StackOverflow — A strict community indeed
I started using StackOverflow seven years ago, and i love the site for the value it provides to developers. With github, it is certainly the most important developer social network on the internet.
Over the years i enjoyed building my reputation and getting to Top 2%.
As a user i quickly realized that StackOverflow is a very strict community, with high-quality standards for user content. The moderators (and i am one of them) are spending a lot of time cleaning up the site from duplicated and low-quality questions and answers.
“There are plenty of places on the internet where people can go to ask programming questions without being held to a standard. SO is one of the few places that’s not like that. It was built like that from the start, very intentionally. It’s the prime reason for so much of its success, that it has narrowed the scope of what types of questions it allows to just those to which are likely to generate quality content.
Some people don’t like that. That’s fine. SO isn’t the entire internet.”
— Servy, Moderator, Top 1%
Being a crowdsourcing system, every user is a moderator to some degree and the strict community is fertile ground for moderators who love to punish others, but also for good guys who like to help their fellow developers. Being strict and removing trash is good in the community.
Down-voting people? yes please. Removing “bad” questions? of course. Posting public critique? Hell yeah.
I think this is good for the quality of content, but the strict behavior of moderators can go very very far into questionable punisher behaviors.
The fact is on StackOverflow every individual chooses his general approach to moderation and his flavor of criticism, while following the general guidelines.
While there are many positive critics on StackOverflow, there are many destructive ones too.
Can you imagine a StackOverflow user, so frustrated by another user he sends an email to a CEO of company Y to complain about the company employee “bad questions” on StackOverflow?
It just happened today.
The user that sent the email has no relation whatsoever with company Y.
For fun and learning i have copied the full e-mail delivered to CEO’s inbox here:
Hello,
I’m writing to make a complaint about one of your employees who is constantly spamming StackOverflow with ridiculously low quality questions.
A person named XYZ, who classifies themselves as an XYZ developer, keeps spamming StackOverflow’s ‘X’, ‘Y’ and ‘Z’ threads with unbelievably low quality questions. Most of his questions do not make any sense and are therefore unanswerable. Some questions make sense, but are so broad that the only answer would be about a 200 page research of all the plausible and considerable options.
Most of his accounts get blocked due to this constant spam of unanswerable questions, but he keeps making new ones on a daily basis.
Here’s a list of his accounts we have encountered just this week: 1, 2, 3.
Pay attention to the number of downvotes the questions have received. Downvotes are fairly uncommon in StackOverflow.
I’ll be honest and just say that this kind of stuff drives me mad and leaves me wondering if this person is really getting paid for asking dumb questions on StackOverflow?
Can you please tell him to stop and assign someone to teach him and answer his questions?
All the best,
X Y
Software engineer at YZY
The employee didn’t meet the quality bar required on StackOverflow, and his basic questions about RxJava were not accepted by the community. Also creating accounts and spamming with “bad questions” is certainly not acceptable. However, the employee is an junior which is having a hard time with an advanced reactive architecture.
This e-mail made me question the human psychology and behavior of people in Strict online communities.
As users, are we making sure that we don’t waste moderator’s precious time? are we doing the best to do our homework and post quality content?
As moderators, are we helping people? and what are our values? was sending an email to a CEO a helpful action? would sending an email to the developer himself be a better action?
We need more empathy from both sides. Users should make sure to honor the community rules and not waste people’s time, but moderators should be more careful to not send emails to CEOs if not needed and risk people getting ridiculed and fired.
I think StackOverflow needs a solid escalation procedure for bad behavior, and better tools to introduce new users into the system and educate them how to use SO properly.
“In my experience, human error usually is a result of poor design: it should be called system error. Humans err continually; it is an intrinsic part of our nature. System design should take this into account.”
“Bad design and procedures lead to breakdowns where, eventually the last link is a person who gets blamed, and punished.”
— Dan Norman