llm/7c7e49f1-870c-4915-9398-3b2e1f116c0c/topic-11-daf0ae00-cef1-49ce-a741-c00ea92a1672-input.json
You are a comment summarizer. Given a topic and a list of comments tagged with that topic, write a single paragraph summarizing the key points and perspectives expressed in the comments. TOPIC: Moderator power dynamics COMMENTS: 1. > I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems, though it certainly didn't help. SO has had poor moderation from the beginning. I was an early SO user and I don’t agree with this. The moderation was always there, but from my perspective it wasn’t until the site really pushed into branching out and expanding Stack Exchange across many topics to become a Quora style competitor that the moderation started taking on a life of its own. Stack Overflow moderator drama felt constant in the later 2010s with endless weird drama spilling across Twitter, Reddit, and the moderator’s personal blogs. That’s about the same time period where it felt like the moderation team was more interested in finding reasons to exercise their moderation power than in maintaining an interesting website. Since about 2020 every time I click a Stack Overflow link I estimate there’s a 50/50 chance that the question I clicked on would be marked as off topic or closed or something before anyone could answer it. Between the moderator drama and the constant bait-and-switch feeling of clicking on SO links that didn’t go anywhere the site just felt more exhausting than helpful. 2. > the core assumption remained that there was a never-ending spring of new people feeding the thing. Hi Shog, hope you're doing well! Just thought this bit was insightful; I can fully believe this was the idea and the motivating factor for a lot of the decisions made seemingly in a vacuum (from the outside). How much do you think Area51 and the push for the SE network rather than sticking with the Big Three affected things? I always got the impression that they tried to scale into places that ultimately attracted too much noise and overestimated the willingness of (community) moderators to effectively work for free for them to take on the wave of less technical/principled users. 3. Friend in my group was in the public beta back in '08. We all ended up signing up by the end of '09. I used it off-and-on over the years (have some questions and replies with hundreds of upvotes). Though SO had a rap for having what might seem like harsh replies or moderation, it was often imho just blunt/curt, to the point, and often objectively defensible. I also agree with your timeframe that, in the later 2010s, the site became infected with drama, and moderation suddenly started reaching its tendrils into non-technical areas, when it should not have. And on an ostensibly technical site, no less! I found myself contributing less and less (same with Wikipedia), because I merely wanted to continue honing my craft through learning and contributing technical data with others who shared this same passion... I did not want to have politics shoved in my face, or have every post of mine have to be filtered through an increasingly extreme ideology which had nothing to do with the technical nature of the site. When I had my SO suspended with no warning or recourse for writing "master" in a reply, I knew it was time to leave for good. Most of the admins on the site transformed from technical (yet sometimes brash!) geeks, into political flag-waving and ideology-pushing avatars (including pushing their sexual agendas front and center), and not of the FSF/FLOSS kind, either. These types of dramas have infected nearly everything online, especially since 2020. Even Linus has lost his mind with pushing politics into what should be purely technical areas https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41936049 LLMs were a final blow for many reasons, though I think that a huge part of it is that LLMs won't chide you and suspend/ban you for wanting to stick to strictly technical matters. I don't have to pledge allegiance to a particular ideology and pass a purity test before asking technical questions to an LLM. 4. I know the feeling of being happy not being the only one with that same problem (and that somebody bothered to actually ask on SO) and the crushing feeling that the question was closed as off topic (so no reason for me to ask) or marked as duplicate (referencing that is clearly not a duplicate and just showing that the mod took no effort to understand the question) 5. The moderation definitely got kind of nasty in the last 5 years or so. To the point where you would feel unwelcome for asking a question you had already researched, and felt was perfectly sound to ask. However, that didn't stop millions of people from asking questions every day , it just felt kinda shitty to those of us who spent more time answering, when we actually needed to ask one on a topic we were lacking in. (Speaking as someone who never moderated). My feeling was always that the super mods were people who had too much time on their hands... and the site would've been better without them (speaking in the past tense, now). But I don't think that's what killed it. LLMs scraping all its content and recycling it into bite-sized Gemini or GPT answers - that's what killed it. 6. Right? It's a perfect example of the problem. In college, I worked tech support. My approach was to treat users as people. To see all questions as legitimate, and any knowledge differential on my part as a) the whole point of tech support, and b) an opportunity to help. But there were some people who used any differential in knowledge or power as an opportunity to feel superior. And often, to act that way. To think of users as a problem and an interruption, even though they were the only reason we were getting paid. I've been refusing to contribute to SO for so long that I can't even remember the details. But I still recall the feeling I got from their dismissive jackassery. Having their content ripped off by LLMs is the final blow, but they have richly earned their fate. 7. When I worked technical support in college I often worked nights and weekends (long uninterrupted times to work on homework or play games) ... there was a person who would call and ask non-computer questions. They were potentially legitimate questions - "what cheese should I use for macaroni and cheese?" Sometimes they just wanted to talk. Not every text area that you can type a question in is appropriate for asking questions. Not every phone number you can call is the right one for asking random questions. Not every site is set up for being able to cater to particular problems or even particular formats for problems that are otherwise appropriate and legitimate. ... I mean... we don't see coding questions here on HN because this site is not one that is designed for it despite many of the people reading and commenting here being quite capable of answering such questions. Stack Overflow was set up with philosophy of website design that was attempting to not fall into the same pitfalls as those described in A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23723205 Arguably, it succeeded at not having those same problems. It had different ones. It was remarkably