Expanding Discussions: Let's talk about curation

Moderating this is a paradox.

We have been trained and disciplined for over a decade to regard conversational content as unceremoniously off-topic, and this helps keep our heads on straight and keeps the cats well-herded.

By its very nature, moderating discussions will require several orders of magnitude more context and investigation into what a discussion was really getting at, and will require even more investment from the volunteers to be able to identify what's OK and what's not OK.

I don't think you can set your veteran curators on content like this which should immediately evoke Gorilla vs Shark-level visceral reactions.

...but what if it's OK? How do we know it's OK? We haven't spent any time in that collective to know intuitively, and if we had something automated keeping an eye out for things like this (a-la Charcoal), all of those heuristics built up on the rock-solid foundation that chit-chat was not what we optimized means we have to rebuild those heuristics. From scratch.

I think the right way to declare how these are meant to be moderated is to reinforce what purpose they serve, and the kinds of content that they're expected to have. Without that guardrail, we're nowhere near close to even getting started on doing this right.

Blatantly off topic could be useful for... say, someone asking a question about jQuery in the R discussion, but given the nature of discussions... anything loosely related to R would be on topic there, even if it would be better posted as a typical Q&A or otherwise would be way off topic, such as what to study to become an R developer.

Discussions by its very nature produces content that is unlikely to be useful long-term... that's why these topics aren't allowed in the general Q&A area to begin with. I don't see much reason to be concerned with curating it at all outside of dealing with CoC violations given it's not a tool for producing long-term useful content. Why even have votes? They certainly don't indicate usefulness in this case.

You already wrote guidelines... Why not just make flags for those guidelines?

• Programming-specific questions that belong in Stack Overflow Q&A
• Discussions about the Stack Overflow experience broadly
• Sharing or requesting information about specific courses/bootcamps/certifications without substantive discussion
• Career advice or posts about open roles
• Posts focused solely on networking or professionally connecting with others
• Event announcements
• Reviews of what it's like to work at relevant companies or for specific people in the field

Either make a flag reason for each, or group some related ones together, or just make a single flag reason that points toward those guidelines.

On the point of closing duplicates, ... I'm glad you brought it up, but the only reaction that thinking about this brings up in my mind is a milder form of despair. By all means, try it. If duplicates are left untouched, then you'll get something like reddit, where things get re-hashed endlessly (info will end up more scattered and harder to find), and they even go as far as enabling auto-archiving things after a period of time (forcing re-hashing). To be clear, I'm not a great fan of what I think will be likely outcome if duplicates are closed either. Stack Overflow was at least partially created to solve the problem of having to slog long threads of discussion / pages of documentation, and having to piece things together, and forget irrelevant info to finally get something of value (not that duplication closure would cause that, but it- as another evil- might help make it worse).

After seeing blatant spam sitting for over a day in Mobile Development discussion space (yes, it was flagged) I am completely baffled that company like Stack Overflow that knows what kind of problem spam represents, managed to implement a new feature without thoroughly thinking about moderation first.

If nobody else, they should know that the second you put an edit box on Internet it is only matter of time before someone starts posting spam there. Moderation is not and should not be an afterthought, it should be the first and foremost thing you define. Especially, dealing with spam.

That also raises another question, who can moderate the discussion space. Will the diamond moderators have the ability to handle posts there, or this will be solely left to CMs and Collective admins?

Update: We are now at day 3 of following spam still being visible in the Mobile Development Discussions. On the site that commonly deals with spam in matter of minutes, if not seconds.

It is beyond obvious, that any new feature that would allow posting on sites, MUST include spam flag support from the day one. Not only that, elected community moderators also MUST have ability to moderate such content. Community Managers and other staff cannot efficiently handle those.

Based on the feedback on this post, conversations with community members and collective Recognized Members, and our own observations and moderation of Discussions, we’re proposing the following flag reasons for Discussions posts:

Showing text field when "something else" is selected

Please provide any feedback here, especially if you have been active in the Discussions spaces.

Update - November 15, 2023 - the proposed modal has been updated per recent feedback. We have consolidated "unrelated to the collective" and "community-specific reason" into the "something else" reason, retaining the visible link to the guidelines.

Update - December 13, 2023 - Discussions flag reasons are now available.

Thanks to all who have contributed to this conversation so far. Below is a consolidation of some of the replies/sentiment, as well as some things that we’ve observed, and some thoughts on each one.

• Concern: Curation takes multiple forms: Flags, votes, text feedback to the author. It feels limiting to focus just on flags right now.

  • Agreed! We started the conversation focused on flags because those can at least cover some of the most common scenarios, and building flagging also needs the most lead time, in terms of development. But all forms of curation are open for ideation here. (Starball, for this reason, I have reverted your title edit, though I understand why you made it).

• Concern: The meaning of votes can seem murky, especially in the absence of defined flag reasons/options. And especially when votes may have different meanings for Q&A that may or may not be applicable. Does it make sense to use voting here?

  • This is a question we asked internally during development as well. In the demo video (showing a potential future design), you can see that there are other types of reaction/sentiment signals there. This is definitely a place we can iterate and experiment, and it’s a key part of curation; more input is welcome.

• Concerns: What is the point in curating Discussions? Who's going to curate this? What's the expected outcome of said curation? 

  • Valid questions! For the space to have ongoing value, there should be ways to signal what content is most valuable/useful. As already noted, there are many potential ways to do that. The community as a whole can send signals in multiple ways. Sometimes that will be enough – reply sorting will be available soon, which will offer readers a way to see the best replies. Flags give a signal to a smaller group, those who moderate/assess the posts, to determine if something should be removed (or perhaps edited) to maintain quality and utility.

    • Reply sorting options will be: Recent activity, Highest score, Date created (oldest or newest). Nested replies will always show in chronological order. Are there additional filters or sorting options you'd like to see to posts or replies?

• Issue: Discussions posts that should/could be questions

  • We are seeing this happen, often from newer users, and are assessing the best approaches to help with the issue. In some cases, we’ve seen that the authors do receive helpful answers. In some cases, community members and Community Managers encourage authors to post to Q&A. In some cases, we’re deleting the posts, and it’s worth noting that authors can still access their deleted posts via links from reply notifications. So a reply right before deletion can be a helpful tool for letting the author know what happened.

  • If a post is deemed clear enough and specific enough to become a question, should there be a way to migrate it to become a question? Who are the right people to help determine if it’s ready to migrate?