[20k]

I was going through some answers on a stackoverflow thread, and noticed that every single one had been edited by the same guy, just.. adding his own personal opinions and 'corrections' to them, and in the process making them universally worse and less correct

The idea that answers should be editable, and the gamification of stackoverflow, was an absolutely terrible combination

[xxs]

Editing used to be fine, back then like 15-16y ago. Personally I posted mostly everything as community wiki (no reputation gain) as I got the mod-alike reputation anyways.

At some point the (say 2013-2014 or so) the site deteriorated quite massively, though - as folks considered stackoverflow CV worthy material...

[kstrauser]

I reverted nearly every single edit to my answers other than obvious typos. If I’d have meant something other than what I said, I’d have said it. You want to see your own words on the page? Write an answer of your own.

Lordy, that use to piss me off most fiercely. I don’t want someone else’s words attributed to me.

[zahlman]

It is taken very seriously in Stack Overflow editing policy that edits are not supposed to go against the author's apparent intent. But it does involve removing a lot of things that you might want the answer to say, but don't meet the guidelines for what answers are supposed to contain.

When you join the site, you agree to Terms and Conditions that, among other things, grant a Creative Commons license to the community over your contributions, which gives them the right to make those edits.

The site is explicitly not trying to accommodate people who want to say things in a specific way because it's their way of saying it. The site is explicitly trying to accommodate people who want to collaborate to produce a polished, coherent work of reference. If that isn't you, unironically, that's what tech blogs are for.

People with the attitude you demonstrate here are consistently among the worst-behaved and hardest-to-deal-with participants on the meta site, because of a stubborn refusal to accept a core principle of the site.

(Yes, the reputation system was an unfathomably bad design choice in light of the site's goals. In retrospect I genuinely don't understand how it survived past 2011 or so with tweaks as minor as it got.)

[kstrauser]

That's ridiculous and you're wrong. I grant them a CC license to my content to fold, spindle and mutilate it for their own purposes, but not to leave my name attached to the folded, spindled, mutilated version.

My answer has my name on it. It's right there saying "kstrauser said these words". If I didn't say them, I don't want the site lying and saying that I did. I don't mind if someone fixes an obvious typo, or updates a URL that had bitrotted. That's fine. They're what I obvious intended to say. But I've had people add extra sentences or paragraphs, and oh hell no.

That was never a core principle of the site, at least not when I joined it before you. If it'd been an expressed core principle that people could edit my words, attributed to me, so that my user account ends up saying things I never said, I never would have signed up and not many other people would have, either.

[zahlman]

> That's ridiculous and you're wrong. I grant them a CC license to my content to fold, spindle and mutilate it for their own purposes, but not to leave my name attached to the folded, spindled, mutilated version.

The choice of license is made clear at https://stackoverflow.com/legal/terms-of-service/public#lice..., and the consequences elaborated at https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/347758/creative-com... . The license itself is at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ . It is one of the BY licenses, so the site is legally required to leave your name on the work. The interface explicitly marks both the original author and the most recent editor on the main facing page; and it offers the ability to click in and see the entire editing history.

> But I've had people add extra sentences or paragraphs, and oh hell no.

This is overwhelmingly done in good faith, and it's explicitly policy not to change your meaning. In fact, there are many posts on meta where people complained about attempting a good-faith edit and having been judged as falling afoul of that for no reason. See e.g. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/349950 .) But it's also explicitly policy that they can "edit your words, attributed to you" (see e.g. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/403176 ). The people who make these changes, generally, sincerely believe that they are either saying things you intended to say, or at least adding information that you would have added if you'd come back to keep things up to date. There has been a ton of discussion trying to clarify and/or figure out where the line is: see e.g. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/search?q=%5Bediting%5D+intent... .

If you saw someone change something that fell afoul of this, there was a meta site where you could raise the objection. But we were constantly inundated with people who thought it was wrong that we took "thank you in advance, my_username" off the end of the their questions or similar (see e.g. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/260776 ), as if they thought they had a right to that.

