Bots Help Moderate Stack Overflow

https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/09/17/meet-the-bots-that-help-moderate-stack-overflow/

by foxfired • 7 years ago

37 14 7 years ago

dmckeon• 7 years ago

Cool tools to leverage human effort in effective ways. I’d love to see a “smells like homework” tag or review queue to catch the questions that sound a lot like homework assignments from first courses in programming, so willing respondents can more readily draw out the querent’s understanding. (“print the squares of the first 10 integers”, “swap the first & last line of the input”, and similar)

cybersnowflake3• 7 years ago

Maybe stop banhammering newbies simply because you think their question about obscure arcane algorithm #44462 is too similar to an even more arcane question 10 years ago about algorithm #783429 and its immediately obvious to a regular with a pH.D in quantum statistics.

The only major support site I'm aware of with a 'stupid questions' punishment policy. Which isn't a bad thing in and of itself except its implemented in such a draconian and nontransparent way. Demerits never seem to expire, even after years of no 'stupid' posts and theres no explanation where they come from.

The bizarre thing is even with this and newbies banned left and right it seems the admin is on another planet running some other website as all they want to talk about is social justice and how evil heteronormative SO users somehow can psychically tell who is a woman or minority and supposedly harassing them to epidemic proportions but nobody somehow ever sees this.

Maybe get a handle on a few real basic problems before you start crowing about your geewhiz new bot.

klez3• 7 years ago

Maybe stop banhammering newbies simply because you think their question about obscure arcane algorithm #44462 is too similar to an even more arcane question 10 years ago about algorithm #783429 and its immediately obvious to a regular with a pH.D in quantum statistics.

You don't get banned for questions closed as duplicate, what are you talking about?

cybersnowflake3• 7 years ago

Yes you do. Among other things. Its one of the things that counts toward your 'demerit' score. Or at least it certainly appears to. Theres people who haven't done anything but ask a couple 'stupid questions' that were answered before that were modded. Of course their moderation policy is so opaque only the admin could tell you exactly what happened.Or maybe not since they seen keen to adapt the 'Google approach' of having their bots take over sight unseen.

m4632• 7 years ago

I can't help but think of Tesla.

They added all these automated ways to schedule service for your car through the app or website, and after they got comfortable with it, they made it the ONLY way to schedule service. [good for tesla, not good for community]

The problem I see is that Stack Overflow tries to be an exclusive community.

I think maybe instead of automated ways to flag bad things, maybe they can figure out automated ways to praise people, be inclusive especially with new users and redirect mistakes into constructive avenues.

rcar• 7 years ago

I'd argue that these sorts of efforts do help move things towards a better community.

The site relies quite a lot on knowledgeable people to review and edit things, and the more grunt work that entails, the more you have to really care about being a part of the site to commit to it. The types who are interested in shouldering that burden will tend to be the ones who are extra hardcore, who are also more likely going to be impatient with mistakes and newbies.

m4632• 7 years ago

I think the sentence that got me was:

"Natty started to flag answers automatically once it had detected a particular answer as a non-answer with considerable accuracy."

It might be that I don't understand - does Natty flag something directly, or flag them for the moderator?

On the other hand, the Heat Detector bot sounded it was punitive too, but in a way that might strengthen the community. (interesting thought - could it flag moderators?)

thrower123• 7 years ago

As much as people love to rip on StackOverflow for being unfriendly, it is in an entirely different plane of existence from all the little php forums that it replaced.

You haven't seen arbitrary, shitty moderation unless you were on the internet in the early 2000s.

The craziest thing is, those people are almost all still on the internet, but they've aged out of the worst of the terribleness.

tastroder• 7 years ago

On the other hand you could switch communities if one style didn't suit your taste back then. It often seems like this was replaced by a choice between large communities like SO and something fringe.

Bots Help Moderate Stack Overflow

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