Andrew Wegner | Ponderings of an Andy - moderation

A Decade of Fighting Spam

2023-11-27T15:45:00-06:00

Introduction¶

Charcoal is nearing a decade of existence. In January of 2024, the Stack Exchange community will have been fighting the good fight of keeping spam off the platform. I've written about a machine being able to flag spam in the past. I've also posted the original and it's follow up on being able to spam flag even better on Stack Exchange itself.

Recently, I was asked to talk a bit about a hobby of mine. I put together this presentation.

What is Stack Exchange?¶

To set a bit of context for those who need it. Stack Exchange is a network of over 180 sites covering almost any topic you can think of. It's a question and answer network. The slide you are seeing here are just a handful of the sites of more interesting logos - but you can see they cover a range of topics from professional work place questions, to the intricacies of the English Language, to Data Science and gaming.

But by far the largest and most popular is Stack Overflow. With 24 million questions covering any programming language or framework you have used. It consistently ranks in the top 500 most visited sites on the internet - depending on what service is doing the measuring. Basically, it gets a lot of eyeballs looking at it daily.

Which means it's a target for spam.

What is spam?¶

The network and the community within it settled on a fairly standard definition of spam:

A post exists only to promote a product or service and doesn't disclose author's affiliation.

The images here show what the site looks like when the community systems aren't operational. This is the front page of two sites and if you look closely at the time stamps, you'll see that these posts occurred within about 10 minutes.

If users - new or experienced - come to the site and see this, they start to turn away.

Back in 2013/2014 this was common. Spam posts would stick around for hours and a group of users decided they could help out across the network by flagging these posts more quickly.

What is flagging?¶

The final bit of context that is needed is: flagging. It's exactly what you'd think it is. The goal of a flag to bring attention to the post by forcing it in the community review queues. This gets more people to look at it. Stack Exchange is built around community moderation. There is very little that elected "Diamond Moderators" need to handle that the community can't handle.

If enough people flag a post as spam, it's automatically deleted. The community and company decided that getting 6 people to agree a post is spam is an appropriate number.

Once a post is removed as spam, the post is locked, deleted and the author has 100 reputation points removed. These are the visible actions. The reputation hit is to prevent - or slow - a spammer from getting more privileges within the network.

Behind the scenes, a spam post also triggers company checks against future posts matching similar information to the user. These aren't publicly disclosed. But, the company is fairly conservative in terms of blocking users.

What is Charcoal?¶

The community hates spam. It's a bad user experience at best to have a page filled with spammy posts. It also makes the site, and community at large, look rather seedy. This isn't great for a community and a company that has built its reputation on accuracy and trust.

Charcoal was created to watch for spam across the 180+ sites. Actually, when we started it was less than half of that, but over the past decade the network has grown and the anti-spam systems have grown with it.

The community has a two phase process to dealing with spam. First is alerting the spam fighting community of potential spam. Users can go cast their flags across the network and deal with it. Second, for the truly egregious spam, the system can utilize the community's flags and automatically cast those flags.

How's this work?

SmokeDetector and Metasmoke¶

There are two systems behind this community effort - SmokeDetector and Metasmoke.

SmokeDetector, affectionately named "Smokey", is designed to be the early warning system. It quickly provides a yes/no decision on whether a post is spam and alerts users for manual action. It passes off the more intense confidence checks and automatic flags to MetaSmoke.

Every post on the network goes through the process below. A user clicks the submit button and Stack Exchange does their few checks - remember these are black boxed - and if the post makes it through these it gets published to a real time web socket.

SmokeDetector does a quick "Is this spam?" check. If it is, it's posted to chat rooms around the network - to the network wide Charcoal room and usually to a site specific room if the room is utilized enough. Users then go and investigate and if they agree that it's spam, cast a flag. After 6 of these are cast, the post is removed. Hooray! Another victory against spam.

When Smokey posts that spam is found, it also sends a message to MetaSmoke. This system is checking how confident we are that this is spam. If there is high confidence, it will start utilizing community member flagging privileges to cast spam flags on the post as well. If there isn't high confidence, no automatic flags will be cast.

The goal is to remove the spammy posts as quickly as possible - and by utilizing automatic flags the number of people that have to go do this manually is reduced. Due to larger community and company discussions and outcomes, the system will not cast all 6 flags except in very very rare circumstances. Someone has to agree with the machines here.

How to detect spam¶

What's spam detection look like? Over the last decade we've tried things like classification schemes, machine learning algorithms, and a handful of AI attempts. But, by far the most reliable has been...

Regular expressions.

(Take a deep breath fellow engineers)

Each post - goes through thousands of regular expressions. Each expression is weighted based on how likely matching that particular expression means the post is spam. The higher weights are posted into the chatroom kicking off this entire process.

The community has built watchlists and blacklists over the decade to help find these posts.

Watchlists are experimental checks. Spam evolves over time. It's actually pretty interesting to watch a dedicated spammer craft their posts to get it to last on the network more than a few minutes. These watchlists are designed to allow the team to test regular expressions without fear of automatically flagging something during testing.

Blacklists are finalized regular expressions that catch spam with a high number of true positives and very low false positives. These the weight spam checkers.

Like Stack Exchange itself, the spam fighting community has built tooling that allows work to be done without a high level user to be around. Users can watch for a new regular expression.

Users that aren't trusted just yet, will have their request created as a pull request in GitHub that needs to be approved. Trusted users will get their watchlist automatically added to the system. The same holds true for blacklisted items.

But, watchlists and blacklists are only half the problem. The other half is validating that these are accurate. As posts are detected as spam, users provide a signal back to the system on whether a post is a tp - True Positive - Spam

Or a false positive - fp - not spam. These feedback to the watchlists and will prevent elevating watchlists that are inaccurate to a full blacklist.

Sometimes, a post has features that the system doesn't detect as spam. In those cases, the community can manually report the post. This triggers the alerts through out the chatrooms so that others can flag it and get it removed. It also allows the community to find potential patterns to watch for in the future.

Users that aren't trusted yet get pull requests created for their patterns. All of this can be handled and approved within the chatrooms. A lot of this system is built on top of, and keeps most users within, the Stack Exchange ecosystem.

I mentioned the weighted reasons on a detected post. When these are posted in chat, the reasons are also posted as well as the weight of the post. The one on the slide below is particularly bad. Generally anything over about ~225-250 is spam with higher numbers becoming more and more certain.

These weights shift over time and as a regular expression is utilized more. This keeps the system flexible.

For this particular post, the system determined it was spam and cast three automatic flags from our users. Each user that grants permissions for the system to utilize their flags - because they are responsible for the usage of the flags - can set their threshold for when to allow their name to be used.

The 4th flag here came in via a user script the community built, but was not automatically cast. The remaining two flags would have come from the users of the site or from someone that saw the Smoke Detector alert and manually flagged it. Metasmoke doesn't have a record of that because it didn't go through Metasmoke.

By the numbers¶

Let's look at some numbers.

SmokeDetector has been running since January of 2014. We didn't start recording stats until about 18 months later though, so the dates in the graph start in August 2015. Initially, the system didn't have watch lists, which is why you see the blue and orange lines are pretty close together.

Around mid 2018/early 2019 we introduced watchlists. This was done because we started seeing persistent spammers. These were spammers that noticed their posts were being deleted quickly and worked to find ways to change the message to stick around longer.

The chatrooms are open and based on some messages we have removed, it's obvious the room is watched by the bored spammers. The watchlists reduced the true positives. But because we didn't ever separate the data between blacklists and watchlists the lines began to separate.

In early 2017, autoflagging was introduced. With autoflagging the system can reduce the time on site for nearly half of the true positives.

You'll notice a major spike in the summer of 2022 and a dip in the summer of 2023. The spike was for a massive spam wave. This was the work of a spammer that had access to a lot of geographically distributed systems - which bypassed Stack Exchange's built in protections - and was a persistent spammer or team of spammers that watched the public chatrooms for changes the spam fighting community made to detect their posts. This went on for 2-3 weeks with thousands of posts being made, adjusted, and deleted. Ultimately, the spammer was blocked at the Stack Exchange level based on heuristics the Charcoal team presented.

This past summer, in 2023, the dip you see is because Stack Exchange experienced a crisis of confidence from the community at large. Moderation work stopped for the months of June and July in protest of the company's policies toward generative AI on the platform. Charcoal participated in that. While not fully resolved, some of the worst policies were reworked with input from the larger community and work resumed.

The goal of the Charcoal project is to remove spam quickly from the site. Flags that are cast by the system are tracked and we can clearly see that more automatic flags mean the post is active for less time.

When there is no system cast flags, an average spam post lives for 21 minutes on the site. If the system casts all 6 - which is only utilized during a spam wave like in the summer of 2022 and with company permission - a post lives for 16 seconds. During day to day operations, the system is configured to cast 3 automatic flags. This was determined by a lot of conversations with individual sites around the network and what they felt comfortable with.

SmokeDetector has over 103 thousand commits to its repository over the last 10 years with 90 different code contributors. In the slide below, the top two graphs show that it's rulesets are updated daily - except for this past summer.

Over the course of a 24 hour period, flags are automatically cast from nearly 420 different users around the network.

Finally, the entire goal: over 450,000 spam posts have been identified and deleted by the system and the community in the last decade.

Conclusion¶

You now have an idea of how one of the largest sites on the internet handles spam. I do want to point out that StackExchange operates very differently from sites like reddit or YouTube or Facebook which spent a lot of company time building their anti-spam systems. Stack Exchange built basic protections themselves and then saw the technical community members step up and take on the challenge.

Stack Exchange Strike - The strike is over

2023-08-07T12:00:00-05:00

Introduction¶

The Stack Exchange strike is over. It took two months and two days of inaction on behalf of community members and moderators to resolve the strike. The results of the negotiations were posted last week. Over the weekend the community voted that the goals of the strike have been achieved and called the end of the strike.

So, what was achieved? What did more than two months of community upheaval get the users of Stack Exchange?

AI Generated Posts¶

Effective immediately, Stack Exchange has agreed to allow the removal of content based on a combination of strong and weak indicators of GPT usage. Additionally, the original policy that was the straw that started all of this has been both publicly released and declared invalid.

This release took two months and was the cause of the strike beginning. It drove a wedge between the moderators of Stack Exchange and the company and its employees. I do not understand why it took so long to release this. The public answer is that there was initial moderator pushback on releasing it but that was rescinded within days. Like much of the public communications during this, Stack Exchange clung to outdated information.

Something that I think is amazing is that this private policy was never leaked in full during the strike. Despite what the company was saying about moderators and the community, the community abided by its belief that agreements - private moderator space - should remain just that: private. I applaud the moderation community for this commitment to their ideals.

Data Dumps¶

The Data Dumps were turned off back in March. They were re-enabled several weeks into the strike as one of the first concessions. However, it's important to note that a former employee has presented that this was not an unwavering commitment. They had been contacted by the Stack Exchange CEO in March to disable the scheduled data dump.

The company officially states that it's committed to the long-term (foreseeable future) survival of the data dumps, the API, and SEDE [Stack Exchange Data Explorer].

This is good. It is concerned that this action was done without informing the community and only discovered after the fact though. This type of "ask for forgiveness" behavior from Stack Exchange is common and is a concern for me.

Moderation Agreement Changes¶

Stack Exchange agreed to a review period for binding policy changes and policies must be made public. This is another big one that caused the strike to move forward. I'm happy to see this has been resolved in a way that benefits the community and transparency. Time will tell if this holds true, as it's only something that we can say is effective until it is no longer effective.

Assuming that the agreement holds though, a review period will be good for the moderators that are expected to enforce changes. It will give them time to get clarifications and be prepared for the discussions on meta.

The company also agreed to update their press policy. New statements to the press must get at least one member of the community management team to sign off on the statement and statements must be as general as possible. This works in tandem with the existing policy put in place in 2019, where statements won't discuss an individual moderator without written permission.

This is another one that we can't judge effectiveness of until it's been broken. Unfortunately, the press policy from 2019 wasn't enough to prevent some statements to the press this time that presented moderators in very unflattering light. Even though none were identified by name, the broad statements were taken out of context in a couple instances.