[20k]

>People with the attitude you demonstrate here are consistently among the worst-behaved and hardest-to-deal-with participants on the meta site, because of a stubborn refusal to accept a core principle of the site.

Most edits I saw to answers on stack overflow were crap though, the system was regularly abused

That stubborn refusal was because it was a terrible idea, and one of the reasons why the site died

[DrewADesign]

But the points system was fundamentally inextricable from the site’s operation, and the officiousness and arrogance it rewarded meant it could never be as good as anybody hoped it would be. The people making the content decisions were often misguided, and vastly less qualified than the authors they meddled with… but were rewarded for their actions all the same.

[zahlman]

> But the points system was fundamentally inextricable from the site’s operation, and the officiousness and arrogance it rewarded meant it could never be as good as anybody hoped it would be.

Er... yes.jpg ?

You seem to be under the impression that I'm trying to defend all the site's design choices. I'm not. I'm trying to defend a community that did the best it could with what they were given, after all sorts of requests were repeatedly ignored or denied (or preemptively judged unreasonable and not even made) and then new ownership came in and tried to force an unending torrent of even worse ideas on us, even undoing the few things we actually liked about the design.

> The people making the content decisions were often misguided, and vastly less qualified than the authors they meddled with… but were rewarded for their actions all the same.

Again, qualification in the subject matter is entirely orthogonal to understanding of what the site is trying to accomplish, what the policies are, and how those policies were designed to align with the objectives.

That was the part we did have control over. But we were making a good faith effort to carry forward the oral tradition of Atwood and Spolsky's vision.

[Yizahi]

There can be a collaborative work site and there can be a chain of posts type of site (e.g. forum or reddit or HN here). But trying to mix these concepts without any control or organization procedures is, was and will always be considered ridiculous by a vast majority of humans in all spheres of life. If SO wished to be an iterative collab site, sure it may have done everything it did and allowed mods to pick and copy any answers and parts of answers into a new, better refined answer penned by them. But just allowing random edits of any posts by any author, just twisting what they said is absolutely idiotic and ask any internet user of any age, they will agree with me, not with SO policy.

Wikipedia is often brought into comparisons with SO either as something close or as something vastly different. But it doesn't matter atm. What I want to highlight is that SO allowed on it's site to essentially go to the Talks page of Wiki page and allow editing of all user comments to change their words in retrospect, and also allowing to go to the edit history allow edit that history too. This is what SO did, no wonder there are almost no humans who would approve this (after explicitly explained to them, SO is mostly banking of user's lack of full picture knowledge and ignorance).

[eecc]

Found the SO mod…

[zahlman]

No; editing a post to meet the site's style expectations is not moderation, and I was not a moderator, just like 99.9% of everyone described anonymously and incorrectly as "a mod" in discussions of Stack Overflow on the Internet.

It's really annoying to see people insist that they should be the ones who get to decide how Stack Overflow either did, or should have, worked, when they can't even be bothered to understand who the mods were.

[DrewADesign]

Semantics

[jay_kyburz]

The gamification was a key reason the site became popular, but as the site grew, the rules and game mechanics did not evolve.

An edit that made a response worse should have knocked the mod down so that they were unable to mod any more. The quality of the edit should have been determined by the original author. "Did this edit make your question better?"

Moderators should have been ranked and scored based on their ability to help and welcome new users. It should have been very costly for them to make a new users feel unwelcome.

[zahlman]

> An edit that made a response worse should have knocked the mod down so that they were unable to mod any more.

Literally everyone on the site is permitted to propose an edit, and everyone with at least 2000 reputation can make unilateral edits. The proposals are approved by a 2 out of 3 majority of random unilateral-edit-privileged users. None of this is considered "moderation" and is not done by "mods". Of millions of Stack Overflow accounts, only a few dozen have ever actually been moderators, and they do a tiny share of curation. Their main job is responding to flags.

> It should have been very costly for them to make a new users feel unwelcome.

