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By rights, Stack Overflow should have died already, turned into an irredeemable cesspool by a combination of outsider influx and insider burnout. You can argue (and many do) that we're headed that way - but we've been headed that way since day one. The best we can hope for is a stable orbit, forever falling but never crashing. I believe there are two major reasons why Stack Overflow has managed to scale far beyond the expected limits of a group:

 

1. Conversations not required. When a question is asked on a traditional forum, answering it often demands some amount of participation from at least a portion of the community. Details are fleshed out, the problem is clarified, solutions are proposed and debated, others with similar problems chime in with their experiences, tangential points are made, and eventually - anywhere from hours to months later - the conversation dies out. It's a very social, very natural way to interact. And it suffers mightily from the problem that Shirky talked about: all that back-and-forth and associated latency kills any hope of scale. On Stack Overflow, we close or delete questions that can't be answered straight away - it's not very sociable, but it scales wonderfully by effectively enabling a vast, human-powered computational grid.

2. Tools that allow decoupling moderation from communication without separating moderators and users. While Stack Overflow does have a powerful "moderator class" elected by the community, a fairly large portion of the actual moderation is performed by individual members of the site, those who've participated enough to demonstrate sufficient familiarity with the community. While this has been a fundamental part of the system for a very long time, I didn't fully appreciate how it relates to scale until I started working with very small Stack Exchange sites: the proportional cost of moderation is much higher, even though the total volume of work is lower. Many hands make (relatively) light work... As long as the system puts tools in those hands.

##Routine exceptions

##Something to work toward

By rights, Stack Overflow should have died already, turned into an irredeemable cesspool by a combination of outsider influx and insider burnout. You can argue (and many do) that we're headed that way - but we've been headed that way since day one. The best we can hope for is a stable orbit, forever falling but never crashing. I believe there are two major reasons why Stack Overflow has managed to scale far beyond the expected limits of a group:

1. Conversations not required. When a question is asked on a traditional forum, answering it often demands some amount of participation from at least a portion of the community. Details are fleshed out, the problem is clarified, solutions are proposed and debated, others with similar problems chime in with their experiences, tangential points are made, and eventually - anywhere from hours to months later - the conversation dies out. It's a very social, very natural way to interact. And it suffers mightily from the problem that Shirky talked about: all that back-and-forth and associated latency kills any hope of scale. On Stack Overflow, we close or delete questions that can't be answered straight away - it's not very sociable, but it scales wonderfully by effectively enabling a vast, human-powered computational grid.

2. Tools that allow decoupling moderation from communication without separating moderators and users. While Stack Overflow does have a powerful "moderator class" elected by the community, a fairly large portion of the actual moderation is performed by individual members of the site, those who've participated enough to demonstrate sufficient familiarity with the community. While this has been a fundamental part of the system for a very long time, I didn't fully appreciate how it relates to scale until I started working with very small Stack Exchange sites: the proportional cost of moderation is much higher, even though the total volume of work is lower. Many hands make (relatively) light work... As long as the system puts tools in those hands.

Routine exceptions

Something to work toward

"Exceptional" and "as little as possible" don't mean that moderators shouldn't act when necessary; rather they mean that we've hopefully designed the system such that most of the time it won't be necessary for moderators to act. That design is an ongoing process, and sometimes we fall well short of that ideal... But that's the goal we should all be working toward: the folks designing the system, the folks using their moderation privileges to help shoulder the load, and the moderators themselves. Because when you see one person doing too much, that's a sign that someone else isn't doing enough: the balance is upset, and the only solution is for more of us to step up and help.

In conclusion, no I don't think we need to update that post, or the help center page that mostly mirrors it. It's the theory on which this whole system is built, and more importantly it's a set of practical goals to keep in mind when we continue building - whether that involves new tooling, new rules, or new guidelines. It may not be particularly useful as a low-level instructional guide, but those are better left elsewhere; this is "A Theory of Moderation", not "A guide to moderating comments" or "why is everything on the Progse homepage closed?" after all.

"Exceptional" and "as little as possible" don't mean that moderators shouldn't act when necessary; rather they mean that we've hopefully designed the system such that most of the time it won't be necessary for moderators to act. That design is an ongoing process, and sometimes we fall well short of that ideal... But that's the goal we should all be working toward: the folks designing the system, the folks using their moderation privileges to help shoulder the load, and the moderators themselves. Because when you see one person doing too much, that's a sign that someone else isn't doing enough: the balance is upset, and the only solution is for more of us to step up and help.

In conclusion, no I don't think we need to update that post, or the help center page that mostly mirrors it. It's the theory on which this whole system is built, and more importantly it's a set of practical goals to keep in mind when we continue building - whether that involves new tooling, new rules, or new guidelines. It may not be particularly useful as a low-level instructional guide, but those are better left elsewhere; this is "A Theory of Moderation", not "A guide to moderating comments" or "why is everything on the Progse homepage closed?" after all.

On a site that gets a question or two a day, this is mostly just talk; a nice ideal perhaps, but not an essential one. But on sites that get hundreds or thousands of questions each day, with answers to go with them, this ideal is what allows that to keep happening! I wrote about this at length a couple of years ago:

On a site that gets a question or two a day, this is mostly just talk; a nice ideal perhaps, but not an essential one. But on sites that get hundreds or thousands of questions each day, with answers to go with them, this ideal is what allows that to keep happening! I wrote about this at length a couple of years ago: