Comment by pygy_
9 hours ago
I remember having to fight a mod for him to restore a reply penned by Mike Pall, to a LuaJIT question.
Mike Pall is the author of LuaJIT.
The reply had been either deleted or edited to the point of being wrong (memory is foggy), because Mike Pall wasn't an expert at SO, and had somehow not used the site exactly as intended. The mod was very dismissive and patronizing.
I was going through some answers on a stackoverflow thread, and noticed that every single one had been edited by the same guy, just.. adding his own personal opinions and 'corrections' to them, and in the process making them universally worse and less correct
The idea that answers should be editable, and the gamification of stackoverflow, was an absolutely terrible combination
Editing used to be fine, back then like 15-16y ago. Personally I posted mostly everything as community wiki (no reputation gain) as I got the mod-alike reputation anyways.
At some point the (say 2013-2014 or so) the site deteriorated quite massively, though - as folks considered stackoverflow CV worthy material...
I reverted nearly every single edit to my answers other than obvious typos. If I’d have meant something other than what I said, I’d have said it. You want to see your own words on the page? Write an answer of your own.
Lordy, that use to piss me off most fiercely. I don’t want someone else’s words attributed to me.
It is taken very seriously in Stack Overflow editing policy that edits are not supposed to go against the author's apparent intent. But it does involve removing a lot of things that you might want the answer to say, but don't meet the guidelines for what answers are supposed to contain.
When you join the site, you agree to Terms and Conditions that, among other things, grant a Creative Commons license to the community over your contributions, which gives them the right to make those edits.
The site is explicitly not trying to accommodate people who want to say things in a specific way because it's their way of saying it. The site is explicitly trying to accommodate people who want to collaborate to produce a polished, coherent work of reference. If that isn't you, unironically, that's what tech blogs are for.
People with the attitude you demonstrate here are consistently among the worst-behaved and hardest-to-deal-with participants on the meta site, because of a stubborn refusal to accept a core principle of the site.
(Yes, the reputation system was an unfathomably bad design choice in light of the site's goals. In retrospect I genuinely don't understand how it survived past 2011 or so with tweaks as minor as it got.)
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The gamification was a key reason the site became popular, but as the site grew, the rules and game mechanics did not evolve.
An edit that made a response worse should have knocked the mod down so that they were unable to mod any more. The quality of the edit should have been determined by the original author. "Did this edit make your question better?"
Moderators should have been ranked and scored based on their ability to help and welcome new users. It should have been very costly for them to make a new users feel unwelcome.
> An edit that made a response worse should have knocked the mod down so that they were unable to mod any more.
Literally everyone on the site is permitted to propose an edit, and everyone with at least 2000 reputation can make unilateral edits. The proposals are approved by a 2 out of 3 majority of random unilateral-edit-privileged users. None of this is considered "moderation" and is not done by "mods". Of millions of Stack Overflow accounts, only a few dozen have ever actually been moderators, and they do a tiny share of curation. Their main job is responding to flags.
> It should have been very costly for them to make a new users feel unwelcome.
The overwhelming majority of people who came to the site wanted the site to be something that it was fundamentally not trying to be, and often something it was fundamentally trying not to be. It was correct to make such users "feel unwelcome", because experience has shown that they typically cannot be reasoned with or explained to. The statistics make it clear that most of them never had any intention of trying to join a community (or, say, ask another question after the one that motivated account creation) in the first place.
Being able to edit answers isn't even a mod thing. In fact, for most of SO's life, it wasn't even a 'being logged in' thing (you could just edit an answer anonymously). How they wound up with a Q and A site where you could edit another user's answer far more easily than leaving a comment on it I still will never fully understand.
(this kind of thing IMO really added to the utterly arcane set of rules and conventions that makes it feel so inaccessible)
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