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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   3166 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 18, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/389834/statement-from-so-june-5-2023-moderator-action

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/390106/moderation-strike-update-data-dumps-choosing-representatives-gpt-data-and-wh

There's some sort of mod strike happening on stackexchange too. Does anyone know the details beyond the histrionic statements?

I think it's as simple as: SE is positioned as a high-quality Q and A site above all else. In particular high-volume users and mods are particularly prideful about this and really, really hate low-effort stuff (plus, again, pride). SE rightfully banned chatGPT and AI content both in answering questions as well as (AFAIK) posing questions, both in generation as well as clarification. This lead to the site more or less continuing as before as well as a lot of bans and mod action to preserve this, coordinated with the site/network as a whole. They then did an about-face, threw the gates open to AI content, and have forbidden mods for banning people (or even doing more regular moderation) for AI content-related stuff. The manner in which this was done feels to some like shoving it down their throat.

So the mods and hyper-active users are unhappy. It should be mentioned that although SE feels like a Wikipedia-type site, and operates similarly in some ways, it's NOT. It's owned by a for-profit ed-tech company.

Wow, I wasn't aware of any of this. Despite being a developer, I don't really engage much with SE. If I find an answer to something there on a Google search, I'll usually prefer it over random blogs, but I don't have much interest in writing questions or answers there.

It seems to me that SE is designed to maximize karma given for fast answers to simple newbie questions, so that's where the great majority of the energy of it goes to. IME, it's very rare to get a real answer to an actual hard question. If I manage to find an unanswered hard question that I know the answer to, I'm willing to post mine, but I don't see much point in asking questions there.

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