A day in the life of a stackoverflow moderator...

http://stackoverflow.com/posts/16630713/revisions

by p8952 • 13 years ago

75 39 13 years ago

stackoverflow.com

kunai• 13 years ago

Let's just hope this doesn't get renamed to "Revisions" by some misanthropic, overzealous HN invisimod.

kbar13• 13 years ago

kunai your posts aren't showing up

plus-• 13 years ago

The diff algorithm is a bit weird

gecko• 13 years ago

It's trying to do word-by-word diffing, since English isn't code, but, unlike Word and other tools that attempt to do that, it doesn't have e.g. cursor movement history to make the editing sane. Thus, that's what you get.

This is a similar problem to what you have on other diff programs, by the way. Any sane diff tool will give you an equivalent diff to any other one, and it'll give you an equivalent minimal diff as well, but the human friendliness of the diff varies widely on the algorithms selected. The best tools I've seen use some source awareness to give you a diff that can pick up that e.g. you removed an "if" guard and then unintendented its child block. The worst do a greedy linear scan to make their patches. Most tools I use (especially ones based on a recursive algorithm) are in the middle.

ThomW• 13 years ago

What kind of jerk has his question answered by the Stackoverflow community, then insist it be pulled so others don't benefit?

pothibo• 13 years ago

Revision #8 is insane... I don't understand what goes through his head

gnagatomo• 13 years ago

He tries again at #19. What a shame...

praptak• 13 years ago

The user clearly believes it is his duty to prevent Google from unfairly benefitting from the existence of the question.

gorrillamcd3• 13 years ago

What he fails to realize is that the site that just helped him depends on Google for a large portion of their traffic (and thus, revenue).

denzil_correa3• 13 years ago

I did some analysis and I found out that roughly 1/8 of the delete questions on Stackoverflow are deleted by the author of the question.

landr0id• 13 years ago

Do you know the context of those though? I delete my questions from time-to-time because they're very specific to my setup or they end up being something really basic like a missing semicolon or a typo somewhere.

bronsoja• 13 years ago

I like how the latest revision is a cleanup edit that introduces another typo.

gcb1• 13 years ago

its probably an attempt at a "reddit roll"

gorrillamcd3• 13 years ago

I like this user. He seems fun to mess with. :)

kevando3• 13 years ago

Amazing post. I feel like CS courses should have requirements that make them take up some of this duty.

kevando3• 13 years ago

Amazing post. I feel like CS courses should have requirements that make them take up some of this duty.

This is amazing post. I believe CS courses should require students to help moderate Stackoverflow.com posts.

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aiiane• 13 years ago

Please no. That would be worse than the existing situation; many of the problem cases on SO are CS students.

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Dirlewanger• 13 years ago

If anything we need high schools to actually teach how to write effectively and concisely, not fill out a 5 paragraph template for 4 years. Too many kids go into college and coast on writing bullshit and fluff.

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kevando3• 13 years ago

And what if I'm just jealous I didn't have SO during my CS days and want to punish the kids a bit? Is that so bad?

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itafroma4• 13 years ago

I think this was supposed to show the crap Stack Overflow power users have to deal with, but I think it more clearly shows some of the worst qualities of the Stack Overflow moderation system.

With a large caveat that moderators have the ability to scrub context from a problem question (e.g., comments) and user (e.g., deleting their past submissions), this is what appears to the outside world:

* A new user asks what they think is a dumb question.

* They get an answer. Still thinking it was a dumb question and not knowing how Stack Overflow works, attempts to blank out the question and request deletion.

* A user with 22k rep (i.e., a power user) goes in and rolls back the question.

* The asker rolls back the rollback.

At this point, the appropriate thing to do is flag the question for a moderator (important addendum: and move on). That doesn't happen. Instead:

* The power user—who really should know better—gets into a petty rollback war with the asker, and the question gets reverted 15 times in 5 minutes before another power user steps in and reverts it.

* The roll back wars stop, but an hour later a diamond moderator steps in and locks the question anyway. (Correction: I originally said it was unlocked 45 minutes later, but child comments correctly point out it was unlocked automatically a week later).