The overwhelming majority of people who came to the site wanted the site to be something that it was fundamentally not trying to be, and often something it was fundamentally trying not to be. It was correct to make such users "feel unwelcome", because experience has shown that they typically cannot be reasoned with or explained to. The statistics make it clear that most of them never had any intention of trying to join a community (or, say, ask another question after the one that motivated account creation) in the first place.

[chuckadams]

> The overwhelming majority of people who came to the site wanted the site to be something that it was fundamentally not trying to be

Message received I guess, seeing as how the overwhelming majority left.

[amanaplanacanal]

So they have essentially killed the site. Congratulations I guess?

[psd1]

What killed it in truth was RAG, but let's stipulate that it was policy that drove users away.

The thing that killed it was the thing that made it prominent.

According to a blogpost i can't find any more about "how to speedrun social media" or similar, it's basically impossible to pivot a community once established given the levers of voting mechanics and mod policy. (I distinguish between Facebook's and Reddit's enshittification and a pivot.)

IOW, the seed of a community property's growth is also the seed of its decline. Analagously, the charming village is attractive to new residents because the existing residents resist the changes that new residents embody.

Very broadly and by no means universally: techies don't like lusers, because lusers don't put effort into understanding, they just want turnkey answers. This is totally counter to the archetypal techie value system.

SO optimised for grumpy misanthropes over bumbling newbies, which, in tech, is roughly congruent with optimising for people with knowledge to share over people who want their homework done for them.

The questions are not the scarce resource - you can browse Microsoft Community Answers to verify that. The answers there are correspondingly useless, which is why "blindly copy from SO" is a meme and "blindly copy from Microsoft Answers" is not.

Here ITT, and more generally on HN, comments are excoriating about the cost of being offputting to new users. Those commenters should recognise that it's not a pure cost, it's a tradeoff, and the upside has been a treasure for a decade. A million projects completed by people who found quality answers, mostly by searching for existing questions.

That resource is still relevant for stacks other than the latest web framework hotness, and i personally still get benefit from it in my archaic hobby of learning to code.

That resource is not still directly relevant for coders deeply plugged into AI, but it did train that AI.

It's one of the most successful endeavours on the web and a towering community achievement. It is a superficially a shame that people experienced gatekeeping, but if "gatekeeper" has only negative connotations in your lexicon, then I advise you to compromise your principles and firewall your network.

[zahlman]

They have gone along with the site dying, as was always realistically going to happen, even if it took people a while to realize. As one of the people doing a lot of what you (in my view very misguidedly) consider "killing", I'm perfectly okay with that.

But I'm upset that my conscious attempts to make a more useful reference for everyone got disrespected from all sides: outside commenters ascribed incorrect and hurtful motives to me while refusing to consider what my real objective might have been; new users cursed me out or wrongly accused me of various things; the site ownership tried to make the task harder in all sorts of ways (while never compensating me for my work in any way); other high-rep users took destructive actions because the reputation system incentivized them (closing and downvoting questions was not incentivized in any way); the reputation system was never meaningfully revised even though everyone knew it was crap; and Google actively and deliberately made their search worse.

[rcxdude]

Being able to edit answers isn't even a mod thing. In fact, for most of SO's life, it wasn't even a 'being logged in' thing (you could just edit an answer anonymously). How they wound up with a Q and A site where you could edit another user's answer far more easily than leaving a comment on it I still will never fully understand.

(this kind of thing IMO really added to the utterly arcane set of rules and conventions that makes it feel so inaccessible)

[zahlman]

You could not unilaterally edit anonymously; your edit would have been put in a review queue.

It is good that leaving comments is hard. First off, because it was learned repeatedly, the hard way, that removing that barrier leads to ungodly amounts of literal spam. Second because even insightful comments detract from the main intended flow of using the site, which is: you find a question from a search engine, read the question and verify that it reflects what you're trying to figure out, then scroll down to the answers and learn something. The entire point is to not be a discussion forum (which is also why comments were not threaded for most of the the site's life). In fact, the site came into existence specifically because of frustration with what ends up happening on a discussion forum where people can discuss endlessly.

