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(I've just moved and don't yet have regular internet access, so I apologize in advance for my slow responses.)
We've talked about migrating to SE 2.0 a number of times. See
Stack Exchange 2.0, and what this means for MathOverflow.
Some of the changes in SE2.0 are irritating...
Isn't it about time we upgraded to SE2.0 now?
The main obstruction has been the fact that we would lose access to the full database dumps, which would mean that it would be very difficult to change platform if something bad happens to SE Inc (e.g. their interests severely diverge from ours or they are bought by evil company X).
I got the chance to visit SE Inc headquarters a few weeks ago and chat with Joel Spolsky (SE CEO) and other members of the SE team. Joel said they would be willing to set up an "in case of emergency, break glass" mechanism whereby we could get one time access to the full database for purposes of migration. I think we should do it.
There are a number of things that would change if we migrated. Here are some important bits I can think of:
One thing that made people uneasy about migrating is the turbulence on math.SE. I also got a chance to meet with Jeff Atwood in person recently. I came away from it with a better understanding of why things went the way they did. I don't think I can articulate it well, but I'll give it a quick shot. From my chat, I got the impression that the problem was that in the early days of math.SE, the community (and even the moderators) lacked a sense of ownership of the site. In a technical sense, this was justified since they didn't own the site, but the result was a severe us-v-them mentality in some of the community. In this kind of atmosphere, it's easy for things to blow up.
The main point is that I don't think that MO is in danger of having the sort of friction with SE Inc that math.SE had.
The thing we're leaving behind by migrating to SE 2.0 is the option to return to SE 1.0.
I'd like to add that my personal experience with SE Inc (everybody there, including Jeff) has been great. In the days before SE 2.0, they were extremely responsive to my (and our) concerns. Since SE 2.0, they've kept it up. Though we're on a frozen platform, any time I've contacted them with any technical issue (this happened a few times), they've been great. On top of the excellent experience I've had by interacting with them directly, they really care about getting the engine and the communities right. It's very encouraging to me that they've incorporated lots of stuff from MO:
Please use this thread to express your support/non-support/concerns. A number of MO community members are moderators on SE 2.0 sites. I especially hope they will weigh in with their thoughts. This is not something that's going to happen for sure; it's just something that we (this includes you) are considering, and something that I think is a good idea. I can email Jeff and/or Joel if we have any questions or concerns for them.
I seem to have this recollection that one of the concerns about migration was that control would be lost over moderation of the site - that all administrative positions would be subject to a vote. I may be misremembering, but would this be the case?
As both a moderator on math.SE and an intern at SE, I'll chime in with a few extra details. (I did not see anyone's responses except for Anton's while composing this.)
The following point may also be worth making: both MO and math.SE are quite successful relative to the average site in the SE network. They reflect well on the SE enterprise as a whole, so it's in SE's best interest to accommodate our needs.
I seem to have this recollection that one of the concerns about migration was that control would be lost over moderation of the site - that all administrative positions would be subject to a vote. I may be misremembering, but would this be the case?
I'm not sure what "administrative" means. In the SE network moderators are elected by the community, but members of the SE team naturally have some extra powers so they can micromanage if things go horribly wrong (which we shouldn't expect them to).
I was very bothered by the drama at Meta.MSE.
I think both sides learned their lesson from that episode. The SE team would be careful not to let the same kind of thing happen again, and I hope that on our part we would try to be more accepting of the SE team's role in maintaining and improving the network (conditional on this hypothetical migration).
Did you get the impression that they would let the MO community run the site? That is, would you have final say?
Beyond a further migration, which Anton has already discussed, I'm not sure what this means practically. The SE team is receptive to feedback, and it looks to me like migrating would actually give us more power to change things, not less (since we could suggest tweaks to the software etc. that are not currently possible). I suppose there is a larger issue here in that, as MO has become an important tool to the mathematical community, it's natural for the mathematical community to want to maintain control over it. I'm probably not the best person to chime in on that.
@Tyler and @sean: Yes, my impression is that the MO community would retain the degree of control it has now, if not more (as Qiaochu points out). Another thing I should have mentioned is that MO was SE's poster site when they were looking for VC funding for SE 2.0. They view MO as a fantastic success of the engine, and they don't want to mess up a good thing. In particular, current moderators would remain moderators. I would be "demoted" from an administrator to a moderator, which means that I would no longer have control over static pages, custom javascript, and site settings. In other words, I'll have to send the SE team an email whenever we want to change one of these things.
In a purely technical (but not legal) sense, they currently have the "final say" because they host the site. If we migrate, the difference would be that they will sometimes want to make changes to the engine, which would take effect across the network. In a sense, this is how it was in the time of SE 1.0. I've given a lot of thought to why it is that the SE engine works well for the mathematics community (I've been thinking hard about this since before SE existed). I still think it's a really good match, so I feel that if they want to make changes that are good for the engine, they will be good for us. If they propose changes that are bad for us, I think they'll respond to a strong case that the change should not be implemented on MO. The main philosophical thing that has changed since SE 1.0 is that they view the engine as hosting a network, rather than a single site. I think this is potentially bad for MO's image in the eyes of mathematicians who don't use it yet. It's really important that MO maintains its image as a professional forum, as opposed to "a thing on the internet," and being part of a network of other SE sites ("things on the internet") undermines this goal. I'm confident that the actual social function of MO won't change, so hopefully this image problem won't be serious.
