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...

▲ sevenseacat 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

> 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.

It's literally a Q&A site. Questions need actual answers, not just opinions or "this worked for me".

▲ zahlman 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Please point at some of these "really good" questions, if you saved any links. (I have privileges to see deleted questions; deletion is normally soft unless there's a legal requirement or something.) I'll be happy to explain why they are not actually what the site wanted and not compatible with the site's goals.

The idea that the question "should have provable answers" wasn't some invention of moderators or the community; it came directly from Atwood (https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/01/17/real-questions-have-an...).

> 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.

Please read "Understanding the standard for "opinion-based" questions" (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/434806) and "What types of questions should I avoid asking?" (https://stackoverflow.com/help/dont-ask).

▲ shagie 4 days ago | parent [-]

I believe that this tension about what type of questions was baked into the very foundation of StackOverflow.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/09/15/stack-overflow-lau...

> What kind of questions are appropriate? Well, thanks to the tagging system, we can be rather broad with that. As long as questions are appropriately tagged, I think it’s okay to be off topic as long as what you’re asking about is of interest to people who make software. But it does have to be a question. Stack Overflow isn’t a good place for imponderables, or public service announcements, or vague complaints, or storytelling.

https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/

> Stackoverflow is sort of like the anti-experts-exchange (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search engine gaming) meets wikipedia meets programming reddit. It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home. Better programming is our goal.

(the emphasis on "good" is in the original)

And this can be seen in the revision history of https://stackoverflow.com/posts/1003841/revisions (take note of revision 1 and the moderation actions 2011)

---

Questions that are fun and slightly outside of the intended domain of the site are manageable ... if there is sufficient moderation to keep those types of questions from sucking up all available resources.

That was the first failing of NotProgrammingRelated.StackExchange ... later Programming.StackExchange ... later SoftwareEngineering.StackExchange.

The fun things, while they were fun took way more moderation resources than was available. People would ask a fun question, get a good bit of rep - but then not help in curating those questions. "What is your favorite book" would get countless answers... and then people would keep posting the same answers rather than reading all of them themselves and voting to cause the "good" content to bubble up to the top.

That's why TeX can have https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fun and MathOverflow can have https://mathoverflow.net/questions/tagged/soft-question and https://mathoverflow.net/questions/tagged/big-list -- there is a very high ratio for the active in moderation to active users.

Stack Overflow kind of had this at its start... but over time the "what is acceptable moderation" was curtailed more and more - especially in the face of more and more questions that should be closed.

While fun questions are fun... the "I have 30 minutes free before my next meeting want to help someone and see a good question" is something that became increasingly difficult. The "Keep all the questions" ideal made that harder and so fewer and fewer of the - lets call them "atwoodians" remained. From where I sit, that change in corporate policy was completely solidified when Jeff left.

As moderation and curation restricted (changing the close reasons to more and more specific things - "it's not on that list, so you can't close it") meant that the content that was not as well thought out but did match the rules became more and more prevalent and overwhelmed the ability for the "spolskyites" to close since so many of the atwoodians have left.

What remained where shells of rules that were the "truce" in the tension between the atwoodians and spolskyites and a few people trying to fight the oncoming tide of poorly asked questions with insufficient and neglected tooling.

As the tide of questions went out and corporate realized that there was necessary moderation that wasn't happening because of the higher standards from the earlier days they tried to make it easier. The golden hammer of duplication was a powerful one - though misused in many cases. The "this question closes now because its poorly asked and similar to that other canonical one that works through the issue" was far easier than "close as {something}" that requires another four people to take note of it before the question gets an answer from the Fastest Gun in the West. Later the number of people needed was changed from needing five people to three, but by then there was tide was in retreat.

Corporate, seeing things there were fewer questions being asked measured this as engagement - and has tried things to increase engagement rather than good questions. However, those "let's increase engagement" efforts were also done with even more of a moderation burden upon the community without the tooling to fix the problems or help the diminishing number of people who were participating in moderating and curating the content of the site.

▲ zahlman 3 days ago | parent [-]

> As moderation and curation restricted (changing the close reasons to more and more specific things - "it's not on that list, so you can't close it") meant that the content that was not as well thought out but did match the rules became more and more prevalent and overwhelmed the ability for the "spolskyites" to close since so many of the atwoodians have left.