That said, there was an apology for that from the Vice President of Community:

I would also like to take this opportunity to extend my most sincere personal apologies to mods who felt that in our previous text we were accusing them of racism. While that was not the intent of the text that I wrote (nor did that sentiment reflect the feelings of anyone involved in drafting the text), I can understand how it could be read that way, and I regret that we allowed it to be published like that. You have my sincere apologies, which I will also deliver in person at the upcoming mod/staff meetup.

Violations of the Moderator Agreement¶

The current moderator agreement does not lay out a process for determining if the company violates the agreement. The strike representatives and the company agreed to an outline for such a process. If Stack Exchange is found to have violated the agreement, actions taken and comments made during the violation must be retracted and nullified and a public apology must be made detailing the violation.

This is one that I hope we don't have to see utilized. Again, time will tell if it is something that will occur.

There is also a process where the moderation team can vote on if a violation occurred. Exact numbers are still being determined, but essentially a minimum number of moderators must vote on if a violation was committed and from that a minimum amount must vote that a violation occurred.

While I'm unhappy with the percentages used as placeholders, the discussions here continue. I am happy with the process and the proposed actions if a violation is determined.

Stack Exchange Processes¶

Several internal changes were negotiated as well. Each of these were around how the company communicates. These include being transparent that the strike occurred, collaboration with the community instead of fighting it, public policies, and clear communication.

All of these are positives changes and can only be evaluated over time. There are already signs that some are taking place with public releases of policies, acknowledgement of the agreement itself and discussions around the final details.

What do I think?¶

I've been pretty pessimistic of the last two months. Stack Exchange appeared to be following reddit's footsteps in some cases. I was afraid that the company would start replacing moderators in a few months - either when the automated systems started flagging inactivity or when the products announced at the developer conference last month started appearing on the site.

I'm still pessimistic about the future of the platform, if I'm being honest with myself. I do not think generative AI will be a benefit to the community, as it exists right now. By the time it's to a point where generative AI doesn't make things up, it'll be too late. The bad data and information will have already been on the site and trust will be gone.

The policies that can't be measured until a violation occurs also has me concerned. We went through this cycle back in 2019 with a strike being very narrowly averted then. Unfortunately, the same things that occurred then triggered the issues now: a private policy and talking to the press. Both were supposed to be resolved then. Both are supposed to be resolved now. Unfortunately, we won't know if that's the case until the policies cause another problem.

So...am I sticking around as a moderator? There is a virtual moderator meet up later this month with the CEO of Stack Exchange. I think that will be when I make my final determination. However, two months of not moderating was a welcome break.

Stack Exchange Strike - Community and AI Talk Reaction

2023-07-27T12:00:00-05:00

Introduction¶

I really was trying not to post anything about the strike again until it was resolved. There was a long period of no action in July so my assumption was that it was being worked on behind the scenes with the company and the designated representatives. Turns out, that it was just quiet for a couple weeks with no movement. One important development was the release (finally) of the private policy on GPT Generators. This is significantly different from the one that was released publicly and was part of the cause of the current moderator strike. The community's response to this policy was as expected - suprise at how bad the policy was even with moderators saying it was bad.

Today, Prashanth Chandrasekar - CEO of Stack Overflow - presented the next vision for Stack Exchange. The presentation is available on YouTube. It starts around the 9 minute mark.

Reaction¶

Welcoming¶

You will continue to be the focus. 100%. We are here to serve you. To fight on your behalf. To make sure you are recognized for the work you are doing and that you are able to responsibly harness the power of AI for your needs to be the best developers you can be. All of this is centered around the collective community and knowledge. That is irreplaceable.

This is a good start. It rings hollow to me right now though. These last two months in particular have shown that the community is easily tossed aside. 2019, and its literal legal settlement with a community member for tossing them aside, shows that current time isn't a one time thing. We'll see what the rest of this talk covers, but right now this feels like pandering to the audience.

Guiding Principles¶

Find new ways to give technologists more time to create amazing things.

Good. I'm all about efficiency for myself and my teams. If we can make developers' and engineers' lives easier, that's a win for me.

Accuracy is fundamental. That comes from attributed, peer-reviewed sources that provide transparency.

Spoiler - I received a sneak peak of a portion of this presentation two days before the official one in Berlin. The information that will be shown later in the presentation will cover some of this. It doesn't address all of it though. I'm pleased with the attribution aspect of this. Stack Overflow content is licensed under CC-by-SA. Attribution is required and I approve of any effort to improve that.

I'm concerned about accuracy. Their own test of the GenAI powered formatting assistant last month showed this is a problem. Current GenAI - Chat GPT, Bard, etc - are well known for making information up instead of saying "I don't know".

The technology field should be accessible to all, including beginners to advanced users.

Weird ending phrase, but I agree. Technology fields are not limited to engineers, software developers and people with the desire to learn how to program. Technological improvements should come from any one who wants to make life easier. AI can and will help with that.

Humans should always be included in the application of any new technology.

Again, agreed. My concern here is whether or not Stack Exchange has the capability to do that. Technically, they've had a human involved, but it's only been from a single perspective - that of the company. They have ignored the other side of this: the community. The people that provided the data for their business to thrive.

Overflow AI¶

insert applause

This has been in development for "the past three months". It also covers 6 items being talked about today and 6 additional items. That time frame is concerning. Three months is not a lot of time to build a lot of these larger items.

Search: Summarized version of multiple answers with citations from where the answers came from. It also allows you to continue the conversation with the results - including code. It also allows the user to post the question to Stack Overflow if the generative AI portion gets stuck.

My concerns lie with how this impacts the community. Hand waving away that the system is able to synthesize an answer and properly attribute it, what happens next? Stack Overflow has a reputation - deserved or not is up to the reader - for being harsh on new users that don't "try". If a new user comes and gets an answer without posting the question that's wonderful for the user. They move on and complete what they need to complete. For the community, though, we have a problem.

I find it unlikely that a new user is going to post a question to Stack Overflow when they received an answer. Why would they? They already got the answer they need. If this repeats constantly, the knowledge base that Stack Overflow represents becomes significantly less useful. Fewer questions mean fewer answers. With fewer answers, the platform becomes more dependent on the trained AI model which is receiving less data to feed it. The system spirals.

Does this only matter to prevent duplicates though? If the system is only summarizing other topics, wouldn't that mean the question being asked is a duplicate? I don't think that's the case. I think with the "continue discussion" portion of this, Stack Overflow will be losing out on better written and described problems. Problems with more detail that the community could benefit from seeing and answering.

The Visual Studio plugin looks interesting. I don't think it's adding much that other plugins can't do already, other than providing a first party integration to Stack Overflow. The same is true for the Slack / Stack Overflow integration.

The Enterprise knowledge injestion is an interesting product. While we don't use Stack Overflow for teams at my current company, this would be a great way to start using it. The ability to load initial data into a new system is important. I'd love to see this in practice and how well it does at building initial Q&A pairs from the data it ingests.

I haven't looked into Stack Overflow for Teams for my professional work. A couple comments that were made do raise a few concerns about how Stack Exchange is using company data. Before making a recommendation to utilize it for my company, I'd need to investigate that data from my company is not made available outside of my organization.

Finally, discussions. Stack Exchange is adding a forum to their collectives product. The community has spent over a decade to not be a forum. This change is not great in my opinion. Forums, social media, are a different beast than Stack Overflow.

Final Thoughts¶

I am concerned about the direction Stack Exchange is taking and the employee resources they are using to go that route. Engagement, page views, and traffic has been a huge underlying concern at Stack Exchange for a while. It was particularly noticed when ChatGPT was released and with the comments about driving users away. However, this downward trend has been ongoing for years.

I don't think GenAI is going to solve this problem. I think it will improve new user experience, but the way this has been presented it will be to the detriment of the larger community. Fewer questions will exist to answer and that will slowly cause users to disengage from the site.

This is why the opening of the talk feels like lip service to the community to me. These changes are designed to put a barrier between users of the community. Even the discussions product has the barrier. Discussions will only be available in Collectives, not to the general community.

Stack Exchange Strike - Now AI is bad? Does Stack Exchange know what it is doing?

2023-07-04T23:30:00-05:00

Introduction¶

My previous posts about the ongoing moderator and curator strike on the Stack Exchange network can be found linked at the bottom of this post, or by visiting the Stack Exchange Strike category on this site. I'd post a summary about what's happened in the last ten days, but there is nothing to report. There are discussions, but no agreements. The appointed Stack Exchange employee empowered to talk with moderators stepped back and is not participating any longer.

Tomorrow marks the one month point. We are hours away from 10,000 pending moderator flags on Stack Overflow. This is up from 78 (yes, two digits, in mid-May). The way this has gone down, the lack of progress, and the continued mischaracterization of moderators to the press hasn't motivated me to spend my free time to volunteer in the last long though. I still have this feeling that Stack Exchange is looking at the reddit protests recently with their demand that moderators return to the community and wondering if they can replicate that here.

New confusion¶

On July 3, 2023 Stack Overflow published a blog post entitled: "Do large language models know what they are talking about?". Spoiler: the conclusion of the article is "Nope."

But that's not the interesting thing. The interesting thing is how this answer is presented. The very last paragraph of the post cuts to the heart of the matter that moderators on Stack Overflow raised in December when we banned ChatGPT.

Treating AI-generated information as purely actionable might be the biggest danger of LLMs, especially as more and more web content gets generated by GPT and others: we’ll be awash in information that no one understands. The original knowledge will have been vacuumed up by deep learning models, processed into vectors, and spat out as statistically accurate answers. We’re already in a golden age of misinformation as anyone can use their sites to publish anything that they please, true or otherwise, and none of it gets vetted. Imagine when the material doesn’t even have to pass through a human editor.

We saw this in action with ChatGPT. We still see it in action with ChatGPT and it's still a problem users are becoming more aware of as the strike continues. We saw it when Stack Exchange tried their formatting assistant on Stack Overflow. What I see here is Stack Overflow admitting that the moderators are correct, in public.

The other interesting thing about that paragraph is that it links to an article from The Verge that quotes the Stack Overflow moderators and the decision to ban AI. It also has this dig at Stack Exchange executives:

The mods say AI output can’t be trusted, but execs say it’s worth the risk.

Their own post is explaining why it's not worth the risk.

What's this mean?¶

I see this as more communication failure on Stack Exchange's part. In an update I posted weeks ago, I linked to internal emails that were leaked.

How are we messaging this? Who is allowed to post and respond to questions and comments on Meta, chat, social media, etc?

The Community Leadership Team ([redacted]) are working together in close coordination with Marketing ([redacted]) on comms. They will post and respond to questions on-site. Unless you are specifically tapped to respond to something please do not engage. It is best to avoid commenting on anything related to this action on site, even if you think you have something helpful to add. Please get review and approval from Philippe prior to posting on site, or from [redacted] if you are approached off-site.

Someone, somewhere, didn't realize what this blog post was about or what it linked to.

But, nothing changes with this. The company has dug in so hard on forcing GenAI to be on the sites and is marching toward an announcement of some kind in late July 2023 about AI. In the meantime, I can only see blog posts like this one as an indication that Stack Exchange doesn't know what they are attempting to build toward and at the same time have come to the conclusion (or at least a team within Stack Exchange has) that GenAI isn't to be trusted.

Just like the community said back in December and continues to say now.

Stack Exchange Strike - How does the company regain my trust?

2023-06-23T23:00:00-05:00

Introduction¶

This post was originally posted on Meta Stack Exchange, the network wide "Meta" for the Stack Exchange network. This meta site and the "child meta" sites mentioned in the post are utilized by community members to discuss the network itself. This is where questions about how the individual site or the network as a whole are posted, where policies are determined, where questions about questions are discussed. This is the location that the community has to make their voice heard.

This post is my answer to the question "What is needed for users to trust the Stack Exchange company?" It's been edited slightly to fit the format of this blog.

How will my trust be regained?¶

Short version¶

TL;DR: I'm not sure and that's a bad thing for me and for the community.

