in both those cases it works because they create sub-divided communities rather than one massive one which inevitably breaks down.
http://www.metafilter.com/98848/The-Post-That-Cannot-Possibl...
Some areas of business make a good local idea, regional idea, but VC firms want you to expand and swallow the world. Maybe that's also the wrong way to think about it: maybe coexisting in the local economy is a better, more stable, and amicable way to go.
Just a thought that your post had on me.
Edit: that was March 11, 2009. Someone should see if the Internet archive took a snapshot of the all-Erlang front page.
Edit 2: Nope, it fell between snapshots. I wonder if we could reconstruct it from the logs. But here's HN from the day before: https://web.archive.org/web/20090310152751/http://news.ycomb....
Of course he later closed his flourishing community suddenly. Very suddenly. Everyone was confused.
And the worlds he's built since, such as StackOverflow, are deliberately completely devoid of all community.
The smallest remnants of the community survive and evolve at http://www.crazyontap.com/
But still, that old post was so good I had to dig it out and read it again. I think it all still stands.
I see the same thing happening in other stack-exchange sites, sadly. The underlying problem may be the gradual fatigue at questions of the form:
"HOW DO I DO DIS???!! SOLVE THIS FOR ME NOW PLZ!!"
or even the more subtle "I was wondering about this homework-like question...?" which are - inevitably - just lazy students posting their homework. These get closed as "homework question".
On the flip side, there are interesting questions which don't fit into the SE model. These are the speculative or more open-ended discursive ones. These get closed as "too broad".
On SO itself, it kind of feels like most questions are homework - or even just people unable/unwilling to use search engines. Then innocent questioners who word their question wrong get caught in the crossfire, and have their question closed.
An observation; reading the meta sites (where they discuss the community) turns up a lot of downright vitriolic ire directed at the stinkin' no-reps who pollute the site with their ill-thought-out questions, like someone traipsing through the house with muddy shoes on.
In fact, I'd wager that if someone who had a mind to ask a question on SO read the meta site first, they'd be completely turned off from the attitude on display.
And I say this as someone that's been on both sides of the equation. I've had questions closed for "too broad" even when they're asking a pretty direct question with an equally direct answer, I've seen the flags pile up in the review queues.
I think that's because the site encourages people to get all the internetpointzzz reputation currency, and not to, you know, actually answer questions. And the questions I asked were somewhat difficult, because I'm not a dummy and I did a lot of research before posting them. So, as a software developer, I do not find SO "successful" as a Q&A site.
As a community, it seems their biggest flaw is they try to solve literally every problem with the reputation system, and they've turned it into a weird mess. For example, the SO FAQ says "if you know or find the answer, go ahead and answer your own question". But the reputation system says, "Nope, no permissions. We were just yanking your chain." Very off-putting for literally everybody who doesn't spent 4 hours a day there farming reputation.
Because like you, I'm relatively bright and I do a lot of research before asking my questions. Hence they tend to get zero answers from:
IRC, mailing lists, personal emails of luminaries, Stack Overflow, Slashdot, or anywhere.
Generally I just keep hammering away and digging deeper until I figure out which CPU register is flipping wrongly that, to the top of the stack, caused the database query to return the wrong result (to give a synthetic example of the sort of thing I tend to run into and solve).
I usually just assume if the question isn't answered by 2-3 different mediums, it's unanswerable. Then I work-around it, usually with some horrible hack that I hate.
Most recently, I was trying to twist and mold WebAPI2 into accepting a multipart/form-data request while also using the auto-serializer. I asked everywhere and every one, and nothing. The work-around is just awful, goddamned awful, but oh well.
I blame the developers who apparently think this REST API is "done" despite it being impossible to, for example, upload a user's profile image using it. Guh.
Difficult questions really don't work well, sadly. Unless there is the rare situation that some expert out there happens to know the answer and has the spare time to post a long detailed reply.
Didn't realise you couldn't answer your own questions without sufficient rep - that sounds a bit rubbish. Don't think you get any points from it either (obviously, otherwise you could just rapidly post a bunch of empty 'questions' and accept all your own answers).
Ultimately, stack-exchange sites seem to work well for a certain volume of questions, with a certain minimum number of enthusiastic varied experts in some field, for a certain level of question (not homework, not blue-sky research). This is kind of Goldilocks-obvious I suppose...
* Something I can figure out myself if I think about it for a few minutes, or
* Already on StackOverflow or another Q&A site so I can look them up.
IMO if the site doesn't tackle difficult questions, what's the point? I don't need yet another site for easy questions, I need a Q&A site to get my questions answered.
RE: the answering my own question thing -
Yeah, the people in control of the site all have like 573453247,3048294723847 rep so they think nothing of saying "well doing action X should require rep" followed by the old canard, "it's really easy to get that much rep!"
I seriously wonder if any of those people have actually created a new account and tried to use their own website. Because there's SO MANY LIMITATIONS on SO MANY THINGS tied to rep, if you come in from the outside there's actually very little you can actually do. And there's no way to ease-in to using the site, because you can't (for example) post comments on other people's answers until after you gain rep.
So if you're like me, and you have no patience/desire to play the internetpointzzz game, nor did you start using the site "early enough" to benefit from its population growth, and the fact that early users could do a LOT more without rep limits-- then you're kind of just stuck in this weird no-man's land.
(I didn't use the site when it was founded because of it's bizarre and foolish insistence on using OpenID. Thankfully they've finally moved away from that.)
Theoretically, I could gain rep (by playing the game), then add a "bounty" to my difficult questions to get them answered, but I ain't got time for that! Who does?
And yes, I do realise it's all a bit Royston Vasey - "a local website for local people"...
In America, we have a social network called NextDoor that uses aggressive methods to keep outsiders from being able to post in your hyper-local community/neighborhood. Your village's site is the same concept, only maybe without the postcard-mailed address verification step.
It's a great concept. Just neighbors helping each other out, right? I thought that, besides the required real names, most members having profile pictures of their real faces, and many of them having their exact addresses listed on their profile page (oh, Bob lives 8 houses down from me!), would put a halt to the vitriol I saw on Facebook. It hasn't.
It must be something about looking at a picture on a screen instead of a human who's reacting, visibly, in real-time to our hateful words, that lets us do what we do online.
The upvote/downvote system works well for how simple it is for the end user. Although, this reward structure seems to favour opinion over fact- The stronger the opinion the more interest in generates. Also, the system only works well if the community is aligned. HN, for example, has enough people to flag flagrantly bad comments that it's managed to [mostly] maintain quality with growth. Reddit "blows up" when the company takes action to realign the community away from what it considers to be bad actors.
Twitter has no control over quality nor content. They've invested so much into developing a monetization platform (which some may argue has diminished quality of content) and they've ignored the core product- a community interacting with itself. Fake accounts, ads, and an organized faction of bad actors; one wonders how far-reaching the Twitter Exodus [of users and investors] will be.
In the same context, you would think that the asshole/quality spiral (love this description, by the way) could be managed by a combination of moderation bots/humans and (especially) the voting system, but when a sub gets big (say 70k users), it's quite often the assholes who are most vocal and cause the most trouble. With that amount of users, there will be a certain amount of "brigading" and a certain group of users who will play along with the griefers for fun.
It's been mentioned above, but a user base can reach a "tipping point" where it becomes impossible to manage with a a small amount of moderators, a bot and a voting system.
Something will eventually give. I've seen all this play out numerous times and experienced it first-hand.