
Sobotics: The Bots of Stack Overflow Moderation - brudgers
https://sobotics.org
======
fredley
Although is not anything like at the scale of YouTube/Twitter, the model they
have for moderation (volunteers, supported directly by staff, BYO bots, as
well as company-owned bots for grunt work like spam removal) works amazingly
well. Much much better than any other site with the same volume of new
content.

It does make me wonder why companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter, which
have much much greater resource to throw at the problem, still struggle with
content moderation. Just hire good people, give them the right tools, and
engage the community.

Disclosure: I am a volunteer moderator on a Stack Exchange site.

~~~
brudgers
The thing I see about StackOverflow's volunteer moderation is that unlike
Facebook, Tweeter, etc.:

    
    
      + StackOverflow has clear criteria for expertise.
      + Reputation is based on being helpful to other people.
      + "How do I make baby" is off topic.
      + Content has long term value.
    

Unlike Facebook, Tweeter, etc. self promotion is bounded because of the
purpose of the site. Imagine if you will, a Facebook where reputation is based
on the quality of a person's Likes and Friendships as determined by community
voting. What gets measured gets optimized. Facebook's user facing metrics
don't encourage skills transferable to moderation.

To me, a big difference with StackOverflow is that it is a bounded community
from which people do not graduate. Facebook was a bounded community until it
expanded beyond people with .edu emails. When Zuckerberg's Harvard cohort
graduated and started producing grand-children, the platform had to expand to
grand-parents to keep people on the platform. Now that those children need
messaging, the platform is expanding to keep people there.

StackOverflow has expanded laterally by adding siloed communities around
expertise as the basis for reputation. While its systems have morphed and
evolved, there has been a set of underlying ideas that prevent _ad hoc_
change.

~~~
TylerH
Mark Zuckerberg is 33; his classmates are not having grandchildren yet.
Facebook did not have to do anything to 'expand to grandparents'; grandparents
could create accounts on Facebook as soon as anyone with a general e-mail
address could.

~~~
brudgers
His classmates' children are somebody's grandchildren. That's why the platform
expanded...emailing photos to grandparents was a pain point that the expansion
of the user base solved. It was the killer app that got old people onto the
platform.

------
Friberg
SOBotics is people (volunteers) having fun developing bots (reporting in chat)
that helps to moderate StackOverflow. If you like to join there is lots of
stuff to dev see
[http://www.sobotics.org/contribute/](http://www.sobotics.org/contribute/),
just get 20 reputation points and join us in chat
[https://chat.stackoverflow.com/rooms/111347/sobotics](https://chat.stackoverflow.com/rooms/111347/sobotics)

------
denzil_correa
Shamless Plug - I have published a couple of research papers which focuses on
prediction of "Closed"
([https://arxiv.org/pdf/1307.7291.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1307.7291.pdf))
and "Deleted"
([https://arxiv.org/pdf/1401.0480.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1401.0480.pdf))
questions on Stack Overflow. It might help some of the bots.

~~~
Friberg
Very nice, we have bots that search for close voting, but to be honest the
amount of questions that needs to be closed are to huge for us we can't
handle'em, so we have concentrate more on Non Answer, Plagiarism, Rude
comments, Bad edits etc where it is easier for us to make a difference

------
azinman2
The webpage is quite unclear as to exactly what this is.

~~~
hawktheslayer
While I too had a hard time reading through the website, I was amused by the
author's style (e.g. "the moderators visit the room frequently and can bust
your bubble") and also enjoy the names of the bots such as Guttenberg, as a
nod to the famous plagiarism scandal in Germany.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guttenberg_plagiarism_scanda...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guttenberg_plagiarism_scandal)

~~~
bhargavrao
Speaking of names, the vandalism detector is named "Belisarius"
[https://stackapps.com/questions/7473/belisarius-detecting-
va...](https://stackapps.com/questions/7473/belisarius-detecting-vandalism-on-
stack-overflow).

(The other names have some back story behind them, mostly internal to the
sobotics team)

