Item — HN Reader

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.

2 comments

> 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.

> The overwhelming majority of people who came to the site wanted the site to be something that it was fundamentally not trying to be

Message received I guess, seeing as how the overwhelming majority left.

So they have essentially killed the site. Congratulations I guess?

What killed it in truth was RAG, but let's stipulate that it was policy that drove users away.

The thing that killed it was the thing that made it prominent.

According to a blogpost i can't find any more about "how to speedrun social media" or similar, it's basically impossible to pivot a community once established given the levers of voting mechanics and mod policy. (I distinguish between Facebook's and Reddit's enshittification and a pivot.)

IOW, the seed of a community property's growth is also the seed of its decline. Analagously, the charming village is attractive to new residents because the existing residents resist the changes that new residents embody.

Very broadly and by no means universally: techies don't like lusers, because lusers don't put effort into understanding, they just want turnkey answers. This is totally counter to the archetypal techie value system.

SO optimised for grumpy misanthropes over bumbling newbies, which, in tech, is roughly congruent with optimising for people with knowledge to share over people who want their homework done for them.

The questions are not the scarce resource - you can browse Microsoft Community Answers to verify that. The answers there are correspondingly useless, which is why "blindly copy from SO" is a meme and "blindly copy from Microsoft Answers" is not.

Here ITT, and more generally on HN, comments are excoriating about the cost of being offputting to new users. Those commenters should recognise that it's not a pure cost, it's a tradeoff, and the upside has been a treasure for a decade. A million projects completed by people who found quality answers, mostly by searching for existing questions.

That resource is still relevant for stacks other than the latest web framework hotness, and i personally still get benefit from it in my archaic hobby of learning to code.

That resource is not still directly relevant for coders deeply plugged into AI, but it did train that AI.

It's one of the most successful endeavours on the web and a towering community achievement. It is a superficially a shame that people experienced gatekeeping, but if "gatekeeper" has only negative connotations in your lexicon, then I advise you to compromise your principles and firewall your network.

They have gone along with the site dying, as was always realistically going to happen, even if it took people a while to realize. As one of the people doing a lot of what you (in my view very misguidedly) consider "killing", I'm perfectly okay with that.

But I'm upset that my conscious attempts to make a more useful reference for everyone got disrespected from all sides: outside commenters ascribed incorrect and hurtful motives to me while refusing to consider what my real objective might have been; new users cursed me out or wrongly accused me of various things; the site ownership tried to make the task harder in all sorts of ways (while never compensating me for my work in any way); other high-rep users took destructive actions because the reputation system incentivized them (closing and downvoting questions was not incentivized in any way); the reputation system was never meaningfully revised even though everyone knew it was crap; and Google actively and deliberately made their search worse.

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)

You could not unilaterally edit anonymously; your edit would have been put in a review queue.

It is good that leaving comments is hard. First off, because it was learned repeatedly, the hard way, that removing that barrier leads to ungodly amounts of literal spam. Second because even insightful comments detract from the main intended flow of using the site, which is: you find a question from a search engine, read the question and verify that it reflects what you're trying to figure out, then scroll down to the answers and learn something. The entire point is to not be a discussion forum (which is also why comments were not threaded for most of the the site's life). In fact, the site came into existence specifically because of frustration with what ends up happening on a discussion forum where people can discuss endlessly.

See, what you're saying makes some logical sense in a vacuum but it's so utterly unlike how any other website works that unless you take a huge amount of effort to explain this to people, gently, then it's not at all surprising that people just bounce off of it.

> but it's so utterly unlike how any other website works that unless you take a huge amount of effort to explain this to people, gently, then it's not at all surprising that people just bounce off of it.

It is, and that's fine.

It's incompatible with a site becoming large; and that, too, is fine.

A large site was not required to accomplish any of Atwood or Spolsky's goals aside from perhaps making a profit off of ads. Many other choices were also counterproductive to the goals aside from profit.

Everyone involved would have loved to "explain this to people gently". There was no space provided in which to do it. We had no access to modify the help pages or do anything about user onboarding flows. Downvotes were the tool provided to de-emphasize things and take them out of the way, and to rate quality; so they were used appropriately. (Despite this, and despite public perception, voting was historically very biased in the positive direction.)

Because new questions were open by default, they had to be closed explicitly and in public in order for them to be dealt with. People walked away with the completely incorrect impression that closing a question is inherently a rejection; the explicit purpose and sole effect of closing a question is to prevent answers unless and until it is fixed. It is done with an explicit expectation that fixable questions will get fixed; but the nature of some problems (in particular: missing information) is such that only the OP can do this. There was a period of time in which "closed" was rebranded as "on hold" in the interface, to try to impress upon people that no, they aren't being turned away, they are being asked to take further action. But this was reverted because it was somehow apparently making things even worse.

