The future - 2019-11-07

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12:34 AM

Has it been officially stated whether the vote reputation thing is true?

1:25 AM

This room isn’t listed in my recent messages

Or the all rooms list

What’s up with that?

Glitch?

1 hour later…

De Novo supports GoFundMonica

2:36 AM

@Stormblessed I don't believe it's a glitch, no

user245382

What gets my goat about all this is the way SE is treating the community with these sorts of changes. I first started noticing it with the Welcome Wagon, but I'm sure it's been going on a lot longer than that.

user245382

First, SE thinks of something that seems good, to them, to implement. Then they implement it. Then they tell the community about it later.

user245382

What they should be doing is 1) Ask the community what they want. 2) Listen. 3) Act on that.

user245382

StackExchange shows, by their actions, that they don't care about what we have to say, or about what we want.

user245382

I think this leak was a good thing.

4:24 AM

@Stormblessed because this room was made by user invitation, thus low priority discussion room :)

4:34 AM

@MetaAndrewT. wait so what’s that mean?

@House-'ReinstateMonica'-man no it’s not a good thing to betray the trust SE has in many of the moderators

user245382

5:07 AM

@Stormblessed If a member of an organization becomes a whistleblower, you could say the same thing about "betraying trust", but that doesn't really tell the whole story, does it?

user245382

sometimes, trust is betrayed for a reason.

user245382

From the leak: "Let us make the fight public before they once again push unannounced changes without discussing with it's communtiy"

5:36 AM

@Stormblessed Not exactly, but none of the mods have actually denied that question upvotes will get 10 points.

@House-'ReinstateMonica'-man no this isn't the same

from my understanding this was that SE told the mods about something, intending to post about it publicly

@House-'ReinstateMonica'-man At least they were trying to discuss it with the mods. OTOH,

One of them leaked it before it was public

yesterday, by PM 2Ring

I guess they're upset that SE want to roll out yet another change. Sure, they're showing the mods, but I get the impression that the change will happen, and that's not up for negotiation.

It's just not good

20 hours ago, by Journeyman Geek

Someone just basically stabbed every other mod, and all the CMs who are actually on our side in the back.

Journeyman Geek

5:37 AM

Yup

It's not some noble leaker

Journeyman Geek

@House-'ReinstateMonica'-man We have never really had that level of agency, ever

We did have really good communication

@Stormblessed Indeed. But I'm not inclined to fully trust the word of a person who has demonstrated that they are willing to betray the trust that SE & the rest of the mods had in them.

This is more comparable to leaking to the enemy where some secret boat thing is than exposing that the government records every one of our phone calls (but obviously not anywhere near that level)

Journeyman Geek

@Stormblessed More like leaking to the public that your secret service is talking to their secret service, to try to get their respective governments from doing something potentially monumentally stupid

5:41 AM

oh do you not like the proposed change @Journeyman ?

What do you, as a much more experienced user, think?

Journeyman Geek

@Stormblessed and there's the frustrating part

I can't talk about any of it without betraying the same trust that our leaker potentially did

@Stormblessed for the actual rep change - its imaginary internet points

We might get a few avid users sooner, but I feel the short and long term effects will be minimal

And honestly, playing for rep is boring :D

Well yeah but do you think it’ll hurt the site? Seems like it’ll get some more experienced users privileges I think they deserve (e.g. me on Scifi) but also give some idiots who don’t know anything too much power (me on Politics)

So... uh.... yeah

Journeyman Geek

@Stormblessed you might not use it though

or if you misused it, the other mechanisms should, in theory mitigate that

I expect that the sudden rep & privileges boosts across the network will upset some people:

yesterday, by PM 2Ring

Do I need to remind anyone about the bad vibes that arose with Documentation?

I mean I like having power

Journeyman Geek

5:44 AM

You can totally get privileges grinding anything after all

@PM2Ring that's why messaging is important

but I think if this happens I’ll maybe have the 25K privileges for Politics Beta essentially from 20 or so questions

Journeyman Geek

In the earliest days, when the mountains were under the sea, policemen wore short pants, and ducks the size of cars....

