Their rules, (I believe unintentionally) give iron-fisted fiefdom rulers a toolbox of justifications to control and alienate under the guise of protecting the quality of the site data. I honestly don’t even think most of the control freak mods could objectively judge the propriety of their actions because it was all encouraged by the rules. (And I do not think this was universal among the mods, but it was certainly endemic to the site culture.) Well, the outcome was predictable.
Before I worked as a web developer, I was a formally educated and credentialed professional in a non-computer-related field with a pretty high barrier to professional practice, but a lot of passionate hobbyists. When I found the related low-ish volume SE, I excitedly poured hours into writing authoritative, well-informed, well-cited, thoughtfully worded, and concise but layperson-friendly answers. I also provided encouraging and positive, but usefully critical feedback to people that missed the mark. I knew how negative the format could be after using SO for years, so I bent over backwards to avoid discouraging newcomers with a punitive or imperious tone. People seemed to find my contributions useful because I became the top contributor in something like two weeks, and still regularly get points for things I wrote over a decade ago.
Some mod— a hobbyist with far less knowledge and experience, but a serious case of Dunning-Krueger— probably got annoyed that I was getting more votes than them because one day they started nitpicking the hell out of every goddamned word I wrote. I pretty quickly got fed up, and stopped participating about a month after I started.
::slow clap:: Well they might not have protected the utility or integrity of their knowledge base, but they sure protected the integrity of a bunch of people’s egos. That’s something, right?!
I remember having to fight a mod for him to restore a reply penned by Mike Pall, to a LuaJIT question.
Mike Pall is the author of LuaJIT.
The reply had been either deleted or edited to the point of being wrong (memory is foggy), because Mike Pall wasn't an expert at SO, and had somehow not used the site exactly as intended. The mod was very dismissive and patronizing.
I was going through some answers on a stackoverflow thread, and noticed that every single one had been edited by the same guy, just.. adding his own personal opinions and 'corrections' to them, and in the process making them universally worse and less correct
The idea that answers should be editable, and the gamification of stackoverflow, was an absolutely terrible combination
Editing used to be fine, back then like 15-16y ago. Personally I posted mostly everything as community wiki (no reputation gain) as I got the mod-alike reputation anyways.
At some point the (say 2013-2014 or so) the site deteriorated quite massively, though - as folks considered stackoverflow CV worthy material...
I reverted nearly every single edit to my answers other than obvious typos. If I’d have meant something other than what I said, I’d have said it. You want to see your own words on the page? Write an answer of your own.
Lordy, that use to piss me off most fiercely. I don’t want someone else’s words attributed to me.
It is taken very seriously in Stack Overflow editing policy that edits are not supposed to go against the author's apparent intent. But it does involve removing a lot of things that you might want the answer to say, but don't meet the guidelines for what answers are supposed to contain.
When you join the site, you agree to Terms and Conditions that, among other things, grant a Creative Commons license to the community over your contributions, which gives them the right to make those edits.
The site is explicitly not trying to accommodate people who want to say things in a specific way because it's their way of saying it. The site is explicitly trying to accommodate people who want to collaborate to produce a polished, coherent work of reference. If that isn't you, unironically, that's what tech blogs are for.
People with the attitude you demonstrate here are consistently among the worst-behaved and hardest-to-deal-with participants on the meta site, because of a stubborn refusal to accept a core principle of the site.
(Yes, the reputation system was an unfathomably bad design choice in light of the site's goals. In retrospect I genuinely don't understand how it survived past 2011 or so with tweaks as minor as it got.)
That's ridiculous and you're wrong. I grant them a CC license to my content to fold, spindle and mutilate it for their own purposes, but not to leave my name attached to the folded, spindled, mutilated version.
My answer has my name on it. It's right there saying "kstrauser said these words". If I didn't say them, I don't want the site lying and saying that I did. I don't mind if someone fixes an obvious typo, or updates a URL that had bitrotted. That's fine. They're what I obvious intended to say. But I've had people add extra sentences or paragraphs, and oh hell no.
That was never a core principle of the site, at least not when I joined it before you. If it'd been an expressed core principle that people could edit my words, attributed to me, so that my user account ends up saying things I never said, I never would have signed up and not many other people would have, either.
> That's ridiculous and you're wrong. I grant them a CC license to my content to fold, spindle and mutilate it for their own purposes, but not to leave my name attached to the folded, spindled, mutilated version.
