The Assembly

1:56 PM

Hi! Somebody here who is up to answer a moderator tools noob question?

@Raphael shoot

@Shog9 I got a flagged question. I disagree with the flag. The left hand buttons says "Flag or disagree...", but when I click on it all I can do is flag. How can I disagree, i.e. (vote to) reject the flag?

@Raphael You're looking at this from the flags page?

/tools?tab=flags

You can dispute flags from that page, but not from the question page itself.

/tools?s=1&tab=flags&daterange , yes

Michael Mrozek

There's an "invalid flag" option in the dialog; that's the one you use to disagree

2:07 PM

Doh, blind me. Stopped recursing into the first item upon reading "needs moderator attention.

Thank you!

4 hours later…

user2334

6:04 PM

@Aarthi idkmybffjill what you wanted to ask me, but I'm always available for pinging in here if you just want to ask me whatever it is you wanted to ask me

user2334

11:01 PM

Nice to see CS has fallen into the speculatory, bikeshedding trap: Why has research on genetic algorithms slowed?, Why are there no mainstream, general-purpose visual languages for developers?, Why are there so many programming languages? (a dupe of a Prog.SE question no less!)

@MarkTrapp The first can actually be answered using facts.

But yea, we have to be wary.

I'll just ignore "Nice to see..." as badly transmitted sarcasm...

user2334

@Raphael The answers suggest otherwise. "Why has X happened?" is always, always an opportunity for people to speculate about the topic.

@MarkTrapp it's a scientist thing. “Why” questions are important.

You'd understand if you were a real scientist :)

user2334

@Gilles Speculating about why something is happens to be important in every field. They just don't work in the Stack Exchange format.

@MarkTrapp True. Some people may have the facts,though.

user2334

11:10 PM

@Raphael They rarely do.

@MarkTrapp Beats not questioning things.

user2334

@Raphael On Stack Exchange? No, it does not. Speculatory questions that let anyone wax intellectual about a topic are what kills sites, or makes them bastions of low quality. They're broken windows: they don't attract experts, they attract people with free time who want to wax intellectual.

@MarkTrapp Can't voting select the gems and disregard the junk?

user2334

@Raphael haha, that's a good one!

@Raphael no, unfortunately, voting ensconces the junk

11:16 PM

@Gilles Too bad, even though I think it is community dependent. I have experienced SO to be extremely low-quality in general,compared to other sites.

user2334

@Raphael People who are attracted to the low-hanging fruit as it were always outnumber the people who are the domain experts or the people who want to keep the quality high. You only need 15 rep to up-vote a question: you need 125 to down-vote and 3000 to close (or whatever the proportion is on beta sites)

@Raphael same on other sites

CSTheory is the exception, not SO

user2334

CSTheory mostly works, from what I can see, because most of them know each other as the field is pretty small.

user2334

It's a glorified mailing list

@MarkTrapp no, it's broader than that. But it is one milieu.

A milieu of people who want to do actual science, many of whom don't really understand there's more to life than this. Most of these people are not interested in favorite cartoons on a boat. That's the key difference with programmers and most other communities.

11:22 PM

Also, cstheory guys share a purpose: learning.

and the topic itself promotes precision, that reflects in how people behave.

I don't know how many really know each other in RL, but we certainly managed to retain the friendly ways of a research community to cstheory

11:52 PM

@MarkTrapp Thing is, any of those could be good. If you got the right answer from the right person right away... In practice, they tend to collect opinions without research or even much thought, and fall apart because folks just vote for whatever statement of prejudice matches their own. "It's the GOVERNMENT, man, and those DAMN LIBERALS running the EVIL CORPORATIONS - they're CONSPIRING TO KEEP HASKELL DOWN! wait, what was the question?"

user2334

Indeed. And they're easy entry-points for new users who like the idea of the site but don't know enough about the subject. "Wow, all these questions are hard: I can't participate here. Oh wait, this one's asking for opinions and theories. I have those!"