This sounds interesting please could you share a link if you find it?

The "population change" effect mentioned above is called Eternal September. Wikipedia is a good source here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

I didn't quite find the quote mentioned by GP but for stack overflow itself, an explicit design goal is to minimize discussions and make the site focus on Q&A, since the kind of argumentative jerks mentioned by GP tend to be involved in long discussions. I quote from Jeff Atwood:

> At Stack Exchange, one of the tricky things we learned about Q&A is that if your goal is to have an excellent signal to noise ratio, you must suppress discussion. Stack Exchange only supports the absolute minimum amount of discussion necessary to produce great questions and great answers. That's why answers get constantly re-ordered by votes, that's why comments have limited formatting and length and only a few display, and so forth. Almost every design decision we made was informed by our desire to push discussion down, to inhibit it in every way we could. Spare us the long-winded diatribe, just answer the damn question already.

Memory is so weird... I feel like I saw it in person. But given that the site was started in 2008, and some other details I remember about the talk would indicate that I must have heard it at least a year after it launched, I can't figure out a venue where I would have seen it in person -- the most likely venue being a talk at uni, and I was long out of university at that point.

Why at least a year after? I also remember the speaker relating a conversation he had with someone from whom it seems like he was asking for money: maybe a VC? The VC told the speaker, "I sat on a plane next to somebody who told me he doesn't answer anything on stackoverflow any more because all the questions are answered too quickly." And the speaker responded, "So wait. You talked to a random person on a plane. This person had heard of my website. And his main complaint was that questions were answered too quickly?"

Wikipedia says SO did get VC funding in 2010, so that sort of matches; and quote from sibling comment is along the same lines. So I don't think I'm imagining things, but I also don't think I'm going to be able to give much more information. :-)

Didn't that backfire anyway?

Jerks found other ways to be jerks?

Yes. The jerks found meta.stackoverflow.com and for a brief period started a campaign of what is off-topic in each very-specific forum in a effort to drive content to their very specific fiefdoms.

basically after sub-forums like bicycle, gardening etc which didn't fit at all under the programming forum, they opened up for randoms moderators. But the jerks started to abuse it to create a reddit-like web of overlapping forums. in 2018(?) you could not post anything without a question being closed with "offtopic! to ask about this specific setting on android phones with a blue or green protective case you must do so on xyz.stackoverflow.com. closed."

in SO cases they became moderators and/or worked their way into the company in paid positions of authority

No. Stackoverflow is, after Wikipedia, the most sane place on the internet. We have our gripes of course, but there really is no contest here.

One of the fundamental problems with most things on the internet is that there’s unlimited output. A socially dysfunctional shut-in living on the internet is simply going to have a much larger output than someone with a healthy social life that only uses the internet in moderation. Someone who is judicious about their upvotes is going to have a much smaller impact than some who just reflexively upvotes or downvotes everything based on kneejerk reactions. This becomes even more prevalent when you add gatekeepers. Most people don’t have time to be volunteer editors or moderators. Or to park themselves in the new submissions section deciding what should make it to the front page and what should drop off.

So of course anti-social nutcases dominate these spaces. That’s how these spaces are structured.

Even assuming equal levels of internet usage, there is also the related problem that unpaid internet moderation naturally selects for narcissists. (And, really, it's the only way the system can work, since the only real currency of the internet is to make someone feel important within a community. It's the only reason sites like Wikipedia and SE can get thousands of hours of free labor from thousands of people.)

> Someone who is judicious about their upvotes is going to have a much smaller impact than some who just reflexively upvotes or downvotes everything based on kneejerk reactions.

It would be very easy for websites to weight upvotes so that one from someone who seldom uses them weighs more.

That probably incentivizes selling accounts to bot farms, usually in social media you give more weight to people who have stuck around longer rather than the accounts that have less activity and might be fake.

I think slashdot did something like that, but limited the amount of total votes you have per day. But that site's a little before my time. Would be nice if you could set the weights on voting yourself, along with other aspects of site moderation/ranking.

It worked for a long while, and things only got bad after a lot of changes from the original rules.