But also, yes, after telling countless people the same things daily, sometimes humans lose their ability to be gentle. But nobody who's dealt with roughly ever gets to see what the other side had to deal with earlier. The way that people talk about "toxicity" on Stack Overflow comes across like they think it was constantly full of insults and slurs. The evidence shows that the large majority of that sort of content (which explicitly violated the Code of Conduct, and there was a full system in place to deal with this, that pundits often ignore or even lie about) was directed at the curators. One of the most common questions on the meta site is "why aren't people required to explain downvotes?", with the main retort being "why don't you think they should be required to explain upvotes?". But the main answer to that question is because people who stuck out their necks to try to explain the site's standards politely, would frequently get sworn at and even threatened. (I was once openly called sexist for applying these standards, with no evidence beyond the fact that the OP was a woman, which I didn't know at the time).

I'm criticizing the design of the site (and to some extent the rules that were set up) more so than the moderators trying to operate within it. I'm aware of how thankless a job moderating can be, and how a Q&A site can quickly die under a mass of help vampires who will just suck up endless effort if you let them. I think a lot of the site's design really played into it, and realistically it was probably something that needed to evolve as it grew and matured, because the dynamics really change at different stages.

> the explicit purpose and sole effect of closing a question is to prevent answers unless and until it is fixed

This is a decision I would question. What is it about a bad question that makes answers undesirable until the question itself is fixed? Especially when the judgement of such badness might be faulty (even if it's encouraged to bias towards leaving it open). Again, the answer may be the moderators doing the best with the tools their given (e.g. lacking good ways to otherwise surface the better questions to potential answers), but this is exactly the kind of issue I think tends to underlie SO's problems.

> The way that people talk about "toxicity" on Stack Overflow comes across like they think it was constantly full of insults and slurs

I don't get that impression. The perceived toxicity comes from a somewhat inscrutable set of rules and also apparently inconsistent enforcement which created a lot of frustration with the site. None of this requires that the moderation is even impolite. In fact, people can get more frustrated when a result they consider wildly unreasonable is delivered with a cordial tone. The trope of a saccharine sweet but utterly evil bureaucrat exists for a reason, and I think that is the kind of impression people who describe SO as toxic are describing, whatever the underlying cause (which is almost certainly not that a bunch of people spending their spare time moderating a site are just evil for the sake of it).

(And it's not unique to SO. Wikipedia has a lot of the same problems, though with different causes and attempts to solve them)

> I'm criticizing the design of the site (and to some extent the rules that were set up)

So we agree (but the people you're talking about are not moderators). Again:

>Everyone involved would have loved to "explain this to people gently". There was no space provided in which to do it.

Onward:

> What is it about a bad question that makes answers undesirable until the question itself is fixed?

Many things.

It was partly about working around other missteps of the system design: closed questions that aren't fixed are supposed to get deleted, but the system automating this was deliberately conservative, and in particular would preserve anything that had an answer.

The more bad questions there are, the greater the chance that a third party trying to find a good question with a search engine will find a bad question instead. Sometimes that can be fixed with duplicate linking, but often not.

When a curator believes that a question is a duplicate, and is trying to find the "canonical" version with the best questions and answers, the more bad questions there are, the greater the chance that the curator fails to find that question. This is because bad questions carry a risk of resembling the desired target while actually being about something else.

Answers written for a bad question might be worse because they misunderstand the situation due to the quality issue; and they might be invalidated when the question gets fixed.

Answering bad, low-effort questions contributes to the incorrect impression that effort isn't expected (because the OP gets a reward that might be seen as far more valuable than abstract reputation points: personalized, possibly-working code). It incentivizes more bad questions, when the goal is to preempt bad questions and get people to understand question quality.

Finally, of course, answering bad questions wastes time and effort that could have been spent on better questions.

> In fact, people can get more frustrated when a result they consider wildly unreasonable is delivered with a cordial tone.

Right. And the site owners would insist that we adopt that cordial tone, and made multiple attempts to shift the Code of Conduct around in a way that they hoped would lead to more cordial tone.

And people reacting badly to commentary, even when given in a cordial tone, led to people not trying to explain their actions at all. Which led to people being upset that actions were taken without explanation (including in a significant fraction of cases where the system's automatic explanation was perfectly clear enough, frankly).

Seriously: there were many people who came to the meta site after asking a question that literally started with words to the effect of "What do you think is the best...", and then presented as if they could not possibly understand why the question was deemed "opinion-based".