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Comment by Turing_Machine | Hacker News Reader

Those rough moderators would close off discussions for the most trivial reasons, yet SO still allowed those discussions to be indexed by Google (despite rel="nofollow" having been a thing since 2005 or so). Presumably this was because SO still wanted the Google juice.

It was irritating as hell to have the top several Google links go to SO discussions that had been shut down by the moderators.

> I can't blame them

I'm sorry, this is like saying you can't blame cops for beating up the occasional suspect because they encounter a lot of genuinely bad people every day.

If you can't do the job in the presence of shitheads, you have no business being a cop. Or a forum moderator.

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> Those rough moderators would close off discussions for the most trivial reasons, yet SO still allowed those discussions to be indexed by Google (despite rel="nofollow" having been a thing since 2005 or so).

At least for "closed as duplicate" that is working as intended: "Closed" doesn't necessarily mean "you shouldn't have asked that question". In the ideal world, a post being closed as duplicate just allows people that phrase the duplicated question differently to also find it.

For police and moderators, having a false positive rate that equals 0 seems impossible.

There are lots of ways to respond to a positive indicator that could reflect a aelf-awareness of your own false positive rate. Being trigger happy probably isn't the correct response.

It isn't clear how SO moderates the moderators, do they have an IA team that investigates corruption?

Except the moderators are unpaid and they don't hurt much more than egos ?

Also Stack Overflow is not supposed to be a public service unlike police (is supposed to be), so the moderators are not accountable to you, only to the site guidelines (which you appeal to I guess)

Given the value it gives to society, it should be turned into a public service before some rich prick takes it over and turns into a cow to be milked or a self-aggrandizing venture.

> Except the moderators are unpaid and they don't hurt much more than egos ?

Read again. It has nothing to do with "ego". By allowing their "moderated" threads to continue polluting search engine search results, they are wasting my time. They are wasting the time of everyone else who has a similar question and makes the mistake of clicking through an SO link.

I would not be at all surprised if they got downranked because people at Google were tired of SO wasting their time.

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