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In an interview with ITPro last July, Prashanth Chandrasekar (CEO) was asked about Stack Overflow’s reputation for "over-zealous moderation" and a "chilly reception" to new users.

He responded:

We have now changed that and we want to serve developers of all kinds. We're not some sort of elitist place [...]. It's all about how we embrace the new folks [...]

However, from a practical standpoint, AFAIK the core mechanics of the site such as downvoting, close votes, and the requirement for Minimal Reproducible Examples remain largely the same as they have been for years. This makes me wonder: what actually changed?

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    I don't see how you can run any SE without closing useless questions or requiring MREs. An SE doesn't exist for people to just post vague questions and then spend forever figuring out what the poster actually wanted. Commented Feb 10 at 21:19
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    @FeliniusRex Sure. But what changed? Commented Feb 10 at 21:24
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    You are claiming that those core things are responsible for SO's reputation, and I am pointing out that it's impossible to run a SE at scale without them. Thus, I wouldn't expect those three things to be changed. If you're unhappy there wasn't a complete skeletal replacement, I'm not sure what to tell you. It's even more unreasonable to expect a 117 rep guy to have an answer. Commented Feb 10 at 21:49
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    I mean, theres been that whole push to allow speculative/off topic questions to be asked in a secondary space. I assume it has something to do with that Commented Feb 10 at 22:19
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    Plus the removal of rep requirements for chat, etc. Removing "barriers" to participation Commented Feb 10 at 22:26
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    This is a PR fluff piece, nothing in there has any connection to reality Commented Feb 10 at 22:53
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    Nothing. Even old users have a hard time to get what they want. Now that the newbies are evaporating, but the "good old boys" mostly remained, I foresee actually a further worsening of the situation. But, even if there would be a significant change, how could it repair 10 years of hostility in the eyes of the world? Commented Feb 12 at 13:29
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    They did add the useless seeking advice questions that cannot be moderated or downvoted or even answered, so there is that, I suppose that has changed Commented Feb 14 at 2:17
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    Seems the CEO simply let slip curation is going away before the official announcement. "Overzealous moderation" is how the help vampires called it. Commented Feb 24 at 18:56
  • @StoryTeller-UnslanderMonica Checking the close review, about a third of the closures are blatantly false or maybe even deliberately destructive; a third of them is only bad (or not the best to do). Maybe a third of them is fair. However, the reviewers vote in about 90-95% for closure, very often - visible from the vote casting timestamps - obviously without even examining the question. I am sorry but we can not talk about a decision process here, it is a race to cast the most close votes without failing an audit... I agree with ts existence, I disagree what is going there, it harms more. Commented Feb 25 at 12:38
  • @StoryTeller-UnslanderMonica Also the so-named "help vampires" could have became useful contributors; a correct learning curve should have given to them, but they were expelled. By destroying content, by handling newbies on hostile ways, we lose the contributor, and by losing the contributor, we also lose his future contributions. There were many tries from the side of the company to fix the situation, but all their tries remain superficial. Finally the system collapsed. SO, as we knew it, is over. What the company is trying, to grow some new on the ruins. Commented Feb 25 at 12:42
  • Rebuilding something after burning it to the ground is not noble; it's insurance fraud. Stack Overflow, a.k.a. Prosus, destroyed Stack Overflow. Not the mods. Commented 17 hours ago

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In an interview with ITPro last July, Prashanth Chandrasekar (CEO) was asked

And you expected to hear what? Something negative?

If you read the article, he perceives being closed as duplicate as "public humiliation". Uh... okay... I perceive it as "great, someone found the answer I could not, lets use it, solve my problem and get on with my life".

You cannot have a technically competent, high quality site that is not elitist. I've said it before: my goal is getting an answer. Any way possible. Duplicate, a rude person insulting me while answering, being a snob, being elitist... bring it on. As long as it brings a good answer, I'm happy.

But we want to be a "community". I guess that sells. Or makes investors happy. So sure, if we make the site less useful and "more friendly", I guess that attracts a specific clientele. It makes me wonder why I would use it though, if solving my problem is not longer the top priority. And what will become of it, if it loses problem solvers in favor of people being "welcoming". I'm not here to be welcomed. That's not for technical networks, if you want unconditional welcoming, get a dog. Seriously (1).

Obviously, a CEO would never say any of that in a public statement, that's not his job. His job is to say anything he cannot be proven wrong at the spot to make the company look good.

(1) No, really. Dogs are amazing, this is not an insult. I love their loyalty and happiness. But my dog(s) can't solve a programming problem, that's why I need both.