[rcxdude]

See, what you're saying makes some logical sense in a vacuum but it's so utterly unlike how any other website works that unless you take a huge amount of effort to explain this to people, gently, then it's not at all surprising that people just bounce off of it.

[zahlman]

> but it's so utterly unlike how any other website works that unless you take a huge amount of effort to explain this to people, gently, then it's not at all surprising that people just bounce off of it.

It is, and that's fine.

It's incompatible with a site becoming large; and that, too, is fine.

A large site was not required to accomplish any of Atwood or Spolsky's goals aside from perhaps making a profit off of ads. Many other choices were also counterproductive to the goals aside from profit.

Everyone involved would have loved to "explain this to people gently". There was no space provided in which to do it. We had no access to modify the help pages or do anything about user onboarding flows. Downvotes were the tool provided to de-emphasize things and take them out of the way, and to rate quality; so they were used appropriately. (Despite this, and despite public perception, voting was historically very biased in the positive direction.)

Because new questions were open by default, they had to be closed explicitly and in public in order for them to be dealt with. People walked away with the completely incorrect impression that closing a question is inherently a rejection; the explicit purpose and sole effect of closing a question is to prevent answers unless and until it is fixed. It is done with an explicit expectation that fixable questions will get fixed; but the nature of some problems (in particular: missing information) is such that only the OP can do this. There was a period of time in which "closed" was rebranded as "on hold" in the interface, to try to impress upon people that no, they aren't being turned away, they are being asked to take further action. But this was reverted because it was somehow apparently making things even worse.

But also, yes, after telling countless people the same things daily, sometimes humans lose their ability to be gentle. But nobody who's dealt with roughly ever gets to see what the other side had to deal with earlier. The way that people talk about "toxicity" on Stack Overflow comes across like they think it was constantly full of insults and slurs. The evidence shows that the large majority of that sort of content (which explicitly violated the Code of Conduct, and there was a full system in place to deal with this, that pundits often ignore or even lie about) was directed at the curators. One of the most common questions on the meta site is "why aren't people required to explain downvotes?", with the main retort being "why don't you think they should be required to explain upvotes?". But the main answer to that question is because people who stuck out their necks to try to explain the site's standards politely, would frequently get sworn at and even threatened. (I was once openly called sexist for applying these standards, with no evidence beyond the fact that the OP was a woman, which I didn't know at the time).

[rcxdude]

I'm criticizing the design of the site (and to some extent the rules that were set up) more so than the moderators trying to operate within it. I'm aware of how thankless a job moderating can be, and how a Q&A site can quickly die under a mass of help vampires who will just suck up endless effort if you let them. I think a lot of the site's design really played into it, and realistically it was probably something that needed to evolve as it grew and matured, because the dynamics really change at different stages.

> the explicit purpose and sole effect of closing a question is to prevent answers unless and until it is fixed

This is a decision I would question. What is it about a bad question that makes answers undesirable until the question itself is fixed? Especially when the judgement of such badness might be faulty (even if it's encouraged to bias towards leaving it open). Again, the answer may be the moderators doing the best with the tools their given (e.g. lacking good ways to otherwise surface the better questions to potential answers), but this is exactly the kind of issue I think tends to underlie SO's problems.

> The way that people talk about "toxicity" on Stack Overflow comes across like they think it was constantly full of insults and slurs

I don't get that impression. The perceived toxicity comes from a somewhat inscrutable set of rules and also apparently inconsistent enforcement which created a lot of frustration with the site. None of this requires that the moderation is even impolite. In fact, people can get more frustrated when a result they consider wildly unreasonable is delivered with a cordial tone. The trope of a saccharine sweet but utterly evil bureaucrat exists for a reason, and I think that is the kind of impression people who describe SO as toxic are describing, whatever the underlying cause (which is almost certainly not that a bunch of people spending their spare time moderating a site are just evil for the sake of it).

(And it's not unique to SO. Wikipedia has a lot of the same problems, though with different causes and attempts to solve them)