Before I begin, I'm not going to segment the company into various groups. I've gotten the impression from moderator representatives that this is a bad thing and they are offended by this segmentation. I have no desire to further that, so "Stack Exchange" in this case refers to both the company as a whole and all employees.

Author note: This complaint was relayed by the moderator representatives from Stack Exchange during discussions. It seems that using phrases like "management" and "leadership" is being interpreted as "good staff" vs "bad staff" at Stack Exchange. While I disagree with this, to me it's not worth the argument thus it's just "Stack Exchange" for me from now on.

Who am I?¶

For context, I've been on the network for nearly 14 years. I'm a moderator on Stack Overflow, Hardware Recommendations and Community Building. I have built automated tooling to flag comments (at one point accounting for 15% of the comment flags raised on Stack Overflow in a year), and I am an admin on the community led Smoke Detector (spam detection) project. In short, I know this network, the tooling it does and does not have, and various communities across the network. My time here is voluntary. Time that I, until recently, was happy to provide without much of a thought. I've had very interesting discussions with fellow moderators and Stack Exchange employees throughout my time here.

Why don't I trust Stack Exchange?¶

What is needed for users to trust the Stack Exchange company

Stack Exchange has gone through this cycle before. I've written about it in those past cycles for anyone who wishes to go through my profile and find previous thoughts. Each time, less of my energy comes back as we - community and company - reconcile and bury the problem in the sand.

The last major cycle ended with a lot of lawyer language, including the new moderator agreement that every mod had to accept to retain their diamond. This cycle started with a violation of one of the provisions of that agreement by Stack Exchange. It received a, in my opinion, flippant "Oops, that was my fault" by the Vice President of Community at Stack Exchange.

This tells me that the legal agreement is completely one sided and Stack Exchange feels comfortable violating it without repercussion. If I, on the other hand, had violated a term in the agreement I'd be forced to hand in my diamond. This has eroded a ton of trust I have with the company.

In the announcement regarding how Generative AI can and should be moderated and in statements to the press, there has been disparagement against the moderators of the network. To me, the subtext of all of that reads as "we don't trust you to moderate correctly". If the company does not trust us to perform activities we've either been elected or appointed to do for our community, why are we still here?

Combining this with the incredible way this cycle all started and the fact that none of this mistrust was known by the moderation team, my trust of the company took a hit. This policy was announced at the end of May. Data was shared several weeks ago. In all of that, there are allusions to improper moderator activity and hints that moderators are banning so many people that engagement across the platform is down. It wasn't until yesterday (nearly a month) that moderators saw any discussion of these "improper bans". It was just...silent. This big, massive problem that could have been talked about back in February or March was just tossed into the public eye with the implication that moderators are doing the wrong thing. Then it took nearly a month for a conversation to begin.

The Stack Exchange network has lost at least four months of time where this "moderation problem" could have been discussed, policies adjusted, and moderators who deal with generative AI on their sites on the daily basis educating the company on how it's actually being detected. Instead, an easily disproved lie about using ChatGPT detectors has been blamed and shared repeatedly with the press for the reason for their sudden policy change.

My trust level of the company takes several hits here too. I dislike being lied to and I really dislike being lied about.

Finally, the method of communication through out the last month. The company has a team dedicated to managing the community. There have been many questions on this site and on child metas during the moderator strike. I have seen very little coming from the community management team to answer these questions. The community has questions and the company is not providing answers to them. Instead, we see announcements on topics that the community is against being announced. Long discussions, in public, are not occurring though. Which erodes my trust even further.

What's this all mean?¶

Where am I today then? How does the company rebuild my trust in them? My answer to that is that I don't know. This past month has eroded so much of my faith in the company to be the trusted repository of knowledge that it was in the past. It's also removed much faith that the company actually cares about the community. Much like the previous cycle we've seen details come out that reflect poorly on the company and employees attempt to respond to that only for more details to come out that make the response look like lies.

14 years is a lot of time to spend some place and not have strong feelings about. It makes simply accepting negative changes impossible and it makes walking away difficult. That's part of why I'm still here. The other part is the communities I mentioned in my introduction. I have built friends and acquaintances across the network and the sense of community that used to exist is a strong desire to remain. But, this isn't something that will hold the community as a whole together. I am an outlier in terms of a user on the network. Honestly, everyone reading this on Meta is an outlier.

The company's goal is engagement and traffic. I guarantee the moderation team has not banned enough users to bring down the traffic the network has seen since December. But, we are the scapegoat at least right now. We're nearing a month and there are users with access to site analytics. The number of bans has been close to 0. Theoretically, traffic should be recovering if we were the problem.

Stack Exchange Strike - Personal Frustrations

2023-06-21T11:00:00-05:00

Recap¶

The Moderation and curator strike started on June 5.
Stack Exchange has downplayed the effect of this to the press, while at the same time straight lied to the press about causes of the strike.
Stack Exchange removed access to the data dump back in March but never told anyone until they were called out on it in early June.
The moderation team has elected three representatives to engage with Stack Exchange to solve these problems and end the strike.
Stack Exchange launches the GenAI powered formatting assistant. The community quickly shows that it's very bad at its job and it is shut down temporarily.

What's new?¶

Yesterday Stack Exchange announced the upcoming launch of a new Prompt Design site. To say the community disliked the idea would be an understatement. The community has pointed out that this will be incredibly niche, with very short term answers because models update constantly. There are also concerns that this will essentially become a "write my prompt" (instead of "write my code") site.

I agree with all of those concerns.

Also hidden in this announcement is another announcement. Stack Exchange is changing their method of launching new sites. This is something that should have it's own announcement. This is a big deal and the community has been asking for improvements to the Area 51 incubator site for a decade. Unfortunately, the new method is to completely do away with all of the work that Area 51 does - building a community, setting initial questions, helping to set scope, ensuring there is an audience for the topic - and instead launching with a "Community Stakeholders" group that will do the work in either a private Stack Overflow for Teams instance or a read only chatroom.

Both of those options entirely exclude people that may want to participate but don't have access. It adds barriers that don't exist on Area 51.

My thoughts¶

The announcement sets a launch date of July 26 for this new site. This is the day before the CEO talks at WeAreDevelopers World Congress. A venue where the company has been promising a major AI announcement for months. This new site, combined with the formatting assistant failure from last week, is starting to show clearly what the company wants to do here.

I mentioned in my last post that I was becoming more pessimistic that this strike doesn't end with resignations. That continues to hold true. I also mentioned that Stack Exchanges seems to be keeping an eye on the Reddit strike - first with the blackouts, then with the John Oliver protests and currently with the NSFW toggles to prevent ads. Last night, Reddit started removing moderators as a result.

With the lack of updates and communication from Stack Exchange to the moderators and curators in the last week, I can't help but think that something similar is being discussed at Stack Exchange. Time will tell, but my feeling is that Stack Exchange is going to plow ahead with GenAI content on their platform. They are going to burn 15 years of trust and quality content and they are going to do it regardless of what the community wants. If the community protests, they will be shown the door.

Obviously, I'm still pretty pessimistic about all of this.

Stack Exchange Strike - Does Stack Exchange Care?

2023-06-19T14:00:00-05:00

Recap¶

The Moderation and curator strike started on June 5.
Stack Exchange has downplayed the effect of this to the press, while at the same time straight lied to the press about causes of the strike.
Stack Exchange removed access to the data dump back in March but never told anyone until they were called out on it in early June.
The moderation team has elected three representatives to engage with Stack Exchange to solve these problems and end the strike.

Where are we now?¶

Last week, I ended with a note that the data dumps should be restored by June 16. Good news. That has been completed and the dump was uploaded by June 16. It's progress, but after two weeks we have only accomplished one out of four tasks on the list of conditions to end the strike.

A retraction of the prohibition of moderating GPT content.
The private policy on GPT content that was issued to moderators must be revealed publicly.
The data dumps must be re-enabled and SEDE and API access guaranteed.
Stack Exchange, Inc. must communicate, gather feedback, and act on that feedback before making major policy or software changes to the public platform.

I've heard rumors that the second bullet may occur, but nothing has been done publicly. Thus, nothing outside of feedback from representatives to go on here.

GPT Content¶

On Thursday, June 15, Stack Exchange enabled their "formatting assistant". To say it went poorly, is an understatement. There are currently 52 answers to that question showing how it doesn't work. It's a thin wrapper around a version of ChatGPT or GPT4. It's also very, very bad at being a "formatting assistant". Instead, it's rewriting content, butchering code being asked about, making stuff up, answering questions and everything other than making formatting better. One user, Mithical, found the prompt the formatting assistant is using.

The one small positive that came out of this is that Stack Exchange did communicate with the community a few days before this was released. This isn't enough though.

Communication¶

Why isn't one post enough?

Behind the scenes it's become clearer to me that several staff members of Stack Exchange don't wish to engage with the community. I briefly touched on one of these people in my [last update][strikeweek1update]. The public press has been out of the loop sounding, the internal reactions on moderation channels has been complaints that moderators are too negative.

Of course moderators are negative right now. There is a strike going on because they are unhappy. The feedback from representatives continues to be filled with road blocks.

Where do I sit today?¶

I think it's becoming more clear that Stack Exchange is not interested in removing GenerativeAI content from it's site. It's actively building and promoting a tool that utilizes ChatGPT under the hood. I am very surprised that they pulled the plug on the formatting assistant after two days. Previous negative feedback has been ignored and I fully expected this one to be as well. The problem with pulling the plug on this, is that CEO has committed to exciting announcements about AI this summer. If the community just showed that one of those AI projects was a flop, they are going to go even harder at getting the next one to succeed.

As this drags on into it's third week, I've become more pessimistic that this strike doesn't end with resignations. Reddit had a two day strike during this time period, and they are already threatening to replace community moderators. The Stack Exchange CEO has expressed their fondness for Reddit on occasion, so I suspect that the action being taken over there is being considered here. Of course, the difference here is that Stack Exchange wasn't effectively shut down by the strike like Reddit was. Sites didn't go dark. Instead, curators and moderators stopped curating and moderating. Everything is still available, the sites are still working, it's just less tidy than usual.

Stack Exchange Strike Update 2

2023-06-13T23:00:00-05:00

Summary¶

Yesterday's update summarized the first week of the Stack Exchange Moderator strike. The strike began last Monday with an open letter to Stack Exchange.

Over the weekend the moderators, and community curators elected three representatives to talk with Stack Exchange. Those talks started this week. They went into these discussions to reiterate the four conditions to end the strike.

A retraction of the prohibition of moderating GPT content.
The private policy on GPT content that was issued to moderators must be revealed publicly.
The data dumps must be re-enabled and SEDE and API access guaranteed.
Stack Exchange, Inc. must communicate, gather feedback, and act on that feedback before making major policy or software changes to the public platform.

So, where are we now?

The update¶

Representatives¶

Discussions with Stack Exchange started off less than stellar, in my opinion. Quoting from the Vice President of Community at Stack Exchange, as relayed to those of us not in the discussions:

"So in summary: Cesar is my delegate for issues here, while I reserve final decision making to myself I"ve vested him with broad discretionary authority and we're meeting on a frequent (daily or multiple times daily) basis to clear any differences between us."

My take away here is that the Vice President of Community - a person who's job should involve dealing with the community doesn't think this is important enough to attend. While I've worked with Cesar in my role as a moderator, this is just making Cesar the car salesman that has to "talk with the manager about your offer". It's a way for the company to drag this out and a way to make the real decisions without moderation input. I fully expect to hear from the community representatives that Cesar liked a proposal but the VP did not but that the VP wasn't around to discuss why not. I'd love to be proven wrong on that though.

Data Dumps¶

Data dumps are the third bullet on our list of things that must be restored. Good news! Stack Exchange will have those restored by June 16, 2023.

This was posted (twice) by the VP of Community - the one not attending the talks above.