successful while the tooling that it had was able to scale for its user base. When that tooling was unable to scale, the alternative methods of moderation (e.g. rudeness) became the way to not have to answer the 25th question of "how do I make a pyramid with asterisks?" in September and to try to keep the questions that were good and interesting and fit the format for the site visible for others to answer. It wasn't good that rudeness was the moderation tool of last resort and represents a failing of the application and the company's ability to scale those tools to help handle the increased number of people asking questions - help onboard them and help the people who are trying to answer the questions that they want to answer to be able to find them. The failing of the company to do this resulted in the number of people willing to answer and the number of people willing to try to keep the questions that were a good fit for the site visible. Yes, it is important for the person answering a question to treat the person asking the question with respect. It is also critical for the newcomer to the site to treat the existing community there with respect. That respect broke down on both sides. I would also stress that treating Stack Overflow as a help desk that is able to answer any question that someone has... that's not what it was designed for. It acts as a help desk really poorly. It was designed to be a library of questions and answers that was searchable. The questions were the seeds of content, and it was the answers - the good answers - that were the ones that were to stay and be curated. That was one ideal that described in https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/ 8. > It wasn't good that rudeness was the moderation tool of last resort and represents a failing of the application and the company's ability to scale those tools to help handle the increased number of people asking questions - help onboard them and help the people who are trying to answer the questions that they want to answer to be able to find them. This is a very charitable read of the situation. Much more likely is, as another commenter posted, a set of people experiencing a small amount of power for the first time immediately used it for status and took their "first opportunity to be the bully". > It was designed to be a library of questions and answers that was searchable. It obviously was only tolerated because of that, as evidenced by the exodus the moment a viable alternative became available. 9. I blame the Internet culture of the late 90s early 2000s. Referring to your customers as Lusers and dismissing their "dumb" questions was all the rage amongst a group of nerds who had their first opportunity to be the bully. 10. I think this "first opportunity to be the bully" thing is spot on. Everybody learns from being bullied. Some of us learn not to do it when we have power; others just learn how. 11. Quite frankly you are wrong. Jeff and Joel spoke about their goals for very harsh moderation in their podcast while they were still building SO. The moderation from the very beginning was a direct result of the culture they created and it was completely intentional. 12. > outdated answers that are locking out more modern and correct answers. There are so many things for which there is no permanently right answer over time.... I’ve also constantly wished that bad answers would get hidden or cleaned out, and that accepted answers that weren’t very good would get more actively changed to better ones that showed up, it’s pretty common to see newer+better answers than the accepted one. Okay, but who's going to arbitrate that ? It's not like anyone was going to delete answers with hundreds of upvotes because someone thought it was wrong or outdated. And there are literally about a million questions per moderator, and moderators are not expected to be subject matter experts on anything in particular. Re-asking the question doesn't actually help, either, except sometimes when the question is bad. (It takes serious community effort to make projects like https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45621722 work.) The Trending sort was added to try to ameliorate this, though. 13. > Moderation should have been aimed squarely at making the site friendly, and community should be moderating the content entirely, for exactly the reasons you point out - mods aren’t the experts on the content. The community was the ones moderating the content in its entirety (with a very small fraction of that moderation being done by the mods - the ones with a diamond after their name... after all, they're part of the community too). Community moderation of content was crowdsourced. However, the failing was that not enough of the community was doing that moderation. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/432658/2024-a-year-... Note the "Questions closed" and "Questions reopened". Compare this to https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/340815/2016-a-year-... The tools that diamond (elected) moderators had was the "make the site friendly" by removing comments and banning users. The "some of the answers should have been deleted" ran counter to the mod (diamond mod this time https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/268369 has some examples of this policy being described) policy that all content - every attempt at answering a question - is valid and should remain. 14. You are positing that only questions with cosmetic or extraneous differences are marked as duplicates. That's not the case. As a maintainer of a popular project who has engaged with thousands of Qs on SO related to that project, I've seen many Qs marked as duplicate where the actual answer would be different in a non-trivial manner. When I look at who all moderated on those Qs, they are usually users who haven't contributed to that topic at SO. 15. > That's not the case. Yes, it is. I have been active on both the main and meta sites for many years. I have seen so many of these complaints and they overwhelmingly boil down to that. And I have gotten so unbelievably stressed out on so many occasions trying to explain to people why their trivial objections are missing the point of the site completely. > I've seen many Qs marked as duplicate where the actual answer would be different in a non-trivial manner. Please feel free to cite specific examples. I'll be happy to explain policy. > When I look at who all moderated on those Qs, they are usually users who haven't contributed to that topic at SO. That is generally irrelevant. 