Changes were clearly necessary because SO became too large. So, I'm not sure there was an alternative besides staying small. (Maybe that's the answer.)

Well, sort of. The "jerks" thing is true in part, but I think the majority of that feel comes from a disconnect between what people want Stack Overflow to be. Many of the contributors (and the founder) want it to be Wikipedia, a place to enter search terms and find your specific problem and its solution, documented exactly once. But many novices get used to finding answers on Stack Overflow, and they quite reasonably see a bunch of questions and answers and decide it's a place to ask for help, which it a thing that looks similar on the surface but is quite different. And so you get a lot of well-meaning answers/moderators closing the majority of what comes in as repetitive noise, because from their perspective it is, and so the majority of people who ask (quite reasonable) questions, especially novice questions, have a terrible experience initially engaging. But yes, ALSO jerks are there.

Reddit has this problem and it ultimately drove me (and I'm sure many others) away, it seems like you can't have a nuanced opinion, and god forbid if you have an opinion that goes against the grain of a sub.

FWIW, Wikipedia also has this problem. Just spend half an hour going through some page histories and browsing some user pages, you'll find feuds and infighting all over the place. People with a profile saying "I stopped contributing because user XYZ essentially bullied me", yadda yadda.

I stopped contributing like 15-ish years ago because it seemed pointless. Anything I might think to contribute by its very nature doesn't already have a presence on the site, and it seems like any and everything that does get added immediately gets some asshole throwing up a debate to try to get it deleted.

One of the things in particular I felt that there should be more of a presence of (because it was basically nonexistent at the time) and I had some good knowledge of, was for Flash animations and games that had literally tens of millions of views and were practically pop culture for some of them.

But because there wasn't a dead paper news article I could easily cite, that was enough for it to be 'not notable' and eligible for long and stupid debates on whether or not there should be an article about it on this virtual Wikipedia that doesn't have a size limitation.

So stupid. Lost interest pretty quickly after that (I had contributed a few dozen minor edits before I started trying to submit those pages).

Now, of course, many years later, there's a whole bunch of them included on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Flash_games But at the time the editors kept arguing to get them killed.

I also notice that a lot of the references that are included on these pages were ones that would be consider not-notable back then, because they are online web articles. Those weren't primary source enough for them at the time.

I feel like on has been so inundated with bots and shill accounts from PR firms, non profits, and state actors that nuanced opinions get shutdown via mass downvoting by bots they also artificially boost fake shill posts as well.

> in his mind the "reply in-line" mechanic specifically contributed to this.

I've always liked the "reply in-line" protocol. It lets the replier address multiple remarks the OP may have made, something that's much more difficult in an oral discussion (without interrupting, or making the discussion hard to follow).

It does make discussions more "robust", though. Many people find direct, robust speech alienating, especially women (I suspect). And it does lend itself to argumentation.

The gender remark was totally uncalled for, off topic, and not backed by any evidence (other than your personal experience in the form of "I suspect"). Maybe you can rethink what you had in mind. But please don't take my comment as a platform to expand on it.. I'm already regretting pointing this out... But it seemed almost sexist..

I thought it was an interesting hypothesis for why I see women actively avoid the sort of debate spaces online that I seek out. They are all absolutely dominated by men and it doesn't matter what part of the political spectrum the particular echo chamber embodies, this happens in both leftist and right-wing spaces.

Is it sexist to say that women seek out conflict less than men? Mens' brains are literally doused in a hormone that makes them aggressive for many years of their development. Isn't it sexist, or just weird, to suggest that testosterone has no effect on mens' behavior?

Go look on female-oriented forums like Mumsnet, you'll find similar levels of conflict as are found in male-dominated places, especially around contentious topics.

or Instagram, or Tumblr, or book writing forums, or true crime forums, or certain political forums. it takes a special kind of man to sit in his own bathwater and ruminate on the fact that there are no women there; it's because of the testosterone in the water, which means that women don't bathe, which is why they sink.

sometimes, this place. smh

> Is it sexist to say that women seek out conflict less than men?