[...] Our intention was never to stop posting the data dump, only to begin to collect more information on how it was being used and by whom - especially in light of the rise of LLMs and questions around how genAI models are handling attribution. However, it’s clear that many individual users (academics, researchers, etc) have an immediate need to access updated versions of the dumps. So we are re-enabling the automatic data dumps (and uploading the one that’s about a week overdue). We believe that this can happen by end of the day Friday. We will continue to work toward the creation of certain guardrails (for large AI/LLM companies) for both the dumps and the API, but again - we have no intention of restricting/charging community members or other responsible users of the dumps or the API from accessing them. [...] In the meantime, the data dumps will be re-enabled by end of day Friday. We will communicate here when that has been completed or if there are any delays. We will also post here prior to making any future changes to the dumps or distribution of the dumps.

I suppose now we wait to see if there are any "delays" before Friday.

This message was confirmed by one of the Co-Founders that has since left Stack Exchange and originally committed to these data dumps back in June 2009.

I have confirmation via email from Prashanth that this is, indeed, the new official policy. I'm glad to see it. Creative Commons is part of our contract with the community, and it should never be broken -- however, CC does need to address the AI issue in an updated license, in my personal opinion. [...] - Jeff Atwood

I am happy with this concession and confirmation of the concession from our representatives, Stack Exchange and a Co-founder.

However, it's telling that once again it's Philippe making statements that are lies.

He's done it with posts to the press that I mentioned yesterday (moderators are depending on GPT detectors!). He's done it with the internal emails to his own coworkers. He's doing it again here.

Our intention was never to stop posting the data dump...

This directly contradicts that statement provided by the Stack Exchange Chief Technology Officer last week.

Stack Overflow senior leadership is working on a strategy to protect Stack Overflow data from being misused by companies building LLMs. While working on this strategy, we decided to stop the dump until we could put guardrails in place.

For being a VP of Community, the ability to communicate with the community is greatly lacking.

AI Policy¶

Not much more progress has been provided by the community representatives. From what I have seen, Stack Exchange is pushing to call an end of this with the promise of a new policy. But it's not done yet. They'll work on it with the moderators and once that's done, that will replace the current policy that started the strike. The representative mentioned they were pushing for a deadline on how quickly moderators would be able to commit to this change.

In my opinion, this is a way to end the community's moderation strike and agree to essentially nothing. It's another promise that something will happen. It gets the community back to moderation (which Stack Exchange employees have been doing for the week), and if they break that promise the effort to re-organize action has to start all over again.

Right now, I'm not agreeing to go back to utilizing my free time to perform moderation duties without knowing what the new policy is.

Where do I sit?¶

Much like yesterday, I continue to re-evaluate my relationship with Stack Exchange. I'm really happy that the data dump has been restored. The messaging around it though continues to erode my trust in the company's actions. This was also one of the easier items for Stack Exchange to agree to, even though it looks like a co-founder may have had a hand in resolving this as well. I don't know if that's true and I appreciate the work the representatives have done to resolve our first point of contention.

It's also very telling that the messaging doesn't mention the restoration in the context of the strike at all. If the company was attempting to build goodwill in this environment, I'd think they would point to the conditions in the open letter and tie the enablement of the data dumps directly to that. Instead, we got a statement that says they didn't intend to stop posting the data dump, directly contradicting a previous statement saying senior leadership decided to stop the dump.

Amazing.

Stack Exchange Strike - Week One

2023-06-12T09:00:00-05:00

Summary¶

A week ago, many Stack Exchange diamond moderators began a moderation strike. They have been joined by power users and curators. At the time of this post, there are over 1200 users that have signed the open letter to Stack Exchange.

This strike has been covered in a few news articles, but I suspect this week's actions against Reddit and their new API pricing changes will overshadow Stack Overflow for a little while. That's fine with me. Perhaps cooler heads will prevail when there is less public focus.

The Stack Exchange strike has been covered:

On Gizmodo
On Vice
On DevClass (with an interview from a fellow Charcoal power user and Stack Overflow moderator)

The important thing in this set of articles is the public statement that was released by Philippe Beaudette, Vice President of Community (taken from the Vice article above).

A small number of moderators (11%) across the Stack Overflow network have stopped engaging in several activities, including moderating content. The primary reason for this action is dissatisfaction with our position on detection tools regarding AI-generated content. Stack Overflow ran an analysis and the ChatGPT detection tools that moderators were previously using have an alarmingly high rate of false positives.

We stand by our decision to require that moderators stop using the tools previously used. We are confident that we will find a path forward. We regret that actions have progressed to this point, and the Community Management team is evaluating the current situation as we work hard to stabilize things in the short term.

They doubled down on this explanation in two meta posts. The initial statement and a post with "data". I encourage readers to spend a while reading through that second link and the answers. The community is skeptical of the conclusions drawn and have counter arguments and data scattered in the answers.

Finally, during the week it was discovered that Stack Exchange stopped their quarterly data dump of all content. This was announced after a former employee stated that the data dumps were turned off in March.

Stack Overflow senior leadership is working on a strategy to protect Stack Overflow data from being misused by companies building LLMs. While working on this strategy, we decided to stop the dump until we could put guardrails in place.

We are working on setting up the infrastructure to do this correctly in the age of LLMs --- where we continue to be open and share the data with our developer community but work to set up a formal framework for large AI companies that want to leverage the data.

We are looking for ways to gate access to the Dump, APIs, and SEDE, that will allow individuals access to the data while preventing misuse by organizations looking to profit from the work of our community. We are working to design and implement appropriate safeguards and still sorting out the details and timelines. We will provide regular updates on our progress to this group.

Where are we now?¶

With the summary out of the way, where do we sit now?

As of midnight today, the users that have stopped moderation activities have selected three representatives to be our voice in conversations with Stack Exchange and listed the conditions for ending the strike.

A retraction of the prohibition of moderating GPT content.
The private policy on GPT content that was issued to moderators must be revealed publicly.
The data dumps must be re-enabled and SEDE and API access guaranteed.
Stack Exchange, Inc. must communicate, gather feedback, and act on that feedback before making major policy or software changes to the public platform.

I want to point out that there is nothing here about GPT detection tools. That's because this isn't the reason for the strike. Despite what Stack Exchange has said in their messages to the press, this isn't about detection tools. (I also have an answer on that question about the policy's origination.)

The discovery that the data dumps were turned off has angered many people - those both already involved and others that learned of it this week. The fact that these were turned off over two months ago and nothing was said to the community has made the situation even worse.

What's Stack Saying?¶

This section was added after original publication

Shortly after publishing my thoughts with this article, internal Stack Exchange emails were published. These show how Stack Exchange is communicating this with their employees.

I highly encourage everyone to read those too. There is a lot of reading scattered around to get the full scope of how unhappy the users of Stack Exchange are.

I think it's telling that the company managed to copy and paste from the strike letter, but at the same time managed to completely ignore that this isn't about GPT detectors. Even worse, the company is spreading that falsehood to its employees, and the press. On top of that, has two teams - Community Leadership and Marketing - working on communications, yet no progress has been made.

Where do I sit?¶

I mentioned last week that I've been here for over 13 years. I've applied and interviewed at the company. I've made friends with the employees and gotten recommendations during those interviews. I've built tooling to help moderate comments and eliminate spam on the network. I've been here a long time.

In 2019, I reevaluated my role on the network during Stack Exchange's last screw up. In that one, they managed to libel a moderator, by name, to the press. This event still reverberates through the network today and serves as a brick that this current situation is built with. Stack Exchange destroyed 10 years worth of trust and community relationships in that event. They've tried to rebuild it over these last three years and have been marginally successful. That's gone again.

Now I'm reevaluating how I utilize my free time again. It's not constructive to say I'll hand in my diamonds and walk away if the conditions above aren't hit. But, it's worth noting that I agree with all four of those conditions. This is my free time I'm donating and if the organization I'm donating that time to has changed their philosophy, I will take that into consideration as I reevaluate.

I think we are long past the point of "how it used to be" at Stack Exchange. The question I am asking my self is whether or not I agree with the new direction the platform is going.

Updated after the email publication, above

Reading the email and FAQ that Stack Exchange sent to their employees, I am struck by how out of touch members of the company are. Not the people that don't interact with the community. The people that should know the pulse of the moderation teams, the community opinions, and users in general - like the Vice President of Community. While I'm not surprised that they are down playing the strike, I am surprised that they are flat out lying to their employees.

Stack Exchange should be called out on that and their employees should know that it's happening. Stack Exchange, Stack Overflow, Inc., is lying to their employees. The email presented was written after the strike started and contains information about all of the FAQ items mentioned.

Joining the Stack Exchange Moderator Strike

2023-06-05T01:00:00-05:00

Summary¶

I'm signing an open letter to Stack Exchange because those of us that volunteer our time and energy have been put in an impossible situation. On Stack Overflow we banned ChatGPT created content almost immediately after it was released. Theoretically, that is no longer in effect.

This isn't due to a change in community perception. Instead, it's due to an abrupt policy change on Stack Exchange's part that was posted on May 30. It's important to note that this public policy does not match the guidance that was provided privately.

The relevant portion of this public policy is:

In order to help mitigate the issue, we've asked moderators to apply a very strict standard of evidence to determining whether a post is AI-authored when deciding to suspend a user.

The private policy notes that "very strict" is essentially "don't moderate unless they explicitly say it was created by an AI".

Background¶

The Stack Exchange CEO posted a blog post at the end of May 2023. In this post, they stated:

Approximately 10% of our company is working on features and applications leveraging GenAI that have the potential to increase engagement within our public community and add value to customers of our SaaS product, Stack Overflow for Teams.

This goes against the community desire to not have GenAI content on the site. The CEO has not provided any feedback to the community, other than a note that there is a big summer project with GenAI. The community reaction hasn't been positive.

Combining this announcement with the newly announced policy the previous day, and an astonishing inability to articulate more details or reasoning, has produced a lot of unhappy moderators.

Additionally, I feel that the company has destroyed 3 years of rebuilding trust. Back in 2019, they destroyed this trust and nearly had a moderator strike then too. That involved providing information to a journalist that had very limited context and due to that, presented a single moderator in unflattering light. The feelings from that have taken years to rebuild and even today that incident is cited as a low point, and users can point out that singular incident when trust of the company plummeted.

The public announcement to not moderate GenAI content contained this:

Through no fault of moderators' own, we also suspect that there have been biases for or against residents of specific countries as a potential result of the heuristics being applied to these posts.

That's just wrong. Absolutely wrong. It is 100% inaccurate and Stack Exchange has offered no data to back this up. User country of origin, region in the world, or any kind of physical location is not available to moderators. We are presented a flag and given information to the content that has been flagged.

Why am I participating?¶

So...my participation? Why am I joining in?

Stack Exchange, and Stack Overflow, thrive due to the human element. It's userbase has been around over a decade and answered millions of questions across over 180 sites. The week ChatGPT came out, the community saw the bad results it can provide. For the past 6 months, we've continued to see how bad that is. The moderation teams across the network to generate a policy and get it approved by the company. I've reproduced it in full below, but as of this post it is still on the site and contradicts the new policy.

In addition to completely ignoring the community's input on how they do not want GenAI on the site, the company ignored their own moderator agreement.

