Stack Overflow Podcast - Episode #22

Summary

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Stack Overflow Podcast - Episode 22

Release Date: April 19, 2011
Hosts: Joel Spolsky & Jeff Atwood
Special Guest: Josh Millard (MetaFilter)

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Joel and Jeff celebrate the public launch of Stack Overflow, reflect on the technical and community challenges of scaling the site, and host an extended, insightful conversation with Josh Millard from MetaFilter. The discussion dives deep into the design of social software, the value of community moderation, the importance of “meta” discussions, and the delicate balance between openness and maintaining quality.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Stack Overflow’s Public Launch

[03:11] - [07:53]

• Surviving the Surge: Stack Overflow transitioned from private beta to public launch, experiencing a dramatic jump in site load and user engagement.

  • "The amazing thing to me is that the site is still up because I really wasn't sure." — Jeff Atwood [03:23]
  • Private beta peak: ~8,500 questions in 6 weeks; On public launch day: 1,500 questions, 6,000 answers, 1,700 comments, 62,000 unique visitors, nearly 700,000 page views.

• Scaling Worries & Reality:

  • Early concerns about questions getting 'buried' too quickly due to increased traffic.
  • "Even though a question lives less time on the homepage, it's still seen by about the same number of people." — Joel Spolsky [06:20]

• Maintaining Quality:

  • The risk of “Eternal September,” but both Joel and Jeff argue that openness brings advantages, particularly addressing niche questions through a broader, more inclusive user base.

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2. Comparing Community Models: Stack Overflow vs. MetaFilter

Entry Barriers & Community Health

[10:08] - [11:19], [34:24] - [34:27]

• MetaFilter’s $5 Fee: A minimal financial barrier deemed to improve participation quality.

  • "It's a speed bump"—just enough friction to deter trolls and spam. — Josh Millard [34:24]

• Stack Overflow’s OpenID Requirement:

  • "It’s about $5 of headache… it’s a minimal barrier." — Joel Spolsky [10:14]
  • Some gripe about friction, but hosts argue OpenID is better than having “thousands of logins across thousands of sites.”

Programming Focus and Tagging Approach

[12:36] - [17:31]

• Stack Overflow aims to be technology-agnostic. Issues with non-programming questions and inadvertent technology bias are addressed.
  • "We’re not saying this is a place to discuss Windows programming, this is just a place to discuss programming, period." — Jeff Atwood [13:10]
  • Tagging enables breadth without the constraints of traditional forum hierarchies.

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3. Insights from MetaFilter: Social Dynamics & Moderation Practices

[20:40] - [60:57]

How MetaFilter Works: Open Structure with “Ask MetaFilter”

• "It’s a community weblog... collaborative blogging site...Anyone in the user base can make a post." — Josh Millard [20:40]
• MetaFilter introduced “Ask MetaFilter,” a heavily used Q&A component.

Discussing the Platform on the Platform: “Meta” Spaces

[26:37] - [29:36]

• MetaFilter established “MetaTalk,” a dedicated space for discussing site operations and policies—crucial as a community release valve.

  • "MetaTalk is key to the success of the site because it creates a sort of release valve…" — Josh Millard [27:45]

• Contrast with Stack Overflow’s reluctance to “talk about the site on the site.”

  • "You begin leaving breadcrumbs about Stack Overflow, and I do not feel like… that's ultimately helpful to programmers." — Jeff Atwood [31:19]
  • But recognition that highly engaged users ("star users") need somewhere for these meta discussions.

Voting, Moderation, and Community Policing

[33:15] - [39:57], [47:11] - [51:52]

• MetaFilter: “Favorites” (akin to upvotes) and invisible “flag” system for moderator review.

  • "Flag system is kind of like a downvote but functions differently—they’re not visible." — Josh Millard [47:31]
  • Stack Overflow made an early mistake displaying flag counts publicly.

• Dealing with spam, abuse, and problematic users:

  • "At this point, we get an email every time someone makes their first post, tells us about it, we check it out…" — Josh Millard [34:39]
  • The $5 fee plus community norms succeed in filtering out most problems.

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4. Maintaining Quality & Handling Growth

Scaling Challenges & Community Health

[53:46] - [56:02]

• Scaling up moderation is mainly workload; MetaFilter limits ambitions for mass growth to keep community manageable.
  • "We're not trying to turn this into something that's going to scale to a million users." — Josh Millard [55:20]
  • Stack Overflow also wary of scaling moderation (“my life sort of ends” at 100+ support emails a day).

Keeping it Civil: Respect, Trust & Private Warnings

[57:17] - [59:02]

• Emphasis on separating the content from the user—flag the action, not the person.

  • "You’re separating the person from their actions, which I think is probably the right solution." — Jeff Atwood [57:17]

• Strong distaste for "public shaming" as a moderation tool.

  • "You gotta take the high road, period, which is hard to do." — Josh Millard [59:02]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "The amazing thing to me is that the site is still up because I really wasn't sure..." — Jeff Atwood [03:23]

• "We have our own $5 barrier. It's called OpenID." — Joel Spolsky [10:05]

• "One of my favorite threads...was somebody complaining about OpenID and then the highest voted answer was... ‘I'm a VB programmer for 16 years, I was able to sign up for this site.’" — Jeff Atwood [10:19]

• "MetaTalk is one of the things mentioned as key to the success of MetaFilter, because it creates a sort of release valve." — Josh Millard [27:45]

• "If people don't like content that's on there, they will vote it down... Nobody has to step in and really do anything other than vote." — Jeff Atwood [34:03]

• "We mostly let people do their own thing... There's a fair amount of community policing." — Josh Millard [34:39]

• "I like that it's about community. I believe deeply in the community. But obviously, there's a scale issue..." — Jeff Atwood [54:49]

• "We're not trying to turn this into something that's going to scale to a million users. I can't imagine what that MetaFilter would look like." — Josh Millard [55:20]

• "You gotta have that mutual respect all around, which means you don't have people in charge, you know, treating users—even jerky users—like crap." — Josh Millard [57:41]

• "I've always been worried about that because actually I have the exact same problem, which is... a lot of the people that are really, really good don't think they're that good." — Joel Spolsky [60:18]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Office move-backstage banter: [01:01] – [03:11]
• Stack Overflow public launch, site metrics: [03:11] – [05:27]
• Scaling, “Eternal September,” and audience quality: [05:27] – [10:05]
• MetaFilter intro & comparing community models: [10:05] – [20:40]
• Josh Millard on MetaFilter’s history, moderation, & success factors: [20:40] – [26:37]
• Meta discussions (“MetaTalk”), meta on Stack Overflow: [26:37] – [32:04]
• Site voting, moderation, and spam/abuse handling: [33:15] – [39:57]
• MetaFilter fav/flag mechanics and community policing: [47:11] – [51:52]
• Scaling and user management challenges: [53:46] – [56:02]
• On respect, private warnings, and public shaming: [57:17] – [59:02]
• New user anxiety and self-filtering (MetaFilter, Stack Overflow, and jobs): [59:41] – [60:57]

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Takeaways & Reflections

• Balance Barriers and Openness: Minimal entry barriers (like MetaFilter's $5 fee or OpenID) can meaningfully improve content quality without employing heavy-handed gatekeeping.
• Meta Discussions are Vital: Having a dedicated “meta” space for policy and self-reflection is crucial in communities to separate noise from core content, empower engaged users, and relieve pressure from main channels.
• Community-First Moderation: Empower users to shape interactions (“vote it down”), reserve moderation for clearly egregious cases, and always strive to treat users with respect—even when they cross the line.
• Mindful Scaling: Recognize the challenges in scaling community moderation; automation and distributed trust (through voting/flagging) help, but some human touch is always needed for a healthy ecosystem.
• Quality as Practice: Both platforms strive for high-quality contributions—not by restricting participation, but by cultivating norms where users organically filter and improve content.

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Final Thoughts

The dialogue between the Stack Overflow and MetaFilter crews offers a rare, honest glimpse into the messiness of building lasting, positive online communities—their strengths, persistent challenges, and the human values underpinning technical design. Whether through transparent meta channels, light-touch barriers, or relentless focus on mutual respect, the message is clear: social software succeeds when it puts people—and their collective wisdom—at its core.

