The unilateral removal of comments by Jeff Atwood

http://meta.math.stackexchange.com/questions/1990/the-unilateral-removal-of-comments-by-jeff-atwood

by omaranto • 15 years ago

32 27 15 years ago

meta.math.stackexchange.com

The commenter, Akhil Mathew, finished third in last year's Intel Talent search. He's a freshman at Harvard now.

I googled him after the announcement, and when I found his Math Overflow profile, I remember being really stunned--the idea that a high schooler could be interacting on such a high level with some of the best research mathematicians in the world is amazing.

protomyth• 15 years ago

Following some of the side discussion, it seems two examples of no-nos happened in some of the responses. Never put quotes around a paraphrase / interpretation of someone's comments. Never refer to a Dr. as Mr./Mrs./Ms. It just isn't done.

Edit for link: http://meta.math.stackexchange.com/questions/1990/the-unilat...

mpyne4• 15 years ago

> Never refer to a Dr. as Mr./Mrs./Ms. It just isn't done.

In fairness to Prof. Clark, it's not like he was pointing out that faux pas to someone who didn't know of his position. Jeff Atwood by this point would be well aware of Prof. Clark's qualifications.

I'm not going to say that Jeff deliberately downgraded Prof. Clark's title in his reply (as opposed to the entirely possible "I just call everyone Mr./Ms.") but given Joel Spolsky's comment elsewhere in this thread about "being nice" (note: direct quote! ;) I'm feeling some cognitive dissonance here.

codinghorror3• 15 years ago

Check the revision history on my post; that Dr. / Mr. thing was corrected in under 15 minutes (22:07 to 22:22) ... whereas the reply referring to it was submitted at 23:00, 8 minutes AFTER it was already corrected. But who needs facts when you have drama? http://meta.math.stackexchange.com/posts/1993/revisions

b0sk3• 15 years ago

It's not just in the Math community. But isn't it common practice that when you use quotes, you absolutely don't paraphrase. Weird move by Jeff.

zck2• 15 years ago

The author has since resigned as a moderator: http://meta.math.stackexchange.com/questions/2029/my-letter-...

As an off-topic aside, when I took Real and Complex Analysis in my senior year of college, the author of the Stack Overflow post, Akhil Matthew, was in the class too. He was by far the smartest student in the room. We used a manuscript written by two professors in the department. Akhil was helping edit it, and has credit on the cover as "with Akhil Matthew": http://www.users.drew.edu/capelian/rcanalysis.html .

At the time, Akhil was fourteen.

Jun82• 15 years ago

In summary Atwood has deemed offensive/unconsrtuctive and deleted two comments by a big contributor to the Math.SO site, without consulting its moderators. The community is now quite angry.

What he needs to understand is that not all these communities are like SO, their demographics, especially for thightly knit, professional one like Math.SO is quite different and they won't. Let him moderate their group in such a heavy-handed manner. One way or the other, he elicits respect in the hacker community (mostly), but he has no such clout among mathematicians.

microarchitect3• 15 years ago

I think you're being generous to Atwood here. I don't see how he has any business deleting comments in a community that (1) he did not start* (2) he is not an active member of. I'd argue that this statement is invariant across communities - hacker or otherwise.

This really is a classic micromanagement fail. The original action was motivated by a misguided sense of "being involved". The problem was then exacerbated by an unwillingness to accept mistakes and a sense of outrage fuelled by an ego-bruising.

*I do of course understand Atwood is one of the founders of the SE network of sites.

codinghorror3• 15 years ago

Actually, it's quite simple: off-topic, unconstructive, borderline rude comments were removed from a meta post on a SE, Inc initiative to support the math community. It'd be like you asking a hacker news question about how to send HN regulars to a conference, and I replied "well, Hacker News isn't worth supporting because Paul Graham has gone on record saying he's a bad programmer, and has expressed exasperation with programmers".

I wish I was kidding. I really do.

Edog• 15 years ago

This is the second time that Jeff Atwood's heavy handed approach has cost Math.SE a generous helpful member who is also a well respected professional mathematician. The first incident occurred in November.

In both cases, if he had expressed his concerns to the moderators, and let them address his concerns, I am confident the issues would have been resolved amicably. As it stands, there are a lot of angry people, including the moderators at Math.SE.

Jun82• 15 years ago

Atwood's actions are inexcusable. However, I think, he feels compelled to interfere with this particular site because he says, in the past, there has been so much in-fighting and flagging, compared to other SE sites. He says this site flags at a rate that is an order of magnitude higher than any other SE site.

I generally hang around in Pysics.SE (other than SO, of course) and sometimes am amazed at how fast they close questions.

spolsky2• 15 years ago

The Stack Exchange community places a rather high value on "being nice." It's an important part of our values and we think it makes the Internet a better place. A lot of the Math Stack Exchange users came from Usenet's sci.math where epic flame wars were the norm. That community has a few members who do not consider "being nice" a requirement of public discussion, so naturally, conflict ensued when Jeff removed non-nice things (as is the norm in the larger Stack Exchange community), thus violating the "all public debate is sacred and must never be censored" norm of a small subset of that community.

Personally, I like the "be nice" norm and I think it contributes to the awesomeness of Stack Exchange. I think that in the long run it will make for healthier communities. I think that the high norm for civilized discourse on Stack Exchange is one reason that it has such a high signal to noise ratio and it's why the mathematicians are on our site to begin with.