With the assumption that the above will change at some point, the relevant section is pasted here:

``` Stack Exchange, Inc. agrees that it will:

i. Respect your privacy per the terms of the Privacy Policy for the Public Network. ii. Get your explicit written permission before commenting to any media (including media outlets controlled by Stack Exchange Inc.) or independent reporters about you or your moderator actions as per our Press Policy. iii. Allow you to resign your position for any reason without penalty or repercussions. As a volunteer, Stack Exchange, Inc. respects your time and will release you from duty should you ask. iv. Operate “Stack Gives Back”, an annual program giving to selected charities in honor of our moderators. v. Post previews for review of all new official policies in the Moderators Teams instance with the policy tag, marked with links to their public version once published, and maintain a listing of all official network-wide policies with links to them in the Help Center. vi. Announce changes to the moderator agreement no less than sixty days before the deadline to accept the new agreement with a period of at least thirty days for discussion and review. vii. Provide support for your questions, requests and concerns on the Moderators Teams instance and/or the Teachers’ Lounge, direct email to CMs, and content on Meta escalated to staff by whatever formal documented process is in effect at the time. viii. Respect your right to speak openly to question and challenge policy without reprisal so long as such speech does not break the Code of Conduct. ```

The relevant section is vi. There was no discussion period on this. No engagement with the moderators, or the community. Instead it was "effective immediately." The best we've gotten so far is an "oops, sorry."

That's not how something in a /legal link should operate. If I can't trust them to uphold an agreement they have in writing, why should I trust them to uphold anything else?

What does the community want out of this?¶

From the open letter:

Until Stack Overflow, Inc. retracts this policy change to a degree that addresses the concerns of the moderators, and allows moderators to effectively enforce established policies against AI-generated answers, we are calling for a general moderation strike, as a last-resort effort to protect the Stack Exchange platform and users from a total loss in value. We would also like to remind Stack Overflow, Inc. that a network that entirely relies on volunteers for its moderation model cannot then consistently ignore, mistreat, and malign those same volunteers.

My feelings on this¶

I've been on Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange for over 13 years. I've been a moderator on the network since 2014 and on Stack Overflow since 2017. I've written about Stack Overflow a bit over the years. I've participated in Charcoal, the spam fighting community since 2015ish. Charcoal has automatically flagged more than 86,000 posts across the network since 2016.

I've applied to several jobs at Stack Exchange. I've interviewed for a couple positions. I have spent a lot of time with the network, the community, moderators, and employees making this a great place for internet users to find their answers.

I have helped to build the community/company trust that I mentioned above. I watched it crumble. I thought about leaving in 2019, but instead spent the next three years working to rebuild that trust. I'm at the point again, where I see the company not understanding their community. At all. It's sad that this cycle has repeated itself and it's worse that the company is, again, tossing their most engaged users under the bus.

This strike serves two purposes in my mind - the first is the officially stated one. Do not allow GenAI content on the network. It will erode the value of the network quickly. We've also demonstrated that ChatGPT and it's peers are not great at answering complex questions. But, second, and unofficially, this strike will represent a change for Stack Exchange to show whether or not they care about what the community has to say. This is, I believe, the last opportunity for them to retract this policy and reflect on why they are over ruling so many communities that reject GenAI in their community. It's their last opportunity to show they support their moderators and the human aspect of moderation. Failure to do either means that Stack Exchange has given up on community building.

I am a volunteer for this community. I would love to continue that role, but this is the best way for me to show that GenAI is not the right path for the company to take.

What's Next¶

On June 5, 2023 at midnight, moderator local time, the network will start to see moderation activities cease (or slow down). I will be part of that.

GPT Policy¶

This policy was crafted with the input of moderators and Stack Exchange. An important thing to notice is that the moderators are empowered to issue suspensions. This is something the new policy prevents.

``` Why posting GPT and ChatGPT generated answers is not currently acceptable

This Help Center article provides insight and rationale on our policy regarding the usage of GPT and ChatGPT on Stack Overflow. While this is the position of Stack Overflow staff, it’s meant to support the prior work done by moderators (namely, the temporary policy issued to ban contributions by ChatGPT).

Stack Overflow is a community built upon trust. The community trusts that users are submitting answers that reflect what they actually know to be accurate and that they and their peers have the knowledge and skill set to verify and validate those answers. The system relies on users to verify and validate contributions by other users with the tools we offer, including responsible use of upvotes and downvotes. Currently, contributions generated by GPT most often do not meet these standards and therefore are not contributing to a trustworthy environment. This trust is broken when users copy and paste information into answers without validating that the answer provided by GPT is correct, ensuring that the sources used in the answer are properly cited (a service GPT does not provide), and verifying that the answer provided by GPT clearly and concisely answers the question asked.

The objective nature of the content on Stack Overflow means that if any part of an answer is wrong, then the answer is objectively wrong. In order for Stack Overflow to maintain a strong standard as a reliable source for correct and verified information, such answers must be edited or replaced. However, because GPT is good enough to convince users of the site that the answer holds merit, signals the community typically use to determine the legitimacy of their peers’ contributions frequently fail to detect severe issues with GPT-generated answers. As a result, information that is objectively wrong makes its way onto the site. In its current state, GPT risks breaking readers’ trust that our site provides answers written by subject-matter experts.

Moderators are empowered (at their discretion) to issue immediate suspensions of up to 30 days to users who are copying and pasting GPT content onto the site, with or without prior notice or warning. ```

