Being a relatively new community, Stack Overflow has been wrestling with these issues for some time. Most recently, Michael Pryor [1] posted a topic [2] questioning the need for closing questions, which, ironically, has been closed 7 times [3], and generated a lengthy (but otherwise well-mannered) discussion with some people on both sides of the isle and many others in between, culminating in a blog post [4] about what constitutes an acceptable question.
Historically, my position has been similar to the unofficial policy here at Hacker News, in that topics/questions should be allowed if they interest/concern hackers/programmers, even though they may not specifically be about hacking/programming. However, recently I've come to see that, if left unchecked, generic discussion questions will overrun Stack Overflow simply because they appeal to the greatest common denominator of the audience, and therefore garner the most attention.
The closing system on Stack Overflow works quite well as that limited check. By providing guidelines for acceptable questions and a mechanism for closing those that aren't, Stack Overflow provides the means to keep it's garden (to borrow a metaphor from the article). However, by having the community, as opposed to appointed moderators, keep the garden, it means that fun, insightful, or otherwise constructive yet off-topic questions can remain in a limited capacity, so long as those that want to keep them outnumber those that want to remove them.
1: Cofounder of Fog Creek. Partner of Joel Spolsky, cofounder of Stack Overflow.
3: On Stack Overflow, users with a certain reputation score can vote to close a question. A question is closed when it reaches 5 close votes. The one exception is that starred moderators can immediately close or open a question. Once closed, the same mechanism is used to open a question back up.
I question the wisdom of pure democracy and majority vote for such decisions as opening and closing articles. As you say, fluff topics appeal to the GCD of the population, and should have plenty of votes to stay open.
One of the things that I liked most about StackOverflow when I started using it was how hard it was to get karma. To get it, you either had to ask good programming questions or give good programming answers. That's not easy to do.
Then I saw a question about office chairs with 50 points on the front page.
True. However, while there is an extremely low reputation threshold for being able to vote, there is a significantly higher threshold for closing and opening. The term "reputation" is sort of a misnomer in that it doesn't particularly signify technical skill, but rather an investment in the community. With a daily cap of 200[1] and a minimum of 3000 required for closing, an extremely active user would need to spend at least 15 days asking great questions and giving great answers. I think that after such an investment of time and effort, most users would want to maintain the level of quality on the site.
Also, one thing that I didn't mention before is that Stack Overflow has a setting called "Community Wiki" that, among other things, is customary to use when posting subjective or off-topic material to prevent reputation gain. Whether or not a question is marked as Wiki can mean the difference between staying open and getting closed, and a question that gets over 30 answers is also deemed subjective and rolls over to Wiki. This means that not only does a closer have to earn 3000 rep, but it's also granted primarily through on-topic posts. The question you mention, I assume, is this one [2], which has been Wiki since it was posted.
1: It's possible to exceed the cap by hitting it then having an answer or bounty accepted, but this is very hard to do regularly for normal users.
StackOverflow is my favorite site that I discovered this year. Its community is incredible. I hope you guys make enough money off of it to stay open for a long time.
I should clarify myself - I'm not affiliated with Stack Overflow, I'm just an engaged user that saw parallels between the article and the recent discourse about how the community should be moderate itself.
That aside, I agree with your sentiment - SO is my newest favorite site, and I, too, hope that Jeff & company are able to keep the site open for a long time. Once you go Stack you never go back.
I think the most interesting part of this is the sentiment of trust that is claimed to be essential for a community to thrive. You have to trust your moderators and they have to trust themselves to act accordingly, or your community is at risk.
I see this exact same pattern in every startup I've been in. Everyone has to trust one another to do the Right Thing (at least to the limits of their ability), to Work Hard and Preserve The Culture. You hear these phrases a lot, but it is very obvious when a startup gets the ideas and has a staff that can still be productive when not hounded and driven back to their desks. Even the moderation aspect is reflected in the way startups tend to do recruiting. In small groups, if even one person objects to a new hire, then they should be out. And if you ever question that objection, you're creating a huge potential problem in the future.
Someone should go grab an anthropologist and ask them if this has any relation to humanity's tribal cultures in history. I bet the answer would be really fascinating and informative. :)
Dealing with mass migrations is also interesting in this context. I'm one of what appears to be many reddit refugees, and I mainly left because of what appeared to be a medium size exodus from digg to reddit.