16. As a former Wikipedia administrator, I think one of the things that Wikipedia has done exactly right is to strongly prioritize readers first, editors second, and administrators third. The unofficial Wikipedia administrator symbol is a mop, because it's much more a position of responsibility than it is a position of power. I obviously think you and other user-hostile people should be permitted to congregate and accomplish something. What I object to in Stack Overflow's case is the site being taken over by people like that, serving themselves and their own preferences with such vigor that they alienated vast numbers of potential contributors, putting the site on a path of decline from which is unlikely to recover. Even by your own terms, having a place for some (conveniently unspecified) group to "congregate in public and try to accomplish something" looks certain to be a failure. However much you don't care about deadness or declining revenue, the people paying the bills surely do. Stack Overflow was only a success because it served and adapted to users. But I give you points for being honest about your hostility to the entire point of the site. It not only makes it clear why it's failing, but it'll keep people from being sorry when it gets closed down. 17. > that's not the point of SO or any of the SE sites. It's not there so you don't have to do some more work to get to an answer. My brain is spitting out a parse error on this sentence. Too many double negatives. Zahlman was claiming above that the "duplicate" question linked earlier in the thread wasn't a useful question. Its not useful because if you read the accepted answer in the original thread, you can figure it out easily. Prove it then. Figure it out easily for us. I think the point of SO is for people to look up the answers to questions they have. If people have similar but distinct questions with different answers, it seems objectively better to surface both SO threads. Ideally they'd be linked together so if I accidentally stumble on the wrong question, there's a link to the question I'm actually interested in. > "I found this answer on [SO](link) Why bother with all of that? I mean, it sounds like all those extra words are all to grovel sufficiently to the SO moderator-gods, hoping in their capricious anger they won't mark your question as a duplicate and wipe it from the internet. Grovelling doesn't help the question asker or the question answerer. As a user, my problem with SO isn't that people ask bad questions. Its usually that the question I actually have - if its been asked - has long ago been deleted as a duplicate. And the only question remaining on the site is subtly different from the problem I'm actually facing. Or the answer is tragically out of date. Perhaps if people asked better questions, the moderators would be happier. But the site shouldn't be run purely for the benefit of its moderators. It became a meme. "How do I do X in javascript?" "Here's how you do it using jQuery." "But I'm not using jquery." "Question closed!" 18. ^ this whole chain-of-interaction is a wonderful reminder of why I left SO: It was like seeing a movie trailer about a remake of some nearly forgotten B- horror film one was unfortunately allowed to watch when far too young. Spoiler warning for those who havent seen this movie before: Callous disregard for the utility and purpose of both the 'Q' and 'A' users; thinly veiled in a 'you don't get to tell me what i care about', wrapped in a 'my concept of how to moderate is just the way it is; if you don't like it, go F* yourself' package, trimmed with a ribbon of 'who do these Lusers that pay the bills think they are' directed at both the site owners (who write the checks to pay the bills) and all three relevant types of visitors, Q's, A's and those who neither ask, nor answer questions, but do see Advertisements and indirectly generate the income which the site owners use to write checks. But who cares?!, since Mods are not being paid (or paid well enough) to adjust a maladjusted concept of 'the way things are' into 'giving a shit' for anyone. Closed with some more vitriol declaring the site still exists and continues to be useful (as nipples on a chicken). WASH, RINSE, REPEAT... That was so last decade; I just stopped giving a damn, removed my browser bookmarks and learned to skim past less frequent and less relevant links to useless and meaningless SO pages when they appear in search results. The funniest outcome is that LLMs will continue to ingest the diminishingly accurate content of sites like this and continue to degrade the utility of even the most broadly defensible LLM use case scenario. phew, haven't thought that deeply about SO in at least 4 ... wait its 2026, make that 5 years. Good riddance to the the Whole Lot of you. 19. Exactly... I'm getting a laugh out of this thread because it's so easy to spot the power-trippers who are enraged at how their fiefdom is rapidly going extinct. 20. > The problem is moderation marking unrelated questions as duplicates. This problem isn't directly solvable (what counts as a "duplicate" is inherently subjective, and therefore mistakes/differences of opinion are inevitable). I think a deeper problem is that once a question becomes closed (for any reason), it's unlikely that it'll ever be reopened. The factors behind this are social (askers interpret close votes as signals that they should give up), cultural (there's not much training/feedback/guidelines about what "duplicate" means for those with voting privileges), and technical (there's no first-class feature for askers to contest closure, and it takes just as many votes to reopen a question as it does to close it (with the same voter reputation requirement)). 21. I actively hated interacting with the power users on SO, and I feel nothing about an LLM, so it's a definite improvement in QoL for me. 22. You're right - those comments are unacceptable. Honestly, it's out of character for that person. I've deleted them but will preserve them here: > "Why not?" questions are vague and hard to answer satisfactorily. The unsatisfactory answer is: did you personally do the work to add this feature to the language? The language is open-source, you want the feature, so why have you not done it yet? Seriously, why not? You've asked a why not question, and you should be able to answer it yourself. Now ask every other person in the world why they did not add the feature either, and then you will know why the feature was not added. Features do not appear magically and then need a reason to remove them! > Moreover, you say that the feature is simple and fits well, so it should be straightforward and simple for you do to the work, right? Send the team a PR! 23. > When a question gets closed before an answer comes in, the OP has nine days to fix it before it gets deleted automatically by the system. One of the bigger problems with the site's moderation systems was that 1) this system was incredibly opaque and unintuitive to new users, 2) the reopen queue was almost useless, leading to a very small percentage of closed questions ever getting reopened, and 3) even if a question did get reopened, it would be buried thousands of posts down the front page and answerers would likely never see it. There were many plans and proposals to overhaul this system -- better "on hold" UI that would walk users through the process of revising their question, and a revamp of the review queues aimed at making them effective at pushing content towards reopening. These efforts got as far as the "triage" queue, which did little to help new users without the several other review queues that were planned to be downstream of it but scrapped as SE abruptly stopped working on improvements to the site. Management should have been aggressively chasing metrics like "percentage of closed questions that get reopened" and "number of new users whose first question is well-received and answered". But it wasn't a priority for them, and the outcome is unsurprising. 