← Back to context

Comment by zahlman

1 day ago

> It's just not that important to me for a dead site. I get it, that means "just trust me bro" is in play.

See, this is the part where I'm actually getting insulted by the invocation of the "bro" language. No; what's happening here is that my lived experience as a curator of the site (which was quite stressful) is being denied, and it is supposed that evidence to counter me is not necessary.

This isn't about "winning"; this is about me wanting you to understand something that you apparently don't understand. Again, it's hurtful to have that motivation ascribed to me.

> SO was filled with this sort of "technically this is a duplicate and you are just a nasty rule breaker" style comments with litigation that ultimately goes nowhere.… Others experienced and are reporting here and elsewhere experiencing the harsh moderation of SO.

First off, I want to make this extremely clear: posting a question that gets closed is not, and was never, considered "breaking the rules". When people close a question, they are not moderating the site, but curating it; which is exactly why the overwhelming majority of such actions are taken by non-moderators. People are wrong and ignorant to call them mods, and it's hurtful that they don't take the time to understand this. I understand perfectly well that people felt that these actions were harsh, or even cruel. Many of them were not executed properly. But nobody ever takes the time to understand my perspective; they assume many false and hurtful things about me (and others) and refuse to be corrected on those assumptions. Worse, the site software, and the company, actively interfered with the intended curation of the site in many different ways over the years (changing according to whatever the company was currently trying in order to be profitable).

There is nothing "technical" about things being marked as duplicates. There is a clear standard for it which was reasoned out according to a very specific purpose: people who search the site should find the best possible version of the Q&A, so that they can directly get the answer to their question.

The only time that "litigation goes nowhere" is when people come to the meta site with the assumption that the rules do and ought to work the way they expected them to, and refuse to accept that they actually work differently. Stack Overflow was (and still is, to the extent that anyone remains) a community, and communities are supposed to have a right to self-determination. It's not the fault of the curators that the site presented a misleading interface, to the extent that that happened; they had no power to modify the interface beyond making more Q&A posts on the meta site.

5 comments

zahlman

Reply
cogman10  13 hours ago

> a community, and communities are supposed to have a right to self-determination.

Your comment can be boiled down to this. And yes, I completely agree with you that a site has the right to operate however it pleases.

But that does not mean a site has the right to be free from outside criticism. Exercising your self-determination in a way that is obviously noxious will get called out, which is the right of an outsider.

Your perspective, frankly, doesn't matter. It won't rehabilitate the reputation of SO. I'm sorry this hurts as you've obviously invested a lot of time there. This isn't a problem of "everyone just doesn't understand the site" or "everyone should understand me".

Sites die when the experience isn't something end users enjoy. That's what happened to SO. No amount of rule litigation and self determination changes the perspective of the users. SO was a Q&A site that bent towards shutting down the Q&A section of the site as much as possible because of "curation". No wonder most people asking and answering questions decided "You know what, what's the point?"

  • zahlman  7 hours ago

    > Exercising your self-determination in a way that is obviously noxious

    But we weren't, and it wasn't.

    People were overwhelmingly trying to be polite and factual about what needed to happen for a question to be reopened, the entire time I tried using the site. The yelling and cursing overwhelmingly came from people who imagined that they were entitled to do things that were explicitly against policy, simply because of UI affordances.

    We are not the ones who created those UI affordances. We had no control over any detail of the reputation system or the review queues. We had no way to show you the things you needed to read except to link them to you, and we were constantly confronted by people who interpreted any kind of hyperlink to policy in a discussion as inherently rude. We had no control over the onboarding flows that failed to show those things to you. The only access we had was to produce a mini-faq (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/251225) out of Q&A on the meta site (which really should not itself have used the Q&A format IMO, but that is also something that was completely out of our control).

    And for the cases where people got out of line, there was a flagging system all over the place and moderators who took complaints seriously; and there was also a meta site where people could come to have policy explained in more detail. But it was genuinely rare that people who actually knew better, actually got out of line.

    It was far more common for people to complain loudly that they were hard done by because someone downvoted their question (which genuinely merited it, per the purpose of downvotes on the site) and didn't leave a detailed comment explaining why (which is not an expectation ever imposed on Redditors or anyone else, and is an action protected by policy because i) there's hovertext on the down arrow summarizing the general reasons for using it; ii) people who leave those comments often get abusive replies). Or to complain that they were hard done by because their question was closed for being "too easy" (which is not why it was actually closed; an actual closure reason was explicitly labelled in the interface, but a more accurate summary of the typical close reason is "you've identified the symptoms of a problem in your code, but thus far you have not actually distilled this to a question; you just want someone else to make your code work again"). Or to complain that someone had the sheer audacity to pick through a problem description, isolate a single apparent cause, recognize that beginners encounter that issue constantly, and provide an immediate link for free to the existing "canonical" Q&A for it. (After all, why should they have to adapt code that was written against some other abstract example reconstruction of the problem, to their own code? Why should they have to figure out how that pattern applies to their hundred-line code dump, and where?)

    > Your perspective, frankly, doesn't matter. It won't rehabilitate the reputation of SO. I'm sorry this hurts as you've obviously invested a lot of time there.

    You don't understand. I am not trying to rehabilitate the reputation of SO.

    I am trying to rehabilitate the reputation of the Q&A site format.

    And I am trying to get people to stop slandering me and other people I made friends with and cared about. In particular, to stop ascribing false and hurtful motivations, and to have some empathy for what we put up with, and to consider the possibility that what we were trying to accomplish might actually be a worthwhile thing to accomplish that serious people might actually genuinely care about.

    When people talk about SO, overwhelmingly they talk about me and my friends. And they repeatedly incorrectly describe me and my friends as "moderators", which comes across as sheer apathy.

    Of course my perspective matters to how people are treating me on the Internet based on their perception of things that I did.

    > Sites die when the experience isn't something end users enjoy.

    I feel like I'm banging my head against a wall here. The site was constantly full of people who were fundamentally not apparently interested in the site's goals, not apparently interested in joining or understanding the existing community, not apparently interested in anything but the service they incorrectly believed the site was there to provide. And the constant implication of this discussion — because it always boils down to "the site died and people hated it and hate you and that's bad and reflects badly on you" — is that I'm somehow supposed to feel bad about the fact that they eventually figured out they were in the wrong place and left. (Or perhaps more accurately: LLMs finally provided they place they really wanted to be the whole time; before that, some made do with Reddit I guess.) After I went out of my way to keep my cool volunteering my time against an unending horde, knowing that attempts to "correct the record" off-site would be at best sneered at.

    No, I don't feel bad about that. Because feeling bad about that is logically equivalent to rejecting the right of self-determination that you just acknowledged.