2021 MathOverflow Moderator Election Chat

6:51 AM

@MartinSleziak I'm willing to help, just can't, and by the time the election is over the question should be out of the HNQ cycle...

3 hours later…

9:42 AM

@AsafKaragila I have mentioned it here since there are (it seems) some users who are willing to help with the site moderation and maintenance. So I hoped that somebody would be willing to guide the OP how to ask for CW-ification.

Of course, I could have explained that in comments myself. It seems that I am particularly lazy today.

@MartinSleziak It's the first day after Easter break, we're all lazy.

Q: Should moderators in some cases remove a question from the network-wide hot questions list?

Since you mentioned HNQs, it seems that the MO community is much less keen on the removals than MSE. Judging by the comments posted here: Should moderators in some cases remove a question from the network-wide hot questions list?

Not too long ago - in March 2019 - some changes have been made to the Hot Network Questions (HNQ). Some of the new features are the limit on the number of hot questions from a single site, or limit on how long a question can be in the HNQ list. For more details, see the announcement on Meta Stack...

@MartinSleziak Yes, I am well aware of that. But I find that a lot of the stuff that makes it to the HNQ is actually okay.

The two issues - CW and HNQ - are more-or-less independent. Although, both actions (making CW, removing from HNQ) would need a moderator.

Regular users can remove question from the HNQ list by adding MathJax - but in this instance I cannot think of a title including MathJax which wouldn't be artificial.

I need to go offline for a few minutes.

With regards to the HNQ, I think of it as an advertisement platform for the site on SE at large. Since MSE is somewhat regarded as a homework dumping grounds, I try to keep questions that can be seen as such off the HNQ (there are a few good ones there at the moment). But MO doesn't have this problem, so most of the things that make it to the HNQ are decent, in the sense that they are usually elaborate, inviting, and full of discussions. Which is how, I think, we want people to think of MO.

10:19 AM

Of course, there were objections form some parts of the MO community, some would prefer not to have MO questions in the HNQ list at all.

Some post discussions are linked in the question of mine that I've mentioned above. (Anyway, I suppose that people who follow meta are aware of those discussions.)

2 hours later…

12:01 PM

@MartinSleziak arguably MO should be excluded from the HNQ. It is inconsistent to refuse to display the HNQ on MO, but to display MO questions on it. (In some sense what is done is even backwards relative to a main original motivation, which was to avoid intrusion of externalities and externals.)

@quid I remember this: Measures to separate math overflow from the rest of the stack exchange network. The suggestion was both about HNQ and association-bonus. (Although the question was tagged discussion. I am not sure whether something like that was actually posted as a feature-request at some point.)

@MartinSleziak thanks; I did not recall that post specifically, though I did recall my chat about hats with Gil Kalai. I think that the network questions are not displayed was negotiated before migration. It came up at the old meta.

I assume if somebody really cared it would not be that hard to get MO taken of the HNQ list, especially nowadays, as there is precedence for sites being excluded.

Looking at the text of the agreement, this probably falls under: "Stack Exchange shall not run advertisements, including internal advertisements, on MathOverflow 2.0 (or any subsequent version thereof), without specific and advance written consent of the MathOverflow."

@quid I was unaware that there are such sites.

BTW you probably wanted to write precedens rather than precedence.

12:17 PM

@MartinSleziak yes IPS for instance; it caused some scandal back then. The issue was that some did not like the titles in the general HNQ.

@MartinSleziak actually I should have written precedent I think.

It seems that they came back after some time: Let's go back to HNQ!

Was this the site where the "twitter-HNQ incident" originate?

Meta Stack Exchange: Which sites are excluded or limited from Hot Network Questions?

@MartinSleziak yes I think so. I missed that they came back.

A: Which sites are excluded or limited from Hot Network Questions?

118

I'm posting this as an answer as this change worries me a great deal. Not the fact that it happened, but how it happened. Someone tweeted a complaint on Twitter about HNQ and didn't explicitly ask for anything to happen. This happened at 11:39pm (UTC). 40 minutes later, an SE developer tweete...

I remember quite a lot of backlash caused by the fact that SE ignored various feature request from Stack Exchange users, but made a change very quickly after some tweet complaining about the title of a specific question.