I'm Resigning as a Stack Overflow Community Elected Moderator

I think the unstated assumption that needs to be made is that the moderators that remain still do a good enough job of moderating the question so that the user contributions can be valuable.

I don't know if the point-chasing ruins the questions I see; but I still see StackOverflow in the search results whenever I'm searching for error messages. Though, I've increasingly found GitHub Issues show up in the results too.

Wow, thanks for putting a name to something that'd been annoying me for decades! It's so frustrating having to re-calibrate your expectations of the value in a community when this happens to it.

Is it any wonder you don't feel engaged, connected, or part of any community when you hold views like that?

I answer quite a few question that are tagged with one low-traffic tag. Four or five people provide 90% of the answers with that tag (I've never counted exactly) and the same handful have done that for several years now. Would you be surprised if that handful of people got to know each other, in a semi-distant, pseudonymous way?

SO was explicitly designed to attract those personalities to author all its content. Now it has the content they have served their purpose and this is the transitional stage where they are purged.

If I had to guess I would say they were just not a profitable demographic for SO to advertise to. If you are an expert with your own network do you need SO’s job board, for example. They are trying to pivot to sell low-end services to newbies who are attracted to the site by the aforementioned content. But how long can they sustain that with no new worthwhile content?

Many (most?) of us were too surprised by the stupidity of the pronoun wars to notice the deeper lesson - building a "community" of non-paid volunteers on the online property of a for-profit company is asking to be stabbed in the back whenever that volunteering effort is no longer deemed necessary.

And I have to agree with you, I don't think Stack overflow will lose anything of value if all those moderator volunteers resign or are removed. Maybe it's different for other stack exchange subomains, but SO moderation can be easily codified as a set of rules and outsourced.

The saddest part is the whining from the moderators. These people actually thought they had a real relationship with the company and that they had rights... that's mindbogglingly naive. :-(

Tremendous.

Twitter is notorious for this: while you might eventually get through to them that a problem exists and they should do something, they seem never to involve the community in upcoming changes or "fixes" to problems.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2019/09/24/announcing-stack-o...

Having a CoC is a good thing and maybe you think it’s too SJW and maybe others think there are offensive moderators and are leaving the site

Personally I think some moderators have confused moderator with area owner and want to run it as they think

Anil Dash?

What users care about is not getting downvoted for reasonable questions, not seeing everything closed as duplicate even though the other answer is 10 years old and contains only/mostly outdated and bad answers, ...

This is what is is actually hurting SO.

One of the challenges SO - at least the ones related to code and Linux - have clearly been dealing with over the past few years is that as time passes, the answers to a question change, e g. today it is vastly more common to use systemd for things, and the commands to run (systemctl, journalctl) reflect that.

StackExchange (SE) announced that users must start being polite and welcoming to beginners and new users, trying to address the perception of hostility and unfriendliness. Generally coming from a well intentioned place, but without good plans for how that would work, except declaring "be nice" and hoping that would do it. There is a break of opinions between "a new user should have a welcoming experience" (both sides - company and users - agree) and "there is an endless flood of 'give me the codez' and homework questions and spam, we're wading through the garbage to your company benefit, and now we get criticism that we aren't doing your dirty work with a smile on top, please acknowledge" (many users agree, the company refuses to engage), and "blunt technical answers are not impolite" (company refuses to engage). SE's unresponsive stonewalling or ignoring questions and suggestions annoys users.

When mods complained about the lack of support from SE, e.g. long standing requests for moderator tools with better UIs, or more guidance from SE employees, SE ignored them.

SE announced that they were retroactively relicensing all content. When people objected, questioned the legality, asked for clarification of specifics, SE ignored and did not answer. It appears they have done this once before, and did not engage then either, but this time might be more serious.

When there was an increasing number of people sharing their bad experiences with SE around the internet, SE more or less blamed the users, and when the users suggested ideas to improve SE in various ways around this (e.g. changes to the flow of onboarding new users, which SE was trialing on some sites), SE ignored and didn't engage.

SE rolled out a new Code of Conduct and insisted everyone will respect people's pronouns[1]. Long standing, well respected, polite, moderator Monica Cellio stopped being a moderator in uncertain conditions, but AFAIK she tried to use gender-neutral language when someone's gender was known, and SE steamrollered her for it.

As a result of her loss of moderator status, several other moderators have either stepped down in protest, or signed an open letter revealing many complaints about how SE has been interacting with moderators - or not interacting - in the private mod/company chatroom which normal users can't see.

Many times through these arguments, an SE employee or two has put out some corporate fluff feelgood non-answer which ignores all raised issues and restates some platitudes or fiat-idealism, which users have taken as worse than silence and/or an insult.

There is a general feeling/suspicion/conspiracy theory that SE is setting itself up to be sold for huge piles of cash, and is trying to stamp out rudeness, appear welcoming, "clear up" licensing concerns, shrug off squeaky-wheel users, and absolutely not say anything controversial, and that SE either has no coherent leadership and direction for the future, or has one they know the users will object to and are therefore silent about it.

Involved in this, although I don't have any idea how closely involved, is SE's spread from purely technical topics to a much wider range of sites covering politics, religion, hobbies and more general interests.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/conduct says "Be inclusive and respectful. [..] Prefer gender-neutral language when uncertain." and "No bigotry. [..] Use stated pronouns (when known)."

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Edit: One of many rant/complaint posts full of links you can dive into: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333965/firing-mods-... which leads to things I missed - the forming and firing of a team to engage with developers in 2017, the redesign of sites making them "worse" while ignoring the user feedback, a single Tweet leading to taking a site off the hot questions list an dropping 80% of its traffic without announcing anything to the site users ("Stack Exchange cared more about how they're perceived by a single person on Twitter than what effect making a change like that would have on a site, and didn't care enough about the community to even let the general IPS community know about the change"), and the statement from employees "Stack Overflow Employees have panic attacks and nightmares when they know they will need to post something to Meta" where the company defended themselves by moving somewhere they don't have to hear the (overly personal) criticism at all.

So small sites will still fail, in fact they'll fail often, but the meta-media as a whole can continue. If anything, it forces them to be responsive because unhappy members will vote with their feet.

It also gets around many of the censorship problems that large sites have. Large sites don't want to make their algorithms or policies clear because there's a massive gain in gaming their system. A diverse collection of small sites is effectively immune to this: it's easy to game one site, but it doesn't get you much of anything.

There's still the expense of moderation, and I think it's where a meta-system shines. If you can draw moderators from anywhere, they're naturally disinterested. You can set up a standard set of procedures for how moderation is done without actually specifying what the rules are. The site owner has sole discretion as to what the rules are, and can override moderator decisions, limited by their willingness to micromanage and upset membership.

The incentive to moderate is that if you want to appeal a decision or otherwise request moderator attention, you must yourself do moderator duty to earn enough "civic duty" points. It's like jury duty, only more directly tit for tat. And I think a well designed system would help educate people as to why certain decisions are made, leading to greater investment.

I think there are huge technical barriers to such a scheme, especially building a UX that works across systems and dealing with not terribly technical site admins. Hell, I'm not even sure what the "meta-media" part of it is, whether it's discussions or interest groups or are there meta-sites that somehow overlay multiple real sites on common topics.

But it would be a fun project...

* Is there a more generic term than "social media" that would better include SO?

Is this not the point though? I generally spend hours chipping away at a problem until I'll resort to asking StackOverflow. There's no point wasting everyone's time if the information is already out there.

Contrary to popular belief, moderators have no special impact on questions getting closed (or downvoted) - that's handled by the "normal" users.