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there are various other things that would be less directly harmful but probably still a bad idea (only 5 reputation points for upvoted questions, having moderator elections, etc.).
We also had moderator elections!
Indeed, if I were to decide I would be for a quite different points computation, something like Q: 2 (up), -4 (down) A: 10 (up), -8 (down).
This makes revenge downvoting too effective. I don't like the current pointspread either, but I think it strikes a decent balance between reward, punishment, and not being easily abusable.
I think that their interests (a policed neighbourhood in a big city) and our interests (a Q&A site for questions which come up during mathematical research) are fundamentally at odds with one another.
I think you are wrong. SE is plenty interested in supporting a Q&A site for questions which come up during mathematical research. I think you took the word "policeman" in Joel's response way too seriously, and in any case, if a drunken hobo comes into your sacred mathematical common room and starts wrecking all the furniture, wouldn't you want a policeman to come in and take him away? (Moderators do not have the ability to IP ban a user, so a really troublesome user can theoretically keep making accounts even if the moderators delete those accounts.)
Let me describe two situations that might be problematic if either of them were to happen while we stay unmigrated:
I have no idea what happens in the first scenario, but it probably isn't good. In the second scenario, SE developers would have to waste an enormous amount of time trying to remember how code they may not have looked at in years works, and they might not be able to fix MO at all.
It doesn't look like you are an active user on math.SE. I would suggest spending some more time there, especially on meta, and seeing if you can find any evidence for the crushing heel of oppression that you seem to be convinced exists. Since "the incident," I have no memory of any member of the SE team intervening in any way except to inform us that moderator elections were happening.
@Qiaochu: I think we can upgrade the situation "Anton gets hit by a bus" to definitely not good. Possible repercussions on MO would probably not be anyone's primary concern.
Many of the changes that I find problematic in the SE platform have been made in the last few months, or even in the last few weeks. I do not engage in site-related discussion on meta.math.SE anymore because of Jeff Atwood's behavior only a few months ago. At the time he made it very clear that he would continue to remove any comments of mine that he found "unconstructive", even if he was the only one who did so. As far as I know, this issue continues into the present: certainly no one from SE has told me otherwise.
democracy isn't all it's cracked up to be
MO is presently ruled by an oligarchy. A change would be very good in that it weaks the oligarchy, however slightly.
Alex Bartel wrote, in regards to homework questions:
If they could be migrated, they would disappear from MO altogether, which is much more sensible
Not quite. They wouldn't disappear altogether. Migrated questions still show on front page, but marked as [Migrated] the same one currently closed questions are marked as [Closed]. And the link on the Front/Questions page gets redirected automatically to the migration target. But the stub question still exists, and still can be accessed: for example there is a back link on the migrated question showing where it was migrated from, clicking that brings up the stub of the original question.
Noah's "I am torn" statement basically sums up how I feel too.
I don't visit meta.SO frequently, but I did today on a whim, and I observed the closure of the following thread. It disappointed me: I was dismayed to see a repetition of the same story that happened on meta.MSE and has happened on meta.SO many times in the past (a while back, for instance, the thread complaining about the removal of the envelope was deleted): a polite suggestion for improvement that is not deemed "constructive" is shut down in a heavy-handed way. There was nothing spammy or offensive about tvanfosson's question. On the contrary, it seemed to raise a very legitimate concern. (I have to wonder, by contrast, why silly -- albeit harmless, but surely not "constructive" -- threads such as this one are left open.)
So my impression is that meta.SO does not seem very tolerant of even civilly expressed but slightly critical posts, and that all the drama that happens each time dissent is suppressed (either on meta.MSE or meta.SO) has led to no policy revisions. As a result, I'd like to revise my earlier statement to argue that we need to get pretty firm assurance from SE 2.0 that nothing like this will happen on meta.MO (i.e., no interference in intra-site matters from the SE team) before even considering migration at this point.
In fact, seeing this makes me a lot more uneasy about the whole idea of migration: I am simply uncomfortable with participating on any website on a network where users are treated with such disrespect. The fact that Anton et al would still be running the show in their much gentler manner on MO would only be partial reassurance.
@Qiaochu: Hasn't MO been used long enough that we can be pretty sure that there aren't any serious bugs in the software?
Also, I am not sure that SE 2.0 would be significantly more democratic, for the above reasons. On the contrary Anton basically governs by "consensus," which is very different from whatever I've seen of the SE team...
@Qiaochu: Hasn't MO been used long enough that we can be pretty sure that there aren't any serious bugs in the software?