24. Yes. The "on hold" change got reversed because new users apparently just found it confusing. Other attempts to communicate have not worked because the company and the community are separate entities (and the company has more recently shown itself to be downright hostile to the community). We cannot communicate this system better because even moderators do not have access to update the documentation . The best we can really do is write posts on the meta site and hope people find them, and operate the "customer service desk" there where people get the bad news. But a lot of the time people really just don't read anyway. Especially when they get question-banned; they are sent messages that include links explaining the situation, and they ask on the meta site about things that are clearly explained in those links. (And they sometimes come up with strange theories about it that are directly contradicted by the information given to them. E.g. just the other day we had https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/437859 .) 25. >> Question can be marked as duplicate without an answer. > No, they literally cannot. You missed that people repeatedly closed question as duplicate when it was not a duplicate. So it had answer, just to a different mildly related question. LLM are having problems but they gaslight me in say 3% of cases, not 60% of cases like SO mods. 26. The meta post describing the policy of banning AI-generated answers from the site ( https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831 ) is the most popular of all time. Company interference with moderator attempts to enforce that policy lead to a moderator strike. The community is vehemently against the company's current repeated attempts to sneak AI into the system, which have repeatedly produced embarrassing results (see for example https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425081 and https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425162 ; https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/427807 ; https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425766 etc.). What you propose is a complete non-starter. 27. Your first example is a public announcement of an llm assisted ask question form. A detailed request for feedback on an experiment isn't "sneaking" and the replies are a tire fire of stupidity. One of your top complaints about users in this thread is they ask the wrong sort of questions so AI review seems like it should be useful. The top voted answer asks why SO is even trying to improve anything when there's a moderator strike on. What is this, the 1930s? It's a voluntary role, if you don't like it just don't do it. The second top voted answer says "I was able to do a prompt injection and make it write me sql with an injection bug". So? It also complains that the llm might fix people's bad English, meaning they ask the wrong question, lol. It seems clear these people started from a belief that ai is always bad, and worked backwards to invent reasons why this specific feature is bad. It's crazy that you are defending this group all over this HN thread, telling people that toxicity isn't a problem. I've not seen such a bitchy passive aggressive thread in years. Those replies are embarrassing for the SO community, not AI. 28. > I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems Just to add another personal data point: i started posting in on StackOverflow well before llms were a thing and moderation instantly turned ne off and i immediately stopped posting. Moderators used to edit my posts and reword what i wrote, which is unacceptable. My posts were absolutely peaceful and not inflammatory. Moderation was an incredible problem for stack overflow. 29. As an early user of SO [1], I feel reasonably qualified to discuss this issue. Note that I barely posted after 2011 or so so I can't really speak to the current state. But what I can say is that even back in 2010 it was obvious to me that moderation was a problem, specifically a cultural problem. I'm really talking about the rise of the administrative/bureaucratic class that, if left unchecked, can become absolute poison. I'm constantly reminded of the Leonard Nimoy voiced line from Civ4: "the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy". That sums it up exactly. There is a certain type of person who doesn't become a creator of content but rather a moderator of content. These are people who end up as Reddit mods, for example. Rules and standards are good up to a point but some people forget that those rules and standards serve a purpose and should never become a goal unto themselves. So if the moderators run wild, they'll start creating work for themselves and having debates about what's a repeated question, how questions and answers should be structured, etc. This manifested as the war of "closed, non-constructive" on SO. Some really good questions were killed this way because the moderators decided on their own that a question had to have a provable answer to avoid flame wars. And this goes back to the rules and standards being a tool not a goal. My stance was (and is) that shouldn't we solve flame wars when they happen rather than going around and "solving" imaginary problems? I lost that battle. You can argue taht questions like "should I use Javascript or Typescript?" don't belong on SO (as the moderators did). My position was that even though there's no definite answer, somebody can give you a list of strengths and weaknesses and things to consider. Even something that does have a definite answer like "how do I efficiently code a factorial function?" has multiple but different defensible answers. Even in one language you can have multiple implementations that might, say, be compile-time or runtime. Another commenter here talked about finding the nearest point on an ellipse and came up with a method they're proud of where there are other methods that would also do the job. Anyway, I'd occasionally login and see a constant churn on my answers from moderators doing pointless busywork as this month they'd decided something needed to be capitalized or not capitalized. A perfect example of this kind of thing is Bryan Henderson's war on "comprised of" on Wikipedia [2]. Anyway, I think the core issue of SO was that there was a lot of low-hanging fruit and I got a lot of accepted answers on questions that could never be asked today. You'll also read many anecdotes about people having a negative experience asking questions on SO in later years where their question was immediately closed as, say, a duplicate when the question wasn't a duplicate. The moderator just didn't understand the difference. That sort of thing. But any mature site ultimately ends with an impossible barrier to entry as newcomers don't know all the cultural rules that have been put in place and they tend to have a negative experience as they get yelled at for not knowing that Rule 11.6.2.7 forbids the kind of question they asked. [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/users/18393/cletus [2]: https://www.npr.org/2015/03/12/392568604/dont-you-dare-use-c... 30. The problem is the people who decide which questions are stupid are misaligned with the site's audience. 