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Comment by riffic | Hacker News Reader

you can't automate good content moderation, and it's just not worthwhile to provide this service if you can't keep up with the duties. Another link to Masnick's Impossibility Theorem:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20191111/23032743367/masni...

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They can't fob off that work on the numerous Tesla die-hards out there?

It's often not a good idea to have the die-hards do the moderation.

You'll end up a stack overflow situation haha

You guys realize that if SO community/mods weren't like they are, then you'd end up with tons of garbage in search results?

I find the majority of SO questions in search results have been wrongly closed as duplicates

Yep, I generally remove SO from my searches because of how many useless closed as duplicates questions find their way into search results.

If they want to moderate like that fine, just delete the dupe questions.

Dupes have their uses - they do a pretty good job of ensuring a wider variety of Google searches lead to the answer. Basically, a built in “this paragraph is a synonym for this other one”.

That’s really not been my experience. I find the non duplicate question is normally somewhat related but not actually useful, being subtly different or quite old etc.

That said while SO has been effectively useless to me for years, if you find it’s helpful then more power to you.

The most useful answers I find on SO tend to be marked "closed; off-topic." Thank goodness for the off-topics and the dupes.

This reminds me of Wikipedia. The hardcore contributors/maintainers cop a whole lot of criticism, and I'm sure some of it is justified (though some is clearly just nerd-shaming), but people rarely acknowledge how amazing it is that the project is basically a success, and how quickly it could degenerate if the most dedicated 'loosened up' or lost interest.

That's an interesting opinion. My impression is that the overwhelming majority of good content on SO is grandfathered from when moderation was much less strict.

That's up to the point that finding good answers to problems with new software is hard nowadays.

I'm sorry, but isn't that what we've ended up with?

Whenever I see SO in search results, it's a sign that I have a question someone else had years ago that wasn't answered.

SO has strict moderation. That's a very different scenario.

I've moderated forums and tend to generally agree with SO's approach. Not sure I'd leave it to users; we had dedicated moderators do everything. I've seen loosely or unmoderated programming forums, and it quickly goes to shit.

Handing moderation over to fans is a different issue. It leads to strict and horribly biased moderation.

It won't scale.

Why can't ai?

When we get actual AI, that question may make sense.

can an AI make the right decision 100% of the time?

Can humans make the right decision at a rate better or worse than AI? If AI makes the wrong decision, is a human empowered to step in and overrule that decision?

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