@ShadowTheVaccinatedWizard TBH - there's 3 possible scenarios I was thinking of
One - we lose a mod temporarily or permanantly due to either good reasons, two - natural potential attrition, three we might have situations where mod workload spikes
@KevinB nothing about that process related to MSE, though. We have no intentions of having elections here. I can get to the election builder here but the big question is what would happen when the election tried to start running.
@Mithical technically - if SE sorted out the reasons you quit, and you were inclined to, I don't think getting back your old diamond would be that hard
I'm not entirely sure why someone would want to be a meta mod tho :D
@JourneymanGeek A lot of the problems have, at least from my perspective as a non-mod, significantly improved. Since a lot of the problems were only really visible with mod access it's hard to see without, y'know, reclaiming it. You can see where the issue is there ;)
IMO SE has taken significant steps towards the right direction and I think overall is moving towards a positive place - there are still issues remaining but there seems to be more communication with mods and more opportunities for mods to get a voice (granted, I only became a mod in September 2020, so I don't really know if the internals are changing or have just always been this way), and SE seems to be improving on that and focusing on its communities
(although there are very justified complaints about overprioritizing on SO/Teams and ignoring the network that doesn't give as much profit)
eh, to me it feels like the outward appearance has improved significantly, but a lot of the things the community overwhelmingly reacted negatively to happened and continued anyway.
@KevinB That's true. There are of course still things that have either not improved or not changed enough. The overall direction seems positive but of course imperfect.
@KevinB Hmmm... not sure I quite agree with that. They tried that; they quickly realized that that wouldn't work. Meta does play a role, just not quite as large as the Days of Yoreβ’.
@KevinB can you explain that? I don't think that reflects things at all. The changes to review and the outdated answers work and new user onboarding are all going through review on meta and many of the things y'all have brought to our attention have been addressed or caused a change in direction for the project.
the outdated answers project for example. the first step was to generate a survey that we weren't allowed to participate in (unless you got chosen), followed by implementation where, again, we're not allowed to participate unless we get chosen, and then some time in the future we'll be given the result
i didn't follow the review changes closely, unless the changes are removing the audit process and replacing it with something less irritating i'm not really interested
... ok. But you're discounting the work we're doing and saying that we're not working with the community because we're either not doing it the way you want or we're not building the thing you want. Do you see how that's not particularly a helpful characterization? We're doing a ton of work and you're free to disagree with it but making it seem like we're doing nothing isn't very nice.
@Catija sorry but this does not sound very good. It's either "there is no feedback loop", or "nothing we consider worthy for you, as mortal, to see". Nothing really fatal, but still, if there is some feedback going on, having it more public could be nice.
@ShadowTheVaccinatedWizard why add the qualifiers? There's literally nothing. None of the recent projects have gone through the council at all... for two reasons... the council isn't supposed to be for that stuff anyway (their focus is policy, not features or tooling) and also because the council did a lot of work to organize themselves and then it kinda fizzled out. We're working on it right now but I don't have anything to share at the moment.
Well for what it's worth then... As a current pro-tem mod council member I can pretty much confirm everything Catija just said and that there's nothing hiding behind a 'confidential' label.
@KevinB Also, I don't remember anything ever leaking from the moderator council. If you're remembering this, that wasn't the council but the mod team, different things.
Depends on the nature of it. Creating sockpuppet accounts on SE is allowed as long as you don't commit voter fraud or any abuse with it. You can create a question from an alt account (you don't even have to register it)
do keep in mind that you won't get reputation from it of course, and you have to be careful to not accidentally give away it's you
if it's really that sensitive, it's probably best not asking on a public Q&A site
@Tinkeringbell good point. it is technically a possibility though... I think. I wouldn't really recommend it either. I'd just say exclude enough details to make it not that sensitive / not contain private info.
@KevinB How would you know? By definition, if the community has not figured it out, you wouldn't know: you would just see a question and have no reason to think there's a different user behind it.