I'll add another item to the list of nice SE 2.0 features which I think would be awesome on MO: suggested edits.
I think it would be preferable to have on a SE2.0 incarnation of MO, as little presence of StackExchange on the actual MO pages as we currently have, which is essentially none. Math.SE has inter-network ads, a footer with links to other sites in the network, the slightly annoying StackExchange logo on the top which doubles as an inbox.
I've been a moderator on Math.SE for too little time to be able to say anything useful with that hat on.
As Qiaochu writes above, I think too that MO has become an important tool to the mathematical community and that it's natural and important for the mathematical community to want to maintain control over it.
One issue that I can think of is that we would need to draw the line clearer between what questions are appropriate on which sites.
We all know that there are occasional questions that are not research-level questions over here on MO. But over at MSE, there are quite a lot of questions which are clearly research level. If MO does become a part of the SE network, it will likely be necessary to more clearly define "what goes where", since I've seen different SE sites merged because of "duplicated functionality". (A recent example is the guitar.SE site got eaten by music.SE, and there may be some consolidations of the various board/card games proposals in the future.) The last thing I want to see is for MO to be merged with MSE because of this.
Another issue is "what should users, especially new users, come to expect" from a website. If you have visited Area51.SE lately (the staging site for new StackExchange fora), you'd have noticed that now, to "committ" to a new proposal, they ask you to declare whether you are a Pro/Expert, Academic/Student, Beginner, etc. Indeed, part of their philosophy has evolved to what I think is a crowd-sourced "ask an expert" site. I am a bit worried that this implicit image may make it hard for us to keep up the research-level-oriented focus. (Ideally, if we can get someone from the Theoretical Computer Science StackExchange site to comment here it would be best; they seem to be doing an okay job at this by dumping a significant amount of questions to Math.SE.)
Logistics aside.....
In terms of the technical merits of the software platform, I can attest that the SE2.0 platform has many, many improvements over the SE1. On the other hand, one should be aware that the SE2 platform is a constantly evolving one. And one thing that I think the SE Inc team has not been doing as good a job on, is documenting and publicizing the changes they made to the system. One often does not find out about the change until one performs an action, sees that it behaves differently from before, complain loudly about the "bug", and see a (status-by-design) mark on the complaint....
Oh, one more thing. In terms of the advertisements: the advertisements are generally inobstrusive (at least I tend not to notice them), though they do take up useful screen real-estate on the side bar. One small caveat is that the advertisements are basically of the form:
[Question title] [Logo] [SE site being advertised]
I think they have some sort of computer algorithm to pick out "popular" questions (assuming popular questions are representative ones of the website) from the site being advertised. Every now and then, however, they used to have ads from the Skeptics website, sometimes with rather provocative/controversial/far-from-safe-for-work titles (mostly because a large portion of questions on that site seems to be of that nature). I certainly hope that their ad selection algorithm has improved now...
And one additional feature that I don't think Qiaochu or Anton has mentioned: the SE2 platform comes with a Chatroom. So those "discussiony" questions we keep closing and telling the OP to take it to a blog? We can now send them to Chat. (In other words, we can actually get the AfternoonTea section that people have suggested in the past, which people who don't care for such things can ignore, and people who do care can have a centralised place to talk.)
One issue that has not been emphasized on this discussion is how much control Anton will retain. It sounds like he 'would be "demoted" from an administrator to a moderator', and my memory from earlier discussions of migrating is we saw this as a negative. In particular, I've been very happy with the Anton-as-benevolent-dictator form of government so far, and would not want to get involved with a Mideast revolution. But if democratizing will not lead to a loss of service, then all's fine: I just worry that benevolent dictatorships can provide higher quality of life than democracies (although often provide lower quality).
This repeats a concern raised by others; the reason why I repeat it is that I believe to have a slightly different 'background' in that I am only on MO but not active on math.SE or any other stackexchange site, and only very rarely visit them. I also explain my experience in perhaps overly much detail, for those also not familiar with math.SE.
Also to me, it seems these internetwork adds could be a problem.
I just went to math.SE and very noticeably (as the background and style is very differemt) I see: "What is the meaning associated to a baseball and a screw?" This was a bit puzzling. It is advertising the English Usage Site. To see whether this changes frequently, I instantly revisited and now got something like (forgot the precise wording) "How to escape student loan sharks?" Advertising the Money site. Or, then "Is spent cat litter an appropriate source of nitrogen for compost?" for Gardening. And, yes, the Sceptics site has some 'interesting' titles for questions.
In the end, personnaly, I think I would get used to this quite quickly and this is a minor point. But, there might or might not be others that are more sensitive towards such things. By contrast, I would have no problem at all with on-topic adds; that is, like in the Notices of the AMS (publishers, math software,...); or, also if the internetwork adds were a bit more limited, say, to TCS, Tex, Physics, computer related ones.