31. Sadly, an accountable individual representing an organization is different from a community of semi-anonymous users with a bunch of bureaucracy that can't or doesn't care about every semis anonymous user 32. > I've "paid back" by leaving a high quality response on unanswered SO questions that I've had to figure out myself I was used to doing that, but then the moderation got in the way. So I stopped. 33. The more experienced I got, the subtler my questions/answers. The few times I asked a question, I would start by saying "it may look similar to this, this and that questions, but it is not", only to see my question get closed as duplicate by moderators. If the moderators are not competent to understand if your question is a duplicate or not, and close it as duplicate when in doubt, then it contributes to the toxic atmosphere, maybe? 34. My feeling is that many times the moderators are not competent to decide correctly. They could go with "when in doubt, keep the duplicate", but they chose the opposite. Meaning that instead of happy users and duplicates, they have no duplicates, and no more users. 35. Same here. I just didn't want to expend energy racing trigger happy mods. It was so odd, to this day remember vividly how they cleanup their arguments once proven wrong on the closing vote. Literally minutes before it would the close threshold. 36. Fun story: SO officially states comments are ephemeral and can be deleted whenever, so I deleted some of my comments. I was then banned. After my ban expired I asked on the meta site if it was okay to delete comments. I was banned again for asking that. 37. The dumbest part of SO is how the accepted answer would often be bad, and sometimes someone had posted a better answer after the fact, and if the all-powerful moderators had the power to update it, they sure never did. Likewise, there were often better insights in comments. Apparently if you have the right mod powers, you can just edit an answer (such as the accepted one) to make it correct, but that always struck me as a bizarre feature, to put words in other people’s mouths. I think overall SO took the gamification, and the “internet points” idea, way too far. As a professional, I don’t care about Reddit Karma or the SO score or my HN karma. I just wanted answers that are correct, and a place to discuss anything that’s actually interesting. I did value SO once as part of the tedious process of attempting to get some technical problem solved, as it was the best option we had, but I definitely haven’t been there since 2023. RIP. 38. > took gamification way too far I disagree, I always thought it SO did a great job with it. The only part I would have done differently would be to cap the earnable points per answer. @rndusr124 shouldn't have moderation powers just because his one and only 2009 answer got 3589 upvotes. 39. It doesn't have anything to do with LLMs. It has to do with shifting one's focus from doing good things to making money. Joel did that, and SO failed because of it. Joel promised the answering community he wouldn't sell SO out from under them, but then he did. And so the toxicity at the top trickled down into the community. Those with integrity left the community and only toxic, selfcentered people remained to destroy what was left in effort to salvage what little there was left for themselves. Mods didn't dupe questions to help the community. They did it to keep their own answers at the top on the rankings. 40. You seem to have filled this thread with a huge number of posts that try to justify SO's actions. Over and over, these justifications are along the lines of "this is our mission", "read our policy", "understand us". Often, doing what your users want leads to success. Stamping authority over your users, and giving out a constant air of "we know better than all of you", drives them away. And when it's continually emphasized publicly (rather than just inside a marketing department) that the "mission" and the "policy" are infinitely more important than what your users are asking for, that's a pretty quick route to failure. When you're completely embedded in a culture, you don't have the ability to see it through the eyes of the majority on the outside. I would suggest that some of your replies here - trying to deny the toxicity and condescension - are clearly showing this. 41. > Often, doing what your users want leads to success. You misunderstand. People with accounts on Stack Overflow are not "our users". Stack Exchange, Inc. does not pay the moderators, nor high-rep community members (who do the bulk of the work, since it is simply far too much for a handful of moderators) a dime to do any of this. Building that resource was never going to keep the lights on with good will and free user accounts (hence "Stack Overflow for Teams" and of course all the ads). Even the company is against us, because the new owners paid a lot of money for this. That doesn't change what we want to accomplish, or why. > When you're completely embedded in a culture, you don't have the ability to see it through the eyes of the majority on the outside. I am not "embedded in" the culture. I simply understand it and have put a lot of time into its project. I hear the complaints constantly. I just don't care . Because you are trying to say that I shouldn't help make the thing I want to see made. > trying to deny the toxicity and condescension I consider the term "toxicity" more or less meaningless in general, and especially in this context. As for "condescension", who are you to tell me what I should seek to accomplish? 42. dang and the other HN moderators do a heroic job to set the tone, which has second- and third-order effects on behavior. 43. I think it has more to do with the fact that when you offer zero salary for moderators, you have to take what you can get, and it ain't good. I don't really see a connection to the voting mechanic. 44. Why do you think it makes a difference if they are paid or not? Or more to the point: what are you saying? That people have different standards when paid? That lack of remuneration justifies poor effort? Isn’t that a very transactional view of human interaction? Are we that transactional? Do we want this? We’re talking about how communities can become toxic. How we humans sometimes create an environment that is at odds with our intentions. Or at least what we outwardly claim to be our intentions. I think it is a bit sad when people feel they have to be compensated to not let a community deteriorate. 45. > That people have different standards when paid? That lack of remuneration justifies poor effort? Isn’t that a very transactional view of human interaction? Are we that transactional? The answer to all of these questions is yes, for the most part. Volunteers are much harder to wrangle than employees and it's much easier for drama and disagreements to flare when there are zero consequences other than losing an unpaid position, particularly if anonymity is in the mix. Volunteers can be great but on average they're going to be far harder to manage and far more fickle than employees. 