Stack Overflow Moderation Strike Update
meta.stackexchange.com
meta.stackexchange.com
SO gives people with points the power to bully others. When you protest you get collectively downvoted to the point that you a temporary banned, for asking a valid question.
For instance the last interaction there, someone closed my question as duplicate, but it wasn't a duplicate, so I asked in Meta how I can find out who closed my question, because I wanted to explain to them why it's not a duplicate. That question on meta got 30+ downvotes and the question on SO got them as well including passive aggressive comments like "do you know the answer now".
What is this 3rd grade mentality?
And because of that people use alt accounts to farm points. They use other accounts to ask questions, and answer them with their main account. Or let their buddies ask and they answer and the other way around.
SO is a terrible place nowadays. It used to be a very good place a very long time ago, had its ups and downs, but nowadays it's just a toxic shitfest
Hollywood could get a good script for a sequel to Mean Girls just by watching those people.
Just like SO then
I've used chatGPT (as well as SO as many others) but always in the context of having enough knowledge (either from experience or experimenting before opening a question) to understand if the answers were just wrong or not.
To each their own but I treat ChatGPT as a rubber duck 2.0 and I think that's what it excel at.
If this happens, there is no way to recover. That question is forever blacklisted, not just closed. No one could ever ask it again. For a particularly long term problem I was having, I asked for a friend to repost it with his account. He wrote up the question, the verbiage wasn't mine (let along copypasta). I'm not sure what gave it away, but his version got -4 within an hour.
There are no effective appeals, no oversight, no reform possible.
And, if we evaluate it honestly what they've strived for the last couple of years, they don't even want the site to be a place for people like us to ask questions or answer them. They see it as some Wikipedia-like encyclopedia of "good questions". If your question isn't a good question, it does not matter that you need answers. It doesn't matter that other people out there have the same sort of question.
It's just not something they want.
Does anyone remember back in 2007 or so when we were all excited that now every link wasn't Expert Sexchange, and we thought the internet and the world were slowly being improved?
An encyclopedia of good questions is a very valuable thing. SO was created with the goal of it scaling, because once you answer the good questions, nobody needs to ask anything anymore.
Then they decided to write a formal specification for "good question". This is when things started to break.
The problem is the gate keepers, seem to hover over the questions queue. I shudder to think how someone who has english as a second language would fair.
Noobs don't know how to form questions. That's what we're supposed to be here for. To help them learn answers, and how to ask better questions.
I would encourage you to look at https://stackoverflow.com/review and the participation in those queues.
If you believe that people are gatekeeping those queues and preventing good questions from getting out, help out in the queues and work to fix up the questions too.
As moderators are on strike and things are not going through the queues, this would be an opportunity to help out the rest of the community.
I will point out that typically the queues have orders of magnitude more things needing than people can do in a day - individuals are limited to how many reviews they can do in a day so that they don't burn out or get in the habit of hitting the same button again and again.
If that's your belief, then nothing I could say will ever convert you away from such a peculiar religion.
(For everyone else) Not only will many need to ask questions still, but the "encyclopedia of good questions" is rather useless to many of us. Some small fraction of our needs is about a classic textbook example like out of some intro class. We live in the real world.
The "encyclopedia of good questions" has more to do about soothing the egos of jackasses who are (somehow) ashamed of the great thing they accidentally created.
you're supposed to edit your post to explain why it's not a duplicate (and actually, before you post, you're supposed to search for existing Q&A, and when you post, to show what you have researched). In the duplicate closure notice, there's a big button suggesting you to edit your post if it's not a duplicate.
> And because of that people use alt accounts to farm points. They use other accounts to ask questions, and answer them with their main account.
This is called fraud and it's not allowed and seriously looked down upon by the community. The system has mechanisms in place to auto-detect fraud and ding people for it.
I've seen it a pile of times.
Back in the day, questions were all valid. It was the way devs should work. If you posted an identical question, so what? Who did it hurt?
This "fraud" is totally allowed. Who looks down on it? I could give a snot about my points. If someone wants to have 10 million "magic points" I don't care. Every dev I know, with 20+ years in has about the same < 5k points. We don't care.
I gave one dev 2k points for answering a single question.