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Transcript

[Joel Spolsky]

Up Next on episode 22, Joel and Jeff cover the launch of Stack Overflow and have an extended discussion with Josh Millard of Metafilter on how to design social software for the web. On IT Conversations. Hi, this is Phil Windley. Today I'm excited to bring you another great program from Stack Overflow with Joel Spolsky and Jeff ATWOOD Here on it conversations. The conversations network is a 501c3 nonprofit and we need your help. For a tax deductible donation of as little as $5 per month, you can support this channel and the rest of the Conversations Network. So please visit conversationsnetwork.org to become a member and help us continue to bring our programs to the world for free. Our audio files are delivered by Limelight Networks, the high performance content delivery network for digital media. And now here's StackOverflow.

[Jeff Atwood]

Hello.

[Joel Spolsky]

Okay, so the technology is working now and the bamboo for our lobby has arrived.

[Jeff Atwood]

Ooh, neat.

[Joel Spolsky]

We're in the new office and it's gonna be really, really noisy. There's a guy doing some drilling to install the shelf for the AV gear where we would install all the electronics that we need to play Rock Band in the new office. So there'll be some noise from that. And none of the walls are here or the doors to any of the offices. This plan was that the front of every office would be a glass wall with a sliding glass door, but those are nowhere to be seen and apparently they're coming in mid to late October.

[Jeff Atwood]

Do you guys have the computer set up so you can actually work? You have the Internet and stuff like that?

[Joel Spolsky]

Yeah. And in fact, our system administrators did just a fantastic heroic. Made a heroic. Came in on the weekends. Came in on the weekend while everything was being moved and pretty much had everything up and running for us by the morning. Oh, there's a guy who's bringing. This is not good.

[Jeff Atwood]

Is a one man band approaching.

[Joel Spolsky]

There's a guy delivering a shelf. Hey, Liz, it looks like they're delivering. I mean, they're delivering this couch here and it needs to go where the dumpster is. The dumpster is. Although actually, you know, they can. I guess they're going to set it up tomorrow maybe so it doesn't matter. All right. Probably safe. They're moving the Dempster. Oh, Bobak just glided by on a scooter. We've got. People are bringing in scooters and bicycles and stuff now because the office is much bigger than it used to be, than what we used to have. Right. So it just takes a Real long time to get all the way down to the other end. And it's just a long straight shot from Rector street to Broadway Avenue. You can check it out on Google Maps, look up 55 Broadway. You'll see. And we basically go from one street to the next.

[Jeff Atwood]

That's cool. That's very cool. Do you guys don't have segues yet though?

[Joel Spolsky]

That would be good. That would be good. I'm all for segues. I'm off for segues.

[Jeff Atwood]

Yeah, that's fair. So the big news this week, in addition to you guys getting moved in, which is cool, is of course we have now I have a public website.

[Joel Spolsky]

Oh yeah, Congratulations. We launched.

[Jeff Atwood]

Yeah. So you wrote a blog post and I wrote a blog post. And I think the amazing thing to me is that the site is still up because I really wasn't sure. Well, I mean I really didn't know. It's just hard to do that level of load testing. But the site has survived. And just to give you an idea of the dramatic increase in load, our CPU graph used to be at about 2 to 3% most of the time, minimal, even under pretty heavy private beta load. And now it's pretty regularly at above 50%, like sustained.

[Joel Spolsky]

Well, wait a minute, wait a minute. When I publish something on my blog, at least there's always like a day or two of heavy traffic that that generates. But then it ends. I mean, it subsides a little bit. And I'm sure the same is true of you. And I also send out an email to 52,000 people who subscribe to my email newsletter. What a blast from the past that is. Email newsletter. What's that?

[Jeff Atwood]

Right. So anyway, you would assume this is some kind of worst case scenario, right? This is probably more attention than we are going to get later, which is good because we got to have some room to scale.

[Joel Spolsky]

There will be a lot of attention now, but then that will be sort of covering up an underlying growth curve. So once the noise goes away, there will be some pretty heavy growth there.

[Jeff Atwood]

Right. I actually got an email from Jeff. We did hook up Google Analytics and I do have some actual numbers if you want to hear them for day one.

[Joel Spolsky]

Oh yeah, totally, totally.

[Jeff Atwood]

So on day one, just random numbers here. So 1500 questions were asked and in context, during the entire length of the beta, I think we had 8,500 questions and that was a month and a half. So in one day we generated pretty sizable percentage of everything that was done during the beta. Almost 6,000 answers, 1,700 comments were left 62,000 unique visitors and almost 700,000 page views.

[Joel Spolsky]

700,000 page views in a day?

[Jeff Atwood]

Yeah.

[Josh Millard]

Wow.

[Jeff Atwood]

Well, our site is kind of amenable to people looking at pages over and over. Right. I mean, you want to see the new questions. You see. Yeah, I was going to say it's going to be a fresh line.

[Joel Spolsky]

One of the things that struck me as, you know, how we talked last week about how we're all stupid. So here's a stupid thing that some people said. Yes, people were, you know, a lot of people had been commenting saying, well, stack overflow is great with this elite super duper beta with very few people coming in, but what's going to happen when a million people flood in and I'll start asking questions?

[Jeff Atwood]

Yes.

[Joel Spolsky]

And your questions only stay on the homepage for, you know, what is it now, like two minutes instead of 15 minutes or something?

[Jeff Atwood]

The lowest I saw get during the beta was about 20 minutes.

[Joel Spolsky]

Yeah.

[Jeff Atwood]

Now it's, it gets down to two minutes. So there's, it's 10 times higher.

[Joel Spolsky]

But we also, but the point is that we also have 10 times as much as many viewers, as much traffic. And so those, those 10 times, I mean, it's still seen a post even though it survives for less time on the homepage, it's still seen by about the same number of people.

[Jeff Atwood]

Yeah.

[Joel Spolsky]

So, yeah, I actually don't think. I think the only problem is if the unanswered questions count starts climbing uncontrollably, that might be a sign that we're not. That somehow we've lost the balance because we really did have a balance in the beta where things were getting answers, they really were very, very obscure questions, weren't getting answers. And the only way to fix that is just to have gigantic scale where we've got, you know, a couple thousand, let's say a couple hundred thousand regular visitors. So there's likely to be somebody that knows about that QuickBooks XML integration with Visual Basic 4.0 bug. So for that you need huge scale, you need Google. And that's something, you know, we were never going to be able to get good answers to those questions until we had much more critical mass. But in terms of just like a person asking how to do X with some technology getting answers, their question is going to appear to about the same number of people as it would have before the beta, even if it doesn't live as long on the homepage. Assuming that the mix of people looking to answer and people looking to question is roughly the same. And then the demographics of the people that come into a real site are the same demographics as people that come into a beta. And I really think they are. I really think they're pretty close.

[Jeff Atwood]

Well, I do think, as we said many times before, one thing that works in our favor is that it's kind of a selective audience. I mean, it should really be programmers. I can't imagine any sort of random Internet user coming to our page and really wanting to stay there for any length of time because it's just much of, you know, technical jibba jabba about really arcane things. But that's the strength. That's why we think it's gonna work. And yeah, we were lacking the long tail of programmers with the private beta. And I did get one email from Jason Cohen of Smart Bear Software, and I guess he works with Justin Standard, and Justin was the person who asked you at the the Business of Software conference about the community on questions. That was actually Justin. So they're heavily involved with the site. And I got this impassioned email from him and Jason, excuse me, and Justin, urging us, like, not to take the site public. They were really deeply, deeply concerned about the eternal September thing of just, you know, bunches hoards of random users coming in and just really diluting the quality the site. But I don't actually think it works that way. Like, I don't. I guess I just don't agree that that's really a risk. I think the bigger risk is just having an insular community where you don't have the long tail. So these really obscure questions can never really get answered. So I think there's a bigger downside to being a closed community than an open one in our case. Now, if we were something like Yahoo. Answers, maybe. And actually this brings up a good point and a transition to something I want to talk about. We're going to have like a special guest on this. So MetaFilter. There was a nice topic on Stack Overflow on MetaFilter, and it got quite a bit of discussion actually. And that was really a big honor because I've been a big fan of MetaFilter. But MetaFilter is a closed community. It cost $5 to sign up at MetaFilter. I'm looking at Wikipedia. That's something instituted in late 2004, but it's really kind of a selective community. I mean, you can read it, of course, but you can't really participate or do anything unless you pay the $5 lifetime membership fee. It's really just a little barrier to get people in there and the quality of the community is in fact very high.