46. Then you have a much darker view of humanity than I have. What you seem to suggest is that because building a community on volunteers is hard it is not worth doing. What makes a community worthwhile is its ability to resolve differences productively. I think that if you replace individual responsibility with transactionality you have neither community nor long term viability or scalability. Then again, we live in times when transactional thinking seems to dominate discourse. 47. It's because I was involved with a large volunteer-based project that was a literal 24/7/365 operation for several years (dozens of volunteers at any given time and tens of thousands of concurrent users) and can speak first hand as to the differences. I didn't say it's not worth doing but it will bring challenges that wouldn't exist with employees. Paying people adds a strong motivator to keep toxic behaviour at bay. Your experiences will heavily depend on the type of project you're running but regardless, you can't hold volunteers, especially online, to the same expectations or standards as employees. The amount of time and effort they can invest will wax and wane and there's nothing you can do about it. Anonymity and lack of repercussions will eventually lead to drama or power struggles when a volunteer steps out of line in a way that they wouldn't in paid employment. There is no fix that'll stop occasional turbulence, it's just the way it is. Not all of your volunteers will be there for the greater good of your community. Again, that is absolutely not to say that it can't be worth the effort but if you go into it eyes open, you'll have a much better time and be able to do a better job at heading off problems. I've seen other people express similar opinions to yours and it wasn't until they experienced being in the driver's seat that they understood how difficult it is. 48. Yeah, but they don't inherit their rules and attitude. Really, if we could apply some RLHF to the Stack Overflow community, it would be doing a lot better. 49. The problem with duplicate questions is that they weren't duplicates at all, and mods weren't competent enough to tell a difference. 50. Show me one that was closed by a moderator. Just one. And I will tell you exactly what happened. 51. I think the poster you're responding to is correct. I've seen it many times myself. And just so you know, asking for a piece of data and not getting it is not going to be proof that you're right. 52. No, but it will show, as someone else already responded, that they don't understand SO systems and processes at all. The question they linked [0] was closed by the asker themselves. It's literally one of the comments [1] on the question. Most questions aren't even closed by moderators, not even by user voting, but by the askers themselves [2], which can be seen on the table as community user. The community user gets attributed of all automated actions and whenever the user agrees with closure of their own question [3]. (The same user also gets attributed of bunch of other stuff [4] This shows that critics of Stack Overflow don't understand how Stack Overflow works and start assigning things that SO users see normal and expected to some kind of malice or cabal. Now, if you learned how it works, and how long it has been working this way, you will see that cases of abuses are not only rare, they usually get resolved once they are known. [0]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32711321/setting-element... [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32711321/setting-element... [2]: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/432658/2024-a-year-... [3]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/250922/can-we-clari... [4]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/19739/213575 53. The linked answer seems like a valid guess for a relevant dupe. Like I said in my comment, "I understand a few eggs got cracked along the way to making this omelette" but I really don't think this was as widespread of a problem as people are making it out to be. They also have Meta Stack Overflow to appeal if you think your question was unfairly marked as a dupe. From what I read, it seems that most mods back off readily 54. > From what I read, it seems that most mods back off readily If a reasonable, policy-aware argument is presented, yes. In my experience, though, the large majority of requests are based in irrelevant differences, and OP often comes across and fundamentally opposed to the idea of marking duplicates at all. 55. > The community is reviewing whether to reopen this question as of 36 mins ago. Asking where in the documentation is something is always tricky, specially because it usually means "I didn't read the documentation clearly". Also... You went and deleted the question immediately after it was closed only to undelete it 2 hours ago (as the moment of writing)[0]. After it was closed, you had an opportunity to edit the question to have it looked at again but choose instead to delete it so that nobody will go hunting for that (once deleted, we presume that it was for a good reason). So, yeah, obviously you will be able to show that as example because you didn't give anyone the opportunity to look at it again . [0]: https://stackoverflow.com/posts/79530539/timeline 56. SO is not obnoxious because the users are wrong! 57. I believe the community has seen the benefit of forums like SO and we won’t let the idea go stale. I also believe the current state of SO is not sustainable with the old guard flagging any question and response you post there. The idea can/should/might be re-invented in an LLM context and we’re one good interface away from getting there. That’s at least my hope. 58. If only those who voted to close would bother to check whether the dup/close issue was ACTUALLY a duplicate. If only there were (substantial) penalties for incorrectly dup/closing. The vast majority of dup/closes seem to not actually be dup/closes. I really wish they would get rid of that feature. Would also prevent code rot (references to ancient versions of the software or compiler you're interested in that are no longer relevant, or solutions that have much easier fixes in modern versions of the software). Not missing StackOverflow in the least. It did not age well. (And the whole copyright thing was just toxically stupid). 59. I think they should have had some mechanism that encouraged people to help everybody, including POSITIVELY posting links to previously answered questions, and then only making meaningfully unique ones publicly discoverable (even in the site search by default), afterwards. Instead, they provided an incentive structure and collection of rationales that cultivated a culture of hall monitors with martyr complexes far more interested in punitively enforcing the rules than being a positive educational resource. 60. > many of which incorrectly marked as duplicate. Please feel free to cite examples. I'll be happy to explain why I think they're duplicates, assuming I do (in my experience, well over 90% of the time I see this complaint, it's quite clear to me that the question is in fact a duplicate). But more importantly, use the meta site if you think something has been done poorly. It's there for a reason. 