SO is not your personal helpdesk. It is a Q&A site. If a question has been asked and answered it is up to you to find it and use it, you don't just ask the same question again when people have already taken the time to write a good answer. That would defy the entire point. Maybe you should try asking on Reddit or a Discord server or some other community more appropriate for the kind of interaction you seem to want.
Even if we wanted to go with this approach, questions that are potential duplicate should just have an answer pointing to the other question and let the OP decide if it's right or not.
Having someone else that doesn't have the full vision on the question and context is not the right approach.
From personal experience, I have come across numerous questions that appeared to address the exact issue I was struggling with, only to find them closed as duplicates, off-topic, or something similar. Often, the suggested alternative Q&As are unrelated except for the surface-level similarity, which is especially frustrating.
Sometimes, when I find one of these closed questions, I feel a strong sense of empathy towards the asker, as if I'm the only person out there who understands them.
Unfortunately, I have always been primarily occupied with whatever problems I was dealing with at the time, so I don't have a list of examples I can share with you.
SO is undoubtedly a valuable resource, and I don't completely disagree with the moderation style. However, it has been a slow burn for me.
Though i also think it is in part that the Asker doesn't understand how to apply the answer to their issue rather than the answer not being relevant. In my experience a lot of people are unwilling or incapable of adapting an answer to their situation, which can be problematic in a place like SO that doesn't attempt to cater directly to individuals like that but rather to answer more generally.
I think issues like this contribute a lot to the dissatisfaction we see surrounding SO.
Change the word most for some and you get a statement that also applies to mods.
I like to check SO for problems I encounter but no way I would ask a question in there. Really don't like the toxic climate.
I decide on my own in a way like: read a ton of similar questions and their answers (if they have some) and rtfm to fix the problem. Or simply ask my friends.
If you must you can imply that SO is not ones friend. At least for me this holds.
Yet I have marked hundreds of questions as duplicate which was often welcomed by the person who asked the question, so clearly it's not fundamentally broken, even though there is some friction at times.
And what about when the nuance of the question changes, supporting points are different because tech has changed, so the original question is no longer accurate even though it's the same problem?
I can not say anything useful about a hypothetical scenario you make up. Maybe it happens, maybe it doesn't, we don't know.
The only way I've found around this is to wait 10 hours or so and repost, hoping the original people who had an issue are now sleeping.
That was never the case; duplicates were around back in the day as well.
The idea is to build a long-term repository of useful questions, and millions of duplicate questions if not helpful for that. If I answered question X with great detail and lots of context then I really don't want to do that every month, so, you mark it as a duplicate, and in principle everyone wins with this.
I'm not saying the process always works brilliantly in practice and I agree there are too many curmudgeons around and that sometimes questions get closed as duplicates too fast, but the basic idea of it is fine.
I don't know why they are they doing it, clearly posting a reference to another question entirely. Why not just let the question hang, it feels almost bot-like behaviour.
The main problem is, without strong oversight, interest group starts to develop and then you got a Cambrian Explosion of motives. And as result of that, fragmentation of experience starts to happen (and maybe even corruption???).
Maybe a centralized management style is better for some of these services. At least so the users can directly talk to someone who's contractually responsible to serve them, instead of to another user from the public who is privileged but unpaid.
Those of you who anticipate continuing to use SO: why?
My last hit on SO was a search for “.gitignore wildcard”. What’s GTP-4 going to do with a two word prompt?
A wildcard in .gitignore file is a special character used to match multiple file names or patterns. The most commonly used wildcards are:
1. `*`: This wildcard matches any number of characters in a single path component. For example, `*.txt` would ignore all files with a .txt extension.
2. `?`: This wildcard matches any one character in a single path component. For example, `file?.txt` would ignore files like "file1.txt" and "file2.txt" but not "file12.txt".
3. `**`: This wildcard is used to match any number of characters across multiple path components. For example, `**/build/` would ignore all files and folders named "build" at any level in the project structure.
Examples:
- `*.log`: Will ignore all files with a .log extension
- `**/.DS_Store`: Will ignore all .DS_Store files in every folder
- `build/`: Will ignore the "build" folder on top level directory
- `/*/temp/`: Will ignore any "temp" folder at the second level of the directory structure (ignores sibling/temp, parent/child/temp but not sibling/child/temp)
For more information, you can refer to the official git documentation on gitignore: https://git-scm.com/docs/gitignoreI also have no idea what it’s trying to communicate with its /*/temp/ examples
I wonder how it does if you tell it it’s wrong. I’ve tried a few times and it seems to get confused pretty easily.