[Joel Spolsky]

We have our own $5 barrier.

[Jeff Atwood]

What's that?

[Joel Spolsky]

It's called OpenID.

[Jeff Atwood]

That's a pretty minimal barrier.

[Joel Spolsky]

It's about $5 of headache.

[Jeff Atwood]

I disagree. One of my favorite threads, and I think I had to close this one because it was beta stuff, was somebody was complaining about OpenID and then the highest voted answer was I don't remember who this was. So I apologize. I'm going to make up a name. My name is Jim. I was a VB programmer for 16 years. I was able to sign up for this site. So even if you're a Visual Basic programmer, you can sort of figure it out and actually make it work. Yeah, I think there's some complaints about it, but I think the people that are complaining about it, I don't know, I don't get it. I think the status quo is so evil of having just thousands of logins across thousands of sites.

[Joel Spolsky]

Yeah, no, I think if we could do something to help promote OpenID, that's worth it. Speaking of Visual Basic programmers, another frequent gripe that we've been hearing is there goes the vacuum cleaner. Another frequent gripe to the audience. I was telling Jeff earlier that they're vacuuming in my office as a part of some construction project that's going on there. And he said, can we just do the podcast after they're finished vacuuming? And I said, yeah, that will be in November sometime. It's not clear. There's this sort of an asymptotic long tail nature to construction. On any kind of construction project they just go slower and slower and slower as they get closer and closer to the end of the project. Can you hear the vacuuming or is my excellent microphone a little tiny bit?

[Jeff Atwood]

It's not any way obnoxious or anything like that.

[Joel Spolsky]

Well, yay, Sennheiser. But the real point was. Yes. Oh, you mentioned vb. And another I don't even want to say criticism, but kind of observation that we got from a few people was that the site seems heavily NET oriented. Relatively like C and. NET are the biggest categories of questions. I actually didn't think that we were disproportionately NET oriented. Now, I don't have statistics for this, but I actually believe that our distribution of tags is probably pretty close to the actual distribution of working programmers in the world. I don't think people realize just how common it is to be a C. NET programmer because it's mostly the internal and the and the enterprise Y applications that do that and the people that make a lot of noise are like the bloggers with their Web 2.0 startups using the Ruby on the Rails. But I just don't. I just think that actually our distribution of tags feels to me to be pretty close to the actual distribution of programmers working today, the actual technologies people are using. I don't know that that's true. I mean maybe a listener can suggest something we could compare ourselves to. Maybe, maybe books or job listings or something.

[Jeff Atwood]

Right? Yeah. I was actually surprised and pleased. This was one of the major goals when we launched the site was to be agnostic. We're not saying this is a place to discuss Windows programming, this is just a place to discuss programming, period. I think really the challenge for us is there's still lots of people. Even though I've tried to make it really obvious. I have the little sidebar says, okay, this is what a question should be. And I actually made it bright yellow for new users now, by the way. So it really pops off the page. It's like ask programming questions. And we still get questions that are just not remotely programming questions. I mean they're computer related, they're not programming questions. And I feel bad like voting them down and stuff. But I think we have to. And that's more the risk than not having like there was a huge question about like bashtrix the other day which I thought was very cool. So we actually are getting. I've seen lots of Python questions, I've seen a handful of Ruby questions. There's quite a bit of activity around non Microsoft technology which was an explicit goal and I've been pleased with that. I think the bigger risk is just people not asking programming questions. It's frankly a bigger problem to me than are we Windows centric? I don't think we are.

[Joel Spolsky]

Well, what do you mean by. I mean if it's a question that's just sort of like what's the best programming chair? That's kind of a programming question.

[Jeff Atwood]

Or that to me is fine. It's questions like I'm having this problem in Windows xp.

[Joel Spolsky]

Oh yeah. I mean if those were sufficiently. If those were. If there was a real way to tag those out of view, you know what I mean? Like if they came in appropriately tagged and I never saw them, I wouldn't care personally. And that goes back to the question of tags, which I kind of want to bring up. The first time I tried to do a Q and A site it was really just discussion groups and there's still one of them which is The NET questions on my homepage. If you click on. NET Questions, there's a discussion group there which I'll probably close down now that we have Stack Overflow, where people ask questions and answer them about. Net. For some reason in the past, I used to think that the right way to go about building something like Stack Overflow would be to start small with something that you can easily accomplish and to go narrow so that you at least have a chance. Like I would generally tell people, you know, pick a narrower niche because it's easier to reach the people that are in your niche. So maybe I would have said, you know what, let's just make a site for Ruby programmers trying to learn Python. Just pick some narrow little thing and then if that's really successful, then you can kind of expand it. And you see all these Q and A sites out there for individual technologies. The Microsoft. You know, there's a lot of Microsoft SQL Server sites, four or five of them in fact. Those are notorious for being behind paywalls. And obviously there are great sites for other technologies. Ruby, what was the one I keep forgetting? Delphi. There's great Delphi sites and stuff like that. But the idea of tags really allows you to just make one site, make it super broad and not worry about it and not have to reach anybody. Just say, just tag it. And it's really kind of working in a way. I mean, even think of the original Usenet, which had. I'm sorry, I'm being distracted because they're rearranging the couch in my. That was just delivered.

[Jeff Atwood]

Well, there was a hierarchy of newsgroups early on. I don't know the history of it, but that's effectively like tagging when you have this explicit hierarchy. Although we do not have a hierarchy. We just have random tags that are applied to questions. And some people actually want that rigid hierarchy. But I don't know of a way to do it that's in any way like a giant pain in the butt for us and users.

[Joel Spolsky]

It's so much better not to have to find the right place in the hierarchy just to be able to randomly tag things to make up a new tag on the fly. Yesterday I was the first person to use the tag for the dhtmledit control, an obsolete piece of technology that I'm still working with to my shed. But that tag is correct. And in fact, it's also tagged VB6 because that's VB6 code. And you know what? I got a great answer to my question that I asked. I asked how to Implement smart quotes using vb6 and the dhtml edit control. And I got code that did it.

[Jeff Atwood]

Wow, that's impressive. Yeah. And I think that's the ultimate measure. It's like, is it actually working in practice? In other words, if you ask a question, a real question, not a BS question with some problem that you're having, do you in fact get an answer? And I've repeatedly gotten emails, I would say at least 10 from people who are like, wow, that's what I did. I asked a question about something that was hard and obscure, and I got a really good answer.

[Joel Spolsky]

Another thing that I thought was that I think is funny about. I guess this is a third point of criticism that we're getting, which is, well, look at this question. It has two bad answers and one even worse answer. And the worst answer has more votes. And it's like, okay, go vote it up. That's why there's a little vote button right there. You can provide a new answer. In other words, a lot of the criticism was reminding me very, very much of the way the mainstream media responded to Wikipedia, which is when Wikipedia was first coming out. You would see all these mainstream media articles saying, well, I went to Wikipedia and I looked up this, that, and the other thing, and this was wrong and that was incorrect, and the other thing just didn't have an article at all. And literally, by the time this thing made it into print and was in people's hands, in the black and white newspaper, printed on newsprint paper and delivered to somebody's front lawn with a rubber band around it for the birds to poop on, by the time this has arrived there, those Wikipedia entries had all been fixed.

[Jeff Atwood]

Right.

[Joel Spolsky]

And I think that's what people miss. The point about the editing and the answering is that you can say, here's an example of something that's not right. But when you have a malleable site, it just gets better and better and better. And so whatever argument you try to use, it's just going to get weaker and weaker and weaker, right?

[Jeff Atwood]

Yeah, that's totally fair. Well, let's go ahead and let's try to add Josh to the call. Okay, this is one of the MetaFilter, one of the core staff there, there's, let's see, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 people total. So he's one of the main team, he's on standby. So I'm going to go ahead and attempt to add him. Let's see how this goes to our call. Add caller Josh. Okay, it's ringing. Yeah, it's ringing. See what happens here.