The main philosophical thing that has changed since SE 1.0 is that they view the engine as hosting a network, rather than a single site. I think this is potentially bad for MO's image in the eyes of mathematicians who don't use it yet. It's really important that MO maintains its image as a professional forum, as opposed to "a thing on the internet," and being part of a network of other SE sites ("things on the internet") undermines this goal.
Perhaps, in hypothetical future promotion of the site to mathematicians, one should stress the importance of SO to the programming community. My understanding is that, partly because of the pairing of SO with the careers site, programmers already view their SO profile as part of their résumé. That's pretty professional, right?
Also to me, it seems these internetwork adds could be a problem. ... By contrast, I would have no problem at all with on-topic adds; that is, like in the Notices of the AMS (publishers, math software,...); or, also if the internetwork adds were a bit more limited, say, to TCS, Tex, Physics, computer related ones.
Well, the idea is that any user of a site is a human being and presumably has interests other than the specialty of the site. Many SE sites are unsurprisingly primarily populated by users from SO with other interests, and the hope is that a user who already likes the SE model for exploring one interest will have an easier time transitioning to using it for another. I think (hope) that mathematicians will be able to live with this.
Qiaochu, for some mathematicians this résumé/career-promotion component might be a positive aspect. To me, even in the very mild form it is present for MO, it is a negative aspect of the site; I am inclined to say the most negative one. (And, reading certain blog posts or comments there -- I believe it was by Laba but not sure and no time at the moment to check -- I am at least not alone; though, I have no idea how common this view is.) So, in case this transition is likely to increase this component, this then is also a concern for me. Regarding the add-point: I understood the idea, and as said could certainly live with it, but it is not something I find great (and apparently some others share this point of view). But, just to recall a discussion I am sure you can remember, others found the naming and the existence of the badges problematic. So, these adds are still something different, but then perhaps important enough to keep in mind.
Having just talked about concerns, let me also say that from the descriptions I read, on the technical/software side I have the impression this upgrade would be a good thing..
This change is a good idea. I have used some of the other SE 2 sites, and they have useful things (like ability to edit comments within 5 minutes).
I am generally favorable to migrating to SE 2.0. The many desirable features of the SE 2.0 platform would only improve the overall MO experience. However, I do have some general concerns both as a moderator and as a user.
My first concern is about the role and status of MO in the mathematical community. In the current state of affairs, our only interest is to make MO more useful and appealing to the greater mathematical community. With the transition to SE 2.0, some new forces will come into play. Some decisions will be made for the interest of the greater SE community, and some of these decisions may have some impact on our relationship with the mathematical community. I doubt that serious conflicts will occur, but there is still cause for concern. I think it would be a good idea for MO to have an official mission statement so that our relationship with the mathematical community is crystal clear. Such a statement would also provide some implicit guidelines on when to "break glass in case of emergency."
My second concern is a logistic one. While the SE team has lots of experience building new sites under the SE 2.0 platform, they have very little experience migrating old sites to the new platform, especially large and mature sites such as MO. As with any kind of software upgrade, there will be some regressions. I doubt that such regressions will adversely affect users to the point that they would leave MO, but we need to make sure that the level of discontent remains low. How can we assess whether the SE team and MO community are ready for the transition?
My third concern is a technical one. In preparation for our eventual migration, I've been observing SE 2.0 sites for some time. There are a few technical issues related to the level of uniformity that SE imposes on their sites. One crucial problem is that there appears to be some issues with customizing the faqs for SE 2.0 sites. For example, cstheory currently has two faq lists: the Main FAQ and the Official FAQ. The first is the one that is linked to the faq button at the top of the page; you need to search through meta to find the other faq. The main faq is only partly editable. The solution for many SE 2.0 sites has been to edit the top part of the main faq to link to the more specific faq. It is not clear that this solution is acceptable for MO. Over time, we have made quite a few important customizations to the MO faq, many of which are incompatible with the SE 2.0 faq system.
I have a few other concerns, but I think the above three are the most important issues at this time.
Responding to Anton Geraschenko's original post. I appreciate the work you've done to correspond with SE.com and investigate the possibility of a migration. I want to express my concerns about the migration, because I think there are probably others who feel similarly, and because I think these issues should be discussed.
I have been active on Math.SE (7k rep) and somewhat active here (2.7k) and my impression is that it would be a bad idea for MO to move there. Rather than being "A mathematics site that happens to be part of stackexchange.com", I have the impression that SE.com view math.SE as "A part of stackexchange.com that happens to be about math". This is a significant difference, and it would be particularly bad for MO, which is foremost a site for mathematicians. I am not trying to unduly criticize math.SE: I participate there and I think they are doing successfully based on their goals, but I don't think their goals match those of MO. The key goal of MO that draws me here is the desire to advance the study of mathematics; the goals of SE.com seem to be unrelated to advancing mathematics.
