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Comment by gwd | Hacker News Reader

I seem to remember a talk I heard a very long time ago, maybe by Joel Splosky? He was saying that he'd observed the "population change" effect in USENET; where argumentative jerks tended to stay and helpful people tended to be driven away; and in his mind the "reply in-line" mechanic specifically contributed to this. So the first-order goal he had when he built Stack Overflow was to build a system with mechanics which encouraged helpful people tended to stay and argumentative jerks to be frustrated and go elsewhere.

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Reddit has this problem and it ultimately drove me (and I'm sure many others) away, it seems like you can't have a nuanced opinion, and god forbid if you have an opinion that goes against the grain of a sub.

FWIW, Wikipedia also has this problem. Just spend half an hour going through some page histories and browsing some user pages, you'll find feuds and infighting all over the place. People with a profile saying "I stopped contributing because user XYZ essentially bullied me", yadda yadda.

I stopped contributing like 15-ish years ago because it seemed pointless. Anything I might think to contribute by its very nature doesn't already have a presence on the site, and it seems like any and everything that does get added immediately gets some asshole throwing up a debate to try to get it deleted.

One of the things in particular I felt that there should be more of a presence of (because it was basically nonexistent at the time) and I had some good knowledge of, was for Flash animations and games that had literally tens of millions of views and were practically pop culture for some of them.

But because there wasn't a dead paper news article I could easily cite, that was enough for it to be 'not notable' and eligible for long and stupid debates on whether or not there should be an article about it on this virtual Wikipedia that doesn't have a size limitation.

So stupid. Lost interest pretty quickly after that (I had contributed a few dozen minor edits before I started trying to submit those pages).

Now, of course, many years later, there's a whole bunch of them included on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Flash_games But at the time the editors kept arguing to get them killed.

I also notice that a lot of the references that are included on these pages were ones that would be consider not-notable back then, because they are online web articles. Those weren't primary source enough for them at the time.

I feel like on has been so inundated with bots and shill accounts from PR firms, non profits, and state actors that nuanced opinions get shutdown via mass downvoting by bots they also artificially boost fake shill posts as well.

>So the first-order goal he had when he built Stack Overflow was to build a system with mechanics which encouraged helpful people tended to stay and argumentative jerks to be frustrated and go elsewhere.

Well, that failed spectacularly. The Stack Exchange sites are some of the most hostile, caustic places on the Internet, surpassed on that axis by only a small handful I'm aware of.

Didn't that backfire anyway?

Jerks found other ways to be jerks?

in SO cases they became moderators and/or worked their way into the company in paid positions of authority

Yes. The jerks found meta.stackoverflow.com and for a brief period started a campaign of what is off-topic in each very-specific forum in a effort to drive content to their very specific fiefdoms.

basically after sub-forums like bicycle, gardening etc which didn't fit at all under the programming forum, they opened up for randoms moderators. But the jerks started to abuse it to create a reddit-like web of overlapping forums. in 2018(?) you could not post anything without a question being closed with "offtopic! to ask about this specific setting on android phones with a blue or green protective case you must do so on xyz.stackoverflow.com. closed."

No. Stackoverflow is, after Wikipedia, the most sane place on the internet. We have our gripes of course, but there really is no contest here.

One of the fundamental problems with most things on the internet is that there’s unlimited output. A socially dysfunctional shut-in living on the internet is simply going to have a much larger output than someone with a healthy social life that only uses the internet in moderation. Someone who is judicious about their upvotes is going to have a much smaller impact than some who just reflexively upvotes or downvotes everything based on kneejerk reactions. This becomes even more prevalent when you add gatekeepers. Most people don’t have time to be volunteer editors or moderators. Or to park themselves in the new submissions section deciding what should make it to the front page and what should drop off.

So of course anti-social nutcases dominate these spaces. That’s how these spaces are structured.

Even assuming equal levels of internet usage, there is also the related problem that unpaid internet moderation naturally selects for narcissists. (And, really, it's the only way the system can work, since the only real currency of the internet is to make someone feel important within a community. It's the only reason sites like Wikipedia and SE can get thousands of hours of free labor from thousands of people.)

> Someone who is judicious about their upvotes is going to have a much smaller impact than some who just reflexively upvotes or downvotes everything based on kneejerk reactions.

It would be very easy for websites to weight upvotes so that one from someone who seldom uses them weighs more.

That probably incentivizes selling accounts to bot farms, usually in social media you give more weight to people who have stuck around longer rather than the accounts that have less activity and might be fake.

I think slashdot did something like that, but limited the amount of total votes you have per day. But that site's a little before my time. Would be nice if you could set the weights on voting yourself, along with other aspects of site moderation/ranking.

It worked for a long while, and things only got bad after a lot of changes from the original rules.

Changes were clearly necessary because SO became too large. So, I'm not sure there was an alternative besides staying small. (Maybe that's the answer.)

Well, sort of. The "jerks" thing is true in part, but I think the majority of that feel comes from a disconnect between what people want Stack Overflow to be. Many of the contributors (and the founder) want it to be Wikipedia, a place to enter search terms and find your specific problem and its solution, documented exactly once. But many novices get used to finding answers on Stack Overflow, and they quite reasonably see a bunch of questions and answers and decide it's a place to ask for help, which it a thing that looks similar on the surface but is quite different. And so you get a lot of well-meaning answers/moderators closing the majority of what comes in as repetitive noise, because from their perspective it is, and so the majority of people who ask (quite reasonable) questions, especially novice questions, have a terrible experience initially engaging. But yes, ALSO jerks are there.

Any discussion on any forum in the early to mid 1990s you would often see a comment "don't flame" (aggressively argue or insult). Argumentative people were not seen as normal by people on a BBS or forums of the time. Even casual swearing was not tolerated. Both of those behaviours are now very common and accepted or seen as normal or worse yet not even noticed as a problem.

This sounds interesting please could you share a link if you find it?

The "population change" effect mentioned above is called Eternal September. Wikipedia is a good source here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

I didn't quite find the quote mentioned by GP but for stack overflow itself, an explicit design goal is to minimize discussions and make the site focus on Q&A, since the kind of argumentative jerks mentioned by GP tend to be involved in long discussions. I quote from Jeff Atwood:

> At Stack Exchange, one of the tricky things we learned about Q&A is that if your goal is to have an excellent signal to noise ratio, you must suppress discussion. Stack Exchange only supports the absolute minimum amount of discussion necessary to produce great questions and great answers. That's why answers get constantly re-ordered by votes, that's why comments have limited formatting and length and only a few display, and so forth. Almost every design decision we made was informed by our desire to push discussion down, to inhibit it in every way we could. Spare us the long-winded diatribe, just answer the damn question already.

Memory is so weird... I feel like I saw it in person. But given that the site was started in 2008, and some other details I remember about the talk would indicate that I must have heard it at least a year after it launched, I can't figure out a venue where I would have seen it in person -- the most likely venue being a talk at uni, and I was long out of university at that point.

Why at least a year after? I also remember the speaker relating a conversation he had with someone from whom it seems like he was asking for money: maybe a VC? The VC told the speaker, "I sat on a plane next to somebody who told me he doesn't answer anything on stackoverflow any more because all the questions are answered too quickly." And the speaker responded, "So wait. You talked to a random person on a plane. This person had heard of my website. And his main complaint was that questions were answered too quickly?"

Wikipedia says SO did get VC funding in 2010, so that sort of matches; and quote from sibling comment is along the same lines. So I don't think I'm imagining things, but I also don't think I'm going to be able to give much more information. :-)

This is a great point: reducing friction is a design choice, and you have to do it in a way to leads to the greater good.

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