The choice of license is made clear at https://stackoverflow.com/legal/terms-of-service/public#lice..., and the consequences elaborated at https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/347758/creative-com... . The license itself is at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ . It is one of the BY licenses, so the site is legally required to leave your name on the work. The interface explicitly marks both the original author and the most recent editor on the main facing page; and it offers the ability to click in and see the entire editing history.
> But I've had people add extra sentences or paragraphs, and oh hell no.
This is overwhelmingly done in good faith, and it's explicitly policy not to change your meaning. In fact, there are many posts on meta where people complained about attempting a good-faith edit and having been judged as falling afoul of that for no reason. See e.g. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/349950 .) But it's also explicitly policy that they can "edit your words, attributed to you" (see e.g. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/403176 ). The people who make these changes, generally, sincerely believe that they are either saying things you intended to say, or at least adding information that you would have added if you'd come back to keep things up to date. There has been a ton of discussion trying to clarify and/or figure out where the line is: see e.g. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/search?q=%5Bediting%5D+intent... .
If you saw someone change something that fell afoul of this, there was a meta site where you could raise the objection. But we were constantly inundated with people who thought it was wrong that we took "thank you in advance, my_username" off the end of the their questions or similar (see e.g. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/260776 ), as if they thought they had a right to that.
But the points system was fundamentally inextricable from the site’s operation, and the officiousness and arrogance it rewarded meant it could never be as good as anybody hoped it would be. The people making the content decisions were often misguided, and vastly less qualified than the authors they meddled with… but were rewarded for their actions all the same.
There can be a collaborative work site and there can be a chain of posts type of site (e.g. forum or reddit or HN here). But trying to mix these concepts without any control or organization procedures is, was and will always be considered ridiculous by a vast majority of humans in all spheres of life. If SO wished to be an iterative collab site, sure it may have done everything it did and allowed mods to pick and copy any answers and parts of answers into a new, better refined answer penned by them. But just allowing random edits of any posts by any author, just twisting what they said is absolutely idiotic and ask any internet user of any age, they will agree with me, not with SO policy.
Wikipedia is often brought into comparisons with SO either as something close or as something vastly different. But it doesn't matter atm. What I want to highlight is that SO allowed on it's site to essentially go to the Talks page of Wiki page and allow editing of all user comments to change their words in retrospect, and also allowing to go to the edit history allow edit that history too. This is what SO did, no wonder there are almost no humans who would approve this (after explicitly explained to them, SO is mostly banking of user's lack of full picture knowledge and ignorance).
Found the SO mod…
No; editing a post to meet the site's style expectations is not moderation, and I was not a moderator, just like 99.9% of everyone described anonymously and incorrectly as "a mod" in discussions of Stack Overflow on the Internet.
It's really annoying to see people insist that they should be the ones who get to decide how Stack Overflow either did, or should have, worked, when they can't even be bothered to understand who the mods were.
The gamification was a key reason the site became popular, but as the site grew, the rules and game mechanics did not evolve.
An edit that made a response worse should have knocked the mod down so that they were unable to mod any more. The quality of the edit should have been determined by the original author. "Did this edit make your question better?"
Moderators should have been ranked and scored based on their ability to help and welcome new users. It should have been very costly for them to make a new users feel unwelcome.
> An edit that made a response worse should have knocked the mod down so that they were unable to mod any more.
Literally everyone on the site is permitted to propose an edit, and everyone with at least 2000 reputation can make unilateral edits. The proposals are approved by a 2 out of 3 majority of random unilateral-edit-privileged users. None of this is considered "moderation" and is not done by "mods". Of millions of Stack Overflow accounts, only a few dozen have ever actually been moderators, and they do a tiny share of curation. Their main job is responding to flags.
> It should have been very costly for them to make a new users feel unwelcome.
The overwhelming majority of people who came to the site wanted the site to be something that it was fundamentally not trying to be, and often something it was fundamentally trying not to be. It was correct to make such users "feel unwelcome", because experience has shown that they typically cannot be reasoned with or explained to. The statistics make it clear that most of them never had any intention of trying to join a community (or, say, ask another question after the one that motivated account creation) in the first place.
> The overwhelming majority of people who came to the site wanted the site to be something that it was fundamentally not trying to be
Message received I guess, seeing as how the overwhelming majority left.