I'm not an expert on such things, but I don't believe that we can necessarily count on MO to continue to be compatible with whatever external things interface with MO to produce and display content. This wouldn't be a near-future concern, but if the participants in this discussion are as concerned about long-term sustainability as they say they are, they should be keeping such things in mind.
I appreciate the overall tone of discussion here, and hope you will bear with me for one more somewhat lengthy post.
Before I start, I will not attempt to address the myriad of smaller issues here, and there are quite a few. This is not because I'm not happy to talk about them, but because I don't want to derail an important conversation by fragmenting it into a hundred little shards. Normally, it's impossible to shut me up about that stuff. I could go on for days about the details of how the Stack Exchange network works both from a technical and a social perspective, but I feel like diving into deep details on every point in this particular thread will likely splinter an otherwise productive conversation. That said, if there's something that you don't understand about the way the Stack Exchange network works, we'll be more than happy to take those questions one at a time elsewhere.
The gist of what I do want to convey here, however, has to do with the way we approach individual sites within a network. Some of you have expressed concern or curiosity about what our approach is to our equivalent of the federal question of states' rights.
Essentially, our belief is this:
[to be continued...]
In other words, we have a very strong economic motivation to allow sites to operate independently, which is probably a better guarantee that we will continue to do so than any personal guarantee I could possibly make that it's my desire to allow sites to operate independently.
That said, when new sites are created in our system, we have observed, now dozens of times, that the early participants in those sites often make certain mistakes (that are, by now, obvious to us, having seen them many times) that will damage their early development. Essentially, while a site is in beta, we consider it to need a certain amount of guidance and direction to ensure that it grows up to be a healthy adult. Once a site graduates from beta, it's a sign that we believe that the site is self-managing. If the comparison to parenting is not obvious, that's sort of the way we think about it.
I'll give you just one example of the kind of mistake that participants often make in a brand-new Stack Exchange site: they tend to ask a bunch of questions simply to fill up the home page, questions which they do not actually care about. When they don't have a question they actually want to ask, they'll ask a generic question like "What are the best {insert subject} blogs out there?" After shepherding 50+ sites, we have learned that those questions serve to deter serious and expert people from participating. The site looks stupid and the questions look dumb, so the people who actually know something about {insert subject} don't take it seriously. The site then enters a death spiral, unable to build up a core group of experts with real questions.
So, during a Stack Exchange beta, we consider it our responsibility to work hard with the initial members of the new community to understand these things and build the kind of site they really want. We have a very good community team of 5 people that devote most of their working day working with the participants in new sites to understand these issues and help their site get off to a good start. But once we see that the site is running well, we hold moderator elections and the site graduates from beta. From that point on, we consider intervention to be mostly unnecessary, unless there's a severe breach by a moderator. We do pay attention to discussions in each site's meta to make sure that we are being responsive to each community's problems, and we do continue to be available to help guide the site, but it is certainly our objective that the site run itself.
Needless to say, MathOverflow is well beyond the "beta" phase and, if moved to SE 2.0, would enter the network as a full site.
Please take this only as a statement of philosophy, not a comprehensive treatise.
Personally, I completely understand that the nature of, say, academic discourse online is by necessity going to be different than, say, asking how to get an iPhone to dock with a walrus. We're well aware of those issues. I like to think it's our role, if we're doing our jobs, to be like a university facilities department. We'll have janitors. We'll make policies about who can park where. We'll make decisions about when to paint the classrooms. And, yes, when a professor punches a student in the nose, we'll call the police. But that doesn't happen very often. Most of the time, we'll keep the temperature between 68 and 76 degrees, and we'll keep the lights on, and the creeps out. And together, these activities will enable academic discourse to flourish.
While I appreciate the analogy about being the janitors, the SE team is to my mind more like the centralised IT department. Janitors don't go around changing the layout of your building, updating people's keys every month or force every department to fit into a one-size-doesn't-quite-fit-all mold. I understand that this is by necessity, but I do not know if it is right for MO (and, to be honest, it chafed when my university's centralised, windows-centric IT department took over my own department's happily-chugging-along mac/unix-based IT system).
I think the SE people are doing a great job at what they do, but I don't think I want them doing it for us.
@Joel Spolsky:
I appreciate your taking the time to come here and explain yourself.
However, I am having a lot of difficulty reconciling your point 2. with the actual actions of Jeff Atwood on math.SE. He has chosen time and time again to police the site in ways which were unwelcome to the community (and which I thought were, in principle, unworthy of a top administrator's time). In particular, apparently at least partially in response to comments I made on meta.math.SE, a new reason for closing a question was created: "unconstructive". He has closed questions which are critical of SE initiatives as unconstructive. In fact he did so within the last 24 hours on meta.SO, as linked to in Akhil's last message. (It seems that the question has since been reopened.)