So yes, if I post a question with a different account and say "I am actually active on SE, I am a moderator of one site and an ex mod of another two and have a guitar in my avatar but I am posting this anonymously" then you'll easily find out it's me :)
@Tinkeringbell Listen I'm thinkin' about it! I got the rep required to make tags, I've just gotta come up with questions that'd be worth it to put on there :P
@Tinkeringbell It's a bit of a mix. WoW, League of Legends (which has some questions I've answered over there, but many of them are outdated. I've yet to look too deeply into how Arqade wants to handle outdated answers/questions.) Escape from Tarkov (little activity, interesting game), a wider variety of newer games that don't yet have tags... I've noticed that Arqade is cool with having as many game-tags as they want provided it has at least one decent question for it.
So, while I'll complain about how there isn't yet an existing interest in the stuff that I like there, it's mostly just musing. I know that I could probably try and get some sort of basis set there, even if nothing much comes of it.
That form of exchange just doesn't interest me for gaming related topics... for the same reason asking anything about a programming language that is very accessible in the docs on SO is irritating, even if it technically hasn't been asked yet
@Spevacus Oh! I know a bit about how they handle outdated answers :D. I encountered one once, and the protocol was to offer a bounty and leave a comment on the existing answer to point out that it could be updated and earn a bounty for the effort :)
@KevinB For one thing, I like Arqade because it doesn't have 20 popups, an ad blocker blocker and any annoying ads. But for some games, there are excellent wikis/forums out there and then yeah, I'm less likely to ask on Arqade and just use a wiki/forum
like recently someone asked a wow question that they knew the answer to, and answered it, because they didn't like how wowhead presents information... it's pointless. the information is out there for anyone who wants it to easily find it, for arqade to be of any use at all on that topic it'd need to have a lot more than that one qa pair to become useful for that topic
i hate their ad situation as well, but arqade can't compete with their completeness/accuracy
@Catija It's extremely easy to single out the few instances where there was no response to feature suggestions, or take legitimate declines (discussed and team came to a consensus not to implement) as flat denials without consideration.
Some people are used to the prior model from the Jeff and post-Jeff days when everything would get a response, and want a return to that model, but don't realize that the scale has changed dramatically since then
it's more, i'd rather be able to participate in the things we are using to determine what we do going forward. I don't post enough answers on MSO to claim i'm being ignored
In general, our focus is on making sure the platform works. Right now there's a lot of very basic things that don't work well and are potentially catastrophic for the future of the site. That's because we stopped focusing on the platform while we built things like Talent/Jobs. Now, 7 years later, there's a ton of stuff that needs to scale with SO volume or aging that... we have to address before we can work on more detail-focused fixes.
For that reason, we identify things that we need to fix. And... lots of people have asked for those fixes. Outdated answers has been a concern for at least 5 years. New user onboarding has been asked for since the second iteration of the stack exchange quality project... review was confusing and not responsive and not interesting to people to participate in... these are important things to address.
One thing that I don't really like about redesigns of SE features in general is that the team doesn't really go through prior meta posts about the thing in question and see that some things that are there were actually added in response to feature suggestions. I often see little things removed as they get deemed insignificant, but were actually added in response to a heavily-supported feature request that is now suddenly de-implemented.
I was about to post an answer to the most recent product-discovery post asking that the team look into prior meta posts, but I didn't know if the answer would be received well as it wasn't a proper feedback suggestion.
@SonictheAnonymousHedgehog you're making assumptions about what's happening without even asking. We often spend a lot of time searching out existing meta posts to consider and we generally don't make changes without discussion of some sort.
In fact, I'd go so far as to point out that many of the announcements we make about new projects link to prior meta discussions... if we're missing them... say something. It's not always possible to recognize things that are important or find things when there's a decade of stuff to dig through.
@Catija I completely understand that now. The analogy is that of remodeling a house: as the house has been unmaintained for a long time, a lot of maintenance needs to be done to its internals (its foundation, plumbing, electricity, etc.), while it looks to users that nothing is being done since there are no visible changes to the usable features. But nothing can be done to those before the internals are fixed.
The solution to that is more visibility. The remodelers should give the homeowner a view into what pipe work/wiring work/etc. was done that day, so they know what's remaining and when their usable features will get remodeled. SE's addressing that with their roadmaps.