[Joel Spolsky]

You know, it just ended the call recording and started a new one. That's okay because I can merge them if this really.

[Jeff Atwood]

If it. Merge them. Okay, that's good. Hi, Josh. So, Josh, welcome to the call.

[Josh Millard]

Thanks.

[Jeff Atwood]

Yeah, go ahead.

[Josh Millard]

Am I coming in okay here? Yeah, it's kind of a fiddly sound. Okay, good.

[Jeff Atwood]

Yeah. You sound great. You sound wonderful.

[Joel Spolsky]

Josh, are you on an airplane using the WI fi on American Airlines with a laptop?

[Josh Millard]

I'm using the built in mic on a MacBook Air was my main concern. I didn't know how good that was going to sound, but if it's coming out okay, then we're in good shape. I'm actually going over a Sprint EVDO card, which has been pretty rock solid since I got it. So.

[Jeff Atwood]

Yeah, very cool, very cool. Well, thank you for taking the time to do this. So let's open. Let's talk about MetaFilter for people who may not know what MetaFilter is and who you are and what that's all about. Could you maybe just talk about that a little bit?

[Josh Millard]

Yeah. What is MetaFilter is one of those weird, unanswerable questions, but the stock line at this point is it's a community weblog. It's essentially a sort of collaborative blogging site on the front page, metafilter.com where anybody in the user base can make a post on whatever subject. It's a very generalist sort of everything goes place kind of in the same circles as what you might think of as like boing boing or Reddit if you just took only the 20, 30 top posts and didn't make it quite so. I don't know, tech centric, but everybody in the community has the right to post. Everybody in the community has the right to comment in threads. So somebody makes a post, everybody jumps in and talks about it. Some get a whole lot of discussion, some not so much. But that's sort of the classic MetaFilter function. A few years ago we also started Ask MetaFilter, which has become probably the most heavily visited part of the site, where folks can go to ask questions to get answers. You had mentioned you saw the thread yesterday on MetaFilter, where from MetaFilter user side, you can see some of the discussion in terms of stack overflow versus as MetaFilter, which I thought was kind of interesting seeing those two going against each other. But you can see sort of the identification people have on the site with that function as well. So that's basically the two Big things the site does. It also has some other subsites that are less well trafficked, but I'm one of the three moderators there. Matt Howey, of course, started the site back in, I think July of 99 and he's been running it since day one. Jessamyn west has been moderating on the site since I think beginning of 2005. And I came on officially as a moderator early last year, so I've been doing it for about a year and a half now.

[Jeff Atwood]

But you've been. I'm looking at your profile on MetaFilter and it says you haven't been there forever. Yeah, Yeah.

[Josh Millard]

I think April 2001 is when I joined spare time in college and Meme pool didn't have enough posts on any given day. So yeah, I've been hanging around there forever and growing up a little bit in the meantime. I definitely wouldn't want 2001 me moderating the site.

[Jeff Atwood]

Yeah, 2001 feels like so many years ago. It really wasn't that long ago.

[Josh Millard]

It's strange. It's the sort of time dilation, especially with the Internet.

[Jeff Atwood]

Yeah, that's very true. So I think a lot of people on the Internet view MetaFilter as really a huge success story in terms of. And when I say success story, I want to qualify. So before you were on the call, we were talking about, well, how do you measure if things are working on Stack overflow? And what I said was, well, are people asking programming questions and getting good answers? Right? That's the ultimate, I think, measure of any site. Does the unit of work actually produce something useful? That's what's amazing to me about MetaFilter is that people will ask questions that are actually very interesting questions that are very well researched on just any topic you can really think of and get this really amazing, really useful discussion on it. Like, not like your usual, you know, how is babby formed type of discussion that tends to occur. And in that sense I think, I know I looked at MetaFilter as a site that we wanted to sort of emulate in some ways when building Stack Overflow. So I was very, very gratified to see all the discussion and it was actually quite an extended discussion. I really enjoyed reading it on, you know, what metafilterites thought of Stack Overflow and what we're doing there. So yeah, that was very exciting for me and just having you on I think is very helpful. So I think the first question I have for you almost immediately is like, how does one become a moderator? It's a pretty select club. We have the same issue at Stack Overflow, although there's not a lot that moderators do that's unique, but one of the things that moderators can do is like sort of force things over the delete threshold and some other sort of high level administrative tasks that I really wouldn't feel comfortable giving out probably ever to anyone, no matter how. So how did that occur? Like how do you get blessed into.

[Josh Millard]

Being a moderator on MetaFilter since really it's only happened twice, or really, I should say two and a half times. But Jessamyn coming on, that was a big actual move for Matt to bring her on because he'd been doing it by himself and just previously and it became, I think as much as anything a workload issue. But she had also displayed really good sensibility towards Ask MetaFilter ever since it launched. And he saw that she was someone who really kind of got what was going on with the site, which is obviously important, but that she was also someone with a pretty even temperament, someone who did not so much wear her prolific liberties on her sleeve. She was able to, you know, disagree with someone without flipping out in classic Internet fashion. And I think it was really, that is what he ended up identifying in her was here's someone who is cheerful, someone with a good demeanor, someone who's good talking to people and who can actually state fairly why she made a decision and who really, really gets the sight. And I think having just glowingly described her and then saying gosh, the same thing for me feels a little self serving. But you know, that's how I got into. I was around, I spent a lot of time on site, probably since about 2006. I became really kind of involved and interested. I spent a lot of time in MetaTalk, which is kind of the back channel part of the site, where people can actually talk about site policy and moderation and what should fly and whether someone's misbehaving, et cetera, et cetera.

[Jeff Atwood]

Can we pause there? Because that's interesting to me because I think one of the issues we have in Stack Overflow is it's become sort of like fight club where I don't really want people to talk about Stack Overflow on Stack Overflow because you have this and it's kind of like it's hard for us because we have aspects of wiki, right, which is like community ownership, but we also have aspects of individual ownership, strong aspects of individual ownership. Like you have a reputation system, you can vote on stuff and These are kind of contradictory goals at some level. Right. Like, you can't service one without sort of, you know, taking away from the other in some regard. And I think one way this comes to a head is like, on Wikipedia, for example, there's always the talk page. And to me, the talk page on Wikipedia was just like a jumble. Like, I would go there and I'd be like, I can't even follow this. You know, it was like, I don't even understand what's happening on that page. Right. So I kind of ignored it for the longest time. But I see the need for it now because you have a topic and then you have meta discussion about the topic. And those two are really very different audiences. Exactly. But they're kind of demanding. So maybe you could talk a little bit about how you guys do that at MetaFilter. It sounds like there's like a special place and it's like somewhere off the site.

[Josh Millard]

Yeah, well, it's not off the site. It's actually right there if you know to look for it. But a lot of people don't necessarily know to look for it. Matt set up MetaTalk sometime, I think, like eight months after he started the site. It was right near the beginning of 2000, like March or so, because people were talking about MetaFilter on the front page. You know, it was natural enough. People would say, hey, what's with this? Hey, look at the post. Hey, this guy's a jerk. So he started up MetaTARK and just started directing stuff that was, you know, meta commentary, as you say, towards that part of the site. You know, delete something and say, hey, take it over there. If people wanted to have an extended argument that was derailing a thread, et cetera. And a lot of people, when we sort of talk about what made MetaFilter work, MetaTARK is one of the things that they mention if you talk to a regular from the site, as being key to the success of the site, because it creates a sort of release valve. It's the same thing with the talk pages on Wikipedia, because I had the same experience the first time I checked those out. It's not necessarily comprehensible to a casual reader. It's like, what is going on here? But for the people who are regulars, for the people who are develop a certain amount of passionate attachment to the site or really, really need to make their voice heard out of day one, beyond just normal participation, you have this safe place. You can let people just sort of let their freak flake fly, as it were. Without damaging the core functionality of the site. You don't have big messes on the front page. So there's a pretty strong culture of regulars who hang out on Meta Talk. And that's kind of insofar as you have like the big contributors and the big sort of serious regulars at any given site that makes up the core of the community. There's a strong correlation between that and who actually spends time on Meta Talk dealing with policy stuff and talking about user issues.