Would you be willing to explain to what extent this sort of behavior would continue on a putative SE2.0 version of MO?
Added: Let me also say that for me losing this threaded meta for a SE-style meta is also a big negative feature of the putative switch. I very much respect the SE engine and largely admire the way they have designed something to succeed very well at a relatively specific purpose: asking and answering questions. Because of this I am baffled why exactly the same engine is used on meta sites, which have a significantly different purpose: community discussion. Trying to shoehorn community discussion into the SE engine has been a bizarre, Procrustean experience. Also the relationship between the site meta and meta.SO has never quite made sense to me, since the latter is both the meta for a particular site and has been held up as the place to go to ask all platform related questions. We have actually gotten inconsistent information as to what extent platform-related questions -- e.g. feature requests -- should be posted on the site meta versus meta.SO. The idea of having to acquire separate reputation in order to have one's opinion heard on meta.SO was a dealbreaker for me. Up until very recently I did not want to jump through the new hoops necessary to participate on meta.SO. (Ironically I have started participating a little in the past few weeks, in reaction to recent platform changes that I am very dissatisfied with.)
On the other hand I want to clarify that when I have spoken about interference or policing of math.SE by SE personnel, I am in fact only talking about their activities on the meta site.
For all these reasons, it seems to me that switching over but keeping the current meta site would be a good idea. It would be an obvious acknowledgment of the individuality and agency of the preexisting MO community, and it would very much set my mind at ease with regard to the concerns of interference I have been voicing in this thread. All in all it would make me view the 2.0ification much more favorably than I currently do.
Added: As mentioned above, Akhil linked to a question on meta.SO which was closed by Jeff Atwood as unconstructive. Here is the text appearing underneath, explaining that reason for closure:
"This question is not a good fit to our Q&A format. We expect answers to generally involve facts, references, or specific expertise; this question will likely solicit opinion, debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion."
Isn't this problematic? Opinion, debate, arguments, polling and extended discussion are all things that we currently do on this meta site and would seem more than reasonable to do on any meta site. One of the ways the moderators of MO have very successfully maintained a genteel, collegial environment on the main MO site is by allowing people to say almost whatever they want on this meta site. In particular aimless complaining is absolutely kosher on meta.mathoverflow.net. (The administrator and moderators of this site understand that they are not honorbound to respond to every aimless complaint, but they let them stand nevertheless.) I think this is very healthy, and its absence would be a big concern.
He has closed questions which are critical of SE initiatives as unconstructive. In fact he did so within the last 24 hours on meta.SO, as linked to in Akhil's last message.
I'll mention that there is an issue here which is probably not clear to the average MO user, namely that SE rolls out changes (of varying sizes, many quite small) frequently enough on the network that it is completely infeasible to solicit community feedback on all of them, especially when that feedback consists of aimless complaining. I think Adam Davis' comment on the closed meta.SO question is worth paying attention to:
By definition this is not constructive. It is a complaint inviting negative discussion without a purpose or end point. If you have a suggestion, put it in the question. If you have a question, put it in the question. If all you're going to do is say, "This place is turning into a straightjacket, amiright?" then it's going to be closed as not constructive. Try some constructive criticism next time. – Adam Davis 15 hours ago
Daniel said:
Top world experts, including a number of Fields Medalists (the Mathematics "Nobel Prize") are regular participants. So I don't see the need for any outside enforcement at all. No professor is ever going to punch a student in the nose through the screen on the internet. I don't even know what that means. I strongly oppose any and all "enforcement" from non-mathematicians.
I don't see what the first sentence has to do with the second. Being a Fields medalist doesn't automatically give you insight into how to manage a community. In fact, I would say that working at a company whose goal it is to foster communities would probably have a better chance of doing that. There are several ways a serious moderation problem might arise (a particularly troublesome user can theoretically keep making accounts even if moderators delete them) and I don't know if anyone at MO currently has the privileges to IP ban a user. My guess is no. In that case, the only way to resolve such issues is to go to SE.
I think comments like this betray a great deal of bias against non-mathematicians. This is an ugly side of the mathematical community that I would rather not see on a regular basis. It makes us seem very narrow-minded and insular.