So they have essentially killed the site. Congratulations I guess?
They have gone along with the site dying, as was always realistically going to happen, even if it took people a while to realize. As one of the people doing a lot of what you (in my view very misguidedly) consider "killing", I'm perfectly okay with that.
But I'm upset that my conscious attempts to make a more useful reference for everyone got disrespected from all sides: outside commenters ascribed incorrect and hurtful motives to me while refusing to consider what my real objective might have been; new users cursed me out or wrongly accused me of various things; the site ownership tried to make the task harder in all sorts of ways (while never compensating me for my work in any way); other high-rep users took destructive actions because the reputation system incentivized them (closing and downvoting questions was not incentivized in any way); the reputation system was never meaningfully revised even though everyone knew it was crap; and Google actively and deliberately made their search worse.
What killed it in truth was RAG, but let's stipulate that it was policy that drove users away.
The thing that killed it was the thing that made it prominent.
According to a blogpost i can't find any more about "how to speedrun social media" or similar, it's basically impossible to pivot a community once established given the levers of voting mechanics and mod policy. (I distinguish between Facebook's and Reddit's enshittification and a pivot.)
IOW, the seed of a community property's growth is also the seed of its decline. Analagously, the charming village is attractive to new residents because the existing residents resist the changes that new residents embody.
Very broadly and by no means universally: techies don't like lusers, because lusers don't put effort into understanding, they just want turnkey answers. This is totally counter to the archetypal techie value system.
SO optimised for grumpy misanthropes over bumbling newbies, which, in tech, is roughly congruent with optimising for people with knowledge to share over people who want their homework done for them.
The questions are not the scarce resource - you can browse Microsoft Community Answers to verify that. The answers there are correspondingly useless, which is why "blindly copy from SO" is a meme and "blindly copy from Microsoft Answers" is not.
Here ITT, and more generally on HN, comments are excoriating about the cost of being offputting to new users. Those commenters should recognise that it's not a pure cost, it's a tradeoff, and the upside has been a treasure for a decade. A million projects completed by people who found quality answers, mostly by searching for existing questions.
That resource is still relevant for stacks other than the latest web framework hotness, and i personally still get benefit from it in my archaic hobby of learning to code.
That resource is not still directly relevant for coders deeply plugged into AI, but it did train that AI.
It's one of the most successful endeavours on the web and a towering community achievement. It is a superficially a shame that people experienced gatekeeping, but if "gatekeeper" has only negative connotations in your lexicon, then I advise you to compromise your principles and firewall your network.
Being able to edit answers isn't even a mod thing. In fact, for most of SO's life, it wasn't even a 'being logged in' thing (you could just edit an answer anonymously). How they wound up with a Q and A site where you could edit another user's answer far more easily than leaving a comment on it I still will never fully understand.
(this kind of thing IMO really added to the utterly arcane set of rules and conventions that makes it feel so inaccessible)
You could not unilaterally edit anonymously; your edit would have been put in a review queue.
It is good that leaving comments is hard. First off, because it was learned repeatedly, the hard way, that removing that barrier leads to ungodly amounts of literal spam. Second because even insightful comments detract from the main intended flow of using the site, which is: you find a question from a search engine, read the question and verify that it reflects what you're trying to figure out, then scroll down to the answers and learn something. The entire point is to not be a discussion forum (which is also why comments were not threaded for most of the the site's life). In fact, the site came into existence specifically because of frustration with what ends up happening on a discussion forum where people can discuss endlessly.
See, what you're saying makes some logical sense in a vacuum but it's so utterly unlike how any other website works that unless you take a huge amount of effort to explain this to people, gently, then it's not at all surprising that people just bounce off of it.
> but it's so utterly unlike how any other website works that unless you take a huge amount of effort to explain this to people, gently, then it's not at all surprising that people just bounce off of it.
It is, and that's fine.
It's incompatible with a site becoming large; and that, too, is fine.
A large site was not required to accomplish any of Atwood or Spolsky's goals aside from perhaps making a profit off of ads. Many other choices were also counterproductive to the goals aside from profit.
Everyone involved would have loved to "explain this to people gently". There was no space provided in which to do it. We had no access to modify the help pages or do anything about user onboarding flows. Downvotes were the tool provided to de-emphasize things and take them out of the way, and to rate quality; so they were used appropriately. (Despite this, and despite public perception, voting was historically very biased in the positive direction.)
