Why was Apocalyptic Defense closed?

Let's be honest: that was a humorous proposal. Area 51 (Stack Exchange site) is new and exciting, so it is natural that some users test the boundaries of relationship between the Stack Overflow Internet Services inc. and the interwebz people at large.

One of the goals of SE 2.0 is to create long-term viable sites. Was the zombie apocalypse defense a long-term joke? Would you like to spend month after month discussing horror cliche memes, or would you move on after a while? Maybe it's time to move on and admit that even though it's [always-friday-in-iceland], today is actually Wednesday.

The Stackoverflow team wants to take baby-steps expanding from programming and IT to other topics. Maybe one day they will finally reach comedy. This day has not come yet and community-run joke sites that keep fine over time are still terra incognita.

For once I agree with the team's decision to overrule the "community."

Joke proposals are a bit like "fun" questions on Stack Overflow. A swarm of initial interest leading to lots of ill-gotten rep and users willing to fight tooth-and-nail to keep it alive because they feel "invested" in it. Eventually, if the topic isn't closed by the moderators or the community itself, it runs out of steam and gets abandoned anyway. The cycle begins anew.

At this point, we really need the moderators to step in, because there aren't enough (any?) Area 51 users with sufficient privileges to do the janitorial work themselves. And many if not most of the members getting close to that level... are the ones creating and participating in the joke proposals. This is not a good situation.

The concept of a Survivalism Q&A site is fine - it's a hobby for many. But if the proposal was actually intended to be a serious one, then the example questions clearly demonstrate the proposal's inability to succeed due to the community's inability to take it seriously. Of the top 5 questions, two are about raptors, one is about zombies, one is nonsense (Earth's magnetic field reversing?) and the last (decontamination of rice and chickens) is a "fun" question at best. A real survivalist Q&A site would be reminiscent of a Scouts meeting, talking about tool-making, hunting, knot-tying, plant identification and so on.

And if the proposal wasn't intended to be serious then it's simply noise for everybody else. It's drawing attention and resources away from the proposals that actually are serious. It's procrastination.

Apocalyptic Defense is the Programmer Cartoon question of Area 51. It's a monument to the early adopters and should be preserved, but at some point we need to draw our line in the sand and repair the broken windows so that Area 51 doesn't completely fill up with junk.

When I signed on to Apocalyptic Defense, weeks ago, I did so as a serious participant, hoping to ask/answer serious questions like "how can I build a bomb shelter in my backyard" and "how much water do I need to stockpile to last 2 people for six months". I was excited to receive an email notification yesterday announcing that it was in the Commitment phase -- until I looked at what had happened to the proposal: full of retarded joke questions like "Can you really blend in with the zombies if you act like one?".

Maybe that's what the rest of the community wanted, but it wasn't what I was interested in. If someone wants to revive this proposal as a serious site towards discussing home defense and survival tactics, let me know. Until then, I have no problem at all with the proposal being closed.

Aw, man...

Jeff, when I die a horrible death from eating tainted rice and chickens, you're getting such a nasty email!

FWIW: I thought this was intended to be a spiritual successor to USENET. Might want to have a look at some of the more esoteric groups out there, especially those from its heyday: some people can get awful serious about a good joke.

The odds of a joke proposal, especially a well-crafted one, generating enough interest in the short-term to meet the creation criteria is relatively high. People enjoy humor; they especially enjoy humor that makes them feel like they're in the know on an inside joke. Throw in the ability to stick it to the The Man^TM and the bar gets even lower. The odds of a joke site actually being viable in the long term for the size of community intended is much lower. I suspect that if joke sites were allowed to actually be created, they'd fall afoul of the viability standards and get removed at the earliest opportunity allowed by the policy anyway.

You might ask, though, "what's the harm in creating them?" I'd say that the problem is the age-old problem that dooms nearly all forums that ever get created: the signal-to-noise ratio. The amount of noise in a channel doesn't need to be very big before people lose interest in the signal. Once it crosses a threshold, basically you're left with only the people who are more interested in the noise, than the signal. Having managed a community site for many years I can tell you that, especially early on before the culture is established, you need to be vigilant that your site doesn't fall into this abyss.

The converse of this is that over-management can lead to the same sorts of problems that undermanagement can. If you stomp too hard (or too often) people stop participating because they fear that what they have to say might be considered out of bounds. Eventually, if you're lucky, a self-regulating culture develops and people moderate themselves. New people join and they quickly learn how to participate or they find that the place is not for them and leave. Only a small number need to actually be asked to do so.

The way I see it is that, while closing down the joke proposals is entirely reasonable, especially while the culture of Area 51 (Stack Exchange site) is being established, @Jeff may have forgotten the lessons learned with SOFU that you need the alt.* hierarchy: people will have fun with your serious tool, they will turn it into a toy if they can and it's not always a bad thing. You simply need a meta site specific to Area 51 where the fun can occur.