We actually had 10 reputation a question

Its worth remembering, while reputation is important to people, rep levels and awarding is entirely arbitrary

With SO.Documentation, a bunch of clueless newbies got big chunks of rep in a very short timespan. The kickback was so severe, that SE had to make radical changes to the Documentation rep calculations.

Journeyman Geek

A question upvote is 5 points simply cause Jeff thought so.

Also, someone would need to upvote the question in the first place

I think that answers should give you more reputation that questions. The thing is, if you write a good answer, that generally takes more expertise than writing a good question

41

Q: What are the arguments for California’s nonpartisan blanket (jungle) primaries?

California has a system where two candidates, chosen in a nonpartisan primary, are on the ballot in each congressional or statewide race. It's sometimes called a jungle primary. This makes it so that some elections have two candidates from the same party; in 2016 seven congressional districts ha...

united-states primaries california nonpartisan-blanket-primary

See this question got good answers

But it was still based completely on a major misconception I’d had

5:50 AM

Personally, I approve of the change. So what if a bunch of people get a few more points, and a few more privileges? OTOH, I don't think it will have any effect on boosting question quality, since so many poor questions come from people with very low rep. But I suppose it might make them feel a little more invested in the site.

25

A: What does a black-and-white Puerto Rican flag signify?

It was used in 2016 as a symbol of protesting the US’s passing of PROMESA, a law making a board control parts of the island’s economy and having unpopular measures such as decreasing the minimum wage by three dollars. A group painted over a famous mural of the flag with black: After this, it b...

Journeyman Geek

@Stormblessed You go into a answer knowing

Asking a good question means starting at nothing and working out what you don't know ;p

This answer took quite a bit more effort, but under the changes would get >half of the amount of reputation

@JourneymanGeek sorry, I don’t understand that sentence?

@JourneymanGeek yes, true

Journeyman Geek

@Stormblessed to post a good answer - you have a question to start with

it is merely the application of what you already know and have into a form useful for others.

I'd say a great question takes more work

I agree with the first party certainly

Yeah some of my questions were really hard to write. Dang words are hard :o

5:55 AM

About a year ago, there was a mentoring experiment on SO to improve question quality for newbies. They could post their raw question in a "sandbox" area, where mentors would help them clean up the question so it'd be fit to post on the main site. The mentors were not supposed to actually answer the question, just supply appropriate meta information. Unfortunately, the experiment was a dismal failure.

@PM2Ring oh what caused the failure?

@Stormblessed Various things. Newbies not understanding the whole purpose of the mentoring, so they expected to get actual answers in the sandbox. Mentors getting frustrated and burned out, and not getting any rep rewards for their hard work. Other mentors answering questions in the sandbox.

So lots of the newbies going into the sandbox were expecting that they'd be spoon-fed answers to their half-baked homework questions.

IMHO, if you want newbies to get more points for their questions, you don't need to increase the rep of upvotes. You need to encourage people to cast more votes on questions. OTOH, you don't want to reward poor questions out of pity for the poor clueless newbie who doesn't know how to write a good question.

There are plenty of newbies who do try to do the right thing. They read the Help pages, they familiarise themselves with the site & learn what good questions look like.

Journeyman Geek

@PM2Ring changing behaviour is hard

changing settings is easy D:

@PM2Ring I guess also it didn't quite scale.

6:11 AM

But there are heaps that don't. You have to wonder if they even bothered looking over the site before dumping their homework question. On some sites, eg Physics (which has a very strict homework policy) we often get questions that have no text, apart from the title, just a photo of a question from their textbook. Here's a recent example, although it's not quite that bad, since it does have some text in the question body:

See physics.stackexchange.com/q/511682/123208

Journeyman Geek

and the closevotes and downvotes have it

and there's a few folks who do worry me, but we can deal

@JourneymanGeek Correct. And the software was a bit clunky. I guess it could've worked better if the mentors had more training, and got rep & badges. And if there were a larger pool of mentors.