* The asker, who by all appearances has asked a single question, gets banned for 15 years.[1]

* The question, while not the best question ever, is decent enough and gets interesting answers but somehow gets a -35 score (edit: now down to -41 in the 20 minutes since I posted this comment), making it one of the worst questions on the site.[2] The comments[3] speculate that it was due to the edit war. So much for voting on a question instead of the person.

It's stuff like this that drives people up the wall when it comes to Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange, and it happens way too easily (I know I slipped into it a few times during my time as a Stack Exchange power user).

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/users/2398036/user2398036

[2]: The questions page, when sorted by votes, only goes to -27 on page 410,195: http://stackoverflow.com/questions?page=410195&sort=votes

[3] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16630713/is-it-true-in-py...

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tommmmmm• 13 years ago

It was unlocked a week later.

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itafroma4• 13 years ago

Thanks, corrected.

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chrisaycock• 13 years ago

What you've described is not at all what happened.

Still thinking it was a dumb question and not knowing how Stack Overflow works, attempts to blank out the question and request deletion.

No, the user rewrote his entire post to

  ok i got my answers, we can delete this post now, i am not
  helping google users.

He then added
IF YOU GUYS ROLL BACK AGAIN, I AM CHANGING MY NICK TO " ALLAH AKBAR " AND YOU WILL ALL LOOK LIKE JIHAD CLUB MEMBERS OF OSAMA BIN LADEN.
That's hardly "requesting deletion".
a diamond moderator steps in and locks the question anyway, only to unlock it 45 minutes later.
The post was unlocked a week later by Stack Overflow's robot ("Community"), automatically.
At this point, the appropriate thing to do is flag the question for a moderator. That doesn't happen.
You don't know that. In fact, I'm willing to wager that the user flagged the question immediately but it took an hour for one of the moderators to get around to it. The "review queue" on Stack Overflow is enormous; it takes a long time for moderators to get to some flags.
Disclaimer: I'm a moderator on a smaller Stack Exchange site.

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itafroma4• 13 years ago

The post was unlocked a week later by Stack Overflow's robot ("Community"), automatically.

Thanks, corrected.

In fact, I'm willing to wager that the user flagged the question immediately but it took an hour for one of the moderators to get around to it.

I would hope so, and I thank you for calling this line out, because I forgot one imporant action. As a moderator yourself, you know that the appropriate action once a user rolls back a valid edit to the question is to flag the question for a moderator and move on, which obviously didn't happen. I've amended my original comment.

What you've described is not at all what happened.

Outside of those two minor points, it doesn't seem like you disagree with my account.

-----

To address the edit you made after I replied:

No, the user rewrote his entire post to
> ok i got my answers, we can delete this post now, i am not helping google users.

That sounds like blanking out his question and requesting deletion to me.

He then added
> IF YOU GUYS ROLL BACK AGAIN, I AM CHANGING MY NICK TO " ALLAH AKBAR " AND YOU WILL ALL LOOK LIKE JIHAD CLUB MEMBERS OF OSAMA BIN LADEN.

He added that in revision 8, after the power user reverted his question 3 times in less than a minute.

As a moderator yourself, you know that every day users come to Stack Exchange that don't know how the system works, it's a given, and they'll make mistakes. This question did not deserve the treatment it got but this type of thing happens with too much frequency for whatever reason: jaded power users, too large of a review queue, whatever. My point here is that while this looks like "mission accomplished" for a Stack Exchange power user, from an outside perspective, this looks positively kafkaesque.

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gorrillamcd3• 13 years ago

15 years?! I didn't know moderators could set arbitrary dates for a "temporary suspension". A month would be reasonable for a first offense I would think.

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peeters• 13 years ago

It was an automatically created "session" user (http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/44557/why-should-i-r...), an anonymous user given an ad hoc account which they can later convert into a normal account. I don't know that issuing this ban in itself blocks that person from signing up for another account tomorrow. Places like Wikipedia get more sophisticated to prevent so-called "sock puppetry", I'm not sure if SO does the same automatically when an account is banned.

