Its tough to find the right balance in online communities that rely on volunteer moderation. There is community moderation drama on Stack Overflow, Wikipedia, reddit, etc pretty frequently.
Sometimes moderators overstep or apply rules unequally. It is essentially a random group of people deciding what the site's values mean to them, with the power to enact their will.
But it does seem to work. Stack Overflow, Wikipedia, and Reddit have found massive success in large part to the work of the volunteer moderation. I have no doubt each of the communities would be significantly worse off without the collective thousands of hours of thankless moderation work done by volunteers.
My recent experience with SO is it makes you jumo through stupid hoops. If there is a question people want answered, with people who want to answer it, then surely this is on topic.
I once asked for recommendations for a message queue framework given some requirements. The question was closed as off topic within minutes, apparently asking for the right programming framework is verboten.
To me moderation is about removing actively harmful / unhelpful content. SO moderation feels like a chivalric order dedicated to upholding some half-sane, half-sane rules they made up for themselves.
Reddit was a source of frustration for me many years ago before I finally quit. It doesn't tell you in the ToS that you may not freely discuss certain topics, so it comes as a chock when your post gets deleted and that there are no alternative subreddits in sight to discuss the same topic unhindered.
So it's a very similar experience to OP. There are hidden rules decided by the whims and desires of the mods and possibly even the administration.
This is not, imo, a successful way of moderating a website. You need to be more clear about what the rules really are, and if the rules are not clear, be forgiving. We are human beings and should treat each other with some level of leniancy and forgiveness. Otherwise, we may as well let a computer moderate instead, and relieve all the unpaid heroes from their duties. No offense.
Stopped contributing years ago and didn't go back. It's toxic, unproductive and breeds the worst of the tech community, gatekeeping.
And there's no saving it, no one will be able to rebuild the culture of that place, it will end with everyone screaming at each other and closing their questions.
I think there’s a place for something like Stack Overflow to replace Stack Overflow, using similar primitives to Bluesky (where you can choose who to block). This avoids the quality and temperament of the mods infringing on the user base. Perhaps you could even build this on top of Bluesky (and the AT protocl) itself.
It’s just about who has the control over what is seen and shared. Let the users vote, annotate, block, etc.
I don't think the problem is blocking, the environment it was built on was sterile. We had large forums back then where people would discuss anything, build community at the off topic channels (like the venerable JavaRanch) but there was no such thing at SO because it was actively trying to kill any off topic discussion.
The site itself was built on a platform of being a tool alone, where people shouldn't interact unless it was to ask a question or provide an answer. I have made friends and met multiple people from the multiple forums and user groups I was a member of but I met 0 people at SO even though i contributed hundreds of answers.
So it's no wonder it produced this mechanistic and toxic environment. It saddens me we lost so much of these niche communities to this thing.
How would you build it from scratch to avoid the pitfalls you mention? And to enable ongoing cultivation? No need to reply here, homework to think about :)
I deleted my account under my real name on S.O. within a few years after its founding because of the toxicity. I ended up in an argument with a rando that was a regular who had no idea what they were talking about, and realized it wasn't worth my time.
I created an anonymous account a year later, used it for a few one-off questions and answers and never bothered contributing again.
I don't even really use it for the "A" part of Q&A since most of the content seems pretty much out-of-date. It's rare to find a good answer for current programming problems, IMO.
It’s the natural cycle of these kind of websites. They start off super useful, then people of a certain temperament gravitate to becoming moderators and it is all downhill from there.
I think a pretty fundamental problem with the current SO approach to question moderation is that if you are not very knowledgeable about something (ie the kind of person likely to ask a question), you can't easily tell if your question is a "duplicate" of another (but differently worded) SO question.
Ive had some of my questions get closed and then get pointed to an earlier question, where the only way to recognize that the answer Im looking for is mentioned on the page is to know the answer already.
> if you are not very knowledgeable about something (ie the kind of person likely to ask a question), you can't easily tell if your question is a "duplicate" of another (but differently worded) SO question. Ive had some of my questions get closed and then get pointed to an earlier question.
This is a success. You asked a question, you got the answer to your question. Closing your question as a duplicate is not punishment or mockery. Closing your question as a duplicate is saying “We already have the answer to that question! Here it is! No need to wait for somebody to come along and explain it again.”
Stack Overflow is a wiki, not a forum or help desk. If somebody starts a new Wikipedia page on George Washington, the correct response is not to have two pages on George Washington, the correct response is to delete one of them. The same applies here.
I’m replying to a comment that is talking about exactly that. If you want to complain about something else, then that’s a different discussion. But for the purpose of this discussion, yes, it’s that.
> It’s the browbeating that is a turn off and rude comments. Like others have said, it is toxic.
Can you give some examples? If I believed everything people say on this subject, I would expect to see a never-ending stream of insults and bullying on Stack Overflow, but when I go there, I don’t see anything of the sort, except for the occasional comment that’s voted heavily down and/or moderated away. I know toxic behaviour is against the rules, and I can see those rules are enforced effectively.
As far as I can tell, the idea that Stack Overflow is a pit of toxicity is a complete myth. Where is all of this toxicity? Saying that something is off-topic for the site is not toxicity. Closing things as duplicates is not toxicity. Hitting pause on an account that is mass-deleting content is not toxicity.
To clarify – you think saying that I haven’t observed what you claim and asking for you to give examples is toxic behaviour? We have very different ideas about what is toxic.
That’s just community age. It starts out vibrant and then you get Eternal September and the resulting backlash causes all but the most crotchety to go elsewhere. I think maybe only metafilter has protected itself from this. Presumably the cost to play does the trick.
This is a class of problem where the community becomes navel gazing and spends most of its time litigating the rules. It was a classic thing to happen to old forums.
Sometimes moderators overstep or apply rules unequally. It is essentially a random group of people deciding what the site's values mean to them, with the power to enact their will.
But it does seem to work. Stack Overflow, Wikipedia, and Reddit have found massive success in large part to the work of the volunteer moderation. I have no doubt each of the communities would be significantly worse off without the collective thousands of hours of thankless moderation work done by volunteers.
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