@Qiaochu Yuan
I think what is being objected is direct intervention of SE employees without even informing the moderators of MO, let alone getting permission or approval from the MO moderators beforehand. The given example in analogy is not constructive (a prof punching a student). The necessity of intervention by SE employees in some cases has nothing to do with the request that those interventions should be approved by MO moderators beforehand (if you like the analogy: the campus police head cannot go and arrest a prof for an incident in the university by themselves without informing and getting approval from the university management and the governing conceal). If there is a justified need for intervention by SE employees in a an extreme case that cannot be handled by MO moderators then SE surely can convince the MO moderators that the intervention is required first, that seems like a very reasonable request to me. To manage a QA site for mathematicians you need knowledge about the norms of mathematical community and about the management of a QA site.
ps: I think you misunderstood Daniel: "No professor is ever going to punch a student in the nose through the screen on the internet. I don't even know what that means." (bold by me)
If there is a justified need for intervention by SE employees in a an extreme case that cannot be handled by MO moderators then SE surely can convince the MO moderators that the intervention is required first, that seems like a very reasonable request to me.
What if the moderators are unavailable? Let's suppose a miscreant that had amassed a little reputation decides, perhaps after being burned by a stinging insult, to systematically edit out the content of every post he can find (or perhaps posts by people he doesn't like). Of course this is completely reversible, but the longer the SE team waits to respond, the more of a pain it will be to roll back every post that was vandalized. In situations like these I think SE is completely justified in intervening without going to the moderators first: there just isn't enough time to make this feasible.
ps: I think you misunderstood Daniel
I think Daniel misunderstood Joel. "Punch a student in the nose" is a metaphor.
I would like to come out as in favour of the transition to SE 2.0. I am torn as well, but my thought process is as follows.
The biggest reason is that MO is already running on legacy code. I find the likelihood that MO will be able to continue running indefinitely on this software to be highly unlikely. The point that the software cannot be changed already needs to be made time and again. If and when a serious security issue came up that required significant changes, or something about the software failed to scale properly, it is not clear what would happen. As a result, I feel like a vote for no transition is essentially a vote to undergo a forced transition or migration some n years down the line, and possibly under emergency circumstances. Things will be difficult enough as it is.
Many of the negative votes appear to be highly influenced by "what happened on MSE". Joel Spolsky has already indicated that they have no intention of interfering. Others have already made this point, but: SE already has the power to interfere in MO and does not. Personality conflicts with the SE admins are not a function of our software version. (Also, let me say that, having not participated in the MSE drama, the visibly different levels of civility between his messages and ours here makes me uncomfortable.)
So far as meta goes, we don't have to stop having conversations here if the SE meta exists and we can still link to it if someone creates a topic on the meta site. (In the current software incarnation there has been some flexibility to add or change the appearance of the main page - can we simply link to alternative meta/FAQ pages?)
It also makes me uncomfortable and sad to see that several people here expect SE to behave in an uncivil and stupid way. We all (including the SE people) agree that driving away good mathematicians and generous contributors to this and other sites would be detrimental for SE, so it's not clear to me why so many people expect them to do just that.
I also feel uncomfortable reading the implicit assumption present in many posts here that mathematicians are all that special. Yes, it is true that a vibrant and healthy mathematical community existed long before SE did and that MO has not built that community but merely provides it with a valuable exchange platform. But the same is true of almost any other reasonably specialised professional community and I am sure that we will not be the only professional community in the SE network. I am also sure that it is perfectly obvious to the SE people that a site that has to build the community around it must be approached differently from a site that merely provides a forum for a pre-existing community.
@Mr. Spolsky: Thank you for your detailed comments. It is quite helpful to see the SE philosophy spelled out, and I find it reassuring to see in print that you expect MO to be self-moderating in the future, if the proposed migration happened.
Qiaochu Yuan said:
I'll mention that there is an issue here which is probably not clear to the average MO user, namely that SE rolls out changes (of varying sizes, many quite small) frequently enough on the network that it is completely infeasible to solicit community feedback on all of them, especially when that feedback consists of aimless complaining.
@Qiaochu: I don't expect the SE team to implement everything that gets upvoted on meta.SO, of course, but I think your characterization of the thread as "aimless" is somewhat inaccurate. Of course it was a complaint, but it was civilly expressed, relevant to the website (look at the upvotes), and -- I thought -- worthy of discussion. If I went to a restaurant owner and politely told her that I was concerned about recent changes to the menu, I would not necessarily expect said changes to be reversed, but I would be surprised if I was told to shush. I am very happy with the current model on meta.MO where such complaints are acceptable: in general, I think this planet would be a much better place if people complained a bit louder about a lot of things.
In addition, I found it very surprising that the thread I linked to was closed. Isn't a company supposed to listen to what its customers think? Isn't it bad for SE if they won't listen?