Because new questions were open by default, they had to be closed explicitly and in public in order for them to be dealt with. People walked away with the completely incorrect impression that closing a question is inherently a rejection; the explicit purpose and sole effect of closing a question is to prevent answers unless and until it is fixed. It is done with an explicit expectation that fixable questions will get fixed; but the nature of some problems (in particular: missing information) is such that only the OP can do this. There was a period of time in which "closed" was rebranded as "on hold" in the interface, to try to impress upon people that no, they aren't being turned away, they are being asked to take further action. But this was reverted because it was somehow apparently making things even worse.
But also, yes, after telling countless people the same things daily, sometimes humans lose their ability to be gentle. But nobody who's dealt with roughly ever gets to see what the other side had to deal with earlier. The way that people talk about "toxicity" on Stack Overflow comes across like they think it was constantly full of insults and slurs. The evidence shows that the large majority of that sort of content (which explicitly violated the Code of Conduct, and there was a full system in place to deal with this, that pundits often ignore or even lie about) was directed at the curators. One of the most common questions on the meta site is "why aren't people required to explain downvotes?", with the main retort being "why don't you think they should be required to explain upvotes?". But the main answer to that question is because people who stuck out their necks to try to explain the site's standards politely, would frequently get sworn at and even threatened. (I was once openly called sexist for applying these standards, with no evidence beyond the fact that the OP was a woman, which I didn't know at the time).
My 16 year old question was recently closed because it didn't follow the rules. It just seemed really petty.
Edit: just checked it has been deleted so no longer visible to non moderators.
Was the title "What's wrong with this JavaScript code?"?
Ha! No it was not :)
I had a pretty high rank on ruby and java answers, with some high traffic stuff, there were always people trying to completely edit my answers into something else entirely, it was such a shitty experience that I just decided the effort wasn’t worth it.
I think it's all about incentives. The power to governance was given to prolific and tenured accounts who wanted to govern. Over the long timeframe their incentive averages to making their life easier and keeping the governance. Wikipedia is going through something similar.
> Their rules, (I believe unintentionally) give iron-fisted fiefdom rulers a toolbox of justifications to control and alienate under the guise of protecting the quality of the site data.
That isn't what happens. I know many, many people believe it to be what happens, but I know from years of seeing the process on the inside that it's absolutely not what happens in the overwhelming majority of cases.
The "quality of the site data" is a 100% honest motivation and I don't understand why people are unwilling to accept that. I and others have made countless attempts to explain it.
> I honestly don’t even think most of the control freak mods
The people you're referring to are not control freaks, and also are not "moderators". Most curation on the site requires consensus between multiple people who are generally not coordinating.
> Some mod— a hobbyist with far less knowledge and experience, but a serious case of Dunning-Krueger— probably got annoyed that I was getting more votes than them because one day they started nitpicking the hell out of every goddamned word I wrote. I pretty quickly got fed up, and stopped participating about a month after I started.
I can practically guarantee that the person you're referring to was not a moderator. If it was (someone with the diamond icon beside the username, and who appeared on https://stackoverflow.com/users?tab=moderators), you should have posted on the meta site about it. The pattern of behaviour you describe is clearly abusive and against the Code of Conduct (and would have been across all versions thereof), and would absolutely been acted upon.
If an "ordinary" (perhaps with higher rep) user was harassing you like this, that is why they put a "flag" link under every question and answer, and icon beside each comment, to raise a flag for moderator attention. This sort of thing is and always has been taken seriously.
> That isn't what happens. I know many, many people believe it to be what happens, but I know from years of seeing the process on the inside that it's absolutely not what happens in the overwhelming majority of cases.
If quite literally every person I interact with professionally has an anecdote about this happening, your anecdote about it not happening is not very convincing.
Have you/SO staff/SO mods considered why this impression is so prevalent if you’re confident it’s (as you claim) not actually true?
Your claim is that "quite literally every person you interact with professionally has an anecdote about" the internal mental state of other people.
Even if everyone else on the Internet thinks a person has a certain belief or motivation or ideology, that doesn't mean that person actually has that belief or motivation or ideology.
