V'dibarta Bam

1:19 AM

@msh210 what a great idea! Payment in torah is way more valuable than the few shekelim he might have otherwise offered.

1:40 AM

@msh210 what do you request of people whom you don't expect to have Torah to share?

@msh210 is this a thing in Israel? Because it reminds me of a similar payment I received here once, without asking.

... now I'm considering imposing a similar fare on my kids' school carpool ...

2 hours later…

Meta-Man

3:50 AM

Q: 2018: a year in moderation

It's New Year's Day in Stack Exchange land... A distinguishing characteristic of these sites is how they are moderated: We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in that we amortize the overall moderation cost of the system across thousands of teeny-tiny sli...

4:10 AM

15K total deleted comments. "God made five shares of discussion; He gave nine to the Jews and one to all the other nations."

(Parody of a real quotation.)

Q: Average number of comments per post: Mi Yodeya vs the rest of the Stack Exchange Network

[Thanks to msh210 for telling me how to make these calculations.1] I checked the average comments per post of the top 8 Stack Exchange Sites, to compare to Mi Yodeya: Stack Overflow 89,126,736 comments 51,068,664 posts 1.75 comments per post Mathematics 5,843,848 comments 2,834,045 posts ...

discussion comments stackexchange

@Alex Well, now you can rerun those numbers with deleted content totals added in. I suspect the measured disparity will increase.

@IsaacMoses I think it already included deleted comments because I used the URLs to see what number each site was up to, and deleted comments also have (or had) unique URLs.

@Alex ah. Clever

Though it was later explained to me that that may not have been so accurate because the system doesn't use all available numbers.

But if we assume a proportional skippage across the network it shouldn't have had too much of an effect.

4:20 AM

@Alex I think there's ample evidence that we've got more commentary than a pro volume of Shulchan Aruch

@IsaacMoses Can't argue with that.

But now I see (having been pointed there by someone who's been looking at the network) that The Workplace had even more: 24K workplace.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5851/…

@IsaacMoses I believe they delete a greater percentage of comments because they have a stricter standard for comments to begin with.

(Same with Interpersonal Skills.)

@Alex oh; is that so? Gotta go see what their policies are.

I think it has something to do with being extra afraid of answers in comments.

Because people might take the comments as good advice, but there's no way for the community to downvote bad suggestions.

4:34 AM

@NoachMiFrankfurt As @Alex dug up, no, not anymore.

@IsaacMoses nothin'

@IsaacMoses I didn't come up with the idea myself, but I dunno.

@MonicaCellio not my idea, I just reimplemented it

@IsaacMoses On the way from school, you can ask someone to say part of what he learned that day. On the way to, I think this would be overly burdensome for most kids.

@Alex Same reasoning applies on MY with certain kind of questions.

@msh210 But I don't think we pursue it as an active general policy as much. For instance, on Interpersonal Skills I often see moderator warnings that any comments not suggesting improvements to the question will be instantly deleted.

5:05 AM

@Alex I suspect a (much) higher percentage of their questions are for practical advice than of ours.

@msh210 100% of their questions are for practical advice.

I do delete comments without further ado when they're chatty, etc., though not always. Among the comments I sometimes delete are those with practical-advice answers — at least if they're not otherwise beneficial (providing a source also).

@Alex I thought so

discussion questions closed-questions statistics reopened-questions

5:29 AM

Q: 2018: a year in closing

Continuing my sometimes-annual practice of posting these numbers, here is the information on how many questions were closed on various sites around the network in 2018: Site Asked AskedAndClosed PctAskedAndClosed AllClosed DuplicatesClosed DuplicatesReopened O...

11 hours later…

4:26 PM

What do you base "An abandoned baby will soon die" on? Is that the statistics, another Posuk, G-d's decree? — Al Berko 3 hours ago

I can edit "can't fend for itself, so" into the question, but think it's overkill. Poll: is this point unclear to anyone else reading this?

1 hour later…

5:43 PM

@Alex it's not so much that Workplace has a stricter standard (we do delete some answers in comments, but that's not a huge number), but that we tend to get huge explosive would-you-folks-please-get-a-room-already-or-better-yet-just-stop comment threads, particularly on posts that touch on controversial topics like gender or religion, or posts that are more rants than questions to begin with.

@MonicaCellio Ah, I forgot you're a moderator there. I guess I have to watch what I say. I was probably thinking more of Interpersonal Skills, then.

@Alex I hope you're joking about needing to watch what you say. And yes, my impression is that IPS is much stricter about comments.

@MonicaCellio Partially joking, partially serious. Joking in the sense that because you have moderator powers I can't say what I want, but serious in the sense that I should be careful not to make assertions that may or may not be true when you are in a position to know that my assertions may be inaccurate.

I just noticed that Workplace and IPS are the two sites with over 50% closure rates (both at 51%). Subjective questions are hard to get right on the first try.

@Alex Well, technically I should always be careful about making assertions that might not be correct, but this is an illustration of it.

5:52 PM

@Alex wouldn't the latter be a concern even if I weren't a moderator? But don't worry; I haven't noticed you saying anything that causes me to raise an eyebrow.

Ninjaed.

@MonicaCellio I should get the Ninja hat for that.

@Alex you might need Photoshop to make that happen.

Oh well.