Mike Pall is the author of LuaJIT.
The reply had been either deleted or edited to the point of being wrong (memory is foggy), because Mike Pall wasn't an expert at SO, and had somehow not used the site exactly as intended. The mod was very dismissive and patronizing.
The idea that answers should be editable, and the gamification of stackoverflow, was an absolutely terrible combination
At some point the (say 2013-2014 or so) the site deteriorated quite massively, though - as folks considered stackoverflow CV worthy material...
Lordy, that use to piss me off most fiercely. I don’t want someone else’s words attributed to me.
When you join the site, you agree to Terms and Conditions that, among other things, grant a Creative Commons license to the community over your contributions, which gives them the right to make those edits.
The site is explicitly not trying to accommodate people who want to say things in a specific way because it's their way of saying it. The site is explicitly trying to accommodate people who want to collaborate to produce a polished, coherent work of reference. If that isn't you, unironically, that's what tech blogs are for.
People with the attitude you demonstrate here are consistently among the worst-behaved and hardest-to-deal-with participants on the meta site, because of a stubborn refusal to accept a core principle of the site.
(Yes, the reputation system was an unfathomably bad design choice in light of the site's goals. In retrospect I genuinely don't understand how it survived past 2011 or so with tweaks as minor as it got.)
My answer has my name on it. It's right there saying "kstrauser said these words". If I didn't say them, I don't want the site lying and saying that I did. I don't mind if someone fixes an obvious typo, or updates a URL that had bitrotted. That's fine. They're what I obvious intended to say. But I've had people add extra sentences or paragraphs, and oh hell no.
That was never a core principle of the site, at least not when I joined it before you. If it'd been an expressed core principle that people could edit my words, attributed to me, so that my user account ends up saying things I never said, I never would have signed up and not many other people would have, either.
An edit that made a response worse should have knocked the mod down so that they were unable to mod any more. The quality of the edit should have been determined by the original author. "Did this edit make your question better?"
Moderators should have been ranked and scored based on their ability to help and welcome new users. It should have been very costly for them to make a new users feel unwelcome.
Literally everyone on the site is permitted to propose an edit, and everyone with at least 2000 reputation can make unilateral edits. The proposals are approved by a 2 out of 3 majority of random unilateral-edit-privileged users. None of this is considered "moderation" and is not done by "mods". Of millions of Stack Overflow accounts, only a few dozen have ever actually been moderators, and they do a tiny share of curation. Their main job is responding to flags.
> It should have been very costly for them to make a new users feel unwelcome.
The overwhelming majority of people who came to the site wanted the site to be something that it was fundamentally not trying to be, and often something it was fundamentally trying not to be. It was correct to make such users "feel unwelcome", because experience has shown that they typically cannot be reasoned with or explained to. The statistics make it clear that most of them never had any intention of trying to join a community (or, say, ask another question after the one that motivated account creation) in the first place.
(this kind of thing IMO really added to the utterly arcane set of rules and conventions that makes it feel so inaccessible)
It is good that leaving comments is hard. First off, because it was learned repeatedly, the hard way, that removing that barrier leads to ungodly amounts of literal spam. Second because even insightful comments detract from the main intended flow of using the site, which is: you find a question from a search engine, read the question and verify that it reflects what you're trying to figure out, then scroll down to the answers and learn something. The entire point is to not be a discussion forum (which is also why comments were not threaded for most of the the site's life). In fact, the site came into existence specifically because of frustration with what ends up happening on a discussion forum where people can discuss endlessly.
That isn't what happens. I know many, many people believe it to be what happens, but I know from years of seeing the process on the inside that it's absolutely not what happens in the overwhelming majority of cases.
The "quality of the site data" is a 100% honest motivation and I don't understand why people are unwilling to accept that. I and others have made countless attempts to explain it.
> I honestly don’t even think most of the control freak mods
The people you're referring to are not control freaks, and also are not "moderators". Most curation on the site requires consensus between multiple people who are generally not coordinating.
> Some mod— a hobbyist with far less knowledge and experience, but a serious case of Dunning-Krueger— probably got annoyed that I was getting more votes than them because one day they started nitpicking the hell out of every goddamned word I wrote. I pretty quickly got fed up, and stopped participating about a month after I started.
I can practically guarantee that the person you're referring to was not a moderator. If it was (someone with the diamond icon beside the username, and who appeared on https://stackoverflow.com/users?tab=moderators), you should have posted on the meta site about it. The pattern of behaviour you describe is clearly abusive and against the Code of Conduct (and would have been across all versions thereof), and would absolutely been acted upon.
If an "ordinary" (perhaps with higher rep) user was harassing you like this, that is why they put a "flag" link under every question and answer, and icon beside each comment, to raise a flag for moderator attention. This sort of thing is and always has been taken seriously.
On the positive side, all of the above have attracted many people to their communities who have contributed useful or interesting points. We all give away our thoughts and experience for free while participating in these discussions, but we gain in return from the freely shared knowledge and experiences of others. I also appreciate those who take the time to vote/moderate so that the best contributions stand out. Overall I find these online discussions extremely valuable and I’m sure others do as well.
On the negative side, there are some common failure modes. There have always been the trolls who will post offensive or misleading comments, and even when it’s a small minority, they can be disproportionately disruptive. There have always been the Dunning-Kruger contributors who would insist they were correct even as others tried to explain why they weren’t, and then the people who do know what they’re doing feel obliged to waste time repeatedly setting the record straight so no-one comes along later and gets misled by the incorrect or misleading contributions. I will never understand the current fascination with getting AI bots to contribute mediocre or just plain wrong comments in these discussions. But the worst recurring pathology by far, IMHO, is when there is some form of community moderation but that goes off the rails. It killed SO by deterring good contributors for petty reasons. It has killed many a promising subreddit; I have recently given up participating in several myself that used to be interesting, because their moderators started killing entire posts retrospectively, which repeatedly cut off discussions where some contributors had already taken the time to write up good solutions to someone’s problem or share their relevant experiences.
I’m not sure anyone has really got this right at scale yet. On smaller sites like HN, the moderation can be very good, but that relies on the fact that it can be managed by a small number of decent people. If your community is big enough that it needs to be more self-policing then the time-honoured question of quis custodiet ipsos custodes? is as relevant as ever. I strongly suspect that the only real answer to this is some kind of hierarchy where the operators of a forum set culture from the top, then just as a few negative contributors can spoil things for everyone and so some form of moderation is introduced, so a few negative moderators can spoil things for everyone and so some ability to guide or if necessary remove the use of moderation privileges is needed.
Slashdot has a meta-moderation setup where random users (with at least a minimum tenure and rating on the site) would get to vote on the quality of the moderation for randomly selected posts. I still think that this has a lot of potential for improving moderation, even if it's just used as a way of ferriting out problematic moderation.
I don't understand why it never caught on elsewhere.
Meta-moderation was an interesting idea, though they seemed to have stopped promoting it much by the time I stopped posting there often. I’m not convinced it’s as effective as having a small pool of “super-moderators” who can not only affect the prioritisation/visibility but also comment themselves to guide contributors in positive directions, but practically speaking, it might be more scalable.