61. If I had kept a list of such questions I would have posted it (which would be a very long one). But no, I don't have that list. > use the meta site if you think something has been done poorly. Respectfully, no. It is meaningless. If you just look at comments in this thread (and 20 other previous HN posts on this topic) you should know how dysfunctional stackoverflow management and moderation is. This (question being incorrectly closed) is a common complaint, and the situation has not changed for a very long time. Nobody should waste their time and expect anything to be different. 62. > Not sure why you are always posting the same regurgitated answer to the legitimate concerns here. I have more reach here than blogging about it, unfortunately. But, ironically, it also helps illustrate the point about duplicate questions. > If the “goal” doesnt work, you have to change and fix the “goal” and not force people to “understand” it. No, that's literally the opposite of how communities work. There is no "force"; there are only conditions on having your contributions welcomed. Having your question closed on Stack Overflow is no more "force" than having your PR rejected on GitHub. You aren't the one who gets to decide whether the goal is "working", because the site is not there to provide you a service of asking questions, any more than Wikipedia is there to provide you a service of sharing opinions on real-world phenomena. There's no reason that the Stack Overflow community should give, or ever have given, a damn about "the site being in a death spiral". Because that is an assessment based on popularity. Popular != good; more importantly, valuing popularity is about valuing the ability of the site to make money for its owners, but none of the people curating it see a dime of that. They (myself included) are really only intrinsically motivated to create the thing. The thing is demonstrably useful. Just not in the mode of interaction that people wanted from it. The meta site constantly gets people conspiracy theorizing about this. Often they end up asserting things about the reputation system that are the exact opposite of how it actually works. For example, you can gain a maximum of 1000 reputation, ever, from editing posts, and it only applies to people whose edits require approval. The unilateral edits are being done by someone who sees zero incentive beyond the edited text appearing for others. They're done because of a sincere belief that a world where third parties see the edited text is better than a world where third parties see the original text. > Frankly you are posting here in the same way the usual SO mod acts. You're talking about people who, in almost every case, as an objective matter of fact, are not moderators. The overwhelming majority of "moderation actions" of every stripe are done by the community, except for the few that actually require a moderator ( https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/432658 ). 63. So here's an example of SO toxicity. I asked on Meta: "Am I allowed to delete my comments?" question body: "The guidelines say comments are ephemeral and can be deleted at any time, but I was banned for a month for deleting my comments. Is deleting comments allowed?" For asking this question (after the month ban expired) I was banned from Meta for a year. Would you like to explain how that's not toxic? Maybe if you haven't used the site since 2020 you vastly underestimated the degree to which it enshittified since then? 64. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills, reading some of these comments. It looks like a pretty clear divide between the people that wanted to ask questions to get solutions for their own specific problems; and those who were aware of what the site wanted to be and how it actually operated, and were willing to put in the time and answer questions, etc. The sheer amount of garbage that used to get posted every day required some pretty heavy moderation. Most of it was not by actual moderators, it was by high-reputation users. (I have 25K reputation on StackOverflow, and was most active between 2011 and 2018.) 65. Garbage was never moderated on StackOverflow, it was always ignored. Moderation was used by the insiders to keep new people out. 66. > You get points for suggesting edits ... Up to 2000 points. When you get to 2000 points, your edits are no longer suggestions and you don't get any additional points for it. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/268479/why-dont-you... --- This is a common misperception about moderation on Stack Overflow. You'll often see people claim that people get rep for doing moderation tasks. And some people do pursue badges... though the gold review badge (1000 reviews) has only been awarded 47 times on Stack Overflow ( https://meta.stackoverflow.com/help/badges/81/steward ) ... and silver (250 reviews) 65 times ( https://meta.stackoverflow.com/help/badges/78/reviewer ). ... so I would find it difficult to accept that badges are things that motivate people. If anything, a story of new people doing community moderation could be told in https://meta.stackoverflow.com/help/badges/80/custodian (it has been several months since a person has done a review for the first time). 67. Fellow OG! And it's been happening on HN since the mid-2010s, too. Moderation went out of control everywhere, but at least this site isn't branded as some strictly technical site. Can't believe I'm even saying this, but moderation on a site that encompasses a cornucopia of topics is their prerogative. The mind-boggling thing to me about SO was that the moderation used non-technical criteria (such as failing to recognize why certain problems were asked and were not dupes, and later to shoehorn in political and sexual ideologies) to shape a technical site. 68. HN has full time staff that provides moderation and does an excellent job. Nonetheless there are numerous users who take it upon themselves to determine what content should be available to the rest of us, as if they were heroes in their own mind. It’s a form of narcissism. While they think of themselves as community saviors everyone else thinks they are censoring assholes. Just let the moderators do their job. Unwanted content will naturally fall off either by downvoting or it will be ignored. All the rest of ask for is just don’t be an asshole. 69. i've been using SO for 17 years as well but ultimately gave up out of frustration, and a lot of comments here are correctly pointing at the toxicity but the real-time chats were on a next level, it was absolutely maddening how toxic and aggressive these moderators were. 70. "comments are not for extended discussion" is one of the biggest own goals of SO product development. Like, they had a feature that people were engaging with actively, and the discussions were adding value and additional context to posts, and they decided "yeah, let's kill this". The people who run SO have some sort of control-freak complex. If there's anything I've learned from the SO saga, it is that oftentimes just letting a community do what it wants (within reasonable boundaries, of course) leads to a better and more successful product than actively trying to steer things in a certain direction. 