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    " if you want unconditional welcoming, get a dog." As a former dog owner - I can confirm there's conditions. My late mutt ignored me for 3 days for yelling at him for slipping his leash for 3 days. I had to apologise. I do think the duplicate system needs a relook but its a lot more complicated than hurt feelings. Commented Feb 11 at 8:32
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    hm, mine could never hold a grudge longer than the next snack, but I guess each dog is different :) Commented Feb 11 at 8:56
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    I disagree that any degree of roughness is palatable, but largely agree with the gist here. On some smaller and non-technical sites the new trend (although probably not CEO/top-driven) is allow a bunch of unclear questions and then the answerers downvote each other to hell [each] assuming a different question/interpretation. Those are also not good dynamics. Commented Feb 11 at 11:16
  • Alas what I observed seem to be 'community driven' although it's probably in part to due a decrease in good questions. There are some users whom could probably be described as addicted to the site who for lack of good questions would answer anything to keep themselves in the loop. Commented Feb 11 at 11:23
  • @starball I appreciate the explicitness of a mod-edit. With the most powerful man's best buddy's horrible alleged crimes on TV constantly and any and all other people involved dodging their accountability in the issue, this being a huge media spectacle, I did not think a random SE user would think "ey, when he says no accountability, he must be talking about me personally". But okay... I guess... weird world we live in now. Commented Feb 12 at 6:50
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    you specifically wrote "anyone on this planet". is the reader "anyone"? isn't anyone "anyone"? would it not be reasonable for one to read it that way? the connection to current events in the US was quite unclear. it also doesn't seem to be necessary to make your point. Commented Feb 12 at 8:06
  • Although the question only mentioned Stack Overflow, it is essential to remember that Stack Exchange is not a "technical network". Stack Overflow is just one site in the vast Stack Exchange network. A majority of Stack Exchange sites focus on what I consider to be non-technical topics (life/arts/fitness/sports/language/etc.). Although a small subset of people may find it acceptable to have others be rude to them (and are only interested in answers), there is no data (of which I'm aware) in the fields of psychology or sociology that supports a notion that a majority of humans feel that way. Commented Feb 12 at 8:45
  • Large bodies of research in social psychology and behavioral economics (e.g., cooperation in public‑goods and trust games) show people generally prefer fair, polite, and cooperative interactions rather than rudeness or hostility. Commented Feb 12 at 8:46
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    The duplicate system is far from ideal, because there is no confirmation that the person who asked the duplicate question actually gets the problem. Also, the same system have a long history of abuse. Someone posts a question with the title "seg fault" or "null pointer exception" and then some elitist user abuses the duplicate system by closing it as a dupe to a general post of why seg faults/null pointer exceptions may appear. In which case both the dupe asker and the close voter have misunderstood that the error diplayed is just a symptom of the core problem, not the core problem itself. Commented Feb 12 at 9:41
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    Now I can understand why someone who is relatively new to programming might think that "seg fault" is the actual problem, but I cannot understand why someone with a gold badge in lets say C or C++ could think that a "list of all common causes of seg faults" solves the actual problem. That is elitism, gatekeeping and generally shitty behavior. The solution is to suspend the close voter from close voting, period. Commented Feb 12 at 9:43
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    @Lundin The checks we had in place were folks bringing it up on meta for community or mod reopening. On most sites meta usage dropped off a cliff - our systems in general are broken right now. Getting another gold badger, a posse of users or a mod to reopen and let the badger know its not right should be what we're doing. Its not working cause, well we don't have enough people doing that sort of thing. Commented Feb 12 at 10:54
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    @Lundin Its the only really scalable system for community re-opens. Its also a sign of healthy community engagement. Unless we're specifically curtailing gold badge closehammers, someone has to review a closure, and it can't just be the mods. If you believe enough in something, you're going to make the effort to ask I'd say. Commented Feb 12 at 12:17
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    @AmazonDiesInDarkness Those studies seem like a colossal waste of money to find the obvious. I certainly prefer pizza to a can of beans. But if I am so hungry that I ask strangers on the internet for food, I will gladly accept a can of beans. Some moderator banning the donation of beans and saying that only pizza is acceptable is not what I need when I'm hungry. and if I'm not actually hungry but just looking for a place to hang and chat and be welcome, that place isn't SO. There's a thousand other places for that. If SE tries to be them, they will lose. The others already do it better. Commented Feb 12 at 12:27
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    Consensus? No, encouraging actual community engagement's a good goal. People feel good when they see their efforts - either by asking or voting work. We will never get consensus, but I'd settle for 5 people agreeing. Commented Feb 12 at 13:16
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    "If a question is a duplicate you're going to get a friendly response from the AI assistant. You're not going to get humiliated in front of the world." That statement alone tell you how out of touch the CEO is with what the goals of the Stack sites are. They aren't invested in the success of the site's goals, they are only interested in the financial success; if that means reinventing the sites, that's the death of the sites. The users who have invested years of expertise will leave, and they'll be left with a place where those who contribute are not those with years of expert knowledge. Commented Feb 14 at 19:34
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I don't know if my interpretation is correct, but...

Dan Oliver: Over the years Stack Overflow has gained a reputation amongst developers for its over-zealous moderation and its often-chilly reception to new users. Is this being addressed?

Prashanth Chandrasekar: We have now changed that and we want to serve developers of all kinds. We're not some sort of elitist place, where it's supposed to just be the best programmers in the world. That doesn't make a lot of sense. It's all about how we embrace the new folks who are interested in this space, open it up so that they are all learning from each other.