One symptom of the "A part of stackexchange.com that happens to be about math" viewpoint is the lack of community control of many aspects of math.SE. There is a general unwillingness to customize math.SE based on community requests, and indeed changes are often pushed out with no advance notice or discussion. Questions about changed configuration that are asked on meta.math.SE are often redirected to meta.SE, with the claim that math.SE must be run in the same way as every other SE.com site. In some cases, we see people who are active on other SE.com sites arrive on meta.math.SE out of the blue to comment on these meta threads, even though they are not part of the community that is having the discussion. A particularly egregious example of SE.com ignoring community requests was a change to all SE sites that made the "enter" key submit a comment instead of adding a newline to the comment ( http://meta.math.stackexchange.com/questions/787/single-comment-split-into-many-comments ). This change drew substantial community opposition but was not disabled. Moreover, the thread about it on meta.math.SE was locked by Jeff Atwood, who is not a community-elected moderator. I expect MO to encounter the same problem if it moves to SE.com.
Another example of the disconnect between SE.com and the mathematics community can be seen in the thread at http://meta.math.stackexchange.com/questions/1968/possible-conference-speaking-sponsorships-2011 in which SE.com made a strange offer to sponsor speakers for mathematics conferences. I think their motivation was understandable (they wanted to promote SE.com by having speakers mention it at conferences), but it seemed from the question they did not do even basic due diligence about mathematics conferences. They sent exactly the same announcement to the cooking.SE site. I see this as another example of the "A part of stackexchange.com that happens to be about math" mentality. When the proposal was justly criticized for being out of sync with actual mathematical practice, Jeff Atwood deleted some of comments critical of the proposal, which led to the thread at http://meta.math.stackexchange.com/questions/1990/the-unilateral-removal-of-comments-by-jeff-atwood .
The two previous paragraphs point to a second issue we have had, which is the use of moderator tools by Jeff Atwood (and at least the possibility of their use by other non-elected moderators). If you do move forward with a merger, I hope you can secure written assurances that only elected moderators will use their tools on the main site and the meta site. SE.com make the bold claim "We don’t run Stack Overflow. You do." but they have not consistently adhered to that motto on math.SE. Jeff Atwood has written "We gladly reciprocate by trusting you to lead and govern your own community.", and I think that we should hold SE.com to that assurance if we move forward with a merger.
Identical conference announcements on cooking.SE and math.SE: http://meta.cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/1077/possible-conference-speaking-sponsorships-2011 http://meta.math.stackexchange.com/questions/1968/possible-conference-speaking-sponsorships-2011
Post by Jeff Atwood about community self-determination: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/12/stack-exchange-moderator-elections-begin/
Francois kindly invited me to join in the discussions, since I'm a moderator over at the cstheory SE site. At the outset, I should say that my motivation for getting the cstheory site set up was to have "something like MO", and in many of our internal discussions about site policies, the MO equivalent has been our starting point (even if we evolved away occasionally). Which is to say that I'm hoping our experiences on cstheory might be useful for you.
There is some concern about being 'assimilated into the Borg', and I can say that so far, this has not been a concern for us. We're pretty much left to our own devices regarding day to day moderation activities. There are only two times when we had a nontrivial interaction with SE admins: once during moderator elections when we felt they were being unnecessarily picky about rules for nominations (and they relaxed things for us). The second time was when Joel Spolsky posted a proposal to expand our scope to "all of CS" rather than theoryCS. There was fierce pushback, and while I still think he disagrees with our stance, we were left all alone (this was prompted by an area51 proposal).
In terms of branding, I don't personally feel like we are the "theoryCS side of SE". We run our community as we see fit. The one disappointing issue is that we were at one time hoping to get a formal branding tie in with SIGACT (the ACM entity that manages theory), and the SE admins kind of lost interest in helping out. So for example, if you wanted any kind of formal AMS/MAA branding, that might be tricky.
Regarding your relation to math.SE: I think math.SE and stackoverflow are the two places we send questions off to most frequently. There's the usual occasional "you people are elitist scum" carping, but for the most part the migration pathways work fine. Personally, I don't migrate questions and prefer to suggest to the users where they take their questions, but the option is there.
Finally, regarding the software: I don't know what mod tools on MO are like, but I can say that the SE 2.0 system is quite amazing, and often find myself frustrated on MO when I can't do what I'm used to being able to do on cstheory ;).
A propos the Mod Tools: Just found out about half an hour ago that SE2's revamp of the "tag-rename" feature (which now they support merging tags and tag-synonyms) also removed the ability to "kill" tags. Unwanted tags will have to be manually retagged now, or you can bug an SE admin to do it. This is far far from a deal breaker.
On the other hand, for things like the [number] tag that comes up once in a while because someone typed "number theory" and ended up with two tags, there is also an automatic clean-up mechanism in place in SE2 so that every month, lonesome tags (I think tags used by only one question) are removed from the system, which does slightly lighten the work load of the moderators.
Regarding my point 1) above, "Being to closely tied to the StackExchange network reduces our ability to maintain the "purity" of MO as a site by and for research mathematicians.", the discussion above has come up with several suggestions:
1) Ask SE to modify the software for us to reduce (or completely eliminate) links with the rest of the SE network. 2) Think about modifying our FAQ page in ways that very clearly set out our goals and target audience.
