Active moderation of SIP threads

[eyalroth]

@joshlemer

An other advantage of the pull request’s is the wider variety of reactions, so lurkers can provide both positive and negative feedback (GH allows , , , , etc).

I actually believe that this kind of minimalistic feedback is non-constructive, especially the negative reactions.

I brought this up in the other recent meta-discussion:

@eyalroth

Also, the idea of negative reactions (as mentioned in one of those comments) is probably not a good one. It has long been an issue on sites such as SO, and they have recently acknowledged this issue :

People who need help with coding problems feel attacked when their questions are closed or downvoted…

It’s simply not enough to ask people to be nice or change their behavior when the software that underlies everyone’s interactions doesn’t facilitate this.

This subject was also touched on the talk “The Hard Parts of Open Source” by Evan Czaplicki (which was brought up in the popularity thread).

At 37:45, Evan claims that this type of feedback is a form of de-contextualization, which is helps making topics more viral; then at 38:38, he claims that this is a form of a powerful incentive for our interactions to go really poorly.

He further discusses this topic at 44:02, and explains how this kind of feedback is not contributing to the discussion, and worsening how people feel about their place in the community.