...I interpret this as alluding to:

It could also pertain to the philosophy of optimizing for pearls (i.e., high-quality answers), sometimes as the expense of questions.

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    I never saw any proof of the "welcome wagon" actually fixing anything. It mainly seemed to piss people off by focusing solely on people posting borderline rude comments while giving everyone who posted rude questions a free pass. Rude question as in "I can't even be arsed to read the first chapter in a programming book, I prefer to get handed fish by unpaid volunteers". Those kind of questions are what messed up the culture of site so that those who have at least done some research before asking a question get thrown under the bus as well. Commented Feb 12 at 11:58
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    Anyway I don't believe the "welcome wagon" is what's referred to as all, but rather: Discussions and it's bastard offspring, chat for 1 rep users and the AI slop prompt. None which has any effect at all on friendliness. Commented Feb 12 at 12:14
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    I confused that with another comment I made - and figured we're dragging that bit of SU drama over here. I've addressed that. I've noticed in every other case a moderator has addressed that too. Commented Feb 12 at 12:22
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This is merely referring to the recent and upcoming changes to stack overflow the site. Things like open ended questions that lack any form of curation at all, challenges, one rep voting, etc etc etc, all of these wildly unpopular changes that have been forced on the community over the past few years that have done absolutely nothing to stop the nosedive.

Nothing interesting to see here.

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This makes me wonder: what actually changed?

If I'm resisting the temptation to use these kind of interviews for buzzword bingo and focusing on what appears to be said between the lines:

Since the post is from July, neither the AI slop generator, the open-ended slop questions nor the 1 rep chat for everyone experiments were live yet.

That leaves us with Discussions and the two 1 rep lobby chats. None of which actually means a change to how the site is moderated, apart from the company abandoning these two experiments pretty much instantly, leaving them with no moderation at all. As in: if it ain't moderated, it ain't over-zealously moderated.

Which in practice meant opening up these channels as a free playground for spammers, trolls and low-life "code dumpers" who think every text box on the Internet is an AI prompt etc etc. If not for a few brave SO diamond mods who did moderate all this Discussions/chat slop, even though the company was lying to them all the time and said that there would be staff support for these features.

Since then we've had Discussions abandoned, but just when we thought that surely it wouldn't be possible to design a site feature worse than Discussions... enter open-ended questions.

And then we have 1 rep for any chat, which had very little impact on SO.

Meanwhile in SO Q&A: over-zealous moderation and general toxic behavior is still thriving, as it always did, thanks to the flawed core site mechanics. Notably however, there never existed any programming forum throughout history that didn't have problems with toxic behavior, so it is as much an unsolved problem now as it was before we had SO and Reddit.

What seems pretty certain to me is that none of the peripheral feature experiments we've seen in the past year will save SO. Much too little, much too late, far too sloppily implemented.

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We have now changed that and we want to serve developers of all kinds.

This is a narrowing of scope. Previously, Stack Exchange Inc. aimed to serve beyond the developer audience, through a variety of non-development-focussed Stack Exchange sites.

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    Is your interpretation that Stack Exchange no longer wants to serve non-developers? Commented Feb 11 at 4:15
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    I think the non-dev sites (like Skeptics and what not) were always 2nd thought, or at best seen as entertainment venue for the dev breaks, via HNQ etc. (I mean by the people running the company. The participants in those sites probably took them[selves] more seriously.) Commented Feb 11 at 11:25
  • Although, that answer you quoted was given in response to a Q about SO (only), so I would not read too much into it otherwise. Commented Feb 11 at 11:32
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    No, in the context of that article/interview, he is the "Stack Overflow CEO", so that must meen Stack Exchange Inc. CEO, where "Stack Overflow" = "Stack Exchange" in this article for whatever reason. It also talks about "the company" and "within Stack Overflow" Commented Feb 11 at 11:41
  • "Stack Overflow" is the official name of the company. The company went from intially being named Stack Overflow, to then be renamed to Stack Exchange, to then go back to Stack Overflow. "Stack Exchange" is the name of the network, not the legal entity. However, the community tends to use "Stack Exchange"/"SE" in an informal manner to refer to the company. Commented Feb 11 at 11:50
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    Stack Exchange Inc. is the official name of the company. The legal entity is Stack Exchange Inc. It never actually changed its name away from that. But regardless, that interview was about the company. The company tends to call itself Stack Overflow, and it did in that interview. Commented Feb 11 at 11:51
  • stackoverflow.blog/2015/09/15/… Commented Feb 11 at 11:55
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    @VLAZ I'm very familiar with that article. Stack Exchange Inc. said it was changing its name, but it never ended up doing that. The company is still "Stack Exchange Inc." To change a company name requires more than just declaring it the case. Check out the Terms of Service. Commented Feb 11 at 11:56
  • @jen: I believe it's a DBA ("doing business as") sort of situation, but I'm not an expert on the legal intricacies there. Commented Feb 11 at 19:57
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    @gottrolledtoomuchthisweek I think Jeff took the broader stack exchange idea pretty seriously - we later did become a second thought, but there was a time we got first rate (and some may argue better than SO has now) support from the company. Commented Feb 12 at 10:45

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