Journeyman Geek

@PM2Ring finding folks who're actually going to sit down and babysit a random stranger is hard

@JourneymanGeek Definitely. We do a bit of that in the SO Python room. We still expect them to ask coherent answerable question, but we aren't as strict as the main site, since we're reasonably good at helping people to focus their vague questions. And they aren't total newbies, since they've earned enough points to talk in chat, and they've explored the site enough to actually find chat. ;)

Journeyman Geek

And all those things matter ;)

user245382

6:19 AM

@JourneymanGeek That's what would seem to be the source of the problem. That's my grievance against the company, anyway. I, for one, am not enjoying the company dictating things to the community first and getting community input second.

Journeyman Geek

@House-'ReinstateMonica'-man a company in touch with the community would have a better idea what's needed, and how to communicate things

user245382

Sounds reasonable

Journeyman Geek

Literally half the things people are teed off at are things Jeff did with nary a shrug

user245382

Is the company even in touch with the community? It doesn't seem like it

Journeyman Geek

Well - it was a lot better at one point

But it was also a smaller community

6:23 AM

@House-'ReinstateMonica'-man Yes, it'd be nice if things were a bit more democratic. OTOH, it's their site, so they get to make the rules, and if we don't like those rules nobody's forcing us to use the site. Still, I'd feel a lot more comfortable if the people making the rules actually participated in the site so they felt like members of the community, not a bunch of overlords in some ivory tower.

user245382

Like I said in an earlier comment, how do we get SE to even listen? Seems like this was just one of many actions taken to try to achieve that. It's almost like a riot, where people are causing random chaos because normal channels have utterly failed.

Journeyman Geek

@PM2Ring parts of that is going to need lots of work

@House-'ReinstateMonica'-man well - its worth considering there's probably many different views and many different teams doing their own thing

So... tricky.

user245382

@JourneymanGeek I have a hard time empathizing with big companies, a la the overlords in the ivory tower. Excuses don't help much, especially given what we've seen with monica-gate. Are we calling it that now? I like that term.

user245382

If Nancy, or Bob, or whoever has enough authority, could just take a week off from whatever it is they normally do to participate on meta and really listen to our concerns, I'd think we'd all benefit from it immensely.

Journeyman Geek

@House-'ReinstateMonica'-man Well, I see/talk to SE employees as people

@House-'ReinstateMonica'-man Meta is hard to do effectively

doubly so now

6:31 AM

One big thing that concerns me is when people (eg Tim Post) day that the goal was to build a repository of knowledge, and that goal has been largely completed. Yes, there is a huge amount of excellent info here. But it's not like gold sitting in a vault. It's more like a collection of fine wines in a cellar. Some of those vintages mature nicely, but some of them have a limited Use By date.

A lot of work & expertise is needed to keep the knowledge repository valuable & useful. Some stuff is relatively timeless, but a lot of stuff is going out of date. And it risks being drowned in a flood of low quality & duplicate questions & low quality answers.

Journeyman Geek

@PM2Ring also, having nothing fun/new to answer is boring D:

user245382

@JourneymanGeek Is that helping?

Journeyman Geek

@House-'ReinstateMonica'-man in small ways

Certainly better than impotant rage. And it gives me something to work with

user245382

Is it like mopping up a street, or sealing cracks on a dam? Like I said in that comment...

Journeyman Geek

@House-'ReinstateMonica'-man Well - least from my perspective, it helps gets mods back on the table.

and as a mod I try hard to communicate with my community

And well

I've been on SE for nearly a decade? Been a mod about 4 years.

I've seen the ups and downs, and stuff was actually improving before all this happened.

So I'm not just thinking about the crisis now

I'm also hoping we can get an understanding to prevent the next one

6:39 AM

@JourneymanGeek Indeed. For several years, a lot of high rep experts have been drifting away, or reducing their participation because of the increasing influx of low quality questions, and the lack of good questions that are satisfying to answer. The whole Welcome Wagon thing only added to that, driving away more experts and making it harder for people to criticize bad questions for fear of being penalized for being unwelcoming.

Now I'm not trying to excuse unfriendly behaviour, but people do need to be able to take criticism of poor content without taking it personally.