The letter¶

The letter below was originally posted as an open letter to Stack Exchange. I've reposted it here for a record.

``` June 5, 2023 Stack Overflow, Inc. has decreed a near-total prohibition on moderating AI-generated content in the wake of a flood of such content being posted to and subsequently removed from the Stack Exchange network, tacitly allowing the proliferation of incorrect information ("hallucinations") and unfettered plagiarism on the Stack Exchange network. This poses a major threat to the integrity and trustworthiness of the platform and its content.

We, the undersigned, are volunteer moderators, contributors, and users of Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange network. Effective immediately, we are enacting a general moderation strike on Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange network, in protest of this and other recent and upcoming changes to policy and the platform that are being forced upon us by Stack Overflow, Inc.

Our efforts to effect change through proper channels have been ignored, and our concerns disregarded at every turn. Now, as a last resort, we are striking out of dedication to the platform that we have put over a decade of care and volunteer effort into. We deeply believe in the core mission of the Stack Exchange network: to provide a repository of high-quality information in the form of questions and answers, and the recent actions taken by Stack Overflow, Inc. are directly harmful to that goal.

Specifically, moderators are no longer allowed to remove AI-generated answers on the basis of being AI-generated, outside of exceedingly narrow circumstances. This results in effectively permitting nearly all AI-generated answers to be freely posted, regardless of established community consensus on such content.

In turn, this allows incorrect information (colloquially referred to as "hallucinations") and plagiarism to proliferate unchecked on the platform. This destroys trust in the platform, as Stack Overflow, Inc. has previously noted.

In addition, the details of the policies issued directly to moderators differ substantially from the guidelines outlined publicly, with moderators barred from publicly sharing the details.

These policies disregard the leeway historically granted to individual Stack Exchange communities to determine their policies, by making changes without the input of the community, overriding community consensus, and outright refusing to reconsider their position.

Until this matter is resolved satisfactorily, we will be pausing activities including, but not limited to:

Raising and handling flags.
Running SmokeDetector, the anti-spam bot.
Closing or voting to close posts.
Deleting or voting to delete posts.
Reviewing tasks in the various review queues.
Running various other bots designed to assist in moderation, such as detecting plagiarism, low-quality answers, and rude comments.

Until Stack Overflow, Inc. retracts this policy change to a degree that addresses the concerns of the moderators, and allows moderators to effectively enforce established policies against AI-generated answers, we are calling for a general moderation strike, as a last-resort effort to protect the Stack Exchange platform and users from a total loss in value. We would also like to remind Stack Overflow, Inc. that a network that entirely relies on volunteers for its moderation model cannot then consistently ignore, mistreat, and malign those same volunteers. ```

Stack Overflow bans ChatGPT temporarily

2022-12-05T14:45:00-06:00

Today Stack Overflow moderators (myself included), have implemented a temporary ban on ChatGPT on the site.

Use of ChatGPT generated text for posts on Stack Overflow is temporarily banned.

This ban was picked up immediately by several technology news outlets, including ZDNet, TheVerge, and Vice. It was also picked up by CNN, The New York Times, and the Washington Post.

That's a lot of news coverage.

The question that I want to answer is "Why?". Stories and marketing from OpenAI, give reasons why this new chatbot is a "good thing". With their examples, it definitely looks that way. But, in practice, it's not working out so well.

The responses that users have been posting on Stack Overflow have a high rate of being incorrect. Normally, the community can handle this, but the responses aren't your usual small code snippet of an answer. Instead it is a long, detailed, explanation that looks plausible. But, it's wrong. Combined with users posting multiple answers an hour, this is a lot of content that Stack Overflow reviewers (or worse, the handful of elected moderators) to go through and determine if it's valid.

At the time the ban was implemented, we'd seen thousands of answers generated by ChatGPT. On the one hand, this is impressive work on the ChatGPT AI itself. It can be difficult to detect and is good at holding a conversation. On the other hand, and more important from Stack Overflow's perspective, this isn't helping the user base. Thousands of subtly wrong answers is awful. It doesn't help the user looking for help, and it will very quickly destroy the trust that millions of developers put in the site if this is allowed to continue.

I'll admit that I'm disappointed that AI hasn't reached the point where it can do what ChatGPT seems to do. But, this is a step forward. Unfortunately, this step seems to have left a bad taste in the mouth of developers looking for help beyond a toy example.

For the time being, ChatGPT is banned on Stack Overflow. The moderation team will continue to work with the company to ensure the community we have volunteered to moderate remains one of high quality. Additionally, as the larger Stack Exchange network of sites debates a similar ban, the Stack Overflow moderation team will be able to provide input on our experiences.

Collecting Diamonds on Stack Exchange

2017-08-18T10:06:00-05:00

Introduction¶

It's been over two years since I first ran for moderator on Stack Overflow. I've run for moderator three times, previously on Stack Overflow. In each election I've done better, coming in fifth in the third election. Well, it's been a little over 8 months since the last one and new moderators are needed again. I decided to run once more with the knowledge that if I lost, I probably wouldn't run again in the next election.

Nomination Phase¶

The nomination phase started off as usual, with a handful of users posting their nomination. This time there were 12 candidates, meaning there would be a primary to narrow it down to 10 before the final election. My nomination was the following:

I'm Andy. I've answered the questions posted by the community here I encourage you to take a look.

Why should you vote for me?¶

I've been a moderator on Community Building for several years. I was appointed to a moderator position on Hardware Recommendations. I know the moderator tools and have worked with the current moderators.

I'm active in the review queues (I am the top reviewer in the Low Quality Post reviewers, with over 26,500 reviews in this queue). I also enjoy the other moderation aspects of Stack Exchange.

I believe that moderation can be tool assisted. I've helped to flag a sizable percentage of comments on Stack Overflow. I've helped build the community spam detection bot. These types of tools help eliminate the obvious bad stuff so that moderation time can be spent on the less obvious stuff.

I have a history of good community moderation, am here consistently, and believe I can help the current team.

Nomination Reflections¶

An astute reader may have noticed this is pretty similar to previous nomination posts. There are a couple major differences though. The first thing is that I am the number one Low Quality Posts reviewer on the site. I am pretty proud of this particular statistic. It shows just how much work I've done during my tenure at Stack Overflow to improve the quality of the site. The unfortunate thing is that I'd probably lose this position as a moderator because they don't sit in the review queues.

The other major change was that I had picked up a moderator position on Hardware Recommendations. That happened at the end of June. Hardware Recommendations is about ten times the size of Community Building (a site I've moderated for several years). It's also a couple orders of magnitude smaller than Stack Overflow.

Primary Phase¶

The most exciting part of the election season is the primary phase. The community can see the scores of users over time and have built tools to watch those numbers change over time. It turns out that this time, my numbers were really high.

There were plenty of good people in the election this time. One interesting thing that I found was that a lot of candidates, like me, were supportive of automation. Several users utilized bots that posted low quality content to various chat rooms. This is a big change from previous elections. It was a welcome change. I think that automated quality content checking can help a lot.

Election¶

The election ended on August 1st. (A busy day for me, apparently). It was a close election. Most surprisingly, no one won in the first round with everyone else picking up carry over votes to get second. I think that speaks to the quality of the candidates. After 8 rounds in OpaVote, both Cody Gray and I were elected the two newest moderators on Stack Overflow!

Post Election¶

The election ended a few weeks ago. I handled more moderator flags in my first hour as a Stack Overflow moderator than I had at both Community Building and Hardware Recommendations combined. What I'm saying...Stack Overflow has a ton of flags that need to be handled. In good news, since the election, we have gotten the moderator queue down from about 1,100 flags to about 75 at any given time. I doubt it will stay that low, but it's still nice to see that I was immediately helpful.

Finally, since the election I turned off the comment flagging bot. It had been used for just over 3 years. The community is currently debating whether or not it should run under a moderator account. The thing that I am finding more interesting about this discussion is that the community seems to agree it's helpful, respects the 99+% accuracy, would love for Stack Exchange themselves to run this tool, but doesn't want the bot to run with moderator privileges. There is, however, a very sizable portion of the community that does want this done under my account. We'll see how this plays out, but I'm hoping to be able to use the bot again soon.

Third time's the charm?

2016-11-06T22:54:00-06:00

Introduction¶

Last year, I ran for moderator (twice) on Stack Overflow and didn't make it through the primaries. I came close on that second run. Now, a year later, and a year more experienced, I'm going to try again. This post will document my progress through the election cycle.

Spoiler Alert: I didn't win. The rest of this post details my thoughts as the election occurred though.

Nomination Phase¶

The election this year took a slightly different route than last time. In previous years, the election was announced at the same time as the call for nominations began. Users had a week to nominate themselves, then we answered a series of community provided questions during the primaries, then the final election.

This year, the election was announced a week in advance of nominations. During the week, a call was put out for Community questions. When a nomination was posted, the answers would be posted as well. This change was made due to how much the community needed to read during the primaries. The primaries were only a few days long and the Q&As were usually ten questions for each user. When a primary has 20-30 nominees, that is a lot of reading that was expected in a short period of time. By bringing this phase forward, now the community has the entire election cycle to read and interact with the nominees.

I provided one question that was used in the final selection of questions. I mentioned last time that I thought it was a great question, so I suggested it again:

Do you have any Meta posts that you're particularly proud of, or that you feel best demonstrate your moderation style?

My nomination¶

My platform isn't all that different than the last two times.

Hi Everyone, I'm Andy and I'd like to be a moderator for you and Stack Overflow. I've answered the questions posted by the community here. I encourage you to take a look.

Why should you vote for me?¶

I've been a moderator on Community Building for over two years. I know the moderator tools and have worked with many of the current moderators. This interaction will continue as a new moderator here.

I have a lot of helpful flags. A decent percentage of these are on comments, but not all. I'd like to help keep the site clean without adding to the current moderators' work load.

I'm active in the review queues (currently holding 5th in Low Quality Post reviewers of all time), provide edits to posts, answers and enjoy the moderation aspect of Stack Exchange.

I have a history on Meta.SO that shows I'm involved in the meta aspect of the site as well.

I enjoy the moderation aspect on Stack Overflow (and Stack Exchange in general). I have a history of good community moderation, am here all the time and believe I can help the current team.

During the first full day, I've gotten positive responses to this post. My two favorite, so far, are:

Andy's work around comment flags has been very impressive. I'm definitely curious to see what his thoughts on the mod queue are and if we could incorporate some of his work permanently on the site. Better identification of flags is something that would be very nice to have permanently. - bluefeet Stack Overflow Community Manager

and

There are always some nominees for this position who are very active, some who have good judgment and cool heads, and some who innovate with their approach to community moderation. Andy is the rare candidate who very clearly checks all three boxes. As a user on SO for 3.5 years, a moderator pro tempore on Engineering SE for 1.7 years and an early participant in the Community Building SE beta, I strongly support this nomination. - Air Moderator on Engineering.SE

My candidate score this time is an impressive 39/40. This is up six from a year ago, and up ten from my first run. The one missing point is due to missing the Refiner badge. I believe the reason for this is because of my workflow. I, generally, don't edit and answer questions at the same time. If I'm answering, I'm not in "edit" mode. If I'm editing, I'm usually in "moderation" mode. It's something I'll work on. I'm 38 out of 50 questions there, so I'll get it soon enough.

Candidate questions¶

None of the questions were that surprising. With the added benefit of a week to prepare answers prior to nominating, I am very pleased with my answers. Two answers have generated a bit of discussion though.

A 10k+ user regularly has their comments flagged as "rude or offensive" or "not constructive", to the tune of 4-5 flags a day. No comment by itself is particularly offensive, but their general tone causes them to be flagged by multiple users. You've contacted them privately about this, but they believe that they aren't doing anything wrong and that people are being too sensitive. The flags keep coming in on their comments. What, if anything, do you do next?

My response is:

No one has an exemption from the Be Nice policy. I think the first step is to understand why nothing has already been done about the user. 4-5 a day seems like the user has moved beyond the "nuisance" stage. I think a temporary ban is appropriate, with another explanation as to what is expected when interacting with others. While some users are more sensitive than others, a stream of this many flags across an extended period of time doesn't lead me to believe the problem is with the community users.

The point raised in the comments was that I was rushing into banning the user without communicating first. I disagree with that, and explained that they've already been contacted privately and ignored those warnings. A ban is the next step in getting the user's attention. I was told this would be "humiliating" for a high rep user. Again, I disagree and believe it's not humiliating, but educating the user.

The second question that generated some discussion was:

You impose a temporary ban (say 1 week) on a user for what you judged as reasonable and valid reasons (the user gets notified by email of your action and the reason). The user replies to your email acknowledging the transgression, says they won't do it again and asks for the ban to be lifted. The user sounds genuine. Do you remove the ban? Do you even reply at all? Explain your reasoning. The context of this question applies to longer bans too. If it helps get the juices flowing, consider the situation of a second offence for the same behaviour, which has a default ban period of 1 month.

My response:

I have two answers for this question, based on the user's history. If this is a first offense, up to this point the user hasn't been pushing limits and attempting to disrupt others, and the ban isn't related to voting fraud, then I'd be willing to remove the ban. Sometimes a ban is put in place to get the user's attention. Once the situation has been resolved, the ban is no longer appropriate and should be removed.

On the other hand, if the user has a history of crossing the line and looking for a reaction, or if the ban is related to vote fraud, I'd simply not reply and the user will return in a week. Stack Overflow has enough "voting irregularity" bans that I imagine the responses to such bans are all similar (and invalid). I see no reason to change that policy.

The push back I received on this was that I was letting a user off the hook by unbanning them. I argued that unbanning has been done in the past. Sometimes the ban is needed simply to get the user's attention and start the conversation and explain that what they are doing is wrong. If the user abuses the trust at that point and repeats the behavior, then the longer ban is completely justified. A bit of compassion isn't a bad thing.

Primary Phase¶

There are 12 nominees, so a primary will occur. Once again, the primary phase will reduce the number of candidates in the final phase to 10. With so few being eliminated this time around, it feels a little unneeded. The primary will last for a few days and during that time users can vote candidates up or down depending whether they believe the nominee should be a moderator. I'll return in a few days...

Primary Results¶

The Primary phase has ended and the final election has begun. I ended the primary in 5th place, securing a position in the final election. I have a sizable margin between my position and sixth place as well. One other stat that I'm rather proud of: I received the fewest number of down votes of any candidate.

On to the election!

Election Phase¶

The election lasts for several days and covers a weekend. We'll see how it turns out in a few days.

Election Results¶

Well, the election has concluded. I didn't secure one of the three positions for moderator. I finished in 5th place, with my elimination propelling second and third place to a victory. I was eliminated in the 10th round of the Meek STV process.

Good luck to the new moderators!

Post Election thoughts¶