I really like the idea of 1). @Anton, do you think it's reasonable to ask StackExchange about this? Unfortunately my feeling from talking with you about this previously is that this option is not even on the table.
Contrary to Qiaochu's statement above regarding the previous mess at math.SE
The SE team would be careful not to let the same kind of thing happen again, and I hope that on our part we would try to be more accepting of the SE team's role in maintaining and improving the network.
I think that we should instead consider making the migration, telling them upfront: "We consider StackExchange employees using their moderation powers on MO as 'the nuclear option', which will immediately result in us 'breaking the glass', taking our database, and leaving". This is pretty confrontational and provocative; on the other hand, the math.SE brouhaha was pretty scary.
Anyone who feels like commenting on this issue but does not want to make their comments publicly on meta can contact the moderators directly at moderators@mathoverflow.net.
There's a certain amount of variation among sites (even in the software) that they welcome. For example, they do run MathJax on a number of the SE sites, and the "cite" link for BibTeX/amsrefs is implemented only on more academic sites. However, my feeling is that asking to eliminate links to/from the rest of the SE network is going to be too much to ask. Having a FAQ that clearly defines the target audience is absolutely on the table; I think both sides insist on it as much as possible.
Aside from burning up time and good will, part of the reason I haven't been pressing too hard about some of these issues is that it's dehumanizing. If people in the MO community started asking me to publicly pledge (or sign legal documents) saying that I'll use my magic powers on MO in particular ways, I find it annoying, and I don't think it would help make MO better. In same spirit, I think it's important to remember that the SE team really is trying to accomplish something awesome, our experience with them has been great overall (they never charged a cent for MO, have a standing offer to host us on SE 1.0 as long as we want, and have been pretty responsive to technical issues), so they deserve a certain amount of our trust.† I expect something much more like Suresh's description of the atmosphere of cstheory than the explosive days of meta.math.SE.‡
Here's another way to get at the same thing. To the extent that people trust me with MO, it's because they understand my motivations. We should consider the question Why does/should SE want MO on their network? I don't really know the answer to this question, and I don't know if they do either. Perhaps producing a really good answer (and showing it to them) is the best way of ensuring that our interests will be well-served. Part of it is just to grow the user base, but I don't think that's the main goal. Even if it were just that, they definitely realize that a certain amount of exclusivity is important to keep the people you want coming back. So I'm not worried about pressure to get MO to cater to Joe SE-user, or about MO being merged into math.SE. I think they really want more sites like MO on their network. If we make a strong rational case that something about the engine is detrimental (or that some addition would be beneficial) to awesome professional communities like MO, they won't ignore it.
† However, I agree with Noah that whatever legal arrangement we produce should be reviewed by a real lawyer. We have to assume that things will be going poorly if we want to break the glass.
‡ Joel told me that a big part of the problem on meta.math.SE was non-uniformity across the network of social norms. His analysis was that many of the early math.SE users came from usenet, where it was acceptable to be more rude. So some of the harsh atmosphere on meta.math.SE came from people saying, "What do you mean I have to wear pants? This is the internet!"
Like Suresh, I am a moderator on cstheory. As Suresh said, the main idea of starting cstheory was a theoretical computer science version of MO and many of our policies are borrowed from MO, so there are lots of similarities. That said, there are also some differences, one of the main ones is that MO is much bigger than cstheory (at the moment we have less than 300 users with rep above 200 whereas MO has around 1500, MSE has around 800).
I have followed the discussions on MSE meta from time to time and I am familiar with the events there to some extent. SE people haven't interfered in our internal policies and events so we haven't had problems similar to those that came up on MSE, they have acted respectfully and nicely and my experience has been quite satisfying with them (though I would like it more if they were more responsive to our requests).
I don't think keeping the research-level of MO will be difficult. It depends on the active users of the site, they have to keep it research-level, there isn't anything negative in SE network per se about this. If you close non-research-level questions explaining that the are off-topic or migrate them to MSE there shouldn't be a large problem, at least this is my experience on cstheory. Some new users will get annoyed and complain about it (not always politely) from time to time but it can be managed. We have borrowed and modified some statements from MO users to explain the scope of the site politely so we don't heart the feelings of these users (http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/faq#questions). My impression is that as long as you direct a user asking a non-research-level question to an alternative site where they can ask their question, as long as they don't feel that you are looking from up to them but just enforcing a policy of the site, the friction is low.
I think you should think well about moving to SE network because after migration MO will be a part of the SE network and this has some consequences. A fail-safe/break-up clause in the agreement will definitely help in the case that the experience is not as you like and you want to move out. Here are some of issues that I think may come up and you may want to think and clarify with SE people before moving:
Some researchers require a much higher sense of independence and have a much higher sensitivity to outside interference, particularly from people they don't consider professional mathematicians (I think this is one of the main causes of friction between some highly active mathematicians on MSE and SE). We haven't had this problem on cstheory (I guess because a. SE moderators have interfered less in internal issues, and in those cases they have been helpful and haven't tried to enforce their decision on us, b. our scope is research-level so users tend to have academic background not general users (say from usenet) which IMHO helps a lot, we can enforce a professional and respectful behavior and zero-tolerance to rudeness policy (though we have had incidents) c. we are not as large as MSE). So you may want to have an agreement that SE moderators should not interfere directly in the internal issues of the site as moderators, any such intervention should be approved by MO moderators. Similarly about major non-technical decisions about the site (say merging). More or less, they have followed such a behavior on cstheory without we having such an agreement with them, but I guess it will be reassuring to those users of MO who might have negative feelings based on their experience on MSE.
