Toxic moderation harms the community

Question

Building community and fixing toxic communities have been a theme this past year on the network.

I thought I would share my recent experience regarding this. I've been around SO since the beta, so I think I've got (a) a bit of experience in the community aspect of SO and (b) a relatively thick skin.

I just had a rather unpleasant experience with a preemptively closed question and the subsequent moderator interaction. I stopped engaging when this comment was made, not because I'm a snowflake who can't handle the language, but because it was obvious that I was not being taken seriously.

This is the first time in 11 years that I feel I've been treated unfairly or disrectfully (a key aspect of "toxic" communication as I understand it) by a moderator, so I would just like to bring this to everyone's attention. It's possible of course that the moderator was just having communications difficulty, but tone as well as content and context does matter in terms of showing respect.

As a practical thing, It's better that arduino.se depend on member voting for closure than having moderators preemptively close (excepting of course spam, abuse, etc). Perhaps the moderators can coordinate amongst themselves and reconsider their closing strategy. FWIW!

Answer 1

Getting even the most basic of information out of you was like getting blood out of a stone. I guess from your point of view, since you already have all the information, that you can't understand our frustration.

When we had finally got some basic information out of you to make any kind of sense of your question it turned out that it had nothing at all to do with Arduino anyway.

If you had:

• Had a problem with creating the software for your board using the Arduino API or the Arduino IDE, or
• Were asking how to manually upload a hex file to an Arduino board

then it would have been on topic and we would have been able to help you.

As it is, you refused to tell us what the board is that you are using (eventually we got the manufacturer of the chip out of you, but still no clue what the board is) despite being repeatedly asked.

If we ask you for information it's not just to annoy you. It's because we need it to be able to answer your question!

Answer 2

I wholeheartedly agree the Arduino:SE should be more welcoming. However, it is also true that it can be difficult to get people to update their questions with information and/or improvements that have been requested in comments.

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In this case, as far as the question itself goes, I've read through your question, and the comments and I still can't see how it is on-topic for this site. If it hadn't been closed by a moderator, I would probably have voted to close the question when I saw it in a review queue.

As regards your interactions with others in the comments, I'll just note that you are fairly experienced in using SE sites, so I assume you are aware that if you think that something has been said that violates the Code of Conduct you can always flag it, and/or report it to SE Community Managers.

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As to your last point, I'm a moderator on another site, and I'm a great believer in the idea incorporated in the Theory of Moderation that moderators should do "... as little as possible".

I try not to use my super-vote to close questions if possible. That is what community moderation is meant to be for.

That's not to say that I don't participate in the review queues. I'm happy to be the 5th-vote to close a question, but (apart from spam, and other posts that violate the SE Code of Conduct), the community decided what is on- and off-topic for that site, and so it should generally be the community that votes to close posts.

On that site, the community has agreed that they prefer a lighter touch from moderators. It works there, and I suspect that it would probably also work here.

In my experience Arduino:SE has enough members who actively moderate via the review queues that moderators really shouldn't need to preemptively close posts quite as often as they currently appear to.

But, at the end of the day, the fact is that it should be for the members of this site who need to decide what it is they want from the moderator team.

If the consensus is that we want moderators to decide what is on- and off-topic, and preemptively close posts that are off-topic using their 'super-vote', then that's fine. It wouldn't be my choice, but I'm happy to go with the consensus view.

Answer 3

You raise some interesting points. There are two main issues here:

• Is there "toxic" moderation on this site or not?

• Did your question deserve to be closed?

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Stack Exchange has been wrestling for a while with their "be nice" policy, and if you go onto meta.stackexchange.com you will find all sorts of posts about this, for example here and here. There are lots of posts. :)

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As for your question, well it was pretty brief, see below. There was no mention of Arduino, or any particular Arduino board. It could conceivably have gone to electronics.stackexchange.com where they are used to dealing with microprocessors in general.

Your original question:

I've compiled a program (betaflight flight controller) via a Makefile and have the resulting hex file.

From the Mac command line, how do I upload this hex file to my Cortex M3 board?

So, I think some votes to close were not totally unwarranted.

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Having said that, I agree with the theory of moderation.

We moderators should be able to sit back and let the community handle problem questions and answers, thus keeping our workload light. :)

As Jeff Atwood said in the above post:

Even with active community self-regulation, moderators occasionally need to intervene. Moderators are human exception handlers, there to deal with those (hopefully rare) exceptional conditions that should not normally happen, but when they do, they can bring your entire community to a screaming halt — if you don’t have human exception handling in place.

Note the use of the word "occasionally". If something is egregiously bad, then a moderator steps in and deletes the spam/insults/harassment. Otherwise, the community (non-moderators with reasonable amounts of reputation) deal with it as a group. That way you know that five people agree that your post is bad, not just one or two.

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I know from personal experience how frustrating it is to have a question you have asked, on other parts of Stack Exchange, to be closed within 30 minutes by a couple of people, one of them being a moderator. It has happened to me more than once.

Answer 4

I am having trouble understanding your complaint. Your question title says "Upload a hex file to a Cortex M3 from the Mac command line? [on hold]" and the title of this meta post is "Toxic moderation harms the community". It’s sounds like you are the judge, jury and executioner. To be honest, the meta title you have so carefully "crafted" reads just like a Main Stream Media Fake News headline.

Regarding your comment:

"…It's better that arduino.se depend on member voting for closure than having moderators preemptively close…"

Your question was not closed, It was put "on hold" because it’s off-topic. Arduino.SE is a small community, and as such, we do not always have enough users with the required reputation level to "vote to close" questions.

A question "on hold" is waiting for the person to, for lack of a better term, "fix it’. It is not "closed", and won’t be until a period of time has elapsed. During the "on hold" phase, if the question is "fixed", any Arduino.SE moderator, or the required votes from the community can re-open it.

If the question is not re-opened, and a period of time has elapsed, the system will mark it as "closed". Does that mean your question is gone? Deleted? Never to be answered? Not necessarily. You can see "closed" questions by using the following text in the "Search on Arduino…" text box. Something like this: https://arduino.stackexchange.com/search?q=closed:1

Google also seems to be able to find the "closed" questions, because I have used Google to search for Arduino related "things", and Google has provided me with links to Arduino.SE Q + A’s with the following text in the question title: "[closed]". Don’t worry, the planet can still see your question, and will be able to answer it for a long, long time.

Regarding your comment:

"I seem to be having problems with an individual moderator, so the Royal We form of pronoun shouldn't be used."

I agree with Majenko that your question is off-topic, so "we" is the correct word to use. In other words, if I had seen your question before Majenko put it "on hold", I would have put it "on hold" for the same reason.

Regarding your comment:

"…But keep in mind that this post is about the toxicity of arduino.se.".

You are trying to "spin" your Cortex M3 "off-topic question" issue into an accusation that all of the Arduino.SE moderators are "toxic". The only thing making our community toxic right now is you.