Hacker News Reader

Comment by georgieporgie | Hacker News Reader

I got tired of the thankless task of doing other peoples' work, along with the overzealous mods shutting down my questions in the most condescending tone possible.

In particular, I recall going so far as to read vendor-specific documentation for someone, and providing example code to parse the binary data in question. It was probably an hour of my work and I didn't even get a 'thank you', much less any reputation bump.

Talk about devaluing yourself and your industry...

(incidentally, I don't know exactly how much rep I have, since the myopenid login I was using just stopped working one day. No idea why, and there doesn't seem to be a mechanism for fixing it. Edit: I managed to log in again. It appears that if you log in to MyOpenID.com for account management, any subsequent attempt to log in to SO will attempt to use that account's credentials rather than the intended user account credentials, and the error results are absolutely useless)

View on HN

> overzealous mods shutting down my questions in the most condescending tone possible.

SO moderator here. We just click a link. The pre-defined close reasons are inserted automatically. No one is taking a tone with you.

We just click a link

Comments.

No one is taking a tone with you.

Oh, the irony.

Comments. What about them? The close message is auto-inserted so we don't have to take the time to comment.

Irony, no. My tone here is a response to being called overzealous and condescending. It has nothing to do with my attitude when I'm acting as moderator on SO.

I don't understand why you seem to be attempting to speak for all moderators. I don't know or care what your attitude is about moderation, I'm speaking of my own personal experience with SO moderators.

Provide some links, please.

I'm not linking my online identities.

And you don't have to. And you do not have to answer to that SO mod's request here for several people here agree with you and know you're not making this up.

There's no need for anyone to provide links. A lot of people are complaining about this. And as soon as anyone tries to post in meta about this issue (the issue of mods over-zealously closing questions), these posts in meta get downvoted to no avail and there's a flamefest of "high horse" posts... By mods! Constantly defending themselves, just like you do here. It's always the same "link or it didn't happen" and then the exact same "oh but I wasn't using a 'tone' here". Yes you were. And you know it. And several people here agree...

"Link or it didn't happen" is a perfectly valid response to empty complaints that provide no evidence. As a moderator I'm in a position to actually do something about real problems. If you just whine and complain without giving me a link I can't do anything about it.

No, I wasn't taking a tone. If I was I wouldn't say that I wasn't. If you perceived a tone, it's on your end. I'd thank you to not call me a liar.

That word: I don't think it means what you think it means.

Sorry, no grammar cop points for you. That was a correct usage of the word "irony."

Not sure the point was to be grammar cop. I, at least, took it as a line from The Princess Bride (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093779/quotes?qt=qt0482717)

No, it wasn't. Either he was implying the SO mod was being inappropriate (wrong), or he used the word incorrectly.

>>> in the most condescending tone possible.

>> No one is taking a tone with you.

> Oh, the irony.

Condescendingly telling someone "nobody is taking a tone with you." That's the irony you're missing.

The comments moderators post are pretty condescending. They turned me off from SO. Not to mention the condescending nature of your comment here.

After calling us overzealous and condescending do you expect a hug?

The fact that you use automation to produce your responses doesn't make you any less responsible for them.

I'm not shirking responsibility for putting the responses there. I'm saying that they aren't condescending. The messages are to inform people why their question was closed and to help them improve it.

If the messages are written in a tone that people generally find condescending, then they are condescending. The intent may be positive but doesn't change the impact of the writing style.

As a matter of interest, do these template responses make it clear that they are indeed templates and not hand written?

They're not inserted as comments, but as a block of text that's offset from the rest of the post, so I think it's pretty clear that they're auto-inserted. You can search the site for "closed:1" to find questions with different messages that get inserted.

http://stackoverflow.com/search?q=closed%3A1

Fair enough - it does look obvious to me that those are automatic 'rubber stamps'.

They don't read as particularly condescending to me, but I imagine that if one was used in error or with questionable judgement it might well come off that way.

Is there any mechanism for quality control on how they are used?

There is some control over how they're used. In most cases it takes 5 users with at least 3000 reputation to vote to close a question. The close reason that the majority selected is the one that gets displayed. Moderators (and employees of Stack Exchange) can close questions with a single vote if they're flagged, but we generally try to encourage people to use close votes if they have that ability.

Also, any closed question can be reopened by community vote whether it was closed by a moderator or by voting.

It doesn't seem condescending to me, I think the people being moderated are just taking it too personally and can't believe that they unwittingly committed a faux pas.

I'm not even a moderator, but if you as a bad question I vote to close it. That's how the site works. Even if you feel you put a lot of work into something doesn't mean it's a valid question to the site. Read the FAQ.

>> along with the overzealous mods shutting down my questions in the most condescending tone possible.

> Read the FAQ.

Your response seems to be a a perfect demonstration of what he's complaining about.

