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This is just my opinion and I mean no offence. AI is irrelevant in my locale so I neither know nor care much about it. But the real solution seems so simple to me. No need for dramas and strikes and ego clashes. It just looks bizarre, like keyboard warriors evolving into a keyboard army.

At the end of the day the community can delete posts just by voting to delete, no questions asked or explanations needed, if they don't then thats up to the community, and it's their site.

Voting to delete is the pre-made way the community have of getting rid of ANY content they don't like. My own excellent answers have been voted into the bin more than once.

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    Did I miss something?
    – TheDemonLord
    Commented Jul 1, 2023 at 20:55
  • @TheDemonLord not a lot
    – Kilisi Mod
    Commented Jul 1, 2023 at 21:45

2 Answers 2

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I think that is a fine stand for our site.

Because we are a small site, with probably one moderator per new question per day, statistically speaking. And because of that, every question and every answer is under a microscope. We have, if I may say so, a very high "experts-to-clueless people" rate. If we see an AI post, it smells like AI and it's pointless. Everyone can read and see for themselves. Joe Random can see, that it is a generic non-answer. And (down)vote accordingly.

On our site, there is also no incentive to cheat. If you get green internet point here... the world doesn't care. Matter of fact, I may not want my next boss to know beforehand, that I know my rights given to me by our labor laws.

Stack Overflow has 4 questions per minute. Not per day, on a good day. And they have a huuuuge amount of basically clueless people looking for help. And you cannot tell if an AI post is correct. The AI will lie to you. The official term is "hallucinate". Because AIs don't lie. But they flat out answer something that is not true. And a normal pass-by reader will not know. It takes an expert, a seriously dedicated person in that little corner of knowledge to say "wait, this is wrong". Their voice will drown in the noise of "oh, this looks correct, it's nicely formatted and pleasantly written". In a way, it is worse than spam. Because spam is something we all have been trained to read around. It's just noise, we deal with it daily. AI generated answers are not noise. They look like signal. Until they lie to you. And you won't even know, until you try that answer for yourself.

Stack Overflow green internet points are also perceived in many regions as something helping you to get a good job and therfore a good life. That is a big incentive for cheating.

So Stack Overflow has a higher incentive to cheat, less rigid user feedback for cheaters and not enough moderators per question to make a difference with just a friendly comment. They will be flooded with bogus content if we open the flood gates.

So as a moderator here, I could shrug and just say "doesn't concern me really". That is why I was undecided at first.

But I am a user of Stack Overflow. And I don't want that to go down in flames. The decision itself is wrong. And for me, not feeling it here, doesn't make it less wrong.