Just to make sure: I always got the impression that Atwood was the one who wanted to keep things strictly on mission and Spolsky was the one more interested in growing a community. Yes? I do get the impression that there was a serious ideological conflict there; between the "library of detailed, high-quality answers" and the, well, "to every question" (without a proper understanding of what should count as a distinct, useful question that can have a high-quality answer). But also, the reputation gamification was incredibly poorly thought out for the "library" goal (https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/387356/the-stack-ex...). And I suspect they both shared blame in that.

A lot of it was also ignored for too long because of the assumption that a) the site would just die if it clamped down on everything from the start; b) the site would naturally attract experts with good taste in questions (including maybe even the ability to pose good https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Dixer questions) before the beginners ever cleared the barrier of trying to phrase a proper question instead of using a forum.

(Nowadays, there are still small forums all over the place. And many of them try to maintain some standards for the OP. And they're all plagued with neophytes who try to use the forum as if it were a chat room. The old adage about foolproofing rings true.)

Around 2014 is when the conflict really seems to have boiled over (as new question volume was peaking). Notably, that also seems to be when the dupe-hammer was introduced (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254589).

▲ shagie 3 days ago | parent [-]

Jeff was the author of https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-... and was more focused on quality than community - his vision was the library.

Joel was indeed more community minded - though part of that community mindedness was also more expectations of community moderation than what the tooling was able to scale for.

And yes, they both were to blame for gamification - though part of that was the Web 2.0 ideals of the time and the hook to keep a person coming back to it. It was part of the question that was to be answered "how do you separate the core group from the general participants on a site?" ... and that brings me to "people need to read A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy" ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23723205 ) to understand how it shaped Stack Overflow.

https://blog.codinghorror.com/its-clay-shirkys-internet-we-j... (2008)

https://web.archive.org/web/20110827205048/https://stackover... (Podcast #23 from 2011)

   Atwood: Maybe. But the cool thing about this is this is not just me, because that would be boring. It is actually me and Clay Shirky. You know, Clay Shirky is one of my heroes.

   Spolsky: Oh...

   Atwood: Yeah I know, it's awesome. So we get to talk about like building communities online and I get to talk about StackOverflow, you know, and all the lessons we've learned and, get to present with Clay. Obviously he's an expert so. That's one of the people that I have emailed actually, because I thought that would be good, because he is from New-York city as well. So we could A) show him the site and B) talk about the thing we are going to do together in March, because he needs to see the site to have some context. I mean I did meet him and talk to him about this earlier a few months ago, I think I mentioned it on the podcasts. But that was before we had sort of even going to beta, so there's really not a lot to show him. But I would love to show him in person. So we'll see if I'll hear back from him, I do not know.

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/105232/clay-shirkys... (2011)

2014 sounds about right for when it peaked... it was also when a lot of things hit the fan one after another. General stress, the decline of community moderation. The dup hammer was a way to try to reduce the amount of close votes needed - but in doing so it became "everything is a nail" when the dup hammer. It was used to close poor questions as dups of other questions ... and rather than making it easier to close questions that didn't fit well, corporate allowed the "everything is a dup" problem to fester.

That also then made Stack Overflow's search become worse. Consider https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/262080 which provides itself as a timestamp of 2014...

    How much traffic do the questions that get duped to something bring? Especially the (currently) 410 questions linked to the Java NPE question.

That question now has 10,356 questions linked to it... and that's part of the "why search quality is going down" - because poor questions were getting linked and not deleted. Search went downhill, dupe hammer was over used because regular close votes took too long because community moderation was going down, which in turn caused people to be grumpy about "closed as dup" rather than "your question looks like it is about X, but lacks an MCVE to be able to verify that... so close it as a dup of X rather than needing 5 votes to get an MCVE close.. which would have been more helpful in guiding a user - but would mean people would start doing FGITW to answer it maybe and you'd get it as a dup of something else instead."

All sorts of problems around that time.

	▲	zahlman 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Thanks; lots of great information here. Regarding duplicates and deletion you may be interested in my thoughts: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/426214/when-is-it-a... ; https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/434215/where-do-the... ; https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421677/closing-a-qu... seem relevant here, browsing through a search of my saved posts. Having duplicates should make the search better, by pointing people who phrase the same problem in different ways to the same place. But low-quality questions often don't produce something searchable for others, and they cover topics relevant to people who lack search skills.

▲ chris_wot 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Dunno why you are being downvoted - there is a certain type of person who contributes virtually nothing on Wikipedia except peripheral things like categories. BrownHairedGirl was the most toxic person in Wikipedia but she was lauded by her minions - and yet she did virtually no content creation whatsoever. Yet made millions of edits!