Being part of the SE network has some negative consequence, they are not a big deal, but I personally don't like these consequences, and I guess some of MO users might get annoyed also. The examples that come to my mind are
a. users from other SE sites start with rep 101 thought they may not know anything about research-level math and this gives them enough rep to vote,
b. moderators on other sites may migrate questions which are not research-level (though annoying, this is not a big deal),
c. some users on SO have very anti-elitist views and don't like the research-level restriction of scope and complained about it (but this has become less problematic, I guess they have got used to the idea),
d. SE wants to keep management of the network simple and increase the uniformity of their user experience over the network, and as a result the decisions about software is influenced heavily by what users of bigger sites like SO like even if all of the users on a smaller site don't like it, so if you move to SE you will need to live with it. This "one size fits all" view and not responding to particular needs of each site can sometimes be annoying (a solution to this would be allowing more user customization to site but so far they don't seem interested in implementing such customizations).
On the other hand, I know that SE people are very enthusiastic about creating high quality academic QA sites on different topics in their network, and MO is one of the most successful such sites on the Internet. It would be nice both for them and for other scientific topics if they get MO style QA sites. I think there are also considerable benefits in moving to SE network for MO. One of the main benefits of moving to SE network is having someone else maintain the software/hardware/backbone of the site and continuously develop and improve it. I think that is the most important benefit to MO. Some improvements of SE v.2 over SE v.1 are quite nice both for user and moderators. There is also the possibility of migrating questions that are not research-level directly to MSE in place of just closing them. And obviously on cstheory we would be happy to be closer to MO.
We should consider the question Why does/should SE want MO on their network? I don't really know the answer to this question, and I don't know if they do either. Perhaps producing a really good answer (and showing it to them) is the best way of ensuring that our interests will be well-served. Part of it is just to grow the user base, but I don't think that's the main goal. Even if it were just that, they definitely realize that a certain amount of exclusivity is important to keep the people you want coming back. So I'm not worried about pressure to get MO to cater to Joe SE-user, or about MO being merged into math.SE. I think they really want more sites like MO on their network. If we make a strong rational case that something about the engine is detrimental (or that some addition would be beneficial) to awesome professional communities like MO, they won't ignore it.
My impression is that SE wants, to a first-order approximation, the same thing MO does: a community of dedicated people giving high-quality answers to questions on specialized topics. Growing the user base is important, but not if it comes at the expense of the quality of the discussion.
a. users from other SE sites start with rep 101 thought they may not know anything about research-level math and this gives them enough rep to vote,
If I had to pick something to complain about, this would be it. There are a surprising number of people who vote without posting, and they skew voting in various annoying ways. Also, currently the "protect" feature (which prevents users with less than 10 rep from adding answers to a question) does not apply to such users.
It looks like migration carries a low risk of a very bad outcome and a near certainty of some minor annoyances like links to other SE sites, more homework questions, and lack of customizability. I am not very impressed by the list of benefits of migration that Qiaochu kindly made earlier in this thread. Certainly, the SE2.0 platform is more convenient in some respects, but I don't think MO as it stands is particularly broken.
I'm afraid I don't have a strong opinion on this matter, but if there were an election, I would vote against migration.
I don't see any benefits attractive enough to risk permanently damaging Math Overflow, which could easily happen if we were to migrate. (Qiaochu's example of new users being given 101 rep is worrying -- but more worrying is the next such policy put into place by the SE higher-ups without consultation.) It seems to me that a risk/reward calculation advocates against moving, given that the benefits are so small (tag wikis?), the risks are so high (best case: site overrun by homework questions, worst case: exodus of senior mathematicians who no longer enjoy contributing), and it's such a hard step to undo. Finally, I view the independence of Math Overflow as a large point in its favor, and I have no interest in the SE network -- I would definitely spend less time on MO if it were part of the SE network.
@Tom: to be honest I don't think "overrun by homework questions" will be a problem. Voting to close as off-topic will probably automatically include the option to migrate to math.SE, so it should be quite easy (and in particular should be doable without moderator intervention). In my experience the rate at which homework questions are posted to MO is not much less than the rate at which homework questions are posted to math.SE anyway, although my memory may be playing tricks on me. Your other points are fair.
Some people have mentioned being worried about being too connected to the rest of the network. My impression is that most of the rest of the network regards MO as a bunch of elitist snobs and would probably prefer to have nothing to do with us; I don't think we need to worry about a huge influx of users from the rest of the network, for example.