Yes.

Is it true, or false, to observe one gender seeking out more or less conflict than the other?

It's your perspective and your perspective is not universal truth even if it may be shared with 90% of the world. That's the argument, I believe.

It does hold some weight really. Especially when you consider change over time. Perhaps, your observations have become obsolete, so to say.

I'm not saying I love this argument because it means the end of the argument but maybe that's just the lesson to be learned here.

Are you making a causal statement or one of correlation? Your original response doesn't make this crucial part clear. And, because of the way it's worded, it appears that you made a causal claim: `if gender then behavior`.

Do you believe men and women are blank slates?

> Is it sexist to say that women seek out conflict less than men?

Inherently? No. In practice, generally.

> Isn't it sexist, or just weird, to suggest that testosterone has no effect on mens' behavior?

It is erroneous to conflate the positive claim that "testosterone has no effect on mens' behavior" with not making the claim "women seek out conflict less than men", and that is particularly true in the context where "conflict" is specifically online debate.

Hmm I guess I would like to add some nuance. I’m a trans woman, and I have thought a whole lot about gendered roles in our society. Indeed, women and afab people are taught in our society to behave a certain way - to be deferential to men, to please others, and to avoid confrontation. Men and amab people are taught to speak their minds, not shy away from confrontation, and to be direct. This cultural pattern is indeed sexist - it seems to be driven by a patriarchal society.

But as observers if we are cautious about what we are saying, it can be okay to point out that women are socialized a certain way and this can lead to certain conversational patterns. We need to be careful to realize this is not some biological thing (hormones make impressive changes but this isn’t one of them), but I think it’s okay to point out common socialization differences if we are careful to attribute them to socialization. At least it can be okay. Certainly it is a delicate subject.

Indeed. Men pretending to be women, and women being deferential to this insulting charade, is evidence of a patriarchal society. You wouldn't get away with any of this "trans woman" nonsense in a matriarchy, or even just in a society where women are respected rather than considered objects to use and wear for men's enjoyment.

Trans people have always existed and we will continue to exist forever. My existence is not pretend, my existence is not a fad, and we will never be eliminated. Your dreams of a society without us will not be fulfilled, and if you do not change and grow and learn to understand what we are, society will pass you by and your thoughts will grow ever more irrelevant.

You can attempt to indulge your male woman-fantasy all you like, but it is ultimately meaningless. You are not a woman and you will never be a woman.

> especially women (I suspect).

Not to be a woke feminist culture warrior on main but, that seems misogynistic.

Interesting read here about this very subject: https://archive.li/MDq6o

In short, it's not misogynistic, it's backed by a large amount of research.

Why?

The claim was that women to a higher degree find "direct, robust speech" alienating. Disregarding whether it's true or not, and my own reservations against using "robust" as a descriptor, it looks like a fairly neutral statement to me.

> my own reservations against using "robust" as a descriptor

I thought for a few minutes about what word to use there. Perhaps "direct" on its own would have been better; but I wanted connotations of "assertive" and "strong".

I used to participate in certain political mailing lists that had a much higher proportion of women participants than, say, Usenet (and I knew many of the participants in these lists IRL). My experience was that it was predominantly women that objected to the style of discussion that inline replies often led to. Inline replies being the Usenet norm, perhaps that explains why Usenet was such a male-dominated environment.

FWIW, I don't think it's misogynistic to say that on the whole, women have different attitudes from men, or behave differently. To what extent that's the effect of hormones or socialization, I don't care to speculate.

I gradually came round to the view that the objectors had a point, and I toned down my use of inline replies a lot.

I'm now fascinated by this insight.

Forget human beings for a minute here and just think in terms of masculine/feminine energy. Where the masculine energy is defined as the "breaking apart" and the feminine is defined as the "coming together". You can see how this describes so many aspects of reality. Also understand that all humans, both male and female, have aspects within them of both natures. Okay.

Now, is it just the case that the "threaded" reply style you see on Reddit and HN is just, simply, masculine in it's purest form. It branches endlessly. Dividing and sub-dividing forever. Destructive. Masculine. Not necessarily bad but, you know, masculine.

