> 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.
[dead]