This election started differently than the previous two I've run in. This election was announced a week in advance and solicited community input for questions for the candidates. I think this was a good change. The element of surprise in the previous two made it much more stressful. Additionally, by having the questions available at the start of the election - instead of at the start of the primary phase - I was able to better answer the questions. Previously, the questions would be available at the start of the primary phase. With the amount of reading needed to get through one candidate's answers, let alone all of them, I imagine that many people didn't read all of the responses.

The other nice thing about this lead time, is that I had time to get my answers read for when I posted my nomination. By posting the questions and answers at the same time, I was able to have my responses available the entire time. Score-wise, on the questionnaire, I did much better than my opponents. I think a big reason for this is that I have my responses posted as soon as my nomination was posted.

One question this time, though, seemed to split the candidates. I mentioned it previously, but it was regarding potentially removing a temporary ban.

You impose a temporary ban (say 1 week) on a user for what you judged as reasonable and valid reasons (the user gets notified by email of your action and the reason). The user replies to your email acknowledging the transgression, says they won't do it again and asks for the ban to be lifted. The user sounds genuine. Do you remove the ban? Do you even reply at all? Explain your reasoning. The context of this question applies to longer bans too. If it helps get the juices flowing, consider the situation of a second offence for the same behaviour, which has a default ban period of 1 month.

I was one of two candidates that explicitly stated we'd consider removing the ban. A third user didn't state it explicitly, but did say they'd consider it. I was surprised by the harsh tone the others took, especially since there is a lot of previous discussions on Meta where the outcome is the moderators or community managers removing the ban. I was happy to see that the other candidate who said they'd consider removing the ban get elected though.

I still believe that removing the ban is a valid option. Especially because their next ban would be much longer if they broke my trust.

We'll see when the next election on Stack Overflow is, but with three new moderators and no resignations, I suspect it'll be a while. I'll consider running again then.

I'm running for moderator on Stack Overflow again

2015-11-18T09:38:00-06:00

Introduction¶

In April, I ran for moderator on Stack Overflow and didn't make it through the primaries. That's ok though, there were several very good users that did get elected. In a surprise announcement, though, Stack Overflow is running a second election this year. This is the first time this has happened since 2011. I'm still interested in a position and I'm still active in the community, so I'm going to run again. This post will follow the process.

Nomination Phase¶

Like last time, the nomination phase began with users throwing their hat into the ring. Nominations were slower and fewer this time. Only 19 nominees, so no one was eliminated due to low reputation. Several users from the last election are rerunning too.

My Platform¶

My platform hasn't changed much since the previous run. Below is my nomination post. This time, I tried to pull emphasis off the automated script by putting it lower on the list of things I've done and instead focused on the moderation tasks I do on Stack Overflow and the work I've done on Community Building. We'll see if it works.

Hi Everyone, I'm Andy and I'd make a great moderator for Stack Overflow.

Why vote for me?¶

I'm active in the review queues (currently holding 10th in Low Quality Post reviewers of all time), provide edits to posts, answers and enjoy the moderation aspect of Stack Exchange

I've been a moderator on CommunityBuilding for nearly a year and a half. I know the moderator tools and have worked with several of the current moderators. This interaction will continue as a new moderator here.

I've built an automated script that continues to handle noisy comments very accurately.

I have a history on Meta.SO that shows I'm involved in the meta aspect of the site as well.

I have a history of good community moderation already. I enjoy the moderation aspect on Stack Overflow (and Stack Exchange in general). I deal with users with respect, even if our opinions on an issue differ.

With this, I received my "candidate score". It was 33/40. Not the highest, but better than last time. The score wasn't mentioned in April. I am not expecting it to be an issue this time either.

Primary Phase¶

Updated November 21, 2015

The primary phase is in the third day. In day 1, I was hovering around 9th/10th place. Overnight, between days 1 and 2 though, I dropped down to 11th. I've been sitting here consistently for a full day now and, while still gaining votes, I'm not gaining as fast as 10th position. It appears I may not make the cutoff by Friday's deadline. While disappointing, there are a few things that I came away with that I'm very happy about.

In the last primary, I received 1,492 positive votes. I've surpassed that already. I have over 2,100 currently. I'm pleased with that upswing. I was also more prepared for the questionnaire portion of the primaries this time. I've gotten the second highest number of upvotes on my responses. Several of the questions were similar to last time, but there are a few that I think should be included in the future elections.

Questionnaire¶

This first question is a great post for candidates. It allows them to show off their involvement in Meta and show their best work. For users, it gives them a sense of how a candidate interacts with the community. I am very surprised that several candidates list only one or two posts. This seems to be doing a disservice to themselves.

Do you have any Meta posts that you're particularly proud of, or that you feel best demonstrate your moderation style?

My response to this question:

I'm proud of several of my posts both here on Meta.SO and on other network sites I participate in. Here on MSO, I have two questions that I am proud of:

Can a machine be taught to flag comments automatically?

I estimate 10% of the links posted here are dead. How do we deal with them?

In both of these, you can see that I care about quality on Stack Overflow. I've spent time analyzing the problem, as I see it, and present my findings to the community. I participated in the discussions that both posts generated and continue to run the bot to this day.

Elsewhere on the network, my participation in meta has helped to shape communities. For example, on Hardware Recommendations, my meta post about "What type of hardware is allowed" helped to set the scope of what the community accepts as on topic hardware. I've also helped to set up the high quality guidelines for questions and argued against certain types of tags and hardware.

With all of these, I've presented my arguments and logic and strived to remain professional. I believe the community on HardwareRecs has seen that as well.

As a moderator on Community Building, I've been involved in many discussions. I was involved in the discussions to rename the community from Moderators.SE to CommunityBuilding.SE. I've been involved in discussions about slow growth of the community. I've also presented arguments that go against other moderators, and walked away still feeling like a moderation team. (Go communication!)

Finally, on OpenSource, I made a post about how moderators had implemented a policy to watch the reviewers. It was similar to the long removed "flag weight" option that used to exist. I believe the post was presented in a way that questioned the decisions of the moderators, yet remained professional.

With all of these meta posts, across the network, I think you can pick up on my moderation style and personality. I like data and I try to present my thoughts in a way that is understandable to all. I'm also willing to speak my mind.

This second question I struggled with for a bit. I've had ideas on how Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange could improve, but what did I want to present in this response.

If you could add/revise one Stack Overflow policy/guideline, what would you change? Why would you change it, and what would it mean for the community?

My response to this question:

At the risk of talking myself out of a position, I think more community moderation would help the problem that Stack Overflow has with scaling moderators. There are a couple areas that I think would work well in opening this to the higher reputation users

Comment flagging: Comments can be removed if enough users flag a comment. If not, a moderator needs to handle the flag. Instead, opening this as a review queue can remove a lot of this burden from the moderators. Users could handle all but the "Other..." flag. There may be guidance needed on the "Obsolete" one due to the difference between "obsolete comment" and "obsolete code block" differences.

Audit Review reviews: On Stack Overflow, we get a decent number of disputed audit review posts on meta. There may be a way to get users with a history of passing both audits and good reviews involved in dealing with these disputed audits. The idea would be to say whether an audit is good or not.

These changes, and other areas where the community could be leveraged for moderation tasks, helps to remove the burden on moderators. Handling 2,000 (and growing) flags a day means that something needs to change. Moderators are exception handlers. They should be handling the cases that are exceptional - not comments that are no longer relevant.

For the community, this would be more involvement with the moderation aspect. Users would be able to more quickly clean up a comment thread. Flag it and it appears in the review queue. From here, the moderators don't need to be involved. The downside of this is that it adds another queue for users to be involved with.

Primary Results¶

With the primaries over, I ended with 2483 positive votes. This put me in 11th place. Sadly, this was not enough to get into the election. I was 185 votes shy of overtaking 10th. Good luck to the candidates that made it.

One of the tools that came out of this election was a way to visualize various data points to compare candidates. I provided a couple notes about outliers various candidates show regarding aspects on the site. I found it interesting to see what each user had "specialized" in.

Election¶

Updated December 8, 2015

The election is over and the new moderators have settled in. We've had our first bout of public drama over one of these moderators actually moderating a chat room too. gasp

Final thoughts¶

I was closer to the top 10 this time, but still missed it. Even more surprising was that the user that ended up in 3rd in the primaries didn't even come close to getting elected. He was eliminated in the 5th round of final STV votes. I still think I'd make a great moderator for Stack Overflow, but I need to figure out the best way to promote myself in the next election.

I'm running to be a moderator of Stack Overflow

2015-04-06T22:00:00-05:00

Introduction¶

Stack Exchange has over 130 sites in its network. Each of those sites has at least 3 moderators that are glorified janitors:

A lot of the moderation work is extremely mundane, almost janitorial. It’s deleting obvious spam, closing blatantly off-topic questions, and culling some of the worst rated posts in various dimensions.

The ideal moderator does as little as possible. But those little actions may be powerful and highly concentrated. Judiciously limiting your use of moderator powers to selectively prune and guide the community — now that’s the true art of moderation.

This works so well in the Stack Exchange network because the users are able to handle most moderation tasks. As users gain reputation, they gain privileges. With these privileges, they are better able to maintain and cultivate the content on the site.

Not all activity can be performed by users though. This is where moderators come in.

I already have a diamond (♦) on the Community Building site. I was appointed one of the Pro Tempore moderators during the beta phase of the site. This is my first experience moderating on Stack Exchange, beyond what my reputation on Stack Overflow gets me. It is not, however, my first time moderating. Community Building is focused on various aspects of building communities - both online and off. It caters to users from all aspects of a site (owners, moderators, users, advertisers and any thing else). My experience here led me to pursuing a moderator position on Stack Overflow. This site is orders of magnitude larger than Community Building. It has millions of users and millions of questions. With all this traffic, there are still only 18 diamond moderators. The idea of community moderation shows that it scales well.

Nomination Phase¶

The election cycle begins with the nomination phase. Users nominate themselves for the position. In 1200 characters or less, you lay out your platform. In this phase, nearly anyone can nominate themselves. However, there are only 30 positions available. If more than 30 people nominate themselves, then the users with the lowest reputation get bumped. With only 11K reputation, I am at the lower end of the spectrum of other nominees, but I am well above the lowest. I have the 8th lowest reputation. I've looked at previous election cycles. It seems unlikely that there will be 30 or more nominees. I think that I am safe.

My Platform¶

I posted my platform shortly after the nomination phase opened. I stressed the work that I've already done on Stack Overflow and previous moderation experience on another Stack Exchange site (Community Building).

I'm Andy and I want to be one of your moderators.

Why vote for me?

I've built an automated script to handle noisy comments. It runs daily, probably to the chagrin of the current moderators, but it helps keep the comments noise down and it is incredibly accurate.

In addition to the automated flagging, I participate in the review queues, provide edits and post answers.

As a moderator of "Community Building", I know the tools used by the Stack Exchange sites. I've used this position to interact with the existing moderators for advice and questions. This interaction will not only continue but be helpful as a new moderator to SO.

I have the flagging history and experience to make the appropriate judgment calls. I feel that is a positive attribute that will help me in helping you to have the best experience you can on Stack Overflow.

I'll continue to help improve the site regardless of whether I am elected or not. I will be able to do a much better job at that, though, as one of your moderators.

With this, I received my "candidate score". It was 29/40. Not the highest, but not the lowest either. I expect, if anyone is concerned about this score, it will be mentioned in the comments.

Nomination Phase Comments¶

Updated April 11, 2014

The comments on my nomination post have focused mostly on the pros and cons of the automated script I built to flag comments. I was expecting this discussion. I'd classify most of the comments about the script as "cautious". Users seem concerned about something completely automated used to moderate or that I focus on low priority content. My response to this concern was:

[...] by automating the removal of this lower priority content it is easier to focus on the actively harmful stuff.

I'd like to point out that I have done more than "build a script". I've actively participated in review queues on Stack Overflow for years. I've flagged appropriate content (with a high percentage marked as accepted). I have also been moderator on Community Building. All of this, in combination with the automation, makes up my "platform". I have the experience of moderation, the knowledge of how the system works and the drive to improve the community.

It was also mentioned a few times that I'd be unlikely to utilize such an automated tool as a moderator. I promised to bring this concern up when I moved further into the election process.

Finally, I received a few comments supporting either me or the work that I've done.

The automation is very impressive - thanks for that, it's a real contribution to the quality of the site. That said - as a privileged user I suspect you won't be able to run these sort of scripts on your account for obvious reasons. – Benjamin Gruenbaum Apr 6 at 21:34

I can vouch for Andy's track record as a pro tem mod on Community Building. I want to note as well for the record that many of the main site questions and answers on Community Building are explicitly about moderation, and his contributions there also provide insight into his approach to the job. – Air Apr 7 at 16:54

Huh. I have to say I'm impressed. Putting you on my list of candidates to watch. – Qix Apr 7 at 19:23

I'd just like to point out that your response to my concerns is fair and reasonable, as well as polite, even if it isn't quite exactly how I see things. It certainly alleviates my concerns of misusing moderator power. I will be seriously considering voting for you. – jpmc26 Apr 8 at 6:41

Overall, I'm pleased with how the discussion has gone. It has been a few days since there were comments left though. Hopefully a little interest picks up during the primary phase.

I am also very impressed by the other candidates. There are many very good candidates that I'd be happy to work with (or be unashamed to lose to).

Primary Phase¶

Updated April 17, 2015

The nomination phase has ended. I have advanced to the primary phase. The purpose of this phase is to narrow the list of 30 candidates to 10. Those 10 will be the ones that can be voted on to be the next moderators. In the primary phase, users can vote nominees up or down.

As part of the election process, one of the other candidates created several tools to help users see nominee activity. He also created a live vote monitor. It was exciting to hang out in the Election Chat room and watch votes roll in. The position of 10th was highly contested toward the end of the primary. I was very pleased to see that everyone remained civil in the chat room too.

I ended this phase with 1492 positive votes. This put me in 15th. Sadly, not enough to advance to the election phase. However, there are several excellent candidates that did advance. Good luck to them.

Other Primary Data¶

Part of the primary phase involves answering questions that users have posed during the nomination phase. These questions were voted upon and the highest were included in the questionnaire. My response was removed at the end of this phase because I did not advance. I was prepared with answers about my moderation style and my expectations for the position.

One of the other tools that was created during this cycle showed nominee activity on the site over time. This was a quick way to compare nominees based on the number of activities they have performed on undeleted posts (because data related to deleted posts is removed from public view). It provided, at a glance, a way to see who is and is not active.

Below are the charts of my activity that the tool created. The green vertical bar is account creation date. The orange/brown vertical bars are previous election windows.

This is my activity chart for Stack Overflow itself. It shows that I've had an account since 2009, but didn't really start utilizing the site, more than occasionally, until 2013. Since then, it shows that a large majority of my activity onsite is in the review queues. There are posts, revisions, comments and more along the bottom, but most of my activity is in the review queues.

