Stack Overflow Moderator Election | Hacker News Reader

Stack Overflow Moderator Election

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33 pointsrob-alarcon48 comments

Anybody who promises to stop deleting and locking interesting questions on Stack Overflow gets my vote.

Wikipedia has the same problem.

IMO Wikipedia is far far worse.

At least SO is clear and honest and upfront about it, and they don't have megabytes of rules and guidelines and essays and etc to follow.

I do understand the frustration of having good interesting questions closed. (Especially if it's for dumb reasons.)

Wikipedia can feel very toxic. Even if you're avoiding the obvious hot-button topics.

Which policy do you have a problem with? I've been an active Wikipedia editor in the past and I think the problem has less to do with removing content, but rather maintaining existing content.

The recent deletion of lutusp / Paul Lutus's article [1] seems to be a reasonable reflection of the problem with Wikipedia, in my opinion.

[1] = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Lutus

Have you read the discussion thread? [1] He doesn't have enough notability to warrant a dedicated article, and a redirect to the Apple Writer article is sufficient. And Paul himself chimed in asking for the article to be either deleted (which it was), or "frozen against vandalism", which is only applied in extreme cases.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...

> He doesn't have enough notability to warrant a dedicated article

You say this as if it were just so. I don't happen to agree.

Well, what are some citable sources on Paul Lutus that don't principally pertain to his having authored Apple Writer?

Look at some older versions in the page history (see https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:EnTerr/Paul_...) before the page got whittled down before some deletion attempt, and you can find quite a few.

You're right. I concede the point. It looks like there's some recency bias in WP's decisionmaking process here.

Stack Overflow should realize that they're actually the perfect platform for asking open-ended why questions. Not having a definitive answer is what makes many of these questions so interesting.

Who would be harmed if those questions were left open (other than the anally-retentive)?

That is not our opinion ;-) We believe that the highly open ended, conversational questions generate heat, not light. They are AWESOME and we LOVE THEM, but NOT ON STACK OVERFLOW. Stack Overflow is a place where you go to get an answer to a programming problem, and what you find there should be just that -- the answer to a programming problem. It's not an online forum or a place to discuss open ended "why" questions. There are a million of those on the Internet already.

(Personally I'm a fan of a little site called Hacker News for this purpose... but I've never found the answer to a programming problem on Hacker News. And I've never found french fries at a Pizza store, and I don't fault Pizza stores for not selling french fries)

While I agree it's your call to make entirely but those "million of [sites] on the Internet" don't have the community like SO. I cannot expect Jon Skeet to answer my question on yahoo answers or experts exchange or any other site for that matter. Sometimes products have to change according to user's needs.

The community isn't a given. Some of the stack exchanges that allow more open ended questions are somewhat useless. I'm thinking of the stats one in particular[1]: you get a ton of questions where it is clear that the questioner will be unable to determine which answer (if any) is correct. Here's a random example I found after 3 seconds of looking:

http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/32007/which-statist...

Fairly open ended, possibly answerable, but the OP will have no fucking idea if an answer is good or bad. (Apologies if the OP reads Hacker News).

Now, the fact that the stats stack exchange also encourages students to ask questions about homework introduces the similar problems, so I can't be sure that the open-ended nature of these questions is the main cause of the site's suckiness, but I'm pretty sure it contributes. And I don't want to participate in that forum even though I waste a shit-ton of time online on places like HN and prefer stats to startups.

[1] http://stats.stackexchange.com

> There are a million of those on the Internet already.

Experts Exchange and Yahoo Answers come to mind. ;-)

IIUC, programmers.stackexchange.com is where "why?" questions should be asked. And IMO this sucks. I hate the SO fragmentation problem.

The community doesn't really agree with that. It's a little more subtle:

http://meta.programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/171/what...

programmers.stackexchange.com is even more deletionist that stackoverflow in my experience.

I absolutely support the somewhat firm hand that they employ to keep out open ended questions and discussions. I certainly believe this is needed to keep out all the garbage, and to keep places like SO from deteriorating into Usenet, or Slashdot.

If someone wants a discussion, or slightly off-topic questions there's other places to do that, and SO is not obligated to accommodate everyone.