[Jeff Atwood]

Right. I totally get that because I don't think this is one of the things about sort of designing social software that you don't really understand this stuff until you lived it. And I totally get that now because for the longest time I was like, just don't discuss this stuff here. You know, just don't do it.

[Joel Spolsky]

Hey, Jeff.

[Jeff Atwood]

Go ahead, Joel.

[Joel Spolsky]

Question I'm kind of with you. I used to like, I still sort of really, really hate when discussion groups become about the discussion group. And one of the reasons, I think my reason, I. Look, I just want to hear, Jeff, your reason why you were so viscerally against talking about Stack Overflow on Stack Overflow. Because, you know, my reason was always that the questions were always newbie questions like why does this work this way? And they were very, very, very repetitive. What would happen is people would wander into the site for the first time and immed asking all the same questions about it. And so discussion of the site or of the discussion group on the discussion group was inevitably extremely boring to the people that had been there for more than 25 minutes and you know, they could have read the FAQ but people wouldn't. And people, you know, I think on Stack Overflow, every single day from now until the end of the universe, you're going to have a person wandering in saying, what is this OpenID? Can't we do this without OpenIDing? And that's going to be their first question that they ask. And you're going to have one of those. Yes, until the heat end of the universe officially guaranteed. No matter what you have, what happens? And then they'll be like, why are you downloading me to negative364? I'm a newbie here. You guys are mean. Jeff, did you have any other reasons why you don't like the site becoming a site about the site, other than just the sheer arrogance of a site that is about itself?

[Jeff Atwood]

Well, I think ultimately you got to view this as you're leaving breadcrumbs for the next programmers who come along. And I do not Feel like leaving breadcrumbs about Stack overflow is ultimately helpful to programmers. You know, the average programmer doesn't really care exactly how Stack overflow works. They care about, if I ask a question, will it be answered? And that's kind of a solved problem at this point. I mean, that part actually works. So then it's just noise, I think, to the average programmer. But I do feel that for people that are highly engaged with the system, these are your star users. And I feel like if you alienate these users, you're kind of hurting yourself in the long run. And that's where I'm a little freaked out about it, because I feel like.

[Joel Spolsky]

Go ahead, can you make a place for them to socialize?

[Jeff Atwood]

That's what I'm looking at now. I think what we need is, and the thing that sucks is we've almost made a system that's too good. At the risk of sounding incredibly arrogant, because it's really easy, it's really easy to have a discussion there. It's so easy, right? It's just completely frictionless. And that was a goal, that was an explicit goal of the system. There's no login, right? You just go in and start typing, man, and it works. And people love that aspect of it. And I think if we. We got to reduce the friction. If we have a discussion forum, it has to be as low friction, almost as low friction as the site. I think there'll be slightly tolerance for logging in.

[Josh Millard]

It's interesting because, yeah, the whole format of the site really presents itself as, hey, go crazy with the questions here. And there's nothing. Glancing at the front page that really. I set up an account all of 30 minutes ago, I think. So I'm sort of exploring it while we're talking, but there's nothing on the front page that really shouts, don't talk about the site here. Even though my way of thinking would be, okay, well, there's probably somewhere to talk about it. I found the uservoice.com sub site poking around, which seems like sort of a place where people can more talk about the site in a meta fashion. I don't know if that's more in.

[Jeff Atwood]

A bug feature crust way, not in a how should we be moderating? That's one of the big threads that happened. And it's sort of a catch 22 because I actually don't think people should really be moderating unless something really bad happens. Joel and I felt for a long time and, well, Joel more strongly than I, but I'm sort of coming around to Joel's way of thinking on this, that you don't really control the site so much as just let the voting do what it's supposed to do. If people don't like content that's on there, they will vote it down and then be below a certain threshold. It just sort of stops appearing in any major area of the site. So someone asks sort of a dumb question or something that's, you know, why can't I log into Windows xp? You know, it's not really a programming question. It just gets voted down. Nobody has to step in and really do anything other than vote.

[Josh Millard]

Yeah.

[Jeff Atwood]

And then for the things that do require moderation are really obvious, like really evil things. And we have a. Even in that case, you don't actually have to be a moderator. There's that little offensive link. Maybe that's a good question for you guys. I guess so. You guys have a pretty close community because you have. It costs now $5 to register, which is just sort of like an arbitrary barrier that was inserted.

[Josh Millard]

Yeah, it's a speed bump.

[Jeff Atwood]

Right. But I'm sure that helps tremendously. That's got to help a lot. But what kind of do you guys have with spam? Like how do you deal with how much moderation do you do on a regular basis? Let me put it to you that way.

[Josh Millard]

Well, at this point. I would characterize my work at MetaFilter as being basically a part time job, but it's spread out across a given day the way Jessamyn and Matt and I all sort of do bits and pieces as we go along to being kind of a full time job. Nonetheless, because there is sort of a lot of trust built into being a MetaFilter user, we mostly let people do their own thing occur mostly. People are pretty good. There's a fair amount of community policing. If someone does something stupid, people will tell them so they'll call them out in the meta talk area of the site, for example. But with spam we actually don't deal with too much. The biggest kind of spam we get is people dropping link spam into ask MetaFilter questions, especially old ones. We'll see people Google for something and they'll find an Ask metafilter article in the first page results and then they'll sign up because they have a business selling widgets in that and they'll say, oh hey, I found this really great site called widgets.com they're great. You should check it out. Just link spamming because they know it's going to get some traffic. So we probably see something like that every day or two. Some days we see a lot of it. Every once in a while we'll get a honey pot question where a whole bunch of people will show up. There was a World of Warcraft account management question months ago that we went back and looked at random and found that like five or six different wow. Gold farmers had signed up over a period of a couple months and pitched their own various sites. And this whole little like spammer sub community hiding in that one thread, which actually inspired us to build a new tool to look for answers coming in very late to threads that are otherwise dormant. So that's kind of how we've dealt with it. That's the sort of thing we deal with is mostly people coming in, trying to take advantage of the pretty good page rank that ASMETA filtered threads get, or people who sign up explicitly to spam on the front page. They sign up. You have to wait a week, you have to make a few comments. It seems like a fair amount of people have figured out that this is the system, because we'll see someone who waits a week makes exactly the right number of comments to allow them to post and then posts within hours of when they're first able to post. So at this point, we get an email every time someone makes their first post, tells us about it. We check it out. Sometimes it's a spit take and we ban them immediately. Sometimes it's someone who's a legit new user to a degree. There's kind of that technologically assisted profiling of how someone behaves on the site is a big assist for us in keeping the spam pretty much annihilated. Which is one of those things that I find it very weird when I look at a site like Reddit or Digg, or a pretty vast amount of the blogosphere, really, when you get down to it, that is much less tenacious, much more friendly to link spam and blog spam and astroturfing. And I realize to some extent it's a matter of whether or not it's worth their time and energy to try and stop that, because we're paying attention to the site every day, all day long to make sure this stuff doesn't get out of hand. But so many sites seem to just not care. I mean, Digg and Reddit.

[Joel Spolsky]

Josh, I disagree with you there. I have not seen spam on the homepage of Digg or Reddit for years.

[Josh Millard]

And that may be this is one of those things where I'm annoyed enough at enough of this stuff that I'm going to probably be harsher in calling stuff spam than some people might. I see people PR blogging, people posting their own stuff and really using Digg and Reddit as an attempt, and maybe a less successful attempt as time goes on here, to more self promote than actually do anything like actual organic link sharing, that sort of stuff. Maybe that's not spam in everybody's book, but as far as I'm concerned, if the function of your site is to put interesting content out there and what people are doing is using it as a platform to jam their stuff out there and hope that other people or.

[Joel Spolsky]

Well, if it's not good stuff, if it's not good stuff, it gets voted down. Early on, in the early days of Reddit, I think there was some discussion and questioning about whether it was okay to post a link to something you had just written on your blog. And they decided it was okay that you can post your own thing. And that was no reason to downvote it. Just go read it and if it's good, vote it up, and if it's bad, vote it down. And so in fact, Joel, you should.

[Jeff Atwood]

Explain your involvement with Reddit so he has some context.

[Joel Spolsky]

Yeah, my involvement with Reddit is nothing really. I guess I just met those guys really early on.

