It’s time for Stack Overflow to address its moderation problems
stackoverflow.com (SO) is an amazing website providing invaluable information to software developers around the world. One part of SO’s success is thanks to the great effort spent for moderation, ensuring quality questions and answers (Q&A). But like any huge organisation, with success also problems grow. Reviewing millions of Q&A is a herculean task and suffers what I would like to call the “police syndrome”:
Like Stack Overflow, police provides a valuable service to the public, but many members of that public dislike the policemen. How comes ? Policemen have to constantly judge who is right or wrong and use their significant power to enforce their decision. Over time, they develop the attitude that they are always right and they get used to overcome resistance from law breakers with force. This becomes an automatism, which can have deadly consequences, like in the case of the killing of George Floyd.
Luckily, moderation mistakes on SO cannot have such grave consequences, but a similar mechanism is at play. The SO moderator team has to review thousands of Q&A posts. They cannot spend an hour to investigate each, they need to make a decision efficiently. Bad decisions are bound to happen. A review is performed by several reviewers and the group decides. A “group think” develops, influenced by the shared annoyance about all the bad Q&A they have to review. They end up with the attitude that their group is always right and they use all force available to fight infractions, especially if the contributor dares to disagree.
Even worse is that the place where SO problems should be discussed, meta.stackoverflow.com, the same moderation team polices the discussion. They do not like to hear SO criticism, they take it personally, go into attack mode against the poster and often use their power to stop any discussion by marking the “question” as a duplicate, even if the referred “question” has completely different circumstances. Meta has 2 problems:
1) If you have a problem with SO, you MUST post it as a question, even if it is actually not a question, but a problem. Of course, then the moderators have an easy time to say the question is not proper (after all, it is really not a question), another way to suppress easily any further discussion.
2) “The police controls the discussion about police problems”. Many moderators and reviewers are on Meta and come to the immediate defence and counterattack if one of their member’s action gets criticised. SO needs something like a Facebook ombudsman (a moderation independent entity which can address moderation problems).
By the way, some SO supporters here might get tempted to aggressively attack this article. Here is part of such a counter attack on Reddit, where I wrote about the same theme “Stackoverflow has too many self-righteous moderators”:
“you didn’t bother to educate yourself on the site’s rules (despite being a user there for almost nine years), broke them, got penalised for doing so, and instead of accepting that you fucked up, learning from that, and moving forward… you decided to whine like a spoiled child about unfairness. Stack Overflow doesn’t have time for spoiled children.”
Besides the vulgar language and baseless personal attacks, so many things are wrong with this comment. The worst is the attitude that contributors must be penalised, instead of making it easy for them to improve their post. In my case, I would have to add only a link and all would have been fine. But one single moderator (they have more rights than the reviewers) decided to delete my answers with no obvious recourse for me.
There are big difference between the present SO moderation system and the SO Core Values as stated on stackoverflow.co:
“Create space for different voices to be heard”: This seems not to apply to moderation critic. That’s one reason I write about this problem here and not on SO Meta.
“by being empathetic”: The required moderator’s empathy diminishes with the time and gets replaced by police attitude.
“Nurture healthy communities where everyone is encouraged to learn and give back.”: Unfortunately, this core value got lost when the SO software got “improved” over time. The focus is on policing and expressing in uncertain terms that the poster has done something bad, something he should not have done. Following SO’s own core values, they should instead help the contributors to improve their posts. I understand that nurturing requires more time than just policing. But at least SO could improve their wording and make it easier for the poster to contest the decision.
I have 4 suggestions for improvement:
1) Find a way back to the SO core values.
2) Improve the language. It really makes a difference if the system blocks and scolds the contributor in no uncertain terms or helps him friendly to improve his post. Do not automatically assume that the contributor writing the question or answer is always wrong and the moderation team always right. Formulate it as a possibility and make it more obvious / user friendly how a disagreement can be addressed.
3) SO needs a place where SO problems get discussed without being policed by the moderation team, but a third party. A bit like the Facebook ombudsman.
4) Use marking questions as duplicate more sparingly. There are way too many cases where the questions are from different scenarios and deserve their own explanations.
I am not the only one who thinks SO has a serious problem. For your convenience and to demonstrate my point, I have compiled a list with some supportive comments on my Reddit post. I wrote to all commenters and asked for their permission to cite them here, some responded that they prefer it done without citing their name:
“Thank you for posting this. It very much needed to be said. “
“I fully support this and agree with all of the above statements in the opening post. SO has become a place where dictatorship is rife, people are unfriendly and there is too much moderation going on. “
“You are totally right, I once asked a question that took hours to write and referenced 5 different approaches to the problem, and all I got was a downvote without explanation. Incredible how much this can piss you off. “
“OP raised some valid complaints, and it makes sense to try looking for ways to mitigate these issues without compromising the quality of the content. These issues are the reasons why I never posted a single word on stackoverflow. “
“The biggest problem with SO’s moderation is in my experience not quality but inclusivity. It’s very easy to robotically do the right thing, but the wrong way. Oftentimes, the case I observe is that moderation can be fully correct and make sense to an area expert but can be unhelpful and dismissive to a question asker (and, rarer, an answerer) in a way that turns people away. … I’ve certainly seen plenty demonstrative examples of bad moderation on SO”
“When moderation is offloaded to community members, you’re basically creating a team of “supreme court justices”. Sure, their intent should be enforcement of the rules to the letter, but too often there is plenty of room for interpretation. Add to that the simple fact that we’re all humans and not binary thinking robots, and you have to expect some biases to creep in to some extent. “
“stack overflow has at this point deleted as much useful content as it currently contains. there were always attitude issues amongst the power users, I wouldn’t expect anything less, but when they started getting militant about the definition of subjective and combining loosely related topics as duplicate then later deleting the question the defined as the original as low quality it started to go downhill pretty fast”
“I just use SO for searches, I never post anything there. If I have a question I’ll go to discord where people are mostly pleasant. “
“I’m overly sensitive to criticism and stopped posting to SO after getting a few fairly harsh rebukes.”
“There is no newbie StackOverflow, by definition it’s built to be hostile to newbies and get worse as time goes on and more questions are “duplicates”.”
“The many internal issues and power struggles within the community are a bit of a sight. Hopefully they take notice of posts like yours and maybe improve their appeals mechanism. “
“It’s not the mods that annoy me. It is the idiotic drive by down voters who downvote perfectly well asked questions without any explanation as to why. “
“For real. It is a shame since SO is both the most useful site and the most toxic. We all know the holier than thou types who first have to demean the person for asking a supposedly simple question, then finally answer it. And people wonder why developers are seen as anti social”
“StackOverflow has become a slightly less spammy version of Experts Exchange. It’s woefully out of date on most things, gives bad and/or conflicting advice on everything else, and generally has become a useless pile of junk. And most of the reason is what you’ve described here. The moderator fiefdoms result in petty turf wars and bad comments rise to the top because of political reasons rather than technical ones. “
“It does not seem like StackOverflow ( or rather their moderators) is/are interested in change. “
“One problem is that accepted answers get quickly outdated, but posing a new question with the latest background will get blocked as duplicated.”
To be honest, there were also many comments defending SO moderation, but those voices already dominate SO Meta, so I will not include them here. My point is that SO has a problem with how moderation is done and that it is impossible to address it on SO. Long live medium.com :-)