My Meta Stack Overflow and Meta Stack Exchange charts show a fairly low activity level. Unfortunately, I think this is obscuring the posts that I do make simply because of the large scale on the y-axis.

Finally, the last chart shows the combined activity across all three areas (SO, MSO, and MSE). It looks very similar to the Stack Overflow one because of the lower activity levels on the two Meta sites.

Election Phase¶

Updated April 21, 2015

The election is over. Three great candidates were elected. One thing I like about Stack Exchange's elections is their usage of OpenSTV and the Meek STV method. The results of each round of the election cycle are available at opavote.org.

Final Thoughts¶

Like most elections, there are known and unknown winners before the election even begins. The response that Martijn Pieters received from the time he nominated through the final moments of the election all but guaranteed a victory for him. It is a well deserved victory. I hope that he is able to keep up his frequent, high quality, answers in the python tag. If not, his drop in activity will be felt. The surprise, to me, was Jeremy Banks. He ended in 9th place in the primaries. That doesn't mean he can't do the job.

I've interacted with all three moderators on site and in chat prior to their victory. I've been very happy with those interactions. With their promotion, I look forward to working with them as a moderator on the Stack Exchange network in the future.

Congratulations to the winners!

Moderation position on Moderators

2014-07-02T10:51:00-05:00

Introduction¶

I've been the owner of Vipers for almost 5 years. In that time I've helped the community grown and get stronger. I've helped members begin their own communities and I've maintained the game servers the players utilize 24 hours a day. I've been concerned about low activity, excited about new events and updates, and watched the community ebb and flow throughout the years. I've dealt with trolls, spammers, and new community members. I think I've gained valuable experience in managing a community.

I'm also a member on Stack Overflow and over the years gotten to know others that enjoy the "Meta" aspect of Stack Exchange. That's the "behind the scenes", "how does this site work?" discussions and activities.

Moderators¶

A few days ago, I found a way to merge my experience with Vipers and the knowledge of the Stack Exchange platform. A new community started recently: Moderators. The idea behind this site is for people building, administering, managing or cultivating digital communities to have a place to ask others with similar experiences questions. I love it!

One of the things a new site needs on the Stack Exchange network is a set of pro tempore moderators. While Stack Exchange believes in community moderation, there are still some things that require more access. These pro tempore moderators are those people. I nominated myself for one such position.

The Nomination¶

This is the nomination I presented to the community. In it, I discuss my experience with Vipers and some of our challenges. One in particular that I mention is the automated language filter we have on the game servers.

I am an administrator/site owner of a medium sized gaming community that runs on a PHPBB3 board. We host multiple game servers as well. I've got a team of moderators that help keep the forum and game servers clean. I've run this site for 5 years, after taking it over from the original creator of the community who wanted to move on. In my time as admin, we've seen the number of participants on the forum increase. We've seen our game server population increase as well. I attribute this to getting the community involved in change discussions.

One of our biggest changes occurred several years ago. Community members complained that our game servers would be over run with trolls at hours when moderators weren't available and spewing filth. The community wanted a cleaner game server experience. Users wanted these players gone immediately. Previous community leaders felt that trolling of this kind was part of the game and did nothing. After some discussions regarding what was and wasn't appropriate, we decided to be (for lack of a better term) "family friendlier". Certain 'extreme' phrases were no longer tolerated at all. A technical solution was built to automatically remove players that violated these rules. This solution allowed users to swear, but once it became excessive (again, defined by the community) they, too, were removed.

The tool we have (PHPBB3) may not have the reputation, badges, or increasing privileges used here on Stack Exchange but for my community that has not been a negative. Engaging with the community in discussions and letting the members provide input that me and my team utilize has been extremely beneficial.

I have no experience moderating a Stack Exchange site. I don't feel that's a down side though. I can provide the "outside" perspective in a Stack Exchange heavy group. That does mean, though, that I'd depend on and expect the community to provide feedback on how moderation is being handled. Much like my existing gaming community, input from the community to the moderation team is important and the moderation team should be listening to that input.

Appointment¶

Updated on August 12, 2014

I have been appointed to a moderator position on Moderators. I now "moderate the moderators", as the running joke has been on meta and the chatroom. I am looking forward to helping this community grow and to providing my experience of community management outside of Stack Exchange to this position.

Renaming to Community Building¶

Updated on December 4, 2014

Almost since the beginning of Moderators, there have been conversations about whether the name is limiting our scope. We aren't a community for only moderation questions. We are a community about how to build communities and moderation happens to be a part of community building. (How many times can you say "community" before it sounds weird?)

Discussions began in August about possible name changes. These discussions continued into October as we worked on the scope of our site. Finally, on December 2, we received our new name: Community Building. It's the same great site but with a much more relevant name.

How to appeal a ban effectively

2014-04-22T22:26:00-05:00

Introduction¶

In last week's post, I showed three ways that appealing bans on the Vipers forums would fail. Everyone makes mistakes and we try to recognize that when someone comes to the forums and makes a good appeal. We usually offer an unadvertised "last chance". This is the chance to prove you've changed. If you fail, you are gone for good. If, however, you have changed behaviors, this allows you to play on the Vipers servers again. To get this chance though, you have to make an appeal.

Super secret formula for getting unbanned¶

The secret to a successful appeal is to do all of the following in your appeal thread:

Post in complete sentences, using mostly correct English. I'm not going to mark you off for simple spelling mistakes, but I'm not going to read your post if it looks like you typed it from your phone to your teenage buddy.
Stay polite. If you lose your cool, it's much less likely we are going to want to work with you. Remember, this is a game. You not being able to play on one server is not the end of the world.
Explain why you think your ban was inappropriate. Make this short and to the point.
Don't lie. I have logs. I know how to read logs. I even have ways of quickly searching through the logs for specific times, if you provide that information. If your story doesn't match what I see in the logs, I'm not going to engage with you.
Answer questions from the admins. It's entirely possible you didn't provide a crucial bit of information or we need to wait for input from the banning admin. In either case, if an administrator asks you a question, you should probably answer it. When you do so, follow the first two bullet points above.

Summary¶

The sad thing is most of the appeals fail at step 1. These posts are to facilitate communication between the admin team and the player that wants to return to the server. In these appeals I try to educate a player on why they were banned in the first place. If it's difficult to understand what is being said, it's very hard to have this conversation.

How NOT to appeal a ban

2014-04-14T22:26:00-05:00

Introduction¶

I've been running Vipers for about four and a half years. In that time I've seen my share of players get banned. The "good" ones realize they screwed up and come back when the ban has expired and never have an issue again. These types of players are common if they are first time offenders. The minute someone gets a second ban, the likelihood of them getting another ban shoots way up.

Our Rules¶

Vipers has five very simple rules. These are presented every time someone joins any of our game servers. They have to click "Continue" to move past them.

We have a very simple structure for how bans work. Unless you are incredibly egregious in your behavior, or are out right cheating by using hacks of some kind, you get a 4 strike policy. The ban length for the first three increases for each, but you are allowed back. On the fourth, we show you the door. Most of our bans are automated, thus are violating the very first rule.

Bad appeals¶

Playing on our servers is not a right. It is not a guarantee. We are not obligated to provide a gaming environment for you to spew your filth. If you can't meet our simple rules, you can leave. If you want to get back into the servers after your fourth offense, you have to come to us and ask. You should think about how you get someone to do what you want in "the real world".

Method 1: Freedom of Speech¶

I think this one is my favorite. Last I checked, I'm not the government of the United States. I'm a private citizen providing a private server for others to play on. My server, my rules (technically, the community's rules, but you understand...) I am not bound by the First Amendment to allow you to say whatever you want.

An example:

Let's break down some of the flaws:

First, and most importantly, we do not have a member named "DarkWolf", let alone an admin
DarkWolf was banned, automatically, 2 minutes prior to the person making this appeal.
The chat logs show that the person appealing even noticed the ban and made a comment. It was this comment that triggered the ban.

Not seen in this image is the response when this was pointed out and the appeal denied. The response managed to hit all of the trigger words we ban for on the servers. Just in case we were reconsidering the denial, at this point we're not.

Method 2: Admin Abuse¶

Admins are evil and are holding a grudge! They hate me and ban for inappropriate language. Honest, I never said anything bad.

It's amazing how quickly that tune changes when I can produce exact, timestamped, logs with their Steam ID attached to it. It's even more amusing when the admin being accused is "Zephyr", the automated process that watches for such language.

An example:

Let's break down this one too:

Zephyr is a bot. It is not holding a grudge and it is not stalking you
Swearing, unless very very excessive, isn't going to trigger a ban
Chat logs show this is the 4th automated ban. In each ban, the user has managed to slip in multiple offensive phrases before being automatically kicked

Method 3: Ranting¶

A rant isn't helpful to anyone. It doesn't endear the poster to the community. The administrators don't want to read through a rambling, unformated, exposition.

An example:

Our break down:

Several logic errors and contradictions to their own arguments
Doesn't actually mention they are looking to be unbanned, just that they want to complain about the rules. (It's mentioned in a later post that they'd like to be unbanned)
Chat logs clearly indicate the player was fond of certain slurs. This is the reason for the bans

Method 4: Threats to the server¶

Threats to attack the server in some way are not going to get you unbanned. There are only two possible outcomes to this appeal type. Either you are successful and the server is off line (now how are you going to play even if unbanned) or we ignore your tantrum and leave you banned.

Break down:

I have no reason to unban you. You've threatened the servers and made an ultimatum that effectively holds us hostage: "Either I get to play with you, or I'll take down your servers".
You offer no proof of your claims (unsurprisingly, none existed)

Summary¶

Above I've posted three of the most common methods people use to appeal their ban on the Viper servers. Every time one of these types of appeals is posted, it is rejected and the player is told they aren't welcome. All I (and the community) ask is a little bit of respect. You've already proven that you can't follow our rules if we reach this point. If you have truly changed, why don't you demonstrate some of that change while requesting the ban be removed.

A special kind of troll

2010-12-28T16:04:00-06:00

What happened?¶

Over the Christmas holiday, the Team Vipers forums were hit by "multiple" users who decided it was a good idea to use our community as a battle ground. A Viper member stepped in to "help" resolve the problem by attempting to play mediator. (Notice the air quotes. These are important later) The battling users turned on this member and escalated the matter to threats of violence. When the member stopped responding, the users got bored and began spamming the board.

Due to a combination of it being Christmas and the admins doing Christmas-y things with their families, this went on for hours. There were several rounds of clean ups, but the battle continued over nearly a 48 hour period.

Why is this troll different?¶

After Christmas festivities had ended and I had time to sit down in front of a computer to investigate what happened, I began piecing together a time line of events. It turns out that all of these "users" were coming from the same IP address. On top of that, they shared the same IP address as the member that attempted to "help". Odd...

A little more background¶

The member that was "helping" had recently been approached by the admin team in an effort to clarify some questions about their age. One of the admins had been presented evidence that the user was under the age of 16, which we all know is the minimum age to be a Vipers member.

The user took this as a threat that we were going to remove them from the community entirely via bans on the servers and forums. They posted a rant on their "sub-community". To me this seems much more like a place where people that didn't like our rules go to complain about us in an unproductive manner. I'm still not sure why they set up this community in the first place, because they have always expressed a very keen interest in Vipers.

Follow up with the member¶

When I started seeing a pattern between the battling users and the member, I sent a Steam message to the member asking if they were around so that we could chat. The conversation began with me asking about the rant they posted and whether or not they were aware that we allowed players under 16 to play on the servers, but not be members. They said they were not aware of this and seemed pleased they'd still be around.

I thanked them for their attempt to help over the holiday. Then I mentioned that it was odd that all of the users were coming from the same IP address. It was agreed that was odd. When I said that there was another user that used that IP in the past, they stopped responding. A few hours later I got a message saying they were back and around to talk again but they'd closed the Steam chat window and lost the conversation.

A few minutes later they began complaining that their own forum had been spammed. I'll admit I was curious, so I went to take a look. There were multiple "users" having a very similar battle across the other forum. The member had posted messages as the voice of the community that it had to stop or they'd issue bans.

I was sick of the game at this point. I mentioned that I knew they were all of the users involved. I'd issued bans to the user accounts on the forum. I revoked their Viper membership and banned their main account. I also made a note that they could appeal the ban in 6 months time. I figured they'd forget about us.

It takes a special kind of troll to spam their own site to try and convince someone you aren't a spammer.

After effect of the bans¶

At this point the member was less than pleased. There were vague threats made against me, the server, and anything they could think of that would offend me. I simply ignored the user on Steam.

This didn't sit well, apparently. The user attempted a denial of service attack on the game servers, which our hosting provider mitigated. Part of this mitigation involves sending me a list of IP addresses that were attempting to connect to the server at the time of the attack, and part of the traffic that automatically triggered their counter measures.

Unsurprisingly, there were only a few IP addresses. Geolocation says they are all in the same city. One of those IP addresses is the IP of the user.

What is going to change?¶

The biggest problem I see out of all of this is that we didn't have active admins during the initial wave of spam. I can't fault the admin team, after all it was Christmas. However, there have been a few requests recently for a couple more game server admins. I feel this incident just confirms that we need a couple more. In the coming days, we'll announce who our new admins will be.

The member that has been removed has been banned from the servers and the forums. We've also destroyed two new user accounts they created since the spam wave. This is business as usual. I did offer them the chance to appeal at the end of June. I suspect they will not.

The appeal¶

This section was added on July 7th, 2011 after the user appealed their ban

It seems I was wrong. They filed an appeal to their ban. Of course it took place over another holiday (4th of July). Fortunately, our two European admins were still around while the rest of us were out enjoying some fireworks.

The appeal was filed on the forums, as is usual. Community members stepped in to express their unhappiness that the user would consider returning after what they did over Christmas. One of the admins that were around put a message in the admin area and asked for feedback from other admins.

When I returned home after some amazing fireworks, I found I had an email from our hosting provider. They'd blocked another attempted denial of service attack. I logged into the forums to see what was going on and noticed that the appeal thread was not going well. The user was getting more and more upset at the community members who were rallying against their return. It eventually ended with a note saying that they hope Vipers never recovers from the DDOS. At this point one of the other admins locked the thread.

A check of the IP address the user was utilizing to post the messages and the list of IPs involved in the attempted DDOS showed that the IP was on the list, and again they were all in the same city (and the same city as in December).

Their appeal was rejected. They were informed they would not be welcome back.

After this appeal, I don't believe anything will need to change on our side. The appeal process concluded faster than normal. Attempts to DDOS the community server make the decision rather easy for the admins.