Comment by anticodon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anticodon | Hacker News Reader

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I think moderation culture changed for a reason. About 8-10 years ago quality of answers started to decline because HR started to source SO for candidates. This created incentive for posting thousands of answers moments after the question is posted that were simply not right. More often than not those wrong answers were upvoted anyway. And HR won't check the quality of answers, they are concerned only with your total score.

Once I was researching something and found wrong answer on SO from some junior dev from India. The answer was wrong and it was evident that the author of the answer didn't even fully read the question. Out of curiosity I checked the author's profile and found out that it was a deliberate strategy: e.g. when there's a question about working with files, he'd post an answer with a link to the language page on "open".

I politely asked the author in the comments to stop posting wrong or useless answers. Instead, he wrote very aggressive response, opened my profile and downvoted as many of my answers as he could.

And there were many similar cases, probably still are.

Everything went downhill once people had real incentive (like actual money, not just internet cred) to game the system for reputation points. The mods had to come up with ever-evolving layers of rules on top of rules that lowered the answer quality and put up huge barriers for an average user to contribute.

“It was a good measurement, until it became a target”

Incentives really make or break this type of website. Often on the internet I find myself thinking "Thank God this [website specific metric] isn't worth anything so people have no reason to game it".

I think "Internet Karma" systems are inherently flawed. I know one technical website with karma, where one type of users eventually gained majority of the karma capital, downvoted all opposition into such deep negative karma, that they can't write anything anymore, and now there's strictly one point of view in all the articles and comments.

Which is aligned with the site owners' point of view, so they have no incentive to change anything. Though everyone notices that quality of articles and comments started to decline once the users with karma majority censored all others out.

I think hackernews' system is still working. Though that might just be because it is small enough.

HN implements some significant limitations to the model that make it work. Things like not being able to downvote replies, can't edit / delete your replies after certain criteria are met, limited upvoting until a certain amount of contribution, etc.

These are constraints that limit the types of people that are interested in remaining here. But HN is by no means "small".

Twitter has recently added monetary incentives to create “engagement”.

I assume that there will be a decline in quality. It will become an interesting case study.

But it's pay to play over there.

So in short, gambling.

And the house always wins.

The "opened up and downvoted" rings so true.

I've a rather high account. So I can revert mod decisions and sometimes do. E.g. reopen a marked-duplicate that isn't duplicate on closer inspection.

I don't do it often (can't be bothered too much) but when I do, I sometimes almost feel the hate radiation over the web. Indeed, people on a rage-tantrum going through all my answers and questions and downvoting those. Lol.

I also have a similar account and you inspired me to vote to reopen maybe twenty questions in a row. All of them were perfectly good questions closed for stupid reasons.

ah, the primordial incompatibility of cultures.

Let's not forget that in india it is not considered wrong to "game" the system, even it is considered unethical by western standards. It is not a coincidence all of these tech support scammers are based in india.

this brings forth an interesting topic, how do we reconcile cultural differences in online platforms ? Nobody can deny they exist, and they create clashes like the aforementioned one.

My mind went to the same place.

Do people not remember the "Hacktoberfest" fiasco? People were encouraged to make a PR on public repos in exchange for a free t-shirt, and _obviously_ this led to repos being overrun with spam PRs changing a single line comment.

https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/01/digitalocean_hacktobe...

There were dozens of videos like this one,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xjmCsdgUhE

with loads of people replying and thanking the author, excited for their t-shirt, not really knowing they're _creating unnecessary work_ for actual engineers with limited time.

Incentivized systems like this can work okay in small, self-selected communities, but as soon as it's open up to the entire world, the implied courtesy of said system vanishes, and immediately we're pandering to the lowest common denominator.

This thread digs in a bit. https://twitter.com/Kautukkundan/status/1311717814768594944/

I don't think you do. Your platform should have an explicit and expected code of conduct set up in advance, and people should be held to it. If they cannot, they aren't allowed to use the platform.

When it becomes apparent that there are cultural norms that make it difficult or impossible for people from those cultures to use your platform, you re-examine your code of conduct, of course, to make sure you're not unduly excluding people. If you are, you amend the code, you change the platform in ways necessary to support them, and everyone tends to end up better off as a result.

But some cultural norms will be antithetical to the point of the platform, like in this case: SO cannot function properly when people attempt to game the system. In those cases, the CoC remains, and people from that culture will either have to adapt to the platform or find (or make) a similar one that works for them.

The alternative, as we see here, is that your platform degrades until it's not useful to _anyone,_ this "problem culture" included.

Agree with the first part of your comment.

gaming the system is prevalent but not considered ethical in india. HRs won’t allow such candidates for example. So there is no question of amending CoC to make room.

There is a difference between something being prevalent and something being culturally accepted. The solution lies in naming and shaming. Making it clear that such people aren’t wanted on these platforms.

But i don’t think anyone should chalk this up to “cultural norms” That’s just being unfair to those of us who are just as fed up with this mindset.

I mean, neither do I, but I'm giving the poster above me the benefit of the doubt, and also kinda recognizing that -- even though I can't think of a concrete example right now -- there's almost certainly a situation where there IS a cultural norm that is otherwise acceptable, but antithetical to a particular platform, so the question is still valid, IMO.

This incentive was always there, from day one. It was a classic thing to put the most basic answer as possible in as quickly as possible just to get it out the door and then refine it later, because whoever posts the answer first would have theirs shown first presuming no upvotes.

This is exactly the reason I gave up on SO. It was so disappointing to see the "frist!" answer get votes, even when it was factually incorrect. By the time it took me to think and write a half decent phrase the original answer had been edited dozens of times. The site was also eager to interrupt me every time to tell me that an existing answer had been edited. They did everything possible to allow the system to be gamed and, well... they succeeded.

That matches my experience. I stopped using it in 2015 after trying to solve something with a new framework I was using and finding that all of the answers on SO were just wrong.

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