Since my experience with math.SE is almost completely limited to reading some of the most egregious topics, here is an innocuous question: is Jeff Atwood the symptom or the cause? Can we expect significantly more reasonable behaviour from the rest of the global moderators/administrators? Can we merge into the SE network on some terms explicitly leaving him and the similar cases out of the equation? Because I do feel there is a reasonable core in SE, but Atwood's persistent attempts to prove that he is a moderator (and has been a moderator back in times when everybody else was in kindergarten) by means of disrupting discussions are a landmine which will most surely blow up if we move over there.
Darij wrote:
is Jeff Atwood the symptom or the cause? Can we expect significantly more reasonable behaviour from the rest of the global moderators/administrators? Can we merge into the SE network on some terms explicitly leaving him and the similar cases out of the equation? Because I do feel there is a reasonable core in SE, but Atwood's persistent attempts to prove that he is a moderator (and has been a moderator back in times when everybody else was in kindergarten) by means of disrupting discussions are a landmine which will most surely blow up if we move over there.
I can attest that in the past, Jeff was partly the symptom and partly the cause. He has a pretty big personality, and some mathematicians also have pretty big personalities. They clashed. Some of his interventions were unpleasant, and somewhat dubious, but in many of the cases I feel that the Math.SE community members are also partly at fault. (It certainly didn't help that some people still hold grudges against anything that Jeff does; whatever happened to forget and forgive?)
But I can also attest that this is completely in the past. In the past few months, the only SE moderator to have stepped in on the Main Math.SE site was Jeff, and his action consisted solely of:
Merging duplicate accounts for users
Moving posts which are obviously Meta posts from the main site to Meta
Deleting SPAM
Otherwise responding to specific user requests that only an SE employee can address (resetting post ownership for deleted/recovered accounts etc.)
The SE moderators still have a presence on the Meta.Math site, but that is necessary and expected, if they were to want to monitor feature requests, address technical problems and such. And Jeff and co. have been really good (recently) in taking a hands-off attitude toward the actual running of the site: they sometimes provide advice and point to prior incidents of similar problems on other SE site (points of view that, regardless of whether you agree with or accede to, are useful to have), and they have generally just ignored the more inflammatory comments from certain users, rather than entering an active argument (which was the main part of the problem early on; a lot of people wanted to get in the last word).
In short, people change and learn from their experiences. And I think it is no longer fair to say that Jeff engages in "persistent attempts to prove that he is a moderator".
Daniel wrote:
alarm over the Robin Chapman affair
Ugh. What is the Robin Chapman affair? I bet even most of the mods at Math.SE doesn't know what really went on there. Yes there was the personality clash and the issue of "hitting the enter key automatically submits a comment", but I really think Robin is partly at fault for making life more difficult for everyone than absolutely necessary. (The response from Jeff Atwood didn't help, but Robin is definitely not blameless.) If there were even bigger issues, they were not aired in the open, and I suggest people not speculate about it.
And I note that Robin Chapman was elected a community moderator. And despite the unpleasantries that have happened in the past, his account was never sanctioned by the SE team and he is still a moderator at Math.SE should he choose to return.
I agree that there are many concerns about moving to SE2 and joining the network; I myself have some reservations, despite being a moderator at Math.SE. But this invocation of the "Robin Chapman Affair" is really blowing an isolated incident out of proportion.
+1 Willie. People are talking about what happened at math.SE as if the math.SE community itself was completely blameless, which as my recollections go is very far from the truth. There were several hot-headed users who made the whole situation worse than it needed to be, and in any case I agree that it was an isolated incident.
@WillieWong:
Are you saying that, if we move to SE 2.0, we can no longer merge duplicate accounts, move posts to meta, delete spam, or reset post ownership without going through SE employees?
@ WillieWong: thanks for letting me know. As my experience with Jeff is limited to reading the discussions where he showed his negative characteristics most obviously, it is indeed a biased sample, and I am happy to see that it is finally over. Although blog posts like this leave me with some doubt. (I am not talking about the idea of hellbanning - it is indeed a commonly discussed concept in forum moderation and it has its advantages as it has its disadvantages. I am talking about the "you have no idea what is keeping your favorite online communities online" undertone. He is sounding like he is a super nanny of the usenet. Again, I am [i]perfectly fine[/i] with it if he does not push this policy in moderating MO, but keeps it to his blog and the rest of SE. Don't get me wrong: I neither wish him out of MO, nor do I doubt his competence (thing is, his bloog IS good when he is not getting condescending about online communities).
People are talking about what happened at math.SE as if the math.SE community itself was completely blameless, which as my recollections go is very far from the truth. There were several hot-headed users who made the whole situation worse than it needed to be, and in any case I agree that it was an isolated incident.
I'm not that reassured by this point. Who's to say that some regular MO users might not prove to be be 'hotheads', who might make a confrontation with the SE authorities worse?
The question isn't 'Did the hotheads on math.SE deserve what they got?' but 'Was the interaction between the math.SE community and the SE authorities good for the math.SE community?'
We all know that the MO community is full of eccentrics. At the moment, those eccentrics merely have to be tolerable to the MO community. The worry is that some eccentrics might be valuable to the MO community but intolerable to the SE authorities.
Are you saying that, if we move to SE 2.0, we can no longer merge duplicate accounts, move posts to meta, delete spam, or reset post ownership without going through SE employees?