[Jeff Atwood]

But you have your own subreddit. Come on, you have the Joel Reddit.

[Joel Spolsky]

That's true. Well, that's.

[Jeff Atwood]

I don't have a Jeff Reddit.

[Joel Spolsky]

You could make one now.

[Jeff Atwood]

I could. You can now. They actually added that feature. I'm not saying you're biased. I'm just saying you have a certain amount of domain knowledge. I'm not in any way calling you.

[Josh Millard]

And that's fair. I mean, I'll freely acknowledge that I'm coming obviously partly from kind of the culture and the annoyances we deal with on MetaFilter, which is very much, you know, there's very specific ways in specific parts of the site where you can do that sort of thing and otherwise it's really just verboten, it seems to.

[Joel Spolsky]

Me, and I may be missing something that's going on here, but it seems to me like just the idea of having a community vote is extremely effective at getting rid of spam very, very quickly. Yeah, it's because the only way to fight it is to make a bunch of fake accounts and have them all vote. And you know, spammers do do this. And so you need algorithmic ways to check for the people making a bunch of Funky fake accounts and voting things up. But it's just been forever since I've ever seen something on the homepage that I thought the community didn't want there. Now what the community wants is a whole other story. Because, you know, Reddit, for example, turned, changed very much from kind of a hacker startup site with a little bit of a libertarian bent into Ron Paul. Libertarian. Yeah, exactly. I mean it just became. And for some reason, you know, there was a particular political community that just really fed on that and drove out everybody else and you know, amount of conspiracy theory and a certain amount of, you know, the Ron Paul business and the, you know, and everything that the mass media does is against us. And their favorite kind of article would be some injustice that was done to a ninth grader somewhere by their librarian. And that was the ideal Reddit article. You would immediately zoom to the top of the homepage. But okay, that was fine. And in fact that's the reason they created a Joel Reddit is because I told them, listen, one of the things that my suggestion to them when this site was barely even up yet and there was nobody outside of Y Combinator using it, was that I thought that at some point it would become a self fulfilling prophecy where a small clique of people started voting up a particular type of article, driving away people that didn't agree with that politics or just disagreed. And eventually you would wind up with a particular niche and you could never become a horizontal application everybody wants to use. You could never become like a huge mass success in the way that Facebook is, because no matter what, you're eventually going to get very, very like minded people. And so I said, you got to make it possible to make multiple Reddit. So let me make. So as long as you're going to have these niches, you want to have a lot of them. You want to have, it's fine. You want to be the atheist conspiracy theorist site, that's terrific. But let me also make one for people that are interested in the business of software. And so that was what the Joel Reddit was. And I think that idea then the history is that they then used this idea to build a site for Conde Nast called Liftstick. I think, I don't really know what the name of the site is. Something with lipstick in it. And it's just a version of Reddit that Conde Nast sponsors and that introduced them to Conde Nast who bought the company.

[Jeff Atwood]

They have ruled out that feature. You can create custom subreddits, you can.

[Joel Spolsky]

Make as many as you want. There are already a whole bunch. And in fact, you can do this really nice thing on Reddit, which I wish you could do on stack overflow, where you can say, I'm interested in programming and business and UFOs and you'll get a homepage that shows you a bunch of all that stuff.

[Jeff Atwood]

Right? Yeah, no, that's still. We're still working on that. In terms of customization, we have some of the infrastructure, but yeah, I agree. So anyway, Josh, just to give you some of the background, Joel was pretty heavily. Joel knows Reddit really well. For example, I mean, not to be an elitist or anything, but I don't really go to Reddit or Digg. I really don't like. I sort of have my blogs that I follow and actually one of the things I follow is the best of MetaFilter feed. And one of the things I like about MetaFilter is it's truly all over the map. Like, I don't know if there's any one type of community on MetaFilter. I view it as like people who are really good at the Internet. If I had to characterize MetaFilter, that's my really rough characterization. Know the Internet, like, they're good at finding things, they're good at asking questions that are haven't been asked and just curating these incredibly interesting things that aren't on Digg. Like, Digg is like sort of mass popular culture. It's like, okay, the Spice Girls and the metafilter would be sort of the people who are looking at the edges of this world and finding all the things that nobody else is finding. To me, that's metafilter. Anyway.

[Josh Millard]

Yeah, that's probably my favorite part of what happens on the front page. It's a mix. There's also a fair amount of news that shows up. We're trying not to be a news site. Not everybody gets that. It's sort of an ongoing challenge with different perceptions of what the front page is all about. But yeah, you do see the same stuff that's going to show up on Boing Boing Digg or on Kottke. But you also see, yeah, these wonderful sort of posts about something. You know, it's not just, hey, here's this link, it's, hey, here's the subject. You know, let me, let me put together a really nicely crafted collection of Internet resources about something that not everybody knows about, which is really, yeah, it's a great way to kill some time. If you've got a rainy day, just go to MetaFilter. And look for one of those posts.

[Jeff Atwood]

Right. And to clarify, when I Talked about using MetaFilter as a reference for stack overflow, that's exactly what I'm talking about, where somebody comes in on some really narrow programming topic, but they really know their crap and they actually are a little bit. They can write at some reasonable level. So they write up problem in a way that's like telling a little story. Like, here's this problem I had, here's all the things I did to try to fix it. And then people are having this conversation about this problem and it ends up being this fairly definitive resource about this problem in a way that an average person could actually understand if you had some programming background.

[Josh Millard]

Sure, yeah.

[Jeff Atwood]

So, yeah. And that's one use of the system. Then there's sort of just the drive by. So of like you're talking about just news of like some really quick and dirty thing that they need to get to. And I think that's fine too. But I guess my perspective is a little bit skewed because I'm only seeing the best of MetaFilter. And actually, how is that selected? Like, how does that work?

[Josh Millard]

Well, what are you looking at? Is this. I know there's.

[Jeff Atwood]

I'm looking at a feed. I believe it's best of metafilter on blog lines. I don't remember where I got it from, actually.

[Josh Millard]

This is maybe an embarrassing thing to say in my position, but I pretty much never touch RSS readers. Not because I don't like them, just because, you know, I long ago developed a habit of going to the place that I'm interested in when I have the time to go there. And I find feed readers still a little bit weird because it can be too much or too little at any given time. So we have a lot of RSS feeds built into the site, but I don't really remember which ones are which. The best of may be driven by the popular favorites, which I think is something we created the feed for relatively recently, like the last year or so. It basically takes sort of the equivalent to upvoting on the site. There's a favorite function where every post and every comment can be favorited by a user. So doing that same sort of thing, we don't really use it for any sort of internal metric. It's just sort of a way for people to both say, hey, this is neat, or keep track of it because they can go back and check through their favorites. Sort of a bookmark function is how it was born.

[Jeff Atwood]

So walk me through the life cycle of say I post a question that's just really a bad question for a variety of reasons. So how does this get flagged? First of all, there's just discussion. Essentially, the model is kind of like very much like you said, collaborative blogging. Right. So that's the model. And obviously I have a hugely successful blog, and Joel doesn't like to call his thing a blog, but it is in fact a blog. So we know this model. Right. And I allow comments on my blog. Joel doesn't. So I know how that works intimately. And I believe it works really, really well. But. So you're saying there will be just sort of discussion in the comments saying, this post sucks.

[Josh Millard]

Yeah, I mean, yes, there will be. The way. We've got a flagging system built in. We don't really have up and down votes. We've got favorites, which can be taken sort of as upvotes, but they don't do anything automatically except for stock, like the popular favorites feed. But the flag system is kind of like a downvote, if you want to.

[Joel Spolsky]

Think of it that way.

[Josh Millard]

But it functions differently. They're not visible. It sends a flag behind the scenes that we can see from the admin side.

[Jeff Atwood]

Can I tell you what? Just interrupt you real briefly. One mistake we made. We have a flag like that called offensive, and we made it visible. And that was a huge mistake. Do not make that flag visible. Because people would get, like, for whatever reason, people would tag things offensive. Because who knows why people find things offensive. Like, one thing I didn't want to do is have a drop down of like, here's 30 reasons. Pick the one of these 30 reasons that you're marking. I was like, no, no, no, that's way too much thinking. Just.