A perfect representation of my git usage then!
This is a great example where many people providing different answers and comments based on their different knowledge and experience provide value, opposed to just ChatGPT telling you stuff. Simply "correct" is nice, but "correct, complete, and with experience and context" is better.
I don’t really accept that SO is just answering questions for you. There are usually multiple answers. There were several comments on SO that went into more depth than the official docs. There are second opinions, and answers pointing out what the wrong answer is. There are links to related questions.
It wasn’t what I was looking looking for initially, but sometimes answers to questions you didn’t ask are better than ones you did.
It's time to update my search reflexes.
Ask it about something you know is a frequently repeated mistake.
Where do you think ChatGPT finds these answers?
As I see it, the mods want to continue on their ChatGPT removals and bans, the company is against that and wants a lighter approach.
And yet they find it so thrilling when they're measuring the grass on your front lawn with a ruler even though they live in the same neighborhood as you and know that it's rained every day for the past two fucking weeks without even 24 hours in between for it to dry up enough to push the damned mower through it.
But I know it's hard to drum up sympathy for mods (or HOA boards).
How is that "clearly"?
What evidence do you have that lets you assert that I was "clearly unsuitable"?
If anything, someone like yourself who makes up bullshit and believes it as if it were established fact is the sort they should be trying to avoid allowing to moderate. Which is why I'm guessing you're actually a mod.
These reasons should have been communicated to you. If not, then clearly something went wrong somewhere.
Ah yes, the "trust us, our secret proceedings against defendants are always highly-principled and just" argument.
How can I argue with that? You've won our debate so convincingly that I must stop and crawl away in shame.
These individuals are mostly doing things like stoping fights in comments, locking (not closing) posts that have debates on them, and investigating vote collusion so that people can't boost their rep from an alt (or coworker or spouse). On smaller sites (not everything is Stack Overflow) moderators are often involved in guiding new users as you can read all the posts from a day in a few minutes - for example Academia gets about 7 questions per day (Stack Overflow gets that many each minute). They also often run anti-spam tools.
Most actions that close questions (especially as duplicates), edit posts, ask questions in comments are from other community users (not moderators) who have rep from contributing to the site. Again, these are not moderators. Some members of the community have more of an interest to curate it to fit their ideal of what the site should look like (and that's a debate that goes back a long way).
It is the diamond moderatos who are going on strike. Some of the community are also further abstaining from doing things (answering questions, closing questions, doing reviews).
So the claim that it is the moderators that are going through and checking things and insisting that they are of the right form is misplaced. Moderators are rarely involved in dealing with the quality or content of a post unless that is brought to their attention by other users and there is a substantial problem with it (e.g. the person is posting with every variable name as a vulgarity and rolling back any attempts to edit it).
The number of moderators on Stack Overflow (and the rest of Stack Exchange) is significantly less than those on Reddit and the standards that they are held to are much higher, the tools that they are given are much more powerful, and the expectations of their conduct is also much higher than Reddit.
I have zero capability of causing them real trouble, and they therefor have zero interest in correcting anything.
Likely, few people have non-zero capability when it comes to causing them trouble.
> and the standards that they are held to are much higher,
I've seen no evidence of that.
If you see a diamond moderator violating anything described in that contact Stack Overflow (the company). There are serious repercussions for a moderator violating that.
Note that this only applies to moderators - those users who have a diamond following their name. Other users are not moderators (and this is one of the sources of frequent confusion - terming anyone who can vote to close a question as a moderator).
If a janitor were to come by my desk mid day and say. "That's not how you use a trash can. You must follow a prescribed format for putting things in the trash. I have decided that you are not allowed to use the trash can for 10 days. If I see that you have a co-worker, and they attempt to put trash in like you, I will also restrict their trash privileges for 10 days."
Then yes I would call the entitled.
No matter how drudgy a job is. If you squash people learning, because they can't live up to your standards, you're entitled.
You also can't show up to ballet lessons and start swing dancing.