I'm speaking to my own mental state, as well as to my general impression of what other curators told me, and the frustrations they espoused. There were chat rooms where people could have easily spent all day talking about how cool it is to power-trip, if they'd actually been power-trippers. Instead, they talked about how helpless* they felt as new people kept coming in and making the same innocent mistakes; about how they had no tools to deal with this except the ones that left offsite users with a bad impression; about how annoying it was to be constantly aware of that offsite bad impression when they were trying to do things necessary to the site's objective; etc.
What you also seem to be missing is that since the Prosus acquisition, "SO mods" (and the rest of the community, who are much greater in number and take the large majority of the actions incorrectly deemed "moderation" by outsiders) and "SO staff" were in active conflict most of the time. The LLM-content ban policy was against the staff's (really the company, who employ a handful of staff as liaisons) wishes; the fighting over this got so bad that there was an actual moderation strike and an extended period where the site got the amount of spam you'd expect for a site that size instead of the almost miraculously small amount it would normally get. (The spam filtering also involved community-operated automated systems that were suspended in solidarity.) Then we got hit with proposal after proposal for AI-powered features that were obviously terrible half-baked nonsense with no real value ad; we constantly tore into them on the meta site; the company showed zero sign whatsoever of caring in the slightest, while Prashanth Chandrasekhar (the new CEO) would give TedX talks and such demonstrating a complete ignorance of how the community felt about AI in general.
Many people come to Stack Overflow carrying preconceptions about how the site is supposed to operate and are surprised when reality does not agree with them. Since admitting to being wrong would be too hard, they prefer to come up with quasi-conspiratorial explanations of inflated egos, secret motives and admin cliques. Same thing happens to Wikipedia, really.
"But you said you want to build the sum of all human knowledge! Why can't you accept this piece of alternative history I just made up?"
"So, Stack Overflow is for the computer stuff, right? I have this Word document that... what do you mean this is not a programming question?"
"Since I have no idea where else I could go with this, you must allow me to post it here!"
I mean, it's not like either project is free from power-tripping moderators and overzealous application of procedure; in fact, it's not even particularly rare... but still rarer than the loudest naysayers keep insisting. I have witnessed plenty of dysfunctions myself, and yet whenever I hear others' complaints, I tend to suspect this is yet another case that boils down to "how dare you delete my stuff". With many such anecdotes, I notice they only speak of the situation in the vaguest of terms, omitting details that would have enabled me to identify the actual problem... which I cannot help but wonder if this is because if I were to see the situation myself, it would have made the complainer look much worse.
Mod vs non-mod-user-with-edit-privileges is a semantic difference from a user perspective. Nobody gives a shit what the internal labeling system looks like or hierarchy among the people with edit privileges. I’m not going to litigate my case in front of a clique of other officious hall monitors just for the privilege of making that site better. I don’t care if it was against the rules for me to be annoyed by their obnoxiousness, or what their exact role was in the organizational structure. I tried, but it ended up being a completely obnoxious experience because of a user with advanced privileges, and so you lost me.
I was the only one with formal education and a professional background consistently answering, and frankly, that site needed my expertise a hell of a lot more than I needed to share it— and they failed to provide a reasonable forum to do that despite being its sole purpose. If the point system actually represented expertise, it might have worked. I’m fine with being scrutinized by a peer or superior… But it didn’t go down like that.
> Mod vs non-mod-user-with-edit-privileges is a semantic difference from a user perspective.
If your lack of interest in how the existing community works is that profound, then you could hardly be said to have a good-faith interest in joining the community in the first place. Which means you're actually upset that the site doesn't provide the service you expected it to.
Sites are not required to provide services simply because the people who arrive there believe that's the service the site provides.
If you're sticking around to keep answering questions, and it's because you think the place has a cool concept behind it and you want to become part of something, you owe it to yourself to make sure you understand what the "something" is. And you owe it to the other people there to accept that you are only one voice out of N in deciding that.
> and they failed to provide a reasonable forum to do that despite being its sole purpose
That is emphatically not what the purpose was. See for example https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92107 .
The point system was a broken mess. But it was not intended to represent what you appear to mean by "expertise"; it was intended to represent trust and engagement.
By answering questions, you obtained reputation which granted you privileges, which you were expected to use to maintain the site according to the site's objectives. This includes, notably, filtering questions according to what helps build the site as a useful reference for users of search engines, which is the real motivating force behind the standard question-closure reasons (even if it took a while to achieve consensus on that, and to decide how to phrase it all). And to refrain from answering questions which should be closed, because that acts counter to the site's objective.