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  • You can vote to delete on Stack Overflow as well, there is no difference that I see. I'm also a SO user. As for not care, thats a fallacy, my kids celebrated when I hit 100K and got some swag proving I'm a hero. I can't think of anyone more important to impress :-)
    – Kilisi Mod
    Commented Jun 28, 2023 at 7:58
  • But I guess you would feel cheap if you cheated here to have your kids celebrate you. Who if not we should know that there are people out there who feel it's normal to cheat for a job.
    – nvoigt Mod
    Commented Jun 28, 2023 at 8:19
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    And you are right, obviously SO has the same mechanisms. But it doesn't have the same amounts of experts per question. In some tags, you are hard pressed to get even a single upvote for the only answer that is correct, not because people don't like you, but because there isn't enough traffic. I agree that an AI post voted to double digit negatives is not a problem. But an AI post with a single positive vote by a random driveby voter is.
    – nvoigt Mod
    Commented Jun 28, 2023 at 8:21
  • I don't really care what other people do on the internet, I assume it ranges from boring to disgusting. Or care much in real life for that matter unless they get in my way. In this particular instance the solution already exists, there is no need to concoct one out of nothing. Just vote to delete.
    – Kilisi Mod
    Commented Jun 28, 2023 at 8:21
  • Having said that, I'm not hassling anyone over their choices in the matter, thats up to them. Just giving my general opinion and a solution for our users (the only ones who voted me in) to solve a problem rather than bugging me with flags I don't understand enough or care enough to make a judgement on. Same as the gender stuff, and the religious drama a while back.
    – Kilisi Mod
    Commented Jun 28, 2023 at 8:29
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    "On our site, there is also no incentive to cheat." - I have to disagree. Our site, like all StackExchange sites, it gamified. By definition, gamification provides incentives for people to seek out votes/points/hats/recognition. For some, that means taking "shortcuts" like copypasta, bots, and certainly AI.
    – Joe Strazzere
    Commented Jun 28, 2023 at 11:46
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    @JoeStrazzere Okay, that is true. There is incentive to cheat, for people that like green internet points. On SO however, people believe those green internet points will translate into a real world benefit. So on SO the incentive to cheat is much, much higher. We had the question here on this site asking whether or not a good SO profile belongs into the CV. And while I am on the "no" side of this, there were plenty of "yes" answers. And we had the questions about cheating on the CV. While I have never heard anyone asking whether workplace.se rep belongs onto a CV.
    – nvoigt Mod
    Commented Jun 28, 2023 at 11:58
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I use this site to learn from answers of folks who understand workplace matters. I decline being used to rate automatically generated texts - I have much more interesting paid job thank you very much.

So far, this wasn't an issue because I saw generated answers here once or maybe twice. Considering these exceptional cases I had no problem voting these down and seeing them removed (and I am grateful to folks who delete voted these).

You say you don't know about AI, but I think there is one thing worth knowing to you as this site moderator - namely that with AI one can generate responses to all and any question we have on that site at much higher speed than normal human written answers.

It is entirely possible for anyone to generate and dump into answer box AI responses to our site at a rate of 5... 10... 20 or even more per hour. If (when?) this happens - just count me out.

I am fine with voting down as a rare, exceptional occasion but if this turns into daily routine job - no... just no, I decline being used to rate generated texts.

Not to mention that site system wouldn't let me do it even if I was stupid enough to agree.

There is another thing you better know as a site moderator - it is not about AI but about how voting system works.

System will treat three or more rapid downvotes to posts from same user as serial and will quickly revert these (myself I learned about this a while ago when I once voted down three posts quickly dumped by some spammer).

Above is also a friendly warning to those who may decide to follow advice to vote down generated content. Folks, please keep in mind that if you do this more than twice for the same user system will quickly revert it.

Besides, if you happen to do this persistently, it is quite likely that system will mark this as a pattern of a voting abuse and flag your behavior as suspicious (I didn't experiment with this, nor I have desire to but it looks like most reasonable expectation for the cases of repeating voting reversals).