Journeyman Geek

@PM2Ring the problem with the welcome wagon, and the summer of love is well...

you can't do that with a blog post.

user245382

Yeah, from my admittedly limited perspective, things started going downhill with the welcome wagon. The community wasn't asked or consulted, it was just COMMANDED from on high. That's where I think the crux of the whole issue is. SE doesn't care about what the community thinks.

Journeyman Geek

@House-'ReinstateMonica'-man It probably started way earlier

@JourneymanGeek Exactly. But SE don't seem to get that. They just keep rolling out the blog posts...

Journeyman Geek

@House-'ReinstateMonica'-man it wasn't even that. It was just "we're doing this thing"

but it had no effect.

and I actually think the big slope downhill was when folks basically decided that SO was the only thing that mattered.

It got better but...

6:43 AM

One definition of madness is when someone keeps doing the same thing over & over in the face of clear evidence that it's not doing what you want it to do. I guess by that definition, we're all a bit mad. ;)

Journeyman Geek

We're still dealing with the fallout from that

Well careers I guess

but that was the last low point.

user245382

How would you "fix things"?

user245382

if you were CEO?

Journeyman Geek

lol

Beef up the community team

Other than that, I don't know what goes on inside SE

maybe shuffle a few people around. Piss off a few people by promoting them

Help folks from groups I want to help a little more directly by offering internships

Other than I don't know

Undo a few things I felt were mistakes. ;p

user245382

well I hope you can help us get back to a good place, whatever path you take

Journeyman Geek

6:56 AM

Oh, I'm doubtful I can do much on my own

But I can try to help the people trying to do the same

7:15 AM

@JourneymanGeek Both in numbers and terms of their ability to actually influence things :)

Journeyman Geek

@V2Blast Well - I don't know how things work now

So I can't really comment on how much influence they have either

@JourneymanGeek True enough

Journeyman Geek

Or the internal dynamics driving change

I wonder if it'd encourage people to upvote questions if you scored 1 rep point for upvoting a question...

Journeyman Geek

Folks would start writing bots to upvote random things for free rep :D

7:29 AM

There's already an userscript that automatically upvotes every non downvoted post you visit

people would start using that

I suppose so.

4 hours later…

11:09 AM

@JourneymanGeek the only thing I have some doubt with is that this also means that downvotes on question will have even less weight on gained score. Before, 3 downvotes nullified a single upvote, now you will need 5.

basically, a single "pity upvote" will have you covered until you hit -5

Journeyman Geek

@Hitodama Well, That's true of an answer too though. And question downvotes might still be free?

but will get someone Q-banned quickly 😜

@JourneymanGeek yep, and if you notice many users do indeed post "try and see if I can get some vote" low quality answers that often aren't even answering the asked question...

Journeyman Geek

They do

I hope a similar change won't have the effect of making users "care less" on question too.

Journeyman Geek

11:12 AM

We'll see

oh, I know, for now I am not worried.

Just a suggestion maybe, if you can relay it to the staff.

When they will roll this out (IF), probably it would be better to add a disclaimer to the public announcement.

Journeyman Geek

@Hitodama I'd be surprised if it hasn't come out yet

but then, for very casual users, what is the meaning of rep?

they probably just want to upvote and comment, and that's all...

> "We are doing this as a test for about 1-3 months while we will monitor the results. If the results are not the ones we expect, we will have to roll back the change. So, keep in mind that the extra rep you will gain during the test period could technically be lost if we will have to roll-back"

I would add something like this to the announcement.

Journeyman Geek

@Hitodama If that's the intention, they will say so

11:18 AM

@JourneymanGeek I know that they "will say what they intend to say". I am saying that I think it would be convenient for them to act this way.

It both shows that they care about the result and gives a way out if this goes bad.

(aka: we told us this could be rolled back, please no arguments about "I lost 1k rep!")

The choice is obviously theirs, but this is what I would do in their place.

Journeyman Geek

Well, you arn't. Neither am I

@JourneymanGeek and that is why this was a friendly suggestion to help them, not a commander order they have to execute I guess

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Nov '197

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