The design was specifically intended to ensure that you get scrutinized by peers or superiors — in the domain of using the site properly and working towards its goal, not in the domain of the subject matter where you have expertise. I agree that the reputation system utterly failed in effecting this.
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Social media has been a fascinating experiment in human behaviour. We’ve long had discussion forums built around technical topics, from the early days of Usenet, through the likes of Slashdot and Digg, the arrival of Stack Overflow, and today the popularity of Reddit and some smaller sites like HN. Each has developed its own culture. Each has dealt with the need to prioritise the most valuable contributions and reduce the visibility of negative ones in its own way. And yet there have been some recurring themes.
On the positive side, all of the above have attracted many people to their communities who have contributed useful or interesting points. We all give away our thoughts and experience for free while participating in these discussions, but we gain in return from the freely shared knowledge and experiences of others. I also appreciate those who take the time to vote/moderate so that the best contributions stand out. Overall I find these online discussions extremely valuable and I’m sure others do as well.
On the negative side, there are some common failure modes. There have always been the trolls who will post offensive or misleading comments, and even when it’s a small minority, they can be disproportionately disruptive. There have always been the Dunning-Kruger contributors who would insist they were correct even as others tried to explain why they weren’t, and then the people who do know what they’re doing feel obliged to waste time repeatedly setting the record straight so no-one comes along later and gets misled by the incorrect or misleading contributions. I will never understand the current fascination with getting AI bots to contribute mediocre or just plain wrong comments in these discussions. But the worst recurring pathology by far, IMHO, is when there is some form of community moderation but that goes off the rails. It killed SO by deterring good contributors for petty reasons. It has killed many a promising subreddit; I have recently given up participating in several myself that used to be interesting, because their moderators started killing entire posts retrospectively, which repeatedly cut off discussions where some contributors had already taken the time to write up good solutions to someone’s problem or share their relevant experiences.
I’m not sure anyone has really got this right at scale yet. On smaller sites like HN, the moderation can be very good, but that relies on the fact that it can be managed by a small number of decent people. If your community is big enough that it needs to be more self-policing then the time-honoured question of quis custodiet ipsos custodes? is as relevant as ever. I strongly suspect that the only real answer to this is some kind of hierarchy where the operators of a forum set culture from the top, then just as a few negative contributors can spoil things for everyone and so some form of moderation is introduced, so a few negative moderators can spoil things for everyone and so some ability to guide or if necessary remove the use of moderation privileges is needed.
Re: quis custodiet ipsos custodes...
Slashdot has a meta-moderation setup where random users (with at least a minimum tenure and rating on the site) would get to vote on the quality of the moderation for randomly selected posts. I still think that this has a lot of potential for improving moderation, even if it's just used as a way of ferriting out problematic moderation.
Yeah, I really like Slashdot's approach to both regular and meta moderation.
I don't understand why it never caught on elsewhere.
The big downside of the moderation system on Slashdot is that you can’t both participate in a discussion and moderate at the same time. I want people who are interested and well informed on a subject doing both in the same discussion!
Meta-moderation was an interesting idea, though they seemed to have stopped promoting it much by the time I stopped posting there often. I’m not convinced it’s as effective as having a small pool of “super-moderators” who can not only affect the prioritisation/visibility but also comment themselves to guide contributors in positive directions, but practically speaking, it might be more scalable.
> The big downside of the moderation system on Slashdot is that you can’t both participate in a discussion and moderate at the same time. I want people who are interested and well informed on a subject doing both in the same discussion!
I get that, but moderation points carried a lot more weight than they do most places because a randomly code chosen subset of users would only get like 5 points… so you had to choose carefully where you used them. Since it wasn’t super common to get mod points, it’s not like you were limited often.
And the users on that site, frankly, could be downright feral in its heyday, let alone now. I think it needed more structure, not less. If there was even one person that would clean up the garbage, maybe the discussion would be civil enough to allow that. They can’t even be arsed to remove swastika ascii art half the time. That’s what happens when you address fundamentally human problems with purely technical solutions.
I actually think the participate XOR vote behaviour of Slashdot was a great feature! It stops people pettily downvoting comments that don't agree with them on the same discussion.
OT, but "ferriting” made me think of a steel stoat, or a magnetic mink. (I did also appreciate the insight in your comment.)