Whereas the inline nature of traditional forums is not that. The chronologicalness ensures that arguments are either resolved relatively quickly or become lost in the noise. There is no real opportunity to break down an idea. As a result, you don't see that extreme division take place.

So it may be the case that the structure of the site determines what sort of moderation you need to do. If the site is threaded, you're going to need to worry a lot more about divisive topics. Whereas, tradition-style forums will probably need to set out separate dedicated spaces for, say, "serious discussion" so that conversations with more depth are allowed to take place.

If you want to get into the reeds of it, I think "assertive" and "strong" are too positively loaded (which I guess is why you didn't use them). However I would say the same applies to robust, coupled with the fact that "robust" on its own is not really applicable to the kind of communication you're referring to. The positive undertones are probably also why you saw a bunch of unnecessary knee jerk virtue signaling in response.

I would personally have stuck with just "direct" (which is neutral), and perhaps added "blunt" (which is neutral-negative).

> (which I guess is why you didn't use them)

You're right! (I don't think I considered the word "strong"). On further reflection, I think I chose "robust" as an evasive euphemism.

I think "robust" was applicable to the kind of communication I was referring to, in the sense in which some meetings of diplomats are described as "a robust exchange of views" (that's euphemistic too).

"Blunt" would have been less euphemistic; but it carries violent connotations that I didn't want to convey, as in "blunt instrument trauma". It's not one of the words I considered, and anyway "direct" covers it.

Thanks for your thoughtful reply.

> The claim was that women to a higher degree find "direct, robust speech" alienating.

I'll assume that (1) you're not sexist and (2) you're asking why is this claim rooted in sexism.

The nature of this claim is rooted in an idea that any observable behaviors between genders is due to the nature of genders themselves. It is not worded to indicate that its root is, for instance, a commentary about how _external factors_ exert different influence on individuals due to their gender.

This is the nature of misogyny. The invalid logical implication that gender controls behavior. It's not actually a causal relationship. It's purely correlation.

(Not the poster to whom you are replying) I didn't suggest there was a causal relationship, nor that the observed behaviour was due to some intrinsic properties of the respective genders, nor that gender controls behaviour. I just said that I suspected that women disliked inline replies more than men.

Right, I was operating under the assumption that this all was driven by a misunderstanding. It's a sensitive topic. I see how the ways in which language is written can make readers jump to particular conclusions about the writer's motivation (and, ultimately, the intent of their writing).

> I suspected that women disliked inline replies more than men.

Not trying to pick on what you wrote here, but I wanted to take a moment to break this specific sentence down to illustrate my message. Without surrounding context, this sentence appears to make the claim that all women dislike something. And specifically, the qualifier is _only_ gender. Worded this way, it starts to look like a statement about a causal relationship. (Again, my apologies, I know that you don't mean this at all).

It's a sensitive subject, so I think it always helps to wrap the message with language that attempts to really clarify whether or not there's an underlying implication of `if gender then behavior` that someone _may_ get from reading. (And that can be hard to do, because _sometimes_ a reader will decide to draw incorrect conclusions!)

Hopefully this was all actually interesting and something that you didn't already know beforehand (if not, apologies!).

I do think that there's a way to re-word sentences like this one to show that there's no underlying intent of `if gender then behavior`. For example,

> I suspected that women disliked inline replies more than men.

Could be re-worded to show that it's a claim rooted in statistical averages of expected behavior (so, implicit assumption: it can just be correlation!) -- "On average, I suspect that women dislike inline replies more often than men."

Or, one could expand it by including the complete chain of logical consequences: `society creates gender norms` (expectations around behavior rooted in one's gender, inherently the crux of sexism) -> leads to `if gender then behavior`. This could lead to that sentence being written as, "Because of the pressure that society exerts on girls and women to be conflict avoidant and conflict resolvers, I suspect that women dislike inline replies more than men." Crucially, at least to me, this is a big difference because the `I suspect` part is _conditioned_ on the `Because of the pressure` bit.