I guess the use of the term "otherwise" is confusing. The first three things can be done by any moderator.
What I would be absolutely opposed to would be trying to merge the two communities.
I don't think anyone is suggesting this!
Regarding Henry Cohn's question above about the status of OSQA, alpha, or other alternatives to the software.
1) OSQA is bad news. They now have a "open source" product, and a "commercial" product. It's very unclear the relationship between the two, or why they have any incentive to treat the users of the open source product well. I can go into much more detail, but I think Anton and I have agreed that for now, OSQA is off the table.
2) alpha.mathoverflow.net is still up and running; you can look for yourself at its current state. It would be possible to bring it up to the level of the SE 1.0 software (in particular, I have the technical skills to do it myself, and it's conceivable that I could find the time to do it as well). At present I don't have significant enthusiasm for doing so, however, and I don't see anyone else about to do it, either. Matching the quality of the SE 2.0 software seems unlikely. My present thinking is that the existence of the present codebase for alpha.mathoverflow.net gives us a relatively easy route to producing a "read-only" site very quickly, while we work out a real plan, if things went really south with SE.
3) We don't know of any plausible alternatives to these two.
@Scott: regarding alpha.mathoverflow.net, could Ravi Vakil or someone else procure funds to temporarily hire someone to work on it?
I have several not-altogether-coherent thoughts:
1) I agree with Scott Morrison's list of four main concerns, though I have sufficient faith in Anton's reading of the relationship with the SE people that I'm not so worried about their involvement. Elitist as it sounds, maintaining the "purity" of MO is pretty big for me -- a site of mathematicians, for mathematicians, by mathematicians, if you will. I've always been hopeful for alpha.mathoverflow.net.
2) I'm a little concerned about the possibility of other sites being able to migrate questions over here. From what little feeling i have for the relationship with SE, I have to agree with Anton that it'd be pretty out of the question to eliminate all links from other sites, but maybe we ask only that other sites can't migrate questions here? The 101-point moderators are a bit of a pain, but we'll live.
3) Extra features of the 2.0 framework are nice, but I haven't found the current software particularly lacking. That said, I'm not particularly active on any 2.0 sites, so I can see the point of view of people who've gotten used to shiny new fancy software and lose features when they come back to MO.
I end up at "I'm intrigued, but don't want to ruin a good thing."
Cam
I have been very active on both sites.
As a lot of people here seem to know already, I have clashed with Jeff Atwood on several occasions. Some of his actions are not of the "forgive or forget" variety, as when he unilaterally deleted two comments of mine which were critical of some SE conference initiative. (Just for a moment let's look at the result of that one initiative: a lot of people were scratching their heads in almost exactly the same way I was. At least one person wrote comments which were very similar to mine in content but "more constructive", and then the entire discussion completely stopped. I read this as people realizing that expressing critique of the process was not going to be welcomed and thus deciding not to participate.) Even given an obvious divergence of cultures, preferred modes of communication and goals, I did not find him to be very reasonable or easy to deal with. And -- perhaps this shouldn't matter, but I admit it matters to me -- overall his attitude towards mathematics is not a very good one.
There are some advantages to switching over: I can attest that the SE2.0 platform is overall an improvement. The one change that is worth its weight in gold is the notification system: here, when someone responds to one of my comments, I may never see it. However, I find the ever-shifting nature of the SE platform to be annoying: they change features on a dime and don't inform users of the changes, but rather wait for them to discover them on their own and complain about them! Overall I don't feel that the SE team feels that they are providing a service and that we are their clients, which was the SE1.0 model. It's more like some sort of grand social initiative.
Fundamentally I disagree with this paradigm: we already have a community and a profession. What we need is a platform -- which we have -- and what we want is a platform that works for us as well as possible with a minimum amount of fuss. At the moment MO is owned and administrated by Anton Geraschenko, and he has ruled with great wisdom and benevolence. (I have not heard a single person say "Gosh, I wish someone besides Anton were in charge of this thing"...until now, when I'm hearing it from Anton himself!) In practice the community really does rule and moderate itself, which is fantastic. This self-rule really has not happened on math.SE. A lot of people have said that it happens "more now" and "most of the time", but I don't really agree with that: for instance I have stopped participating on meta.math.SE entirely because I felt that I was not being treated with enough respect and agency.
There is something appealing in a trial changeover with an escape hatch. If we are going to try this at all though I think we should insist on acknowledgment of our special needs. Also, call me a capitalist, but I would feel much more comfortable if we were actually paying something for the services we want SE to provide. Others may especially disagree with this, but I honestly think that it was a bad sign when SE never accepted "our" money in the first place: that was a sign that they had a very different idea of who and what they were.
In summary, my opinion is that the opportunity to get better site features and service is a very appealing one, but for all the reasons above it should be approached with extreme caution. I see no hurry here on our part: we are quite content with what we have now (aren't we?). I would ask SE to think hard about what additional services and perks they are, then wait a few months and try again. I honestly think that conversion of MO to SE2.0 would be a very desirable outcome for the SE team, and we should make sure to get some value for it.