Reading the rest of this thread, it sounds like moderation truly was SO’s downfall, and almost everyone involved seems to agree the site became extremely anti-social. Not sure I’ve ever seen the word ‘toxic’ this many times in one thread before.

Anyway, that is a good question you asked, one that they didn’t figure out. But if there are enough people to ask questions and search for answers, then aren’t there enough people to manage the answers? SO already had serious community effort, it just wasn’t properly focused by the UX options they offer. Obviously you need to crowd-source the decisions that can’t scale to mods, while figuring out the incentive system to reduce gaming. I’m not claiming this is easy, in fact I’m absolutely certain this is not easy to do, but SO brought too little too late to a serious problem that fundamentally limited and reduced the utility of the site over time.

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.

One thing the site could have done is tie questions and answers to specific versions of languages, libraries, tools, or applications. Questions asked where the author wasn’t aware of a version dependency could be later assigned one when a new version changes the correctness of an answer that was right for previous versions. This would make room for new answers to the same question, make room for the same question to be asked again against a new version, and it would be amazing if while searching I could filter out answers that are specific to Python 2, and only see answers that are correct for Python 3, for example.

Some of the answers should be deleted (or just hidden but stay there to be used as defense when someone tries to re-add bad or outdated answers.) The policy of trying to keep all answers no matter how good allowed too much unhelpful noise to accumulate.

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shagie 3 days ago | parent [-]

> 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.

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dahart 3 days ago | parent [-]

> every attempt at answering a question - is valid and should remain.

Yeah this is describing a policy that seems like it’s causing some of the problem I’m talking about. SO’s current state today is evidence that not every attempt at answering a question should ‘remain’. But of course it depends on what exactly we mean by that too. Over time, valid attempts that don’t help should arguably be removed from the default view, especially when high quality answers are there, but they don’t have to be deleted and they can be shown to some users. One of the things it sounds like SO didn’t identify or figure out is how to separate the idea of an answer being valid from the idea the answer should remain visible. It would serve the site well to work on making people who try to answer feel validated, while at the same time not necessarily showing every word of it to every user, right?

	▲	shagie 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		That would entail a significant redesign of the underlying display engine... and an agreement of that being the correct direction at the corporate level. Unfortunately, after Jeff left I don't think there was that much upper management level support for "quality before quantity" After the sale it feels like it was "quantity and engagement will follow" and then "engagement through any means". Deleting and hiding questions or answers that aren't high quality... really would mean making most of the site hidden and that wouldn't help engagement at all.