It's worth noting that the deletionism is part and parcel of Joel Spolsky's community curation philosophy. He regularly gives speeches to that effect, so it's likely he and SO as a whole will weigh their influence towards maintaining it.

This. Here's a video of the speech in question: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpGA2fmAHvM

We generally believe that it's important to keep the quality on Stack Overflow high, so that when you click on a stackoverflow.com result on Google, you can trust that you're going to get something good. That means that Stack Overflow is not just a host where anyone can type things into the Internet, and we host it. It's a curated environment.

SO defines quality by rhetoric and writing style, not so much by content. Again, how can you define what is low quality if you are deleting baselines?

I literally clicked randomly on a subject I know about to read a question and its answers:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15305764/angularjs-clear-...

The question is wrong, the answer is bad. Didn't get 'curated'.

Now take this one, a very useful question, great answers. It was 'curated' and it's only there because of page views:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/194812/list-of-freely-ava...

SO should let us decide what is good or not, people don't like to be 'moderated'.

Here's what I think is happening. The moderators on SO have decided that there are certain classes of questions that are unacceptable and should be closed. I agree, so far.

Now, that question is of that class, so it has been closed. However, there are exceptions. Normal humans are good at making exceptions and should have made one here. A certain type of personality -- one that's over-represented in engineers -- likes to create systems that don't have exceptions. They like to create abstractions. And then you get this.

It's also why you have people who still organize their email, even though search obviates that problem.

FWIW, it's not the moderators who've made these decisions...

Like it or not, the types of questions you see allowed or discouraged on SO are in large part the result of years of discussion, debate, and collaborative moderation by a rather large portion of the userbase on SO. Even the handful of people able to take unilateral action to include or exclude questions are elected - hence the event that instigated this thread to begin with.

Ultimately, the folks with the most power over these decisions are the ones using the site. If you don't like what's being closed, cast your re-open votes and convince others to do likewise.

That particular question ended up being closed and reopened multiple times, and discussed heavily on meta. Ultimately, it reached the point where it was simply unmaintainable, in spite of the hard work of many people involved. So it was locked to preserve it.

If you visit some of the more well-maintained tag wikis, you'll notice they contain sections for freely-available books amid links to other useful learning resources. This tends to keep them smaller, easier to maintain, and much more likely to be maintained by folks who know something about the topic. Example:

http://stackoverflow.com/tags/php/info

I have come to accept that your definition of quality and mine do not agree.

This is not to say that most of what is closed shouldn't be closed. But your existing policies consistently drive away conversation that I'd like to be involved with, and contributers like me.

As a concrete example, I'm quite sure that my most upvoted answer on SO is on a question that would be instantly closed and deleted under current guidelines if it came to the attention of the SO policy lawyers who volunteer to "moderate". See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/93526/what-is-a-y-combina... to verify.

I doubt that one would be closed. It has a definite answer (or could at least be re-asked in such a way as to limit discussion).

Incidentally, the answer just after yours is mine (lwburk), so don't draw too much attention to closing the question! What I'm more upset about is that the accepted answer is nothing more than a link (and has a lot more votes than your much better answer). That is definitely a historical accident. If these answers were each given today, yours would be voted much higher and his would be closed.

Looking at http://stackoverflow.com/faq I see the requirement that, You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face. There is no way that the question fits that criteria.

I've had personal interaction with moderators over that exact issue. I personally enjoyed answering algorithm questions. However it came to my attention that any time moderators notice that type of question, they close them for exactly that reason. (No matter what the wishes of people who ask and answer that type of question might be.)

As for the historical accident - I agree. I'm amazed that an answer given years after the question was asked got as much attention as it did.

Maybe you're right.

Regarding the historical accident: I was the one who suggested that you post that answer there after I saw you post it here [0]. I posted my answer a little while after that. I'm pretty sure all of our upvotes came from Hacker News.

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2769132

A lot of the people with moderator powers on SO got them by contributing highly-upvoted content over time on the site. Anyone with enough karma can close or re-open a question.

Just tell Google not to index these questions. Don't censor whole ranges of questions for an arbitrary and mostly wrong definition of quality.

