Skip to main content
Meta Stack Exchange

You are not logged in. Your edit will be placed in a queue until it is peer reviewed.

We welcome edits that make the post easier to understand and more valuable for readers. Because community members review edits, please try to make the post substantially better than how you found it, for example, by fixing grammar or adding additional resources and hyperlinks.

Required fields*

20
  • 37
    The part about the optics is exactly where my head is at - if quality no longer matters it's unclear why I'm here. And I'm really struggling to read it any other way. Commented Jun 7, 2023 at 21:32
  • 22
    New users, if banned temporarily, will rarely return. Banning someone for a week is pretty much the same as banning them forever Commented Jun 7, 2023 at 21:34
  • 2
    @Richard: That's a human behavior problem, then. To be fair we've had literally decades of this style of moderation to explain why, from the venerable bulletin boards to IRC to phpBB to Reddit and the mainstream social networks. Only in the last few years have strong operating policies or laws required communities to start caring more about this fact. Commented Jun 7, 2023 at 21:43
  • 12
    Sure, but saying 'the bans aren't permanent, and I don't think they're even that long' is incorrect if most bans result in the person leaving entirely. Commented Jun 7, 2023 at 21:51
  • 25
    @Richard: Do not conflate a prohibition from participating in the same light as an unwillingness to participate. I don't disagree that banning someone carries the likelihood that they'll not come back. But once the ban expires, they can participate as normal here. It's the choice of the individual to come back or not, hopefully after reflection on what they did wrong. Commented Jun 7, 2023 at 21:53
  • 26
    @Makoto "you value people being here more than the quality of the content" Wish I could upvote this more. The writing on the wall was there when I posted this more than a month ago: "If that's the choice, I expect such a change of direction to alienate and drive away many of the longtime good-faith contributors, myself included.". Commented Jun 7, 2023 at 23:57
  • 10
    @Makoto I think the part you're missing is that if it's an unjust suspension - and especially if they never receive any kind of recognition or apology as to that - then that choice isn't really neutral. If they want to participate in a platform that treats them with respect, then the moderator who banned them effectively selected SO out of the candidate list. Of course, this is somewhat a "devil's advocate" position. In my experience, moderators mostly tend to engage more proactively than that, so I question how widespread a problem this actually was. Commented Jun 8, 2023 at 4:16
  • 9
    I guess the OP is too long? Philippe is pretty clear about their metric for estimating the number of ChatGPT posts. Other answers here demonstrate that the metric is seriously flawed, but it is described in the OP. Commented Jun 8, 2023 at 15:22
  • OP in these quarters means original poster. Commented Jun 8, 2023 at 16:34
  • @CrisLuengo I'm not convinced that the metric is sound though. They are presuming multiple edits automatically means non-GPT, but since the policy was announced publicly, there seems (to me) to be sufficient motivation for GPT users to try to edit their copy-paste answers so as to not appear to be GPT-sourced. This seems to be the only metric being used to determine false positives, and for the total count they seem to be relying on moderator bans. So there isn't actually any true empirical data here - just conjectures with little evidence Commented Jun 8, 2023 at 17:50
  • 4
    @vbnet3d Yes, I never said their metric was good, I just said that it’s described. This answer asks what the metric is, I was replying to that. Plenty of other answers here poke holes in the metric, the data, the analysis and the results. Commented Jun 8, 2023 at 19:21
  • 2
    @CrisLuengo: Maybe in this context you're missing the forest for the trees. If Stack Overflow had this approach in mind to detect ChatGPT posts, why not share it with the moderators instead of handing them yet another rubber mallet and tasking them to level El Capitan, and even worse, say that they shouldn't use those mallets since it's causing too much sediment to go away? Commented Jun 8, 2023 at 19:28
  • 2
    @Makoto Philippe is not saying that they can tell a ChatGPT post from a regular one. He's saying that it gives them a statistic that they correlate to the number of ChatGPT posts. I think it is pretty clearly described what they do. Of course the decrease in their estimated number of ChatGPT posts is due to people changing how they copy-paste the posts, invalidating their metric. I'm not defending them. I just find your answer either purposefully misrepresents what is written up top, or was written without reading what was written up top. Commented Jun 8, 2023 at 19:36
  • 1
    @BryKKan: I went back through the post and couldn't find any instance where Philippe said the suspensions were unjust, only that they were abnormally more frequent. Who knows, the mods may have found more ChatGPT posts that largely predate the "big wave". Moderation is across a spectrum of time, not a fixed point in time. Commented Jun 8, 2023 at 20:45
  • 1
    @DavidRoberts I should have said "that they think correlates to the number of ChatGPT posts." Anyway, I am only pointing out that they described their metric, I'm not defending the metric. There are answers already on this page clearly pointing out why the metric is broken. Please stop arguing with me about the metric. Commented Jun 9, 2023 at 7:34