There was never any question of "censorship" -- the entire brouhaha took place in the META site, the site ABOUT the site... nobody deleted any comments about math on the Math site itself.

microarchitect3• 15 years ago

The "be nice" norm is obviously good and important, but I also think different norms need to come into play here: (1) Due to asymmetric balance of power, moderators need to hold themselves to higher standards of behaviour than the community and (2) Criticism of the moderator has to be treated differently from criticism of regular users.

There's a fine line between deleting comments which are critical of the moderator(s) because they are deemed "unconstructive" and simply being high-handed. I don't know if Atwood actually crossed the line here, but I believe the perception that he _may have_ has hurt this community more than the (relatively minor) initial transgression of the "be nice" rule.

mpyne4• 15 years ago

> The Stack Exchange community places a rather high value on "being nice." It's an important part of our values and we think it makes the Internet a better place.

OK. That's a fair viewpoint, also espoused by many open source communities for instance.

> A lot of the Math Stack Exchange users came from Usenet's sci.math where epic flame wars were the norm.

This, on the other hand, is kind of misleading. Is there some other threads elsewhere with material from Prof. Clark that is of the "epic flame war" variety? I ask this because I read Akhil Mathew's post in its entirety and even if you claim that Prof. Clark was not nice in his mentions regarding Jeff Atwood (a claim I highly disagree with by the way), his comments were in no way flame war material. So unless he's actually done this elsewhere, why even mention epic flame wars in association as it does nothing but confuse the issue.

> That community has a few members who do not consider "being nice" a requirement of public discussion, so naturally, conflict ensued when Jeff removed non-nice things (as is the norm in the larger Stack Exchange community),

I have to ask: Is referencing a person's own quotes in support of a valid position suddenly "not nice". This quite honestly reeks of removing comments that only Jeff Atwood (and perhaps yourself ;) finds personally offending. I understand from the thread that there is apparently some history between Jeff Atwood and Prof. Clark -- I still don't think that justifies the response given in this case.

> thus violating the "all public debate is sacred and must never be censored" norm of a small subset of that community.

I doubt that this is literally an actual community tenet even with professional mathematicians. The fact that they apparently permit citing relevant facts to support a point of their does not imply that they feel all public debate is sacred and non-censorable. Akhil Mathew quite clearly elucidated his position in my opinion, and I do not see where he claimed that Prof. Clark's comments should stand merely because they were debate. It seemed to me that he felt the comments should stand because they were constructive in nature.

> I think that the high norm for civilized discourse on Stack Exchange is one reason that it has such a high signal to noise ratio

Civilized discourse is certainly good for S/N -- but this is not uncivilized discourse from Prof. Clark by any reasonable definition!

> and it's why the mathematicians are on our site to begin with.

I'm sure the network effect of having other very high-quality associated sites with stable working backend software had nothing to do with that. ;)

> There was never any question of "censorship" -- the entire brouhaha took place in the META site, the site ABOUT the site... nobody deleted any comments about math on the Math site itself.

I hate to say this, but this is disingenuous. If you prevent someone from talking constructively about the site then you are censoring him. Sure you may not be censoring him from the main site, but let's not split hairs here.

As an aside I operate in a few communities that enforce a conduct policy... Prof. Clark's comments that were deleted would have been well within the bounds of decorum on any of those communities. You may want to ensure that your Stack Exchange values are being consistently enforced to avoid the appearance of impropriety, as the policies seem to be quite severe to me given the actions here.

spolsky2• 15 years ago

Ha! I see what you did there! A classic, Usenet-quoted, point-by-point nitpick, complete with UseNet style > quotes. I salute your ingenuity!

codinghorror3• 15 years ago

> It seemed to me that he felt the comments should stand because they were constructive in nature.

And yet many on meta.math also felt they were distinctly unconstructive, to the point of overt rudeness -- including the most highly upvoted answer to that question. You say to-may-to, I say to-mah-to.

Honestly, I think the mathematicians would be a lot better off if they spent more time worrying about math and less time writing thousands (literally, thousands) of words on meaningless issues on the meta site.

"According to the onetime editor of Woodrow Wilson’s papers, however, long before any of them strode the academic-political scene, Wilson observed often that the intensity of academic squabbles he witnessed while president of Princeton University was a function of the “triviality” of the issues being considered."

http://ask.metafilter.com/80812/Academic-politics-are-viciou...

prodigal_erik• 15 years ago

Atwood and the math.se community seem to disagree vehemently about what "nice" consists of and how important it is relative to other values like "transparent" and "unbiased". I urge you to handle remarks criticizing management very cautiously (especially via actions invisible to even the moderators), it's a short slide from there to a community of sycophants that's unworthy of defending.

omaranto• 15 years ago

All of your spiel about wanting the StackExchange community to be nice is fine and I agree with it, but it is irrelevant here since the comments Atwood deleted were not "non-nice". If he is so sensitive that he construed them as such he probably should not be a moderator.

b0sk3• 15 years ago

Reading the exchanges, it seems that Prof.Clark and Jeff Atwood had prior exchanges wherein Jeff was asked not to privately email Clark. It seems to be a classic case of power struggle.

But I'll say this -- Mathematicians are strange cats. My boss is one. His emails seem extremely rude but he's one of the nicest guys in person.

Tycho• 15 years ago

Stack exchange is useful for finding technical answers, but the sense of community I get there is not something I want to participate in (far too much editing/screening of other peoples' content by people who really must have something better to do).

The unilateral removal of comments by Jeff Atwood

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