[cookiecaper]

This shows the problem with the way Stack Exchange doles out moderation abilities (automatic once you hit a certain karma threshold). You get a lot of people who want to use these newfound powers. That's understandable, for sure. The issue is that in their eagerness to be a good mod and help clean up and get to do some cool moderatory stuff, they get overzealous and it results in hamfisted, overbroad moderation because everyone is looking for a reason to close the question. The higher principle behind the community gets lost in a sea of technicalities.

Stack Exchange could improve their guidance and closure templates to help curb the habit of closing useful stuff all the time, so part of it is an identity issue that SE sites have within themselves, but it's compounded and exacerbated by a lot of fresh faces looking for a reason to stop the discussion so they can click their brand-new "lock thread" button.

[mediumdeviation]

This is an extremely popular narrative that seems to pop up every time a Stack Exchange post geta onto the HN or proggit front page.

The problem with this narrative is that it is almost never substantiated. So instead, let me posit an alternative hypothesis, as someone who has gotten his hands dirty on the various Meta sites:

The reason most people feel that SE has a moderation problem is because the moderation process on SE is significantly more transparent than almost any sites out there. And because of this transparency, people find it easier to point blame at these users.

The transparency part I hope is obvious - when a post get moderated on other sites, the full edit history and name of the moderators involved are almost never revealed. The close reasons are in general decided upon by the users themselves. Individual moderation decisions can be contested and debated on the Meta sites, and there are checks on almost every level.

In other words, the moderation process is already fairer than most other sites, where the moderation process is essentially a black box with no means of appeal. But people don't like it because the content which elsewhere would have been swept quietly under the rug is still visible and indexable.

[cookiecaper]

I disagree. Most other forums do not lock or hide useful threads that are popular, gaining substantive replies, and generating meaningful discussion. In the more traditional moderation perspective, moderators have incentive to keep active discussions alive, because they're usually considered staff and they want to generate traffic. With StackExchange, there is no vested interest from the moderating audience, they just want to click buttons; there is little or no incentive to ask about the macro-level effects a moderation action may have on the site.

[richardwhiuk]

And yet StackExchange has survived to rule all over programming forums. Probably largely because the moderation is extremely heavy and kept heavily on topic...

[TeMPOraL]

I don't think so. SO/SE have won because they've always been honest - they provided Q&A service without upselling you bullshit, spamming you with ads or forcing you into paid plans. That eventually led them to #1 spot in Google for everything programming. I don't see how heavy-handed moderation could help here; if anything, half of the questions I search for are marked as duplicate / not relevant / etc. Basically, I can't imagine what question can be relevant to SO anymore...

[detaro]

The ones you are looking up in the documentation yourself?

At least that's what I've noticed: I had a similar impression (everything interesting is closed) until I had to work with stuff where I didn't know the structure of the docs. Suddenly checking SO was quicker and had tons of relevant content.

But yes, it is annoying that there isn't an easy to find place to go for questions that require some discussion/debate and don't survive on SO.

[Houshalter]

I don't think the moderation itself is the problem, it's the rules. There are certain kinds of questions that are interesting and useful, and get shut down. That of course makes people upset. The moderators are perfectly fair and consistent in enforcing the rules, but the rules are stupid.

[phjesusthatguy3]

All rules are arbitrary, though, and if you want to participate in a community you have to abide by the rules. If the rules are stupid enough, anybody can splinter off and say they're starting their own community, especially on the internet!

I mean, look at HN here. I'm on my third account: the first, I have no idea why I got hellbanned; the second, I know exactly why; the third, I don't really care about. But it's interesting to read the stories and ideas I fundamentally disagree with, and occasionally I post something detrimental to my fully participating in this community. Those are the rules.

[Houshalter]

You are allowed to criticize the rules. Rules can be stupid. And if no one complains, then they will never change.

I don't agree with many of HN's policies, but they are nowhere near as bad as stack overflow. At least on censoring actually useful discussions, whereas HN mostly censors flame wars and political stuff.

[michaelt]

The majority of message boards have few people with message-editing powers, and using them (as opposed to just deleting a message) is a rare event. I've only moderated very small message boards, but we strictly avoided editing users' posts for content, because it would erode user trust if we made it appear that people had said things they hadn't said, for example.

That's in stark contrast to something like a wiki, where it's expected that people will edit one another's content. Of course, most wikis don't attribute editable content to named individuals!

If you look at a high-profile question in Stack Overflow, often the proportion of replies that have been edited by someone other than the author would be shocking on a typical message board - 18 out of 27 answers, for example [1]. I'm quite sure my posts on this site are edited far less well below 66% of the time - in fact I haven't noticed any being edited at all.

In other words, I would say stackoverflow has positioned itself between conventional message boards and wikis in terms of message-editing convention. It's unusual, but it seems to work for them.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9329446/for-each-over-an...