The moderation strike is officially over as per this post: Moderation strike: Conclusion and the way forward.
Is it safe to say that Stack Overflow is back to normal and fully moderated, or am I missing something?
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18I would just like to add that participation levels have been dropping on Stack Overflow, especially between December 2022 and April 2023. They remain slightly lower than what they were in April and it doesn't look like this trend will reverse.– Dharman ModCommented Aug 9, 2023 at 22:50
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eh, i'd expect at least some increase in the next 4 months, even if only in new users.– Kevin BCommented Aug 10, 2023 at 14:20
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@Dharman Are there any public metrics that show this? Review queue size over time maybe?– LiamCommented Aug 10, 2023 at 14:58
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2@Liam I don't know if Dharman refer to all or only mod activity, but you can find a traffic graph here: observablehq.com/@ayhanfuat/the-fall-of-stack-overflow– A.L - say no to AICommented Aug 10, 2023 at 15:12
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@Dharman "...participation levels..." Of moderators or of users or both?– NoDataDumpNoContributionCommented Aug 11, 2023 at 8:33
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Both. Mainly I referred to się analytics.– Dharman ModCommented Aug 11, 2023 at 10:51
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1Nobody has ever accused the moderation crew of being normal...– Machavity ModCommented Aug 12, 2023 at 14:08
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2 Answers
For the most part.
17/27 mods are marked as active, and that number is slowly going up. However, it is summer, and vacation season, so some people are inactive because of that (including, probably, some people marked as active). Personally, I'm taking an extended break after the strike from moderation for motivation reasons. I'd imagine I'm not the only one doing that, but I want to be very careful speculating why the other 6 strikers (there's three mods marked as inactive for unrelated, personal reasons) are still inactive.
Additionally, we have a backlog of currently 6300 flags, and it takes time to get through all that. That number has been going down though.
It takes time to ramp back up to full capacity. It's impossible to predict when we'll be back to normal, or a level comparable to normal. We'll likely be seeing a resignation or two in the future, from people who decided they were done regardless of the outcome (assuming they haven't changed their minds), which will affect flag handling capacity too. There's a lot of moving parts here, and not a whole lot that can be predicted.
That's just mods though. There's also non-mod curators involved, where there's a similar pattern; some are back, some quit, some are taking an extended break (some of which to wait for SE to follow through on their promises before making a decision on what to do), some are on vacation, some have reduced their activity, etc. All the major organisations (Charcoal, SOCVR, and SOBotics) are active again.
Restoring normality, or at least as much normal as we can get given the damage done, will take time - assuming SE follows through on their commitments and don't trigger a mass-resignation, that is.
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21hope you'll be back after your extended break, you are a great moderator and burnination needs you!– VickelCommented Aug 10, 2023 at 0:15
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21Burnination should not lead to burnoutation though. Badum psssh.– GimbyCommented Aug 10, 2023 at 7:24
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8@Vickel assuming SE holds up their end of the negotiations, I will be back. I just need time to regain motivation. I'll still be around though, just won't be involved in moderation– Zoe ModCommented Aug 10, 2023 at 7:31
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1IIRC, there was a MSO post saying that we had about 15k~20k flags in backlog (or even more than that) while the strike was ongoing. Now there are only 6300 left? Good job! Kudos to all the mods.– InSyncCommented Aug 10, 2023 at 14:42
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1@InSync yeah, one mod eradicated most of the comment flags. That dropped the backlog quite a bit– Zoe ModCommented Aug 10, 2023 at 15:07
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3"However, it is summer, and vacation season" - in the Northern Hemisphere :)– Dale KCommented Aug 10, 2023 at 21:02
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1@DaleK Swap with "it is winter, and vacation season" for Southern Hemisphere :-)– TylerHCommented Aug 24, 2023 at 15:07
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I mean, statistically speaking, it's true for ~87% of the population. There is allegedly a vacation in the southern hemisphere too, but not as long (and it's normally earlier, but normally doesn't mean always, and google isn't specific on how any of it works). Even then, I'm only aware of two southern hemisphere mods, which is around 7% of the mod team. Unless SO users at large are a severe statistical anomaly on geographical distribution, it doesn't really matter when it's, statistically speaking, true for the vast majority of users. This answer isn't exhaustive for reasons why stuff takes– Zoe ModCommented Aug 24, 2023 at 19:41
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time to ramp back up, but it attempts to explain some of the important reasons. Vacation season affecting 87% is definitely one of them– Zoe ModCommented Aug 24, 2023 at 19:42
Stack Overflow is probably back to community-driven moderation. Some expectation setting should still exist in that this is not something that we should always depend on as "someone else" doing.
Basically, the community is back to participating with the moderation of the site, but that doesn't mean that they are obligated to moderate the sites.
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1I checked reviews page (in incognito mode, to eliminate impact of my own reviews) and numbers for Low quality answers (740) suggest that community moderation hasn't yet fully recovered. For comparison, data on how it was about 3 months before strike started looks much lower: "I've been sampling number of pending reviews in various queues displayed at reviews page for about 10 days. Observed numbers for... Low quality answers 87-138..." (FWIW other review queues appear to be back to the ranges observed in the past)– gnatCommented Aug 10, 2023 at 8:24