Hacker News Reader

Comment by spaceheater | Hacker News Reader

Is this the consequence of having entitled moderators for years, only now instead of powering over random users they finally turned against their creators?

View on HN

I don't know why you say "entitled moderators". If you send any time with them, you'll quickly see the vast majority of the job is drudgery. You wouldn't say "entitled janitors" would you?

I might say "entitled HOA board members". Their job should be (in theory) pure drudgery.

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.

When Stack Overflow refers to "moderators" it is referring to the people who have a diamond after their name who were elected as part of a moderator election.

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).

SO mods can sometimes be just as petty and power-abusive as reddit mods, which is annoying to see, and of course there is little recourse.

The recourse for a power-abusive SO diamond mod is to contact Stack Overflow the company through the contact us form and explain your grievance.

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.

Their interest in correcting your grievance is directly proportional to your ability to cause them trouble if it remains uncorrected.

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.

The moderator agreement is viewable at https://stackoverflow.com/legal/moderator-agreement . There is nothing equivalent on Reddit.

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).

That's . . . not a bad analogy. Only instead of 100 homes (like the condo I lived in with an HOA) imagine thousands of people complaining about their neighbors each day. Sometimes it's the ticky tack lawn nonsense and sometimes it's a leaky water heater flooding the neighbor. (The second happened to my neighbor. Unfortunately, it was my water heater.) Until you understand the scale of what the SO moderators were doing, it's easy to call them "entitled".

But I know it's hard to drum up sympathy for mods (or HOA boards).

I feel everyone complaining about Stack Overflow should become a Stack Overflow moderator for a month. I am 100% convinced almost all of them will severely nuance their opinions after that, if not radically change them.

Admins routinely interfere in elections to make sure they get the "right kind of moderator". This has happened personally do me, on one of the other SEs.

Every single time I've seen this happen it's been for a good reason, but of course I can't comment on your specific case.

Then why bother with elections? Be transparent and just appoint them.

Because they were clearly unsuitable and this avoids drama. It's not a binary on/off thing.

Clearly how? My score was in the tens of thousands, I asked good questions Gave good answers. Strove to avoid downvoting/vtc-ing good questions/answers worded poorly. Tried to participate in the way that leads to the ideal outcomes.

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.

I can't judge your specific situation one way or the other from where I'm sitting right now as I have almost zero knowledge of it. All I can say is that I was a moderator for close to five years on a SE site and every time I've seen this happen or be discussed behind the scenes it was for good reasons. On our site we even had a moderator removed at one point, and this was for a good reason too.

These reasons should have been communicated to you. If not, then clearly something went wrong somewhere.

> or be discussed behind the scenes

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.

Well..

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.

Stack Overflow was never intended to solve every single programming question out there, or to help every single person trying to learn.

You also can't show up to ballet lessons and start swing dancing.

Well your question was apparently so uniquely bad that they recognized it and correctly identified the duplicate by your coworker. So maybe you're just salty because they were right.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com