The Water Cooler

10:34 AM

@Lilienthal possibly that feel of being powerless is only because we stopped trying anything besides complaining. Few years ago we arranged sort of coordinated upvoting on HNQs at sites other than this one ("work to rule") and this quickly revealed how system is broken. Soon after that, they introduced quite substantial corrections, like shuffling and penalization trick that keeps SO questions from sticking in the list

3 hours later…

Lilienthal

1:13 PM

@gnat There is ultimately little that can be done. HNQ will still pop here like clockwork and even if you clear the questions off the site faster the damage has been done. The SE model is not designed to handle the kind of off-site influx it brings. But like you say SE has been quite clear in their support for the concept, which makes sense from a business perspective, and at that point I can only conclude that there is nothing further to be done.

1:45 PM

@Lilienthal the point is not to have hot questions off of our site - that's impossible. The idea of our "work to rule" experiment back then was to use voting to make questions from other sites stick in the list for too long. Back then, changes were made not because something went wrong with Workplace questions but because some bland PHP question from SO stuck in hot list for about a week and that made people laugh at Atwood in twitter or wherever else he was active online

2:01 PM

Seems like a side effect of whatever recent change they made is that I hardly ever see actual SO questions in the HNQ list. Occasionally, but feels very rare

MackM

2:38 PM

@smci It is also possible that people create throwaway accounts to ask questions like that, given how many accounts are tied to people's professional personas.

2:49 PM

@MackM Seems plausible, especially with regard to the embarrassing nature of this particular question.

Speaking of which, does the SE network have a stated policy about throwaways/second accounts? That's pretty routine on some networks (Reddit, etc), but explicitly banned on others (Facebook)

Found a couple of (very old) meta.SE posts that seem to answer my question:

Jeff Atwood: dup accounts are ok as long as they aren't sock puppets

Meta: How do I ask a question anonymously?

Seems like they are allowed, as long as they don't show signs of sockpuppet-like behavior (mutual mass upvoting, etc).

Snow

3:46 PM

Pretty much, yes. But then again I'm not sure why you'd need one that much.

3:57 PM

@BradC yes. Don't use two accounts to do anything you can't do with just one account -- sockpuppet voting, casting double votes or double flags on the same target, having a "discussion" with yourselves in comments ("wow, great post!" etc), evading automatic blocks or suspensions...

Are sockpuppets rearing their heads again?

I am too lazy for that @MonicaCellio

@Snow Hodor

@MisterPositive dunno. I was just answering the policy question.

@MonicaCellio Gotcha.

No, just speculating about whether the "I made a fool of myself" question was a true new user, or perhaps an embarrased throwaway

And I ventured into wondering about policy about throwaway/anonymous posts

@BradC gotcha. That one feels like a troll to me...

4:05 PM

Only time I've ever needed to use a throwaway was one of the very ancient (now closed) questions on another site asking "what is a good website for (purpose)", and I was recommending a NSFW site (with caveats).

@BradC I see

I try to work on the assumption that anything I post online will eventually be linked to me even if I think I'm being clever with secondary accounts, and behave accordingly. That doesn't mean I haven't said things I oughtn't've, but I think it's cut down on the problem.

Agreed

its too much effort to spoof your identity ( like your IP for example ) @MonicaCellio

So I just don't

( Which may or may not have gotten me in hot water once or twice )

@MisterPositive yeah, nothing I want to do online is important enough to climb the Tor/VPN/etc setup curve.

4:24 PM

@MonicaCellio same. even a VPN can be traced back to you, although a court order might be necessary.

bottom line is I assume anyone can read and view what I do online. period.

well, I assume someone can, or at least that admins behind different sites can see their own individual pieces within their domain. I'm not sure how easily someone on the outside could piece that all together from all the different places I visit, at least without putting malware on my PC.

Well, nevermind. Tracking javascript is basically server-side malware that does the same thing

(Assuming that the same trackers are used by many/most sites).

If the frequency of just-visited products being displayed on other sites is any indication, that ship has long ago sailed.

(Although, again, how much of that could be uncovered by a motivated outsider, I'm still not sure)

4:54 PM

@BradC I explained the hack they use in this post at MSE, "If you take time to monitor questions in the hot network list, you may notice that SO ones seem to leave it much faster compared to questions from smaller sites.. While official reason for adjustment is to prevent SO questions dominating hot list, if you dig deeper you'll find that it is most likely nonsense..."

Interesting analysis

Makes sense

2 hours later…

IDrinkandIKnowThings

7:13 PM

@gnat yeah SO Benefits from the economics of scale. One of their questions can get alot more attention than one of the sister sites to the point that when you compare how much attention gets to how much other questions on the site are getting. I suspect you would need 1k votes on an SO Question to keep it on the hot list very long

We get one question with 25 votes and its probably spending several days on the hot list because we dont get thousands of votes an hour like SO does.

2 hours later…