71. A lesson can be learned here. If you don't introduce some form of accountability for everyone that influences the product, it eventually falls apart. The problem, as we all know now, is that the moderators screwed things up, and there were no guardrails in place to stop them from killing the site. A small number of very unqualified moderators vandalized the place and nobody with common sense stepped in to put an end to it. 72. Monica has the last laugh it seems 73. LLMs absolutely body-slammed SO, but anyone who was an active contributor knows the company was screwing over existing moderators for years before this. Writing was on the walls 74. I think the biggest issue, what lead to the toxicity, came down to the question/answer format not suiting the problem it was trying to solve — The answer could only be as good as the original question, and the platform gave little leeway to "get to the bottom" of the problem. Getting to a high-quality question/response required a back-and-forth that the platform made difficult by burying the discovery/definition work in comments and edits instead of a clear discussion mechanism. All of this meant the learning-curve on how to participate was high, and this spurred gate-keeping and over-zealous moderation. High-quality but out-of-date information was preferred over lower-quality but more recent updates. When combined with the rapid shifts brought on with mobile development and web frameworks, the answers could easily get out-of-date months after being answered. I remember a time when StackOverflow dominated every search query. Now we're seeing searches take you to a dedicated forum/discussion board, which feels more appropriate for the current state of the industry. 75. I think the disallowing of “controversial” technical questions might have helped as much as the AI boom. So frustrating to be reading a deeply interesting technically and intense debate to be closed down by an admin. 76. StackOverflow didn't feel like a welcoming and humane place the last 10+ years, at least for me. Actually I think it never did. It started when I was new there and couldn't write answers, just write comments and then got blasted for writing answer-like comments as comments. What was I supposed to do? I engaged less and less and finally asked them to remove my account. And then it seems like the power-users/moderators just took over and made it even more hostile. I hope Wikipedia doesn't end up like this despite some similarities. 77. Moderator team must be over the moon 78. Obviously LLMs ate StackOverflow, but perhaps developers could keep it alive for much longer if they wanted to . LLMs provide answers, but only humans provide human contact. And that last part is where SO failed by allowing a few people power trip over the rest of us. Kind of like reddit does at times, but harder. I'm not sad. 79. Incompetent moderation and the air of hostility towards contributing users. 80. Good times. Although, I have to say, I was getting sick of SO before the LLM age. Modding felt a bit tyrannical, with a fourth of all my questions getting closed as off topic, and a lot of aggressive comments all around the site (do your homework, show proof, etc.) Back when I was an active member (10k reputation), we had to rush to give answers to people, instead of angrily down voting questions and making snark comments. 81. People are mentioning the politicization of moderation. But also don’t forget when Joel broke the rules to use the site to push his personal political agenda. 82. I'd still use SO at times if it weren't for how terribly it was managed and moderated. It offers features that LLMs can't, and I actually enjoyed answering questions enough to do it quite often at one time. These days I don't even think about it. 83. Signs of over-moderation and increasing toxicity on Stack Overflow became particularly evident around 2016, as reflected by the visible plateau in activity. Many legitimate questions were closed as duplicates or marked off-topic despite being neither. Numerous high-quality answers were heavily edited to sound more "neutral", often diluting their practical value and original intent. Some high-profile users (with reputation scores > 10,000) were reportedly incentivized by commercial employers to systematically target and downvote or flag answers that favored competing products. As a result, answers from genuine users that recommended commercial solutions based on personal experience were frequently removed altogether. Additionally, the platform suffers from a lack of centralized authentication: each Stack Exchange subdomain still operates with its own isolated login system, which creates unnecessary friction and discourages broader user participation. 84. I fairly recently tried to ask a question on SO because the LLMs did not work for that domain. I’m no beginner to SO, having some 13k points from many questions and answers. I made, in my opinion, a good question, referenced my previous attempts, clearly stating my problem and what I tried to do. Almost immediately after posting I got downvoted, no comments, a close- suggestions etc. A similar thing happened the last two times I tried this too. I’m not sure what is going on over there now, but whatever that site was many years ago, it isn’t any more. It’s s shame, because it was such a great thing, but now I am disincentivized to use it because I lose points each time I tip my toes back in. 85. And still last month one of my questions on SO got closed because it was - "too broad". I mean it was 2025 and how many very precise software engineering questions are there that any flagship models couldn't answer in seconds? Although I had moderate popularity on SO I'm not gonna miss it; that community had always been too harsh for newcomers. They had the tiniest power, and couldn't handle that well. 86. They're desperately trying to save it e.g. by introducing "discussions" which are just questions that would normally have been closed. The first one I saw, the first reply was "this should have been a question instead of a discussion". Let's never forget that Stackoverflow was killed by its mods. Sure, it needed AI as an alternative so people could actually leave, but the thing that actually pushed them away was the mods. 87. Flag it as off topic 88. >This post was not virtue signaling enough and therefore closed as duplicate. SO had the greatest minds but the shitiest moderation 89. Stackoverflow bureaucracy and rule mongering are insane. I recommend participation just to behold the natives in their biom. Its like a small european union laser focused on making asking snd answering a question the largest pain point of a site that is mainly about asking and answering questions. Write a concise, engaging paragraph (3-5 sentences) that captures the main ideas, notable perspectives, and overall sentiment of these comments regarding the topic. Focus on the most interesting and representative viewpoints. Do not use bullet points or lists - write flowing prose.
Moderator power dynamics
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