[spfzero]

This seems to happen over and over: something that is working fine is changed. Not to make it better, but in hopes of business growth. Half the time it backfires, the other half there are some mostly middling improvements to the business. The odds aren't great, but there are people charged with "growing the business" and so they must change something, even if there's nothing that pops out as a great idea.

The community of moderators is kind of a symbiote attached to this enterprise. It gleans and curates and makes the end product more helpful to users. "Helpfulness" is a second-order effect of this moderation, and the whole attraction to the business.

After telling moderators to not moderate, moderators should get the message: It's not about AI, its about whether moderation is valuable, and whether helpfulness of answers is valued by the business.

[johnea]

This is just the most recent decline in stackoverflow 8-(

Ever since the posting system was turned into a social score where people are mostly conncerned with increassing their score versus answering questions, stackoverflow has failed it's users.

Just another example in the very long list of for-profit plaforms doing what's best for profit over what's best for the users...