This kind of wording also explicitly notes the existence of sexism and how that social phenomena can become the causal force that is ultimately observed through behavior and the correlations of that behavior with gender.

Yeah.

Well, I can qualify what I say; and then I can go back over my qualifications, and qualify them too. Your proposed rewrite is OK; it conveys my meaning. But it reads a bit like a sociology essay, when it was really just a tangential comment on an article about Wikipedia.

One of the Wikipedia rules is "Assume good faith". It's tedious to harden all your comments against people who assume malevolence, and it makes the comments over-long and hard to read; so I don't do it.

I don't know how to interpret this answer. The nature vs nurture aspect of the alleged gender preference against direct/blunt speech was never even discussed.

It seems to me like people are just letting their own biases shine through. Perhaps the people claiming sexism falsely believe that a higher preference for direct/blunt speech is always superior somehow?

> idea that any observable behaviors between genders is due to the nature of genders themselves.

> This is the nature of misogyny. The invalid logical implication that gender controls behavior.

Why do you consider the very suggestion misogynistic (leaving aside whether it's true)? "Misogyny" means "hatred of women," in the literal sense. What you're stating is that biological essentialism implies misogyny, which isn't true. As a counterexample, there are radical feminists who self-described misandrists who argue that men and women act differently for inherent biological reasons, and they aren't misogynist.

> It's not actually a causal relationship. It's purely correlation.

That is an absurdly strong claim that contradicts lots of evidence in many cases.

Argumentative women, especially in the '90s, tend(ed) to be called bitches. That obviously changes behavior. Beyond that, much of the progress we've made in education equality is recognizing that boys and girls are, on average, different, and accounting for that. Be it nature or nurture - it doesn't matter at that point - you need to be inclusive regardless of the source of a difference or else you're failing half the population.

Everyone is, of course, an individual, and their preferences and behaviors can vary wildly outside of "norms".

Does being factually wrong about a group really entail you hate them? People are really too casual with these terms nowadays.

> It does make discussions more "robust", though.

Citation needed.

> especially women

Citation needed.

But (semi-)jokes aside, "reply in-line" can be good for debate in the sense that you can dissect arguments point-by-point and argue them individually. It does however also mean you can derail the conversation more easily by attacking multiple irrelevant fragments of the post without addressing the actual point.

Replying in-line to multiple points is useful to you, the reply guy, when writing the first reply. It's completely useless to anyone else two replies in as you're basically forced to either maintain multiple different conversations in the same post or need to decide which ones to abandon.

It's trivial to overload any conversation using "reply in-line" with the shotgun approach of throwing a bunch of low-effort nitpick replies into one post and seeing which one sticks. This is the opposite of robustness. Instead of being forced to steelman the other person's argument because you need to reply to the post as a whole or risk being called out for nitpicking, "reply in-line" allows you to unravel the argument, pick out the weakest parts, ignore the rest and then derail the conversation by replying to an army of strawmen all at once. This is the conversational equivalent of bikeshedding.

I used to, but mostly changed my mind. I still do it with certain people/discussions, but that's usually for long, high-context, complicated discussions.

In the general case, I try very hard to make no more than one point or ask no more than one question per email. It feels reductive and limiting, but it really does make comms with the median person work much better.

I'm not sure what work that weird, irrelevant gendered speculation is supposed to be doing, so I have no comment.

>So the first-order goal he had when he built Stack Overflow was to build a system with mechanics which encouraged helpful people tended to stay and argumentative jerks to be frustrated and go elsewhere.

Well, that failed spectacularly. The Stack Exchange sites are some of the most hostile, caustic places on the Internet, surpassed on that axis by only a small handful I'm aware of.

This is a great point: reducing friction is a design choice, and you have to do it in a way to leads to the greater good.

Any discussion on any forum in the early to mid 1990s you would often see a comment "don't flame" (aggressively argue or insult). Argumentative people were not seen as normal by people on a BBS or forums of the time. Even casual swearing was not tolerated. Both of those behaviours are now very common and accepted or seen as normal or worse yet not even noticed as a problem.