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  • 1
    Interesting answer
    – Kilisi Mod
    Commented Jun 29, 2023 at 10:22
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    People can post crappy content faster than we're allowed to downvote it even without AI. The serial voting detection algorithm is too simplistic and I refuse to waste time on poor quality content to work around it. Downvoting does next to nothing to prevent future crappy content unless the person posting it wants to be part of the community. The people posting AI generated text are throwing mud at the wall and seeing what sticks. Downvotes just help them refine their approach.
    – ColleenV
    Commented Jun 29, 2023 at 15:45
  • @ColleenV FWIW I find this particular limitation on downvotes useful, however stupid it may look like in some cases. I sometimes feel the urge to vote down many posts of some user and only knowing that this won't work stops me. Yeah this limitation definitely leads to less of deserved voting to low quality content but on the other hand it prevents voting from becoming personal - which would be in my opinion even more dangerous. As they say, this is why we can't have nice things
    – gnat
    Commented Jun 30, 2023 at 6:28
  • @ColleenV no different from any other troll throwing mud at the wall. Only difference is the mud. I can see several questions right now that are just mud but people are taking them seriously and would defend them passionately despite them just being 'mud' at best.
    – Kilisi Mod
    Commented Jun 30, 2023 at 8:05
  • Reverse serial downvoting became a thing when "I sometimes feel the urge to vote down many posts of some user and only knowing that this won't work stops me." I can't imagine downvoting every single contribution a user has submitted. It means just downvoting any post, without bothering to read it, because you mistrust the user.
    – Mari-Lou A
    Commented Jun 30, 2023 at 8:40
  • 2
    @Mari-LouA I’m not saying there shouldn’t be reversals of serial voting (up and down). just that the current algorithm does a bad job of distinguishing malicious serial voting from good faith voting. The last time I had votes reversed, I was just going through the home page not even paying attention to who the author of the post was and it turned out someone had posted 4 or 5 one line poor quality questions in a very short period of time. The threshold for how fast I could vote didn’t account for how quickly the posts were made or their length. That’s not really a problem on Workplace though.
    – ColleenV
    Commented Jun 30, 2023 at 9:44
  • I don't really see a point in downvoting
    – Kilisi Mod
    Commented Jun 30, 2023 at 11:25
  • 2
    @Kilisi well, your own suggestion in original posts shows that you rely on downvoting quite heavily. "Voting to delete is the pre-made way the community have of getting rid of ANY content they don't like..." <--- this exactly requires downvoting because there is no way for regular (non diamond) users to vote delete answer having non-negative score
    – gnat
    Commented Jun 30, 2023 at 13:21
  • 3
    @Kilisi It is an important mechanism on the network to ensure that the best answers and the most interesting questions are more visible and that poor quality posts get reduced visibility (and the reputation consequences are designed to incentivize users to at least wonder why they're getting negative feedback on their posts). Negative feedback is helpful, although admittedly more helpful for "experts" trying to improve than "beginners" trying to learn. I save my DVs mostly for users who should know better, incorrect posts, and posts that are so low-effort they're offensive.
    – ColleenV
    Commented Jun 30, 2023 at 14:03
  • @Mari-LouA this is totally normal, especially at smaller sites or in smaller tags at SO. When one sees a parrticularly poor quality post it is normal to get curious about whether other posts from the author are also poor quality or this is just an occasional glitch. And it is totally normal when this curiousity reveals that other posts are poor quality too (for the sake of completeness, it also frequently happens that it is just an isolated glitch). Voting down in cases like that would also be normal but system can't allow this at it would also open a door for unfair undeserved downvotes
    – gnat
    Commented Jun 30, 2023 at 14:55
  • @gnat I imagine if I downvoted four posts, composed by the same author, in the space of one minute, that would trigger the algorithm–and rightly so. Unless they were posted on the same day, it means I was targeting a particular user. I don't think any software would be able to tell the difference between downvoting answers that were objectively incorrect from someone who bears a personal grudge. What I've done is to leave a comment pinpointing the error or asking the author to support their answer. They will either ignore the criticism, start arguing, or edit their post and fix the error(s).
    – Mari-Lou A
    Commented Jun 30, 2023 at 15:20
  • Nothing to stop me from downvoting it the next day. And, hey presto, the user wakes up and fixes their post or provides the source, or the reference that supports their answer.
    – Mari-Lou A
    Commented Jun 30, 2023 at 15:26
  • per my observations, automated part of the system is primarily (or maybe even completely) focused on short term rage outbursts. Longer term and subtler voting anomalies seem to be considered relatively rare and left for manual intervention. Maybe system also raises some flags for some particular patterns of suspicious voting, I don't really know. And frankly have no interest in knowing, because when I see something slippery myself I just raise flag about it and let moderators handle it from there
    – gnat
    Commented Jun 30, 2023 at 16:57
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    @gnat good point, I'm not very familiar with downvoting, it's not really my thing, But I've had posts deleted, so I know it's possible if people want to do it. So I'm just mentioning it as a potential solution.
    – Kilisi Mod
    Commented Jun 30, 2023 at 19:20

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