Some parting thoughts... and apologies for the drama

Question

First off, I know I said and take the weekend, but it turns out I don't need it, and it does seem like a dick move to let things keep going on as they have, when there's no benefit from doing so. As they say, when there's no new information to be had, it's time to make a decision. In this case, there's no new information that could come about to change my mind, so, same difference.

Second off, Shog, I can't respond to your moderator message until someone responds first. Makes it hard to be communicative when I am actually being preventing from responding. A moot point at this point, but you've got my email if you desire further information on anything. I doubt I can provide you with anything more than what I've said already, but feel free to ask, should you desire.

Finally, before I get into it, my apologies to everyone for the drama/fallout/whatever. Hopefully, this post will do something about cooling that off or preventing further dramatics.

---

The events of yesterday and today have made it clear to me that I am not suitable to be a moderator for Server Fault, and not unrelatedly, that I do not wish to be one anymore, either. It doesn't matter who's right or who's wrong, the simple fact that my actions have created "friction" indicate that I no longer belong as a moderator, and that I don't belong here at all anymore, either.

I understand everyone's point of view - the members who are insisting it's a good thing to be cleaning up the crap, the Community Managers who see my actions as unilateral or suspicious or detrimental, the members who think there should have been more discussion or oversight, before I took it on full-bore, etc.

The problem is, for me, that there's a question, or concerns at all about me (or even any high-repper/old-timer) re-tagging and/or mod-closing (etc.), is an irreconcilable problem. As I see it, this has all been discussed at such length, with such overwhelming community consensus that I'm sick of hearing it. We've got an indescribably massive pile of content that needs reviewed, the active community is now so small that there aren't enough people to do it, so fine, I'll step up and do it, no possible way that could be a problem for anyone.

Except that it was.

Reviewing literally thousands of low-quality or off-topic or just plain bad questions (and probably easily into the tens of thousands) is enough of a chore without having to talk about doing it too, especially when I've been in that discussion dozens of times. If that's what it takes, I don't want to do it. And to find out that all this effort was for nothing, for less than nothing, seeing that it caused this drama, gave the Community Management team headaches, and didn't even make the site appreciably better as a result... well, damn, I clearly shouldn't have bothered in the first place. In fact, what the hell am I even doing here?

I've been trying to keep the tide from coming in with a toy shovel, and the whole time, I wasn't making anything better, I was just wasting my time and spraying sandy salt water in peoples' faces. The Server Fault that's a community for professional systems administrators to congregate around doesn't exist, and I cannot make it that way, no matter how hard I try.

This is all probably something I should have known 2 years ago, when I took a ~9 month break from the site, or ~9 months later when the only thing that brought me back was the now absent denizens of the Comms Room, or when I decided to run for mod to prove that I wouldn't get elected, or when I actually did get elected, or when the core of the community packed it in and abandoned the Comms Room for pastures unrelated to Server Fault and Stack Exchange, or on any one of countless days when I've had to "quit Sever Fault for the day" because I couldn't bear to see one more piece of crap posing as a question from some inconsiderate jackass moron treating this site and everyone on it as a personal answer machine happy to accept his typed-out diarrhea.

But I didn't.

My bad, and my sincere apologies for the resulting fallout from the last couple days that are ultimately a result of me being too stupid and stubborn to accept what should have been obvious to anyone with half a brain, paying the least little bit of attention.

I am extremely grateful to Server Fault (and to Stack Exchange for making Server Fault possible) for all it's done for me, but the painful truth is that the Server Fault I joined, contributed to, learned from, and met a wonderful group of systems administrators through no longer exists, and trying to make it exist again is no good for anyone. Time for me to move on and make way for what comes next.

Answer 1

The biggest problem I see here is that Stack Exchange is showing that they do not trust democratically elected moderators to do what they were elected to do. We, as a community, elected HopelessN00b to be one of our leaders because we knew he would be willing to do the one thing that he got spanked for... cleaning up junk questions that didn't belong on this site.

And the defense of "well, he didn't discuss what he was going to do first" is 100% invalid. We, the members of the Serverfault community, have all been discussing for years how bloody cPanel (and the like) have no place here. To have a stranger walk in and let us know what we have and haven't been talking about is, frankly, insulting to all of us.

I don't know why anyone would want to be a moderator, now.

Answer 2

(this started as a comment on Ryan's post, but it got too long, so now it's an answer)

The way SE staff handled this situation was an absolute nightmare. If one is going to be a Community Manager, they had better have intimate knowledge of the community they're managing. Lacking this, clear, open, and honest conversations with the active community members are essential.