This is kind of an embarrassing failure mode to have, since old-style forums figured out the solution years ago: don't delete anything, but move things to an "offtopic" section where it's less likely to be seen. That way you get the nicely curated (unmoved) content, avoid offending anyone, and allow discussions to continue rather than cut them short.

Right, the main problem here is that -- in many ways like the recording industry before them -- these guys are trying to apply all sorts of real-world analogies and metaphors to virtual problems.

I get it. They were actually right about the broken-window theory. The demand for quality has had an enormously positive impact overall and they should get a lot of credit for that. But they routinely close questions that simply do not need to be closed.

I do agree that our community sometimes misapplies the rules. We study this regularly and are continuously working on tweaking and improving the moderation system to reduce the incidence of good questions which are closed. But trust me when I say that 98% of the questions that are closed are not anything you would ever want to land on as the result of a Google search. Look here and tell me what you think:

http://stackoverflow.com/search?tab=newest&q=closed%3a1

There's no doubt this is true (and I think I said as much). I agree that the dial should be there. We're just arguing about how far to turn it.

Exactly; way too often in arguments like this (such as with Wikipedia) people point at the places where something worked while totally ignoring the costs of false positives, as if the people who want "different" or "slightly less" moderation are somehow calling for "no" moderation... it's a total strawman.

I guess that's why old-style forums are so successful and Stack Overflow doesn't work, right? :)

Sorry, that was unnecessarily snarky. People on the Internet tend to believe that if there is a TEXTAREA tag on the internet, they have a right to type things into that TEXTAREA and have them hosted on the Internet by somebody else until the end of time. This eventually leads to youtube, reddit, etc... very amazing things but nevertheless not necessarily good places to solve programming problems quickly.

I agree, but these guys have had a lot of practice inventing silly metaphors [0] to defend their stance. It's a pretty big part of the culture.

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4273374

Unfortunately people like you and me don't have a voice on SE. I tried a couple times to defend this opinion on meta, but you get downvoted very quickly and people will recite the gospel of SE without even listening to your arguments.

Pretty much, but really, there's not much point hoping for that as long as the people who actually own the site don't want it that way.

What's needed is for somebody to set up an equivalent site with better moderation policy. I'd love to take a shot at that, but I'm up to my eyes already, I just don't have time. Probably the same is true of most people here, but if you ever run into anyone who is looking for a project, please point them to that idea.

A moderator that saves me from having to type long queries on google has my vote. I currently have to type: termtosearch site:stackoverflow.com "closed as not".

I'll be looking for moderators who won't close "Why?" questions on the basis that knowing "why" doesn't solve an existing problem.

Why does an upvote/downvote community need moderators? Isn't the whole point of letting users upvote and downvote content to avoid having moderator overlords?

Should be closed as not a real question and too localized.

A popularity contest to choose moderators? I wouldn't run my forums that way. We would end up with the wrong people in charge.

It's not just a popularity contest. Each of the candidates had a dedicated comment discussion during the nomination phase. These comments were frequently focused on how the nominee already participated in the community moderation process.

On the other hand, sometimes is really is a popularity contest. My number one pick is someone from the tag community I hang out with the most. I already trust his judgement.

I'd vote for moderators who punish people for answering:-

X. It took me Y seconds to google your problem and find that solution.

It'd save me downvoting every time I see that kind of ridiculous passive aggressive bullshit.

Feel free to propose edits to such answers with constructive criticism. In practice, there aren't many of these on SO.

You say that as if you know that for a fact, I've seen them over + over again (anecdote, but still), as well as many other such passive-aggressive responses. I often do take action on them, however the prevalence makes me think that not enough is done about the standard developer issue of people not knowing how to behave civilly to one another.

Frustrating to be so downvoted for raising something that is so rotten by the way, presumably it's ok to talk down to somebody simply because you feel they haven't put in enough effort in asking a question?

Or perhaps it was the language? That stems from being frustrated with the nasty culture that seems to be seeping in to so many corners of our development communities.

Flag those - and then select the "not an answer" option from the menu.

"Google it" answers tend to be deleted pretty quickly by the mods.

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