At least, I expected that we (the users) were the customers, but maybe my impression was wrong. I am not quite sure about what the SE 2.0 business model is (while SE 1.0 seemed very clear and reasonable), but it often appears more like a social experiment to me than a moneymaking device. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but we need to make sure that the experiment will not interfere in unfortunate ways.
Incidentally, I find Pete Clark's compromise suggestion of keeping meta but migrating the main site to be intriguing.
What if the moderators are unavailable? Let's suppose a miscreant that had amassed a little reputation decides, perhaps after being burned by a stinging insult, to systematically edit out the content of every post he can find (or perhaps posts by people he doesn't like). Of course this is completely reversible, but the longer the SE team waits to respond, the more of a pain it will be to roll back every post that was vandalized. In situations like these I think SE is completely justified in intervening without going to the moderators first: there just isn't enough time to make this feasible.
I have never seen this problem on MO. Maybe it has happened, but presumably the moderators are sufficiently active that they can catch such events quickly; by contrast, as Joel Spolsky observes, the size of the network means that SE admins probably could not patrol for such occurrences any more efficiently than moderators.
@Akhil I think the saying "if you are not paying for something, then you are not the customer" is worth bearing in mind. We are the target audience but certainly not the customers. I imagine that the companies interested in advertising space on SE sites are the actual customers, although I don't know enough about the SE business model myself. Of course, the bigger the target audience the more lucrative the advertisement business, so it is still in the best of SE's interest to have active and healthy communities. But I suspect that there are also other, more altruistic and ideological reasons for some of the stuff they are doing, since e.g. MO has so far been pretty useless to SE Inc as a company, and I think it is fair to not expect this to change very much. The only benefit has been the supply of contributors on math.SE from MO.
If I went to a restaurant owner and politely told her that I was concerned about recent changes to the menu, I would not necessarily expect said changes to be reversed, but I would be surprised if I was told to shush.
I think you are taking the closure too seriously. Thousands of people post on StackOverflow every day, and if the SE team was forced to listen to all of their complaints, they would never get anything done. The standard for a reasonable, productive complaint on meta.SO needs to be set high so that signal can be reliably separated from noise. It's an issue of scale. Sites of different size merit different moderation policies.
Finally, remember that all it takes is five reopen votes to reopen a question and that close votes are as much requests for the question to be rephrased as anything else. If Jeff really wanted to silence all dissent or whatever, he'd be deleting those questions, not closing them.
I think this planet would be a much better place if people complained a bit louder about a lot of things.
I think this planet is already full of enough people complaining about enough things! Again, the problem is how to reliably distinguish signal from noise.
In addition, I found it very surprising that the thread I linked to was closed. Isn't a company supposed to listen to what its customers think? Isn't it bad for SE if they won't listen?
Once again, it's a question of distinguishing signal from noise. When you have on the order of 40,000 customers a month, most of what they think will be noise, and they will generate so much of it that it's impossible to listen to that noise while still doing your job.
it often appears more like a social experiment to me than a moneymaking device. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but we need to make sure that the experiment will not interfere in unfortunate ways.
It is very much a social experiment, and it is not currently geared towards making money. If people don't like that about the SE network, then I guess that's that.
This is getting a complicated discussion (to which I might or might not contribute later in more detail). But, for now just two points regarding the thread linked to by Akhil. It is now 'locked' not only 'closed' (and was 'deleted' at some point). The OP has almost 150k rep on SO (this means Top 15 on SO); so not a 'random stranger'.
Ah, not /currently/ geared. Well, but what we are talking about is the future of MO. IT companies often get sold and then their politics change drastically, especially with regard to 'free' services.
This is a very important point, but it seems to me to apply equally well to keeping MO hosted on Fog Creek servers (which I understand to be the current case). We have no guarantee that hypothetical future management will honor the current agreement to keep MO untouched, so we are already exposed to this danger.
My current inclination is that we should not hurry to migrate, but that we should nevertheless agree with SE a specific proposal for migration, that we can then proceed with, if we choose to, at a later date. At the same time, some subset of us should think about some infrastructure work which will make a future transition away from either SE 1.0 or 2.0 more viable. I'll post separately some concrete ideas in that direction.
Here is a tentative proposal for migration, that I'd encourage everyone to comment on and modify. Even if SE agree to exactly what I propose below, I'm not certain I'd personally want to follow through, but I think I could be convinced. Moreover, I don't think that every item here is essential --- some compromise with SE will still allow for a migration process that I'd seriously consider.
Some things that would be nice:
Without commenting pro or con on the many