There should be a lesson for other communities but, unfortunately, there is none. StackOverflow used to be a fun and welcoming place in 2009. It became a toxic hellhole overtime
There are no obvious flows in the original design, and there were no endemic wrongdoings in the governance either. It just rotted slowly like any other community does. And nobody in the world knows how to keep communities from becoming toxic. There is simply no recipe. And that's why StackOverflow doesn't serve as a lesson either.
> And nobody in the world knows how to keep communities from becoming toxic. There is simply no recipe.
There's a recipe, it's just expensive. Intense moderation, exclude disruptive users, no grand plan for massive growth/inclusion.
StackOverflow did have intense moderation, but it also seemed to want to be a place where anyone could ask a question and that desire for mass inclusion competes with the desire to be moderated/curated and then there's issues.
Wikipedia is one of the only places I know that seems to have gotten this pretty much perfect.
I think the thing that ultimately made wikipedia work is that moderation actions are done pretty publicly with a heavy focus on citing sources. The problem a lot of these OG Web 2.0 sites have is many of them have focused on keeping moderation discussion and decisions as private as possible.
That, I think, is where SO failed. Someone can mark something as a dup and that's basically the end of discussion. I think that's also where sites like Reddit really struggle. A power tripping mod can destroy a community pretty quickly and they can hide their tracks by deleting comments of criticism.
It's one thing I think HN actually gets pretty right. It's a much smaller userbase, which helps, but also the mods here are both well known and they post the reasons for their actions. There's still some opacity, but the fact that mod decisions are mostly public seems to have worked well here.
Yes, that's exactly what I mean. Suppose HN allowed regular users to perform certain moderation actions. I use that and start powertripping and deleting all your posts, for instance. In that scenario, I expect dang would reach out to me pretty quickly and tell me to please stop doing that.
In that case, dang would be part of the "vetted set of mods" I mention with the power to overturn my decisions, because HN is paying him to make sure the site runs in line with its vision, even if that means disagreeing with the "ground-level" moderators.
I'm pretty sure you and I see eye to eye on this, given your other comments on the topic here.
> there were no endemic wrongdoings in the governance either
Once it became a product there was constant tension between community and management. A 24 year old PM who had never worked in software would come declare a sweeping change and then accuse the community for being toxic uninclusive trolls.
Also Joel violated all rules and norms and used it to promote his personal political platform.
And nobody in the world knows how to keep communities from becoming toxic.
Mostly true, but there are exceptions... HN is about as good as I've seen for a publicly accessible forum, but has very active moderation (both from Dang and team and a pretty good vote & flag mechanism).
The other good forums I've seen are all private and/or extremely niche and really only findable via word of mouth. And have very active moderation.
But, yeah, I think you're probably right for any sufficiently large forum. It'll trend to enshittification without very active management.
> HN is about as good as I've seen for a publicly accessible forum, but has very active moderation
I wonder how much of it is because of good moderation versus having a site that deliberately doesn't appeal to the masses. The layout is purely text (Aside from the small "Y" logo in the top). No embedded images or videos. Comment scores (aside from your own) are hidden, usernames aren't emphasized with bold, and there are no profile pictures, so karma farming is even more pointless (no pun intended) than on reddit. There's no visible score to give the dopamine from the knowledge of others seeing your high score.
In other words, a smaller community is easier to keep clean, and HN's design naturally keeps the community small.
>And nobody in the world knows how to keep communities from becoming toxic. There is simply no recipe. And that's why StackOverflow doesn't serve as a lesson either.
I think a well-moderated community can be non-toxic. Lobste.rs is a good if not extreme example: it's kind of a vouch system for the people you refer and there's pretty good moderation to prevent overly mean discussion.
HN itself is way better than people give credit to. The toxicity tends to be very isolated, and divisive topics disappear quickly from the front page.
I find that there's still a subset of users that make it worse than it should be, by making too much noise about "tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage", but that is already against the rules/guidelines.
AFAIK, not a lot in HN gets outright removed. A decent amount of stuff will get flagged (and thus becomes invisible) especially when it's anywhere near politics.
But even in those spaces, few things end up actually being flagged even when the flames are burning hot.
Students are lazy, in a good way, so they are more likely to run things on their own and play with interactive bits if the whole lecture is just one link.
The idea here is, one can pick the slides they want and arrange them into a sequence right in the URL. This way, there is no registration, no user data collection, no persistent state even. You just pick the slides, teach your material, and move on.
It's very raw, I still want to add a convenient sequence constructor, a "blank" slide so you could display your own content in it, and a similar quiz page. But I already used some of the slides for teaching, students seem to like them.
Hopefully, I'll have the rest done by the beginning of the spring semester.
The most interesting thing in this whole picture is not AGI, it's how the collective intelligence works. CEOs claim the AGI is near because that's how they manipulate the public. But the public knows that it's only a manipulation. So how come the manipulation is still possible?
Sunk cost fallacy? What percentage of the public has actually invested the billions/trillions and is now demanding something to show for it? I'm not sure the average joe wants copilot in their outlook, but sure as hell someone wants it in there
Because "the public" isn't one person or even one cohesive group. Some see the manipulation, and point it out. Others don't see it, or ignore it when it's pointed out.
And why ignore it? Because they don't want to believe it's manipulation, because it promises large numbers of dollars, and they want to believe that those are real.
because people hedge their bets almost always. basically how likely something is vs costs vs what everybody else is doing vs how you are personally affected.
So in case of the current AI there are several scenarios where you have to react to it. For example as a CEO of a company that would benefit from AI you need to demonstrate you are doing something or you get attacked for not doing enough.
As a CEO of an AI producing company you have almost no idea if the stuff you working on will be the thing that say makes hallucination-free LLMs, allows for cheap long term context integration or even "solve AGI". you have to pretend that you are just about to do the latter tho.
Fun fact, there were no commercials in the USSR. No TV advertisements as a genre, so nobody knew how to make these. And one of the first Soviet commercials I saw was already during perestroyka, and it was about Lada. It was 15 minutes long, and it featured a line (sorry, may be misremembering it a bit) "if your brand new car doesn't start, no worries! Just take a 10mm wrench, and tighten the battery bolts. See how easy it is!"
The Fiat 124 was actually a pretty good car for its era. Russians improved its suspension, refitted the engine, and messed up the hydraulics. Still, pretty good car for the 60s. And then, they continued to produce the same car with miniscule modifications until 2010s.
That's the problem with authoritarian regimes. You can buy a plant by a fiat (pun intended), but you can't make a decent car by a decree.
They could have done much better if it was a priority. The priority however was tanks, nuclear submarines and missiles. Up to 25% of GDP was outright wasted on the military.
Not within the socialist system, there was absolute zero incentive to do a quality job. Sometimes there were incentives to do more on the quantity (see "udarnik") with moderate success but these were detrimental to the quality.
There are plenty of activities that are essential for engineering but not a sort of engineering themselves. Like writing documentation, or communicating requirements to your colleagues. Making instructions and operational procedures. Management. Accounting. Marketing. What makes making software an engineering discipline and making coffee not? Where is the line and why we presume we should be behind that line?
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