Help me understand what's condescending about being a normal user to the site (ie, I don't work for Stack Exchange, nor am I a moderator) and telling him to read the FAQ.

Help me understand this.

Ok, I'm going to assume that you actually want me to explain, and not that this is just an argument tactic you're using to try to score debate points. I hope I'm correct.

The OP's complaint was presented in a reasonable tone of voice, was articulate and carefully worded. Now, it may be that he has misunderstood something about Stack Overflow, or that he's looking for something the site doesn't provide. But, the OP does not come off as an idiot or a troll.

Your response to "read the FAQ" treats him as if he were a fool (the exact word you used in another reply). It was also so hastily typed, that you misspelled "ask" as "as" and you obviously cared so little about your writing, that you didn't notice this and go back to redit your comment and fix it.

So to sum up: somebody posts a carefully worded, slightly angry but non-offensive complaint, and you rapidly dash off a short, typo-ridden response telling him to read the FAQ.

In other replies to the same user, you put words in his mouth and beat him up like a straw man. You come off as an angry, petulant, mean-spirited and unreasonable person.

In other words, condescending.

First off, realize that I don't actually care about the FAQ or site rules at all. I care about getting value out of a site. That's true of everyone.

Second, I asked a question, and I believe it was a good one. However, it was closed for being "too conversational," whatever that means. Instead of merely answering my question, the mods instead chose to make condescending comments, which eventually lead to an answer in the comments, so why not just answer the question in the first place?

SO mods think their job is to eliminate 'bad' questions. But that's not their job. Their job is to foster a community and a valuable site. Look at all the 'bad' questions which have made it onto HN and Reddit that have been closed by an overzealous mod, then re-opened due to mass appeal. Overzealous SO mods are a known problem, so much so that they've alluded to it repeatedly on the SO podcast.

> First off, realize that I don't actually care about the FAQ

Has it ever occurred to you that you're a fool? You complain about the site and have no regard for the rules or what the site is. It's not your spam-filled phpBB site that you dump the same 'plzzz halllpp I can't get $_[get] when I make a post!!11' nonsense onto every day.

> it was closed for being "too conversational," whatever that means

I'm calling you out on this.

Link to your question. You're totally full of it, there is no "too conversational" option. There does happen to be a "too localized" question, which is something we pick when users think the site is a place to dump thousands of lines of code and ask a question nobody else will ever have (ie, lazy slobs who don't read the FAQ and know what the site's about).

In short, you're full of it.

Your aggressive tone is unhelpful.

There was / is a "closed as not constructive" - as well as getting the moderator's comment for closing the questioner could have had other comments from users pointing out that conversational questions are not welcome on SO.

Has it ever occurred to you that you're a fool?

Wow.

You complain about the site and have no regard for the rules or what the site is.

You have completely failed to understand what I wrote. SO mods, instead of working to form community and value, have become trigger-happy bureaucrats. The entire method by which mods operate is, in many cases, opposed to the stated goals of SO.

Link to your question.

I have zero intention of linking my online identities, and I don't care in the least whether or not you believe me.

He's not full of it at all. He's describing a very real SO issue (one of many) and, as usual, the SO-fanbois/shills are getting on their high-horse explaining that SO is perfect, that there is nothing to see, that mods cannot possibly be overzealous, etc. And all this using a "tone", as usual...

SO has decided what they think will make a good useful community. They might be wrong, but the way to tackle that is to create a different community.

Part of SO's strategy is to rigorously prune bad questions. A bad question has a specific meaning in SO. It's defined by the FAQ. Bad questions encourage more bad questions and dilute people available to work on good questions.

Becoming familiar with site guidelines is an established part of Netiquette, and has been for very many years.

(http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1855)

> Read both mailing lists and newsgroups for one to two months before you post anything. This helps you to get an understanding of the culture of the group.

tl;dr: their servers, their rules.

I actually don’t use Stack Overflow as a contributor for precisely the same reason: I created my account with an OpenID, the provider is no longer around, and now I can’t log in nor fix it.

You can create a new account and ask for the accounts to be merged.

Since I am in this exact situation (lost OpenID provider), can you explain how does this work? Any link to documentation?

http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/18232/how-can-one-li...

This poll is missing an option: I don't use SO because it required OpenID to register.

I guess it supports other options now, but back in the day, that's why I never participated.

Hey, same here :) (although I did register a few months back when seeing that they finally had alternative options).

However, my reputation is at 1, several reasons to that :

- I use it mostly for "consuming". Which by the way, is problematic, because I can't upvote useful answers because my reputation is only at 1 (is there a way around that ?)

- I can't really spend time at work to answer questions, and, frankly, have other stuff to do at home (such as doing home projects). Besides, I guess there is always someone answering faster than you :p

Reply on news.ycombinator.com