This did not happen.

Instead what happened are a series of ominous conjectures, continual accusations that a trusted mod was lying (without ever explaining what exactly that lie was), complaining about a lack of response to inquiries from Shog9 (when it appears that N00b did respond to every question Shog9 asked), and most of all, making the assumption that HopelessN00b was a "rogue moderator", operating outside the bounds of what the community wanted him to do.

This episode has given me serious pause, to consider whether or not I wish to be associated with SF. I presume many others are in the same place. This grieves me, as it's become my "neighborhood" of sorts, where I can gather with my peers and exchange ideas.

This being Serverfault, and myself being on the lower-end of the high-rep users, I realize my voice does not carry much weight. That said, I would implore SE to spend a non-trivial amount of time de-briefing this situation, how it went down, and how it could have been done better. It's a tragedy how this situation played out, but it would be an even larger tragedy if the Community Managers did not learn something from this and change their policies for how to deal with situations like these.

Thank you, HopelessN00b. You've been done an injustice. Heck, we've all been done an injustice. Your work here was not in vain. Thank you for it.

Answer 3

Makes it hard to be communicative when I am actually being preventing from responding.

You asked to discuss this in public, so I obliged. Once that began, neither one of us could put the genie back in the bottle - going back and replying privately after I'd posted publicly didn't really accomplish much.

I try to avoid handling problems with moderators in public; I don't think it accomplishes much. Folks usually tend to be more receptive to criticism when they're not playing to an audience. That's why the last time I talked to you it was in a private chat room; this time it was a bit more urgent that I get your attention ASAP, but once done we could've conducted it more or less the same way.

That said... Perhaps it's for the best that this was public. As much as I believe your intentions were good, your efforts as a moderator were ultimately doomed: even with all of your energy, single-handedly moderating six years' worth of posts is an impossible task; if you weren't burning out already, you soon would have...

Over the past few months, two moderators here on Server Fault have each individually handled more flags than all of the user-moderators combined. There is no other site on Stack Exchange of comparable size where this is the case. Moderation activity on Server Fault looks healthy at a glance, but remove your activities over the past few months and suddenly it becomes a ghost town: folks posting questions and answers, but mostly not editing, not close-voting, not reviewing. This is deeply unhealthy; Stack Exchange is designed for community moderation:

Remember, the folks with the diamonds next to their names aren't the only people moderating these sites - the entire system is designed to make the bulk of moderation something anyone can do, provided they've put the effort in to earn that privilege. You're there to handle stuff that can't or won't be handled by anyone else.

Without that broad, community-based support - lots and lots of people doing a little bit to help out - this simply does not work. I've watched this play out again and again across the network; moderators playing Atlas - quietly shouldering the bulk of moderation - is a strategy that inevitably backfires, as the moderator tires of becoming the focal point for blame while the site's ability to moderate itself atrophies.

The greatest tragedy here is the lost opportunity to bring together an increasingly fractured and apathetic community, to teach them how to work together to build the site they want to see. You had a vision that could have inspired a legion of followers, working together to accomplish far more than any of you could have or did working alone. But you kept it largely to yourself.

After an exhausting weekend reviewing the full record of your time as a moderator, I truly believe you did the best you could for the site.

I just wish you had asked for help.

Answer 4

Your mod-hammering will be missed!

Rambling thoughts:

I think it's a good thing to let this particular incident go. It's pretty clear that most people think most of the stuff you closed deserved it, so what's the worst outcome for you? That SE comes back with smoking gun evidence that your process for closing them wasn't acceptable mod behavior? But even if that's the case, this was way more drama than necessary.

OTOH, if there isn't clear evidence of you eating kittens while gleefully robo-closing innocent questions, then the SE response comes off as totally out of proportion and incredibly dickish.

Looking at the bigger picture... in what you've said above I hear an echo of what MDMarra said during the election drama, which was basically that things change. SF has changed and if it's changed in ways that make many of the people who used to contribute a lot want to cut back or move on, well, that's not necessarily bad, it's just the way things have gone.

I think you're right about trying to hold back the tide - this shows it's a waste of time. I suspect this pretty much spells the end of anyone attempting to deal with the flood of OT/non-professional questions, but maybe there's a way for the site to thrive.

Luckily, this is by no means goodbye since the slack chatroom is still very much a going concern, so see you there!

Answer 5

N00b, we'll miss you. I think that what happened to you wasn't right.

I do get tired of hearing how "ServerFault used to be great, but now it sucks because all of the best people have left." Many fine contributors are still here, and IMO it's not that hard to filter out the junk and find the good Qs and As.

