Why is anybody moderating on Stack Overflow at all?
What is the incentive?
What is the incentive?
I used to use LinuxQuestions, a forum site, but found that SE provided better answers for me (better format, less searching), so in return I answered questions there if I could. I also used to blog tricky problems I'd solved on my *nix boxen; SE was marginally easier than making a blog post and would get better responses/corrections.
That was the initial motivation: community participation, quid pro quo.
Keeping SE sites like U&L and AU useful is my on-going motivation, in part I enjoy helping others, in part I enjoy using my Linux knowledge acquired over many years as a user.
Yes, the company get value but all answers are "open source" and it serves the public good too.
What's the incentive for dang to moderate HN? If it's garbage and uncurated, people probably won't use it because the filtering tools to parse the data are non-existent.
People come for an answer to their question, perhaps they answer the questions of others. Just like how any "community" works.
"Their treasure was knowledge."
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/
Just that typical questions about popular technologies.
Isn't Dang being paid to moderate HN?
I would assume so, yes, but the point still stands: he needs to moderate it or people won't find value in it, thus he'll be out of a position.
What's the value in Wikipedia? The curated knowledge. You only have to go on the average Talk tab for an article on Wikipedia to realize how hard-won most content is, and no, the best outcome doesn't always happen, and plenty of genuine nonsense still makes its way into articles and stays there for years on end.