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Comment by dvt | Hacker News Reader

I'm currently in the top 0.86% overall on Stack Overflow, even though I haven't been actively contributing since shortly after college (2015ish). I've always thought about writing this kind of blog post, but I think it's just pointless.

SO, over the past decade, has been destroyed by power-hungry admins. These admins are (1) not technically competent, (2) not politically astute, and (3) do not have the best of the community in mind. Simply put, they're power hungry online weirdos that just want to be "in charge" of a community. I've witnessed this dozens of times, and there have been many (many) controversies concerning SO admins. After a few run-ins that rubbed me the wrong way, I no longer contribute. I feel that SO has become the new "Experts Exchange" or "Yahoo Answers" -- ironically, exactly what they were trying to replace.

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In order to be an active admin for a site, you need to have a lot of free time for it. And it's exactly these mentally inept people who have that time. There needs to be a name for this paradigm.

The role of moderation is soul draining - all communities suffer from an Eternal September effect. There's always a someone new who didn't read or disregarded the rules.

I do agree there are those who are simply attracted to the power of moderating a community; what is "Cancel Culture" but that same exercise of power?

When a seasoned, prolific contributor gets disabused you know there's rot in the community; who is doing the moderation without knowing or ever communicating with the top contributors? That I don't get.

> SO, over the past decade, has been destroyed by power-hungry admins. These admins are (1) not technically competent, (2) not politically astute, and (3) do not have the best of the community in mind. Simply put, they're power hungry online weirdos that just want to be "in charge" of a community.

Sadly, your comment perfectly describes what happened to Wikipedia about five to ten years ago, and also exactly what is happening more and more every day on Reddit.

Recently a post of mine on Reddit hit the front page and got a ton of awards (i.e. revenue for Reddit). Quickly the majority of my comments were deleted and I was given a temporary ban from the subreddit. The rules say "Only one link to social media per submission", and I was linking to websites that were extremely helpful and relevant to the questions I was being asked.

My takeaway is that Reddit doesn't want me to submit content that garners a massive amount of attention (119k upvotes), over 4700 comments and 357 awards.

Unrelated: I see you posting on HN every now and then, and every time I'm like "oh it's the Africa expedition guy!" -- and maybe this is just the few gin and tonics I've had earlier, but cheers to you, your story is awesome!

> Simply put, they're power hungry online weirdos that just want to be "in charge" of a community.

It's funny, I actually think that this is true for most of the mods we see online, be it Reddit, SO and the whole SE network, or any other forum.

Comparing SO to Yahoo! Answers is a bit much, though.

reddit and their mods have completely destroyed their website. The admins of reddit do not care because the cash keeps flowing, so why stick to founding principles at all?

Aaron Swartz is spinning in his grave I'm sure.

The interesting thing on Reddit is that every sub Reddit has their own set of moderators. If you go to /r/China or /r/history you will get destroyed for even posting the most sane comment, in other reddits there is literally zero moderation which can be very relieving (if the community is not too big). so reddit can be good for everyone whereas Stack Overflow is converging to be good for no one.

He's only spinning because dudes like you don't allow him to rest in peace by bringing his name as an appeal to authority on irrelevant topics. Please stop.

I think it's not SO specific. More generally people that want power are not often the one that will use it wisely.

Wow... I think I should've better written https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26164826 comment here.

Just a perfect illustration of how "синдром вахтёра" works in mods/admins.

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