I quit. Here's why.

Question

I have offered my resignation as a moderator to the SE team and I think it's important that I provide some explanation here. Principally, I decided over the past weekend to pull the advertising for math.SE from a local professional newsletter because I was no longer comfortable recommending the site to my professional friends and colleagues, and given that state, I don't think it's appropriate for me to be a moderator.

For a little more than a month, nearly every visit to math.SE and meta.math.SE has left me feeling ill. From the moderator's view, there is a constant stream of nasty comments on the main site and frequent attacks on us and between users on the meta site. A small number of very loud users have a tendency to make overly-broad assertions about the moderators and draw conclusions from them (e.g. that we are not math people, that we are 20-somethings, that we don't know what USENET was like) and/or to assert that they have more experience than we do without any proof behind that assertion. It has been similarly asserted that the experience of MathOverflow trumps the much longer and much larger experience of StackOverflow, SuperUser and ServerFault.

From my personal perspective, there is a fundamental misunderstanding that is generating a lot of the ugliness on meta. A small number of very loud users seem to think that the goal of math.SE is to create the perfect math Q&A site and so they persist in demanding changes to the SE model, under the premise that math people are somehow different from normal people or programming people or other people. My understanding—as in, when I saw this site proposed on area51 and first joined, before I was a moderator—is that the goal of math.SE is to create a StackExchange Q&A site for math questions. By this, I mean that it is a fundamental part of the site that it has the same model and rules and behaviors as the other SE sites.

It has been suggested more than once that it is more important to retain users who have contributed a lot to this site than to ensure that those users behave appropriately; perhaps this should be taken as an indication that failing to ensure appropriate behavior from users will serve to drive away users who contribute a lot to this site.

I hope that once I no longer see math.SE from the perspective of a moderator, I will want to contribute again and perhaps even recommend the site to my friends and colleagues.

Answer 1

I'm sorry you have had such a negative recent moderating experience. In the best of circumstances, moderation is a rather thankless job. So I want to take this opportunity to thank you for your service.

There is an undeniable tension between the SE model and the goal to have a math Q&A site which serves the interests of the existing math Q&A community. I don't myself know how this will play out in the end: maybe there is room for compromise and collaboration, but maybe there isn't. We'll see.

I do want to acknowledge that a (very) small number of users have been absolutely vicious in their treatment of the moderators of this site. I was horrified when I first saw this, but like the frog in the pot I guess I got somewhat used to it as time passed. I'm sorry about that. Once again: good job, thank you.

Answer 2

Like everyone else I'd like to thank you for the time spent moderating. I feel particularly thankful because I've always felt a little bit guilty that I was too busy to be a moderator myself.

I occasionally visit both math.SE and meta.math.SE and I wanted to say that although every time I stop by the latter it seems like a mess, every time I look at the former it seems to me that it's working very well.

What I mean to say is that although as a moderator you have to wade through the muck that does occur, I think it may be helpful for you to realize that from the point of view of an occasional visitor the site you've been working on really does look good. Your time hasn't been wasted even though it might feel that way to you right now.

Answer 3

Isaac,

Thanks for being a moderator. I concur that there's something unique about the math community as it exists here. Certainly the number of mod flags and problem "needs moderator intervention" issues here is about two orders of magnitude higher than any other community under our banner.

We're talking about this now and we are going to try the following:

1. Democratic moderator elections using our new site code to do so (should be available by the end of next week)

2. We will cross-reference with Math Overflow, where possible, to coordinate bans. If a user has been banned from Math Overflow, except in the case of extraordinary extenuating circumstances, they will be banned from here as well.

Answer 4

dear Isaac,

a few comments.

First of all, to the extent that moderation here took up your time, thanks for volunteering.

Second, the work done by moderators (the part requiring more than edit powers) is somewhat invisible and if it is crucial to the site that should be made clear. I have raised, and am not the only one interested in, the question of what functions the moderation performs, which of those are beneficial, and how much can be automated or obviated by changes to the software. Especially in light of the imminent moderator elections, any concrete information you can provide such as what number of hours per week the moderation took up for you and how they were typically spent, would be illuminating and appreciated. Perhaps it could be done in a separate thread or an update of the old one.

Third, your discussion of a "misunderstanding" of math.SE's nature is at odds with the assertions of the site founders that SE is "like USENET 2.0". In addition to learning the lessons from past forums that failed, this site is specifically being compared with USENET because 2.0 has not reached the functionality of 1.0, not to mention its level of freedom and laissez faire intellectual content sharing. For as long as the site creators (and their promotional material) proudly cite USENET as a precursor and analogue of the current enterprise, the two will be compared. Comparisons will also be made with other less structurally similar math sites, but the newsgroups are for many reasons the primary point of comparison, and the SE founders did not cite them by accident. The demographic and volume issues faced by USENET groups are just beginning to be felt on this site, but they are the same. MathOverflow and math.SE are directly analogous to sci.math.research and sci.math, respectively, and I don't know anyone familiar with all of those forums who does not see it that way.

Fourth, I also doubt that people conversing on the meta misunderstand that, having created StackOverflow, the founders intend to clone its platform for the new sites, and have an incentive to assembly-line the expansion process without too many single-site customizations. The actual point that some may have missed in the back-and-forth about the present and future structure of math.SE is that the role of the users here need not be a passive one. Of course the users can make of the site what they will as content contributors, but they also have an interest in advising SE on molding the software to the needs and interests of a math site. As Jeff Atwood has stated in his recent comments, this can be a win-win because the math site drives technology later found to be useful on the other sites, such as TeX display, and I believe that all the seemingly "special" suggestions based on needs of a math site would ultimately benefit all the SE sites, including StackOverflow and the SE 2.0 platform.

Finally, you use "e.g." as though it were heading a generic list of misguided statements here in the meta.math.SE, but in fact you criticize a single posting by a single user. It is easy enough to find the original and notice that any substantive resemblance between your summary and what was posted is relatively slight. For instance, it was not asserted that all moderators are 20-something (though most are), or that USENET experience or an academic research background are prerequisites for moderators of the site. It would certainly be helpful if the latter categories were well-represented among the moderators, and of course, I would prefer a setup that limits the dependence on any moderators of any background.

Whatever you may think of the above: thanks again for your time.