[Joel Spolsky]

You think it's like the evil $15 for a piece of checked baggage, which is that. Is it spam? I mean, it's obviously offensive.

[Jeff Atwood]

Yeah, it's offensive. Right? It's offensive to pay $15 for checked baggage. But who knows? And people would see this and they would freak out, like, they would just get really kind of pissed, actually, that somebody found their thing offensive. So one of the earliest changes we made was like, okay, you can't see that anymore. Only moderators can see that count.

[Josh Millard]

Yeah, and I think that's really smart. I mean, yeah, you have the problem where the person who's being flagged is going to be upset. You have the problem where you're going to end up with a meta discussion in the thread by other people who agree with or disagree with that flagging. You get this sort of what we call the king of the shit pile function is something we've tried to avoid on MetaFilter by not making the bad stuff visible. Yeah, so yeah, definitely making that moderation view only is smart because that way if someone has a weird objection, it's just going to be this one off thing. It's not going to stack up, you're not really going to see much of it. You can ignore it. No one needs to know that it's being ignored. And then yeah, if you get that real volume then you know, ok, we've got a problem. And that's exactly how we tend to deal with things on the site as well. We'll see something will get an odd flag here and there and we check out each flagged item to make sure there's nothing wrong. But if it's only one flag it's probably not a big deal. Whereas we'll see stuff that has five flags. It's like, ok, there's something up every once in a while we'll see something that gets like 30 flags because we're all at lunch and it's been a half an hour and it hasn't been deleted and it's something that really needs to go. But yeah, keeping that all are still.

[Jeff Atwood]

Pretty low because you guys have a pretty active community. So you would say 30 is like a colossally large number and 5 would be enough to trigger like serious attention.

[Josh Millard]

Yeah, well, yeah, it's an opt in system. You know, if you're a brand new user, you may not even know about the flag system. We don't try to sell it particularly hard. You know, we covered in the faq, but who reads the manual? Right, well, exactly. So yeah, the people who actually do flag. The nice thing about that is you don't have to. People just punch in a shiny widget as soon as they join the site. They're probably going to learn about flagging in the process of becoming familiar with how the site works and becoming a more active member of the community. So by the time they start flagging, they kind of know what's up and they aren't just flagging frivolously.

[Jeff Atwood]

Right, right, right, right. We have severe warnings around this. In fact, there's like a JavaScript dialogue. It's like, is this hate speech abuse or spam? Because we had people that I think were just exploring the site early on and just clicking it, I think for fun, for whatever reason. And yeah, when you show up, you explore. Yeah. So between the flags that you guys have and the favorite system. So those are the only real sort of numbers that community policing that you guys have.

[Josh Millard]

And beyond that, it's pretty much OK on the site to have some sort of civil statement of objection if someone's doing something problematic, it's definitely okay. And sort of classic thing on the site that people can have a conversation in thread briefly about why something's not a good idea. Works pretty well if nobody freaks out. We've got that meta talk section that people are explicitly expected to take serious discussions about this stuff too. And then in theory, nobody starts a big fight in a thread in Ask metafilter. In theory, if there's a problem with a question, people flag it and move on. In practice, of course, some people are going to be annoyed enough that they're going to jump in with a comment, they're going to say something nasty in the thread or just say, hey, this sucks. You are a bad person for posting this. You know, that's not really how we want it to work.

[Jeff Atwood]

But some of that you said is expected though. I mean, some of that's normal. Yeah.

[Josh Millard]

I mean, to a degree it's going to happen and if it happens in small doses and is done with a relatively simple tone, it's kind of okay. It really kind of depends.

[Jeff Atwood]

So what do you do in the case of. And we haven't gotten to this point yet, we've flirted with it and it's obviously a very slippery slope. But in terms of dealing with users who are just need to be excommunicated for some reason, like how do you. What do you do? How often does it happen? What do you do?

[Josh Millard]

We do it very rarely actually. As far as actually banning someone, it's really not common. Setting aside spammers, you know, anybody who's going to come up and just like abuse outright the whole fundamental idea of the site. Yeah, they're going to go well.

[Jeff Atwood]

So this would cost them $5 at some level, right?

[Josh Millard]

Yeah.

[Jeff Atwood]

So that's already kind of a barrier.

[Josh Millard]

Yeah, that's a good upfront disincentive to come up and act like a jerk, which is kind of nice.

[Jeff Atwood]

Normally it's free. It's free to be a jerk. You can just be a jerk for nothing.

[Josh Millard]

Yeah. So there's so many places where they can get better bang for their buck as far as that goes, if that's all they want to do. So yeah, we'll give people timeouts, give them 24 hours that they can't log into the site, or a week if they're really seeming like they're kind of unhinged or need a break. And we do that occasionally, but it's really not common. Mostly what we do is deal with Matt and Jess and I all write a fair amount of email every single day, including, you know, we'll drop someone online and say, hey, this is kind of a problem. You need to cut it out. You know, talk to me about this if this is going to be an issue. And that works most of the time we don't get a whole lot of crazy raging cases. I think because of the paid sign up as a barrier to keep a lot of the really not so random drive by people out. And beyond that, yeah, we try and work with people as much as anything. We may talk them to death in email if they really just want to fight. Once they've wasted our time and spent themselves, they go away in their own right. We don't usually have to just nuke someone very often because most people will either chill out or just go wave their own accord.

[Jeff Atwood]

Well, there's obviously some scaling issues there because you started with Matt and then Jessamyn and you and so, I mean, it looks like the staff has been growing over time. I assume to keep up with this administrative overhead of sort of.

[Josh Millard]

That's definitely a big part of it. I mean that's what brought Jessamine on in the first place is when Matt realized it was just too big for him to keep doing as a one man affair and same thing bringing me on. When it continued to grow.

[Jeff Atwood]

One thing we flirted with was having users sort of rate each other. But Joel quickly headed me off at the pass there and felt that that would lead to what he called bad high school days flashbacks of in club.

[Joel Spolsky]

Hey, hey, hey. We can have them rate each other's pictures.

[Josh Millard]

You should have a best smile badge.

[Joel Spolsky]

I was thinking more like we already got Wikipedia, Reddit and sex exchange. Why not also have hot or not.

[Josh Millard]

It could work. You know, you've already got the voting architecture, just, you know.

[Jeff Atwood]

Yeah, no, I did have one complaint about a Gravitar that somebody set up that several people found offensive. It was a religious space thing. But I emailed him and he did cut it out. So when you say you email somebody and say, hey, please cut it out. I like that because it sets up a connection between you and the user and I like that it's about community. I believe deeply in the community. But obviously there's a scale issue there where if I'm having to mail 100 users a day, it's like my life sort of ends. Right.

[Josh Millard]

And the scale thing is obviously a real concern with MetaFilter. We've been trying to keep it from going crazy with scale. I mean, the site's obviously grown continually over the last nine years and it's going to keep growing, but it's not zooming. We're not trying to turn this into something that's going to scale to a million users. I can't imagine what that MetaFilter would look like. And that may be a little bit different from how people are approaching these type of things. You see somebody who wants to set up a new community site, they may really look for, they want to be hit, they want it to be big, they want it to be huge. But to some extent, that kind of scaling, if what you're doing is primarily social, yeah, you're kind of trying to set up Yahoo. Answers. And Yahoo. Answers is not what I consider a success as something with utility.

[Jeff Atwood]

I don't think anybody would gauge Yahoo. Answers as success, although there are some. Surprisingly, if you dig, it's kind of like YouTube in that, yeah, you can find this stuff. You can find comment streams on YouTube that are actually good. I mean, sort of a myth that there aren't any. And I think the same thing with Yahoo. Answers. There are some questions that work, but.

[Josh Millard]

Most giving.

[Joel Spolsky]

It's tricky, Jeff, Think about, like, the whole scaling problem. If you have one person who's making stupid gravitars that are problematic on a huge site, even if you have 10 people, you still have the same proportion of people that have this particular. That have this particular problem that are antisocial in this particular way. And if that proportion is low enough, who cares? So there's one or two people that are doing unacceptable things. The chances that anybody will even encounter them on the site are very slim.

[Jeff Atwood]

You know what I mean?