Answer 6

Please forgive that I haven't read everyone's comments here. However, I may have some valuable insights to all this... While my rep is VERY low, I hope you'll take my comments very seriously as - if you check my profile you'll see - I've been around the block a few times, but this isn't about me...

First, let me say up front, I think this topic should be about process, not about personality or people because the core issues here are really issues about process. And, I for one am all for using automation combined with process to help the site be all it can be. But I also want it understood that, in my view, PEOPLE are the real core value here, their intelligence, skill, knowledge, dedication, willingness to help, etc. So, the best bet is to use compute power to leverage the human intelligence / resource that's available - and it's all about the interaction of the human and the software that are the make-or-break of SF - and the rest of the related sites, for that matter.

There's PLENTY of human resource available. It just needs to be leveraged properly - not always easy to do, but SF is already reasonably mature in doing this; I perceive that the incentive system could use some tweaking to use what capitalists like to call "market forces" to improve the site. Some examples:

• Give us - plebs, low-rep people, all of us who visit the site - a substantial incentive to edit other people's answers, and not just for the edit that results, but a share in follow-on up votes.

• Create an easy way for people of low rep to say, "these two questions look about the same, here, I've merged them!", where mods can quickly review, confirm and merge articles before it is actually completed. The primary labor is done by the community at large, they feel good for helping, someone of greater knowledge / skill comes along and confirms things, and everyone shares in the new rep points that come later and people can bask in the perception that they did good. And the site needs a lot less cleanup from people who might burn-out.

Two keys here: grant enough reputation points per action and you'll get the action, but only if the second key, ease of use, is also present.

A main point: tweak the amount of rep points to get the action you want.

If a lot of low value / useless articles exist, make a way for people of low reputation to decrease them by seeking these out and giving them something to do about it. Dis-incentivize the creation of new questions when similar ones seem to be out there. But, rather than dis-incentivizing via taking rep away, instead give a larger chunk of rep for helping people improve similar questions, spurring dialogue. For example, MAYBE - just thinking out loud here - the existing comment system can be tweaked to include a "follow-up question" capability which includes a good reputation bonus for improving the whole question / answer tree on a given subject. I think most of the code is already there.

Bumping up the amount of reputation points given for various actions can give room for more subtle tweaks in the middle, tailoring incentives a bit better, and certainly sharing in up-vote rep points for helping improve someone else's questions and / or answers is desperately needed to keep people focused on existing entries.

It's worth pointing out that not granting the newest of newbies up-vote capability seems very odd to me and disincentivizes participation. It's as if the new person is told "we can't trust you for ANYTHING". I don't understand why you need to earn the ability to do an up-vote.

It can also be annoying when you get a down vote and have zero idea why - turns people off. An anonymous but requisite "reason you got a down-vote" would be a great addition to help people learn, feel connected, that whatever the down vote was was justified, etc. You'll get a lot more help when people feel things are fair and if they don't understand they won't think it's fair. Not only does it help avoid the tumbleweeds, it also helps the quality of each user's interaction while at the same time reducing their angst.

This might be harder to implement but I think it'd be great to use Bayesian logic to help bring questions to people on the site that they might be able to answer, thus lowering the number of unresponded-to questions and improving the quality of existing entries (maybe two lists for someone, those with NO answer, and those with unconfirmed answers). It could work similarly as a spam-filter in reverse, and the positive reinforcements (to teach the software) are the articles people take the time to look at and the tags they use. A key reason I'd like this is to assuage my own feelings of guilt - for every time I come to the site get an answer, I try very hard to leave two new answers, the question is the time I have available. ... I have a LOT of experience (in the real world) that's very valuable and I'm happy to share as thanks for the help I get, so any system that helps me get to the questions I can likely answer would be a win-win for everyone - I'm SURE I'm not alone.

In closing, I admire the effort of most everyone involved with SF - and the rest of the Stack Overflow community. MOST people are very sincere and give of themselves. The WHOLE POINT of my comments here are to say, we don't have to loose the HopelessN00bs of the world, NOBODY has to be burdened with cleanup load if the system is self-cleaning - and I think it can be with the right reputation reward tweaks ... I hope these suggestions are of value.

EDIT:

Barely 10 minutes pass and I get a cowardly down vote with no comment. It's that kind of behavior that drives people away. You want a dieing community? That's how you create it.

You think the post unresponsive to the subject? what? At least have the balls / courtesy to say WHY. Coward. Nobody who posts positively oriented suggestions deserves a down-vote because it's basically pissing on people who are trying to be helpful.