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klodolph2• 13 years ago

Accounts are cheap. Free, in fact. Length of suspension should be related to the severity of the offenses (in this case, vandalism and abusive/offensive speech) and the likelihood to commit additional offenses (in this case, high because the user vandalized the question many times).

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Permit• 13 years ago

Stack Overflow isn't meant to be a special site where everybody is welcome. Joel Spolsky gave a talk[1] about how the most important function of their home page is its ability to drive much of the traffic away.

You may not agree, but in the eyes of most StackOverflow members, a user who posts "I will change my name to Allah Akbar if you revert my question" is generally considered a negative for the community. It is a feature, not a bug, that people like this are driven away.

Also, you seem to really be twisting the facts when you claim the user wants to delete it because they thought it was a dumb question. I'm not sure if you didn't read the logs, but they cited their primary concern as "ok i got my answers, we can delete this post now, i am not helping google users.".

http://vimeo.com/68200924

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itafroma4• 13 years ago

You misunderstand the point of my post: it's not merely that this user was driven away, but that the community moderation has run amok on this post over a simple, and easily resolvable problem. There is no reason why:

1. two high-rep users should've engaged in a rapid-fire edit war with a new user

2. the question deserves a -35 score

I'd also argue that there was no reason the user should've been given a 15-year ban (really, 15 years? Even if one concedes a warning or a short-term ban wasn't enough, a month or even a year wasn't enough either?), but I'll agree to disagree on that.

This should be held as an example of what not to do, because this level of overreaction by the community in moderating a single bad post is what drives people nuts with Stack Exchange. It's not necessary, but because of the way moderation is structured on Stack Exchange, it's so damn easy to do.

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iLoch• 13 years ago

I had a moderator change the wording of my writing because they didn't like the way I was doing it, it looked a lot like what was going on here. They revised it such that it partially lost the meaning of what I was saying, but also just didn't come across the way I had intended to write it - so I changed it back. Then they changed it back. Then I changed it back again. Then they changed it back. Finally I changed the post back to my own wording, and I guess the moderator said "fuck it" because the changes stopped.

The mods seem a little power hungry. If you're a SO mod, I'm sure you've got better things to do than correct tiny grammatical quirks that make people who they are - try focusing on the bigger issues.

Edit: Ahh, mine wasn't quite this dramatic - I didn't notice how many revisions there were. This is hilarious and sad.

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klodolph2• 13 years ago

I doubt it was a moderator that edited your post. Moderators are unlikely to engage in edit wars because it would be easier for them to lock the post.

Your post may have been edited by just another user. Look for a diamond ♦ in the username. The diamond indicates that the user is a moderator. However, any user with 2,000 rep or more can edit posts. There are a lot of 2k rep users on Stack Overflow! Some of them are teenagers (look at the profiles).

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chc• 13 years ago

The mods seem a little power hungry. If you're a SO mod, I'm sure you've got better things to do than correct tiny grammatical quirks that make people who they are - try focusing on the bigger issues.

It was probably another user instead of a mod — Stack Overflow is a weird combination of a forum and a wiki, so people are allowed to fix each other's posts.

Besides that, though, I think you should consider the possibility that you were also in the wrong. Just because their edit lost meaning doesn't mean it didn't also add something useful. Instead of reverting, I think a better approach would have been to add those meaningful aspects back in and call attention to them, since they obviously weren't clear to everyone. If a hard revert was really necessary, you could have just explained why.

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denzil_correa3• 13 years ago

If you want to read answers from the Stackoverflow moderators(or Diamond users as they are called) you might want to check the discussion on meta.stackoverflow.

http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/166623/what-is-a-day...

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calgaryeng• 13 years ago

Life of a stackoverflow moderator - closed as off topic :)

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MrZongle2• 13 years ago

This must be the part of the day where the moderators aren't closing useful questions due to subjectivity.

I really wish they could just have a "subjective" flag and let users filter out those posts as they see fit. Some of the closed-subjective material is quite useful, as it contains the hows and whys behind developers choosing a framework or widget or technical solution over another.

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