[Josh Millard]

And if you provide something in offensive flagging or wait for people to let you know if there's a problem, then yeah, even when it does come up, you can deal with it as you go. So, yeah, I don't think it's necessarily a huge issue if you can keep on top of it. Obviously, if it scales past your ability to control it in that fashion, you have to find another way, right?

[Jeff Atwood]

Well, I can see now where flagging content seems safer because if you're flagging a person, it does become kind of personal at that point. It's like you could say, okay, this MetaFilter post that you made, we really feel is not a good post. But then if you Flag the person. You feel like you're saying, okay, this person is not a good person. Right. You're separating the person from their actions, which I think is probably the right solution. Yeah.

[Josh Millard]

And that's the sort of thing, if you've got a user who's really causing problems to the point where people are flagging a lot of their content behind the scenes as moderators, you can see that easily enough. We certainly, as far as aggregate experience go, me and Matt and Jess can really, really tell if a user is a problem. We don't need anybody to be able to put a black mark on that user's record for the public to see if we get repeated issues. Yeah, we're going to talk to that person. And then, yeah, without it having to be a spectacle, you don't have this sort of aspect of public shaming necessarily, is how it's handled, which I think is a good thing. I really dislike that aspect of how things work on some sites. I don't like the idea that what you're going to do is mock your users in public as a way to deal with them. And that's certainly not a unanimous feeling. There's a certain social value to public shaming, but it's not something that I think. It's certainly not something I think works very well on MetaFilter. And I think in any site that's really trying more for community than sort of function that happens to have people driving it. If you really want a community, you got to have that mutual respect all around, which means you don't have the people in charge, you know, treating users, even jerky users, you know, like crap. You know, you got to sort of. You got to take the high road, period, which is hard to do.

[Jeff Atwood]

I love that. Yeah. Respect. It is really about that, because how can you have trust without respect? So I think you're right. And I think Joel sort of saved me for making a major mistake in that regard by implementing sort of the Scarlet letter of you have been misbehaving probably would have been a huge mistake. And that's one of the reasons we have calls like this and we have discussions like this. We don't. You know, people have accused me of trying to, like, let the technology control the users, but I actually try to think about it a lot before I even implement anything. I don't just assume the software is going to do the job and head myself off for making bad decisions. So, Joel, did you have any further questions for Josh?

[Joel Spolsky]

Not right. Not right now.

[Jeff Atwood]

Okay. I just want to make sure, we got them all.

[Joel Spolsky]

I'm going to think as soon as we get off the call, I'm going to be like, wait a minute, what did you do about.

[Jeff Atwood]

But I love metafilter. I mean, I'm not super active. I do have an account. I did pay the $5 or whatever. I'm actually in there as coding horror. I think I was kind of afraid to post actually, because I viewed it as such high quality. I wasn't sure I could ever meet the bar. Actually. Maybe that's a good thing.

[Josh Millard]

We didn't really engineer it in on purpose. But the fear that new people feel about making it post to the front page I think is actually part of what makes it stay pretty good. You know, a lot of people have actually expressed in Meta talk that they don't post because they're not sure they'll do a good enough job.

[Joel Spolsky]

I've always, you know, I've always been worried about that because actually I have the exact same problem, which is that I keep discovering pockets of people that won't apply for a job as a programmer at Fog Creek because we have a reputation as being so strict about who we hire. And unfortunately the thing I'm afraid of is that a lot of the people that are really, really good don't think they're that good. And a lot of people that are not good thinks that they are that good. And so for people to self censor themselves as saying, I'm not that good, I'm not going to apply or I'm not going to post to the homepage of MetaFilter, I'm not going to ask my question. Maybe, you know, you definitely get a, you get filtering, but I don't know if it's necessarily quality based filtering.

[Josh Millard]

Yeah, it's a mixed bag because, yeah, I've seen the same thing. And it's interesting. The front page, we have sort of that fear aspect where some people, you know, won't post or are at least very hesitant and slow to finally post because they're worried about that. But then you look at the Ask metafilter side of it and it's so much more obviously, let us help you out with something. Function that I don't think we see that at all. We see people who sign up and we make people wait a week before they can post their first question to avoid again a speed bump to some of the random spammy stuff. And we get email probably once a week from someone saying, hey, what do you mean I have to wait a week? So, you know, there's complete inversion of that. You have people who are really enthusiastic to jump in because anybody can ask a question. It's not like writing a post about 17th century art or buying a man. Yeah. So yeah, it's an interesting sort of dynamic in the site itself across the different parts.

[Joel Spolsky]

Right.

[Jeff Atwood]

Well, Josh, thank you so much for coming on and I really thank you very much for having me. I enjoyed the thread and I continue to enjoy MetaFilter. And additionally, if you have any thoughts after looking at Stack Overflow, anything that you think we're doing wrong or. Yeah, I mean, I would love to hear. Yeah, no thoughts.

[Josh Millard]

I'll definitely let you know. I'll be exploring the site some.

[Jeff Atwood]

Yeah. All right, great. So we usually cut these off in an hour to save our listeners ears. So we wasted some of it in Joel and I's Jibba Jabba up front. But Joel, any final things before we go?

[Joel Spolsky]

Well, we have a couple of announcements. First of all, the new office means that we have a T1 line for our first phones, which means I have a number that you can call if you, meaning our listeners. We now have a phone number to call into the show, leave a message, leave some comments or something you want us to talk about, ask questions about the site or just general questions about life in English, preferably less than 90 seconds. The phone number is 646-826-3879. That's in the United States for our international listeners. So do whatever it takes to make your phone make a little plus and then press one because that's our country code here. And then 646-826-3879, that's the stack Overflow mailbox, which you can call, leave a message and if it's good, we'll play it on the show. Also, you could just record an MP3 if you want and email it to podcastackoverflow.com in the meantime, the site is now live, so we don't have to advocate for any kind of beta testers or anything like that. It's at. What's the URL of our website again, Jeff?

[Jeff Atwood]

It's very complicated.

[Joel Spolsky]

It's stackoverflow.com stackoverflow.com thanks, Jeff. And finally, what is it that we always say? Oh yes, there's a transcript of this show. There's a transcript wiki. It's a wiki where people contribute to a transcript of the show, which is very helpful for finding things that we said which are embarrassing later or for quoting the show from your blog. Right. You did that yesterday or put it here.

[Jeff Atwood]

No, no. The people who are transcribing. Thank you so much because I love being able to quote the things we've said here. And so it's deeply, deeply appreciated. And I think we've got to work out some more of a reward system for the people doing the wiki work. Honestly.

[Joel Spolsky]

Just give them badges. Just give them badges.

[Jeff Atwood]

Just an infinite supply of these badges that I'm pressing out over here.

[Joel Spolsky]

The transcript wiki badge. Hey, the whole idea of Stack Overflow is built on the concept that we don't need to reward people, that people do things out of the goodness of their own heart.

[Jeff Atwood]

That is true. But I find that it gets done a lot faster when you reward them. It really does. It really does.

[Joel Spolsky]

Disagree. Okay, so if you're doing the transcript out of the goodness of your heart, transcribe things that I'm saying. And if you're doing the transcript because you believe that you're going to get some kind of a badge or that Jeff is going to owe you one in some future universe, or that you'll get some coupons in the mail. Good to buy songs on Rock Band 2, transcribe things that Jeff said and we'll see who gets more of their Jibba Jabba transcribe next week. In the meantime, in the meantime, once again, the phone number 646-826-3879, which goes to a voicemail box. Leave us a message, we'll play it on the next show. Thanks very much and see you all next week.

[Jeff Atwood]

And thanks to Josh.

[Josh Millard]

Yep, thank you.

[Joel Spolsky]

Thanks, Josh. You've been listening to Stack Overflow with Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky. The Conversations Network is a 501c3 nonprofit and we need your help. For a tax deductible donation of as little as $5 per month, you can support this channel and the rest of the Conversations Network. So please visit conversationsnetwork.org to become a member and help us continue to bring our programs to the world for free. Our audio files are delivered by Limelight Networks, the high performance content delivery network for digital media. The post production audio engineer for this program was Joel Spolsky. Our website editor was Jeff Atwood. The series producer is Jeff Atwood. This is Phil Windley. I hope you'll join me next time for another great presentation from Stack Overflow here. On it, Conversations.