I assume that the people were moving from digg to reddit because they saw that there were generally "better" elsewhere - why would you move to somewhere if you didn't think it was better? - and then some proportion of those people didn't take the time to get to know the prevailing culture, and so they brought parts of the culture they were fleeing with them.
Seeing that has made me stop and think and then think again before posting here. I'll probably start to consider myself part of the community after a year or 500 comment karma, whichever comes last. Unless reddit implodes and they all come here.
I think that the thesis here is true, but the statement "communities that X cease to have X when any old person is allowed in" applies not just for values of X == "intelligent discourse", but also for X == "group-think leftism", "group-think rightism", etc.
The third pattern Bion identified: Religious veneration. The nomination and worship of a religious icon or a set of religious tenets. The religious pattern is, essentially, we have nominated something that's beyond critique. You can see this pattern on the Internet any day you like. Go onto a Tolkein newsgroup or discussion forum, and try saying "You know, The Two Towers is a little dull. I mean loooong. We didn't need that much description about the forest, because it's pretty much the same forest all the way."
Try having that discussion. On the door of the group it will say: "This is for discussing the works of Tolkein." Go in and try and have that discussion.
Now, in some places people say "Yes, but it needed to, because it had to convey the sense of lassitude," or whatever. But in most places you'll simply be flamed to high heaven, because you're interfering with the religious text.
Sometime the religious texts are opinions, sometimes they're people, sometime they're both.
I was a semi-frequent commentor on a popular blog. I'd spoken to one or two of the founders of the blog on the phone a few times, had done some business with them, and all-in-all had a cordial relationship, even though we differed on major-party-politics.
Then the popular blog hired a well known blogger to do their moderation. This well known blogger had a VERY strong political stance ... and brought with her to the group blog a bunch of her alcolytes.
A few times someone would post "politician X did Y and is the worst person ever". And I responded calmly "ummm...didn't politician Z do the exact same thing? Are they both the worst person ever, or might the situation be a bit more nuanced?".
...and for that, the moderator censored my comments.
I appealed to the founders of the blog, they agreed that I had said nothing untoward, the moderator was talked to ... and then the same thing happened two more times.
At that point I gave up on the group blog.
If they were willing to tolerate a bit of intelligent dissent from the orthodoxy, I was happy to be there ... but if the purpose of the group blog was veneration of the religious texts ... well, I've got better things to do with my time.
So... it is true that moderating can increase the IQ of a conversation. ...but it can also increase all sorts of other things: insularity, group-think, distrust of dissenting voices, etc.
What the article argues is sometimes true, but sometimes it happens that a community dies because of insane moderators, as the above commenter observes.
It happened on the MaxPC forums a few years ago, where I and a few other long-time posters were banned for reasons that were trivial, because one of the mods -- a very hotheaded and patriotic Canadian -- was threatened by the respect others accorded us.
BoingBoing is doing the same thing, from what I can tell, with its idiotic disemvowelling.
I would love to make a subreddit that auto-posted bb links and allowed unmoderated discussion of them. bb links are pretty good, but I agree that their human moderation is dumb and heavy-handed. I've always gotten stuck on how to programatically submit reddit posts.
Historically, my position has been similar to the unofficial policy here at Hacker News, in that topics/questions should be allowed if they interest/concern hackers/programmers, even though they may not specifically be about hacking/programming. However, recently I've come to see that, if left unchecked, generic discussion questions will overrun Stack Overflow simply because they appeal to the greatest common denominator of the audience, and therefore garner the most attention.
The closing system on Stack Overflow works quite well as that limited check. By providing guidelines for acceptable questions and a mechanism for closing those that aren't, Stack Overflow provides the means to keep it's garden (to borrow a metaphor from the article). However, by having the community, as opposed to appointed moderators, keep the garden, it means that fun, insightful, or otherwise constructive yet off-topic questions can remain in a limited capacity, so long as those that want to keep them outnumber those that want to remove them.
1: Cofounder of Fog Creek. Partner of Joel Spolsky, cofounder of Stack Overflow.
2: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/756650/why-do-people-clos...
3: On Stack Overflow, users with a certain reputation score can vote to close a question. A question is closed when it reaches 5 close votes. The one exception is that starred moderators can immediately close or open a question. Once closed, the same mechanism is used to open a question back up.
4: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/04/the-stack-overflow-que...