@KevinB looking at the homepage, thereβs very little discussion, and more about βfor politcisRelatedThing what happens for xβ and this is generally consistent with the theme of the site (speaking from expierence), and opinions/discussion are shut down fast.
Iβd say all troll posts on politics, as well as most opinionated ones get shut down because of the lower amount of question and the higher amount of high rep users.
my main concern of that is, what is considered internals? we've been seeing a lot of cosmetic changes, such as messing with post notices and css related things, are both equally considered things that the community shouldn't care about? or are internals something else entirely that's happening behind the scenes that isn't at all visible, and these things we are seeing are things happening on the side of whatever internals is.
Very little of what we're doing is purely behind the scenes. But there's elements that may impact some people more than others. The UI is completely redone and now responsive. That's what everyone sees. Along with being able to rank more than three people (which is a huge deal for elections with >2 seats).
But I now have buttons that do things y'all didn't realize were time consuming for us, such as creating the questionnaire collection posts, chat rooms, etc.
Running an election used to take about 3-4 hours over the course of the three weeks. It's now closer to an hour.
And most of that time is reviewing questions from the questionnaire. Everything else is really fast and practically automated.
And that's just the default time, not the answering questions in chat or handling flags time.... which depends less on UI and more on whether it's a SFF election or not. π
Even tiny things like making it possible to flag comments on nominations (and flag nominations themselves) are important to have but easy to miss.
Anyway, the point here is that even the stuff we're doing that's internal, we're still talking about publicly.
unfortunately (or fortunately, because it means the site is generally in great shape?) the issues I have are more... people issues. things like, people contesting questions being duplicates when the only difference between question A and B is cosmetic, and then that question being brought to meta resulting in it being upvoted rather than properly dealt with.
@KevinB Cosmetics and duplicate questions can go a few different ways. There's the obvious cosmetic duplicate where maybe the only difference is the variables being used. Those generally seem pretty undisputed. Where I tend to find more confusion is in questions that are more specific subsets of a broader question.
My general feeling there is that, if you have to find your answer in a single sentence within a much longer answer that doesn't generally relate to your specific question... maybe there's room for both to exist as separate questions?
@KevinB I think the concern there may be whether someone understands how to use the two solutions in concert? So, to use a math problem... if you have a question like this: 4 x (3 + 6)... if you consider that a duplicate of two separate questions: 4 x 9 and 3 + 6 - what happens if you don't know to do the 3 + 6 first?
@KevinB Finding a sentence inside a 10-paragraph answer is not always easy to do. That's why I'm not a huge fan of preferring huge canonical answers in some cases.
I'm just not a fan of leaving a question around, just because people might not have the knowledge to apply an answer to a different but same question to it.
in other words, i have no sympathy for people just looking for a copy-paste result.
there's an infinite number of ways fundamental questions that get asked daily can be unique, while still having the same ultimate answer if you know how to apply it
It's not always about copy paste, though. The focus has always been about specific, narrow questions. So preferring canonical answers seems like a departure from that focus. I don't think we should be answering the same exact question for each variable but I do think it's appropriate to make solutions easy to find. It's maybe easier to think about outside of SO (for me, anyway).
At what point do we transition from "heres your unique answer that will help only you" to "The answer over here explains how to resolve your problem"
I'd prefer people learn from their interactions here, gain the ability to see an existing solution and apply it to their situation. I juts don't know what pathway gets us there most reliably
@KevinB "messing with CSS" is a major overhaul of all electrical wiring within the house, to stick to the analogy. I think it is a long needed change to get things to be more maintainable and scale easier towards the future
Say someone wrote a 20k character answer to a question about something broad... then someone asks a specific question that happens to be addressed in one paragraph of that 20k character answer. I'd argue that forcing someone to dig through 20k characters to find the one paragraph that mentions the answer to their specific question is not appropriate. Particularly in cases where the question that bears that answer doesn't specifically relate to the other question, the answer just happened to mention the answer to the other question while being thorough.
each scenario that comes up related to that question is very unique, and the answers are too. but the underlying thing every single one of them covers is 100% the same
users in that scenario need a better understanding of javascript, not just an answer to their unique situation, and i feel the dupe target provides that (and there's literally no pushback in the community against this scenario)
@KevinB sure. But I'd still say there's times it's being overused. My one SO question got made a duplicate of a similar canonical question that... didn't in any way explain the solution to my specific question. I definitely want people to do the work but ... I think there's a middle ground between general answers and helping people who have more specific questions they're trying to understand. Duplicate closures can feel like slamming a door in their face.
Tim used to have this idea of answering as a duplicate. Meaning that someone could vote to close as a duplicate while quoting part of one of the answers that addressed the specific needs of the new question or, explaining a specific connection to the duplicate that the asker might not understand on sight.
It'd be a bit better than a comment and could reward people who went out of their way to actually identify duplicates and help users understand how they matched up.
Rewarding duplicate finders has also been a long-standing request.
an idea I floated for a new QA platform (which has the benefit of not existing yet and therefore being able to be anything) was being able to target a closure at an answer, and answers being able to have titles. effectively, instead of questions coming up when you search, answers do.
When i search for duplicates, i tend to use the site search or google
Questions rarely have the keywords i'm looking for because the people asking them aren't usually the most informed users in terms of what their problem is
@KevinB Well it could be an alt atribute for your answer. In that regard being able to include HTML anchors into your answer would also be a great benefit. In that way you can link easily to specific parts of a long answer. Which is ofcourse especially useful with FAQ posts
@Spevacus I wonder how it would work though, especially the reward part... I can also see that somehow backfiring in a kind of FGITW kind of way, especially since closing can take as much as 5 votes and there's still only one name on an answer?
I think the concern id have with using an answer as a duplicate is whether it would exacerbate the issue of people thinking that having the same answer means the question was the same. The usual sort of example is "what are the primary colors on a zebra?" and "what are the primary colors on a penguin?" The answers to both are "black and white" but the questions are not the same.
@Luuklag we'd talked about anchors now that we're using Common Mark (not that there's a CM spec for anchors). The difficulty is ensuring that the anchors are unique somehow.
He sorta will be. If only because he was on sabbatical for two months so he wasn't doing anything for that time. I think they generally do one week per month?
I had hoped SO Docs would have been a useful tool for dupes, allowing the creation of an "answer" that isn't directly tied to a question that applies broadly to a given common problem, but i feel like adding rep to docs the way they did ruined it
not every action needs to be encouraged with gamification
like the dupe closure scenario, simply getting people on board with the overall goal is often enough to get people to change
eh, there are those who simply don't care about the goal and just want rep. IMO they can do more harm than good, but i have no solution that. gamfication do what it do
Just watching a video on facebook. It can't get more Dutch then this. A guy commuting to work by bike, leaving his house at 6:30 to do 57 km's and be on time to start his job at 9 am
user707129
@Catija How many people reached out by email saying they were interested in a MSE mod position?
I want to whack Martijn over his usage of the word bami ballen... It's bami schijf and bitterbal! The shape is literally the only way to make sure you grab the right ones (bitterballen) if they're mixed XD
I specifically wanted to avoid people being nominated or it feeling anything like an election. Any sort of post, even on the mod team, would have felt too much like a competition.
@Catija Shift keys are pressed with the 'opposite' hand of whatever letter I'm typing... After all that's how the typing course said it should be and I never unlearned it
@Catija Did you type a lot before learning it? I have a theory that people that already had different habits sort of fall back to those after a course...
@Luuklag I was in 'groep 8', so 11. That would've been 2002
I had classmates doing their exercises on typewriters. I got to do mine on the computer, complete with putting colored stickers on the keyboard.... I never forget my dad's curses and grumbles when the poor man had to type something and had to look up each letter on a chart XD
@Tinkeringbell I don't think so? But I never really took the course particularly seriously. My typing speed was never particularly fast until I started using online forums and chatting with friends... so I guess that I just... adjusted to improve speed over time.
@KevinB Schools are stupid like that. I had this one teacher that was convinced I was cheating on the extra math work by just copying the answers in the back of the exercise book, just to go read after....
I tried to do a bit of research before posting that list - but if being a mod somewhere was a requirement I guess they would all be out; despite having a good standing on Community Building.SE.
