points by cowlevel 14 hours ago | 0 comments
Goodhart's law. You award dopamine for closing questions, so they will be closed.
Even though you didn't get a reputation score for that specific action as I remember, it still gave you the little "I'm helping" feeling.
The honeypots in the review queue trained you to err on the side of closing questions - you were punished for not closing a honeypot when other people had closed it, regardless of whether it actually deserved to be closed. Complaints about incorrect honeypots were frequent and the system was not improved.
[–] braiamp 11 hours ago
[–] joe_the_user 12 hours ago
Wow, I didn't know anything of the moderator-interface-and-training details and this definitely gives the situation more clarity also.
Question-closing was a big complaint through-out SO's history. My guess is that the top people were unconcerned because someone who complained about it was by the way the system defined people, a bad user (since they were lumped-in with those who really did ask already answered questions).
[–] cowlevel 7 hours ago
That's not the moderator interface, it's the mid-level user interface. I think you needed a few thousand points to access review queues, which the system constantly nagged you to do if you have permission.
There's zero reward for closing a question. I know that because I casted 2 thousands of those, no reward ever came my way.
> The honeypots in the review queue trained you to err on the side of closing questions
That's also false, there were as many for either side in the audit queue. There's a whole list of post about people complaining[1]. Most of the time, the answer is the same: if you are not sure, hit skip.
For most the negatives audits, SO famously used spam rather than bad posts (which also taught the wrong lesson)
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/search?q=%5Bdisputed-review-a...