You guys had your fun in the beta—but normals will be confused if they see joke proposals on the front page of the website. It would be causing harm.

The focus of the sites we're creating is learning. Amusement and entertainment has its place in the world (and even on our own sites occasionally), but it has little to do with our core mission of

• making the internet a slightly better place
• teaching each other professional(ish) skills through Q&A

As I said in that blog post, for grey area "fun" questions, the deciding factor is

Does this question teach me anything that could make me better at my job? Can I learn something from it?

We might eventually allow a humor site to be created ... who knows, maybe we'll eventually build another ICANHAZCHEEZBURGER network for great humanitarian justice.

_{but I doubt it}

It's bad enough that Jeff refuses to blindly follow the demands of a few dozens strangers on the Internet. What's worse is that he has ensured that it will never be possible for the talented and motivated web developers who were following that proposal to go out and start their own Q&A site on Apocalyptic Defense.

When I looked at the questions for the proposal, and which was voted to serve as the foundation of the site, I understand why you would find it unserious and silly. But regarding apocalypse or what you want to call it, there are no real facts. We don't know for sure if it'll happen and how it'll be if it does happen. The foundation of the knowledge is from religious scriptures, etc.

But if you look at this subject with some seriousness, you can't deny that the proposal itself, how do I prepare for the end of the world? is valid. If you take a look at Wikipedia, you can see that almost every big religion tells that a time of great tribulation will come.

Numbers from wolframalpha:
Buddhism 369 million
Christianity 2070 million
Islam 1250 million

This is more than half of the world population, and if they actually believe, then this topic has some relevance for them.

If you search for books about the end time on Amazon, you get almost 3500 results.

So I'm just saying, you can't just throw it off as not a real proposal. I can understand some of welbog's other proposals was closed/deleted, but this one was backed by the community and I find it valid. With that many books written about the subject, there must be both experts and people with questions.

As much as I appreciate Welbog's creative genius (and that of the other people contributing as well of course), and as much as I demand that those questions be reopened at a later date, I can't bring myself to being too outraged over this. The whole project is young, and I can see its owners coming down on proposals they don't see as productive to protect it at this vulnerable stage.

I think this is definitely not an issue worth walking away over. The proposals were (as far as I can see) all created as jokes - rather excellent ones, but still jokes.

Being community-driven doesn't mean you have to follow every whim of the community. I think that closing proposals that were obviously made in bad faith is good policy.

It's too bad, though, because I think the subject matter would work rather well. As it turns out, preparing for a 'zombie attack' involves lots of the same considerations as preparing for a flood, earthquake, or even just going camping. Mixing real advice with humorous hypotheticals might turn away the 'expert' audience, but it also dials down the tinfoil hat factor.

Example: another site that has lots of serious advice under the guise of "zombie defense."

I strongly disagree with the closing of Apocalyptic Defense. Communities can be built and can learn from fun topics as well. Take TDWTF, which is humorous, yet can be a pretty useful teaching tool, showing you what not to do.

Jeff's set about to make the internet a slightly better place and to teach others, but eliminating all fun from the equation will not get him any closer to his goals. There should be a bit of fun in any community. Meta is just such a place for Stack Overflow, whether Jeff likes it or not; people need to unwind.

Why not have a Stack Exchange site that's light hearted? There are people who actually want that; Apocalyptic Defense got through the first phase and it actually had people that had committed to it.

Someone said the StackExchange 2.0 creation procedure was inspired by the way Usenet groups where formed. Usenet has an alt.* hierarchy where anyone can create a newsgroup, but you could also publicly discuss it as a proposal (at alt.config).

StackExchange is not Usenet, but at the same time people will eventually demand sites which are not 'serious'. Even if closing Apocalyptic Defense was the right choice in this case (I don't think it is), it'd be nice if there was more discussion about dealing with similar future sites. Who defines what is acceptable and what isn't? The community has already decided it was worthwhile, so if the administration doesn't agree they should at least have a list of topics we're not supposed to propose.

When the Zombie Sparkly Wear-wolves take over the planet, I hope Jeff gets it first. humph

You had a deferred success. Don't take it too hard, and try again. How about creating a more serious-sounding proposal for natural disaster survival?

I have not seen the original proposal, but as I understand from this thread:

• The proposal started out as serious.
• After the proposal attracted some humorous questions about zombies, it was treated as a joke proposal and closed.

I hope this does not turn into a loophole for sabotaging other proposals. For example suppose you object to the "Sex" proposal for religious reasons (and you are not a moderator) instead of leaving a negative comment and/or voting to close, ask some silly questions involving sex & zombies. If a moderator comes along and sees those silly questions on the front page maybe they will close the proposal.

I can certainly see why you wouldn't want to confuse people with a joke site as the first (one of the first) sites to go up. But then you should be consistent and get rid of the Area 51 (Stack Exchange site) designation. How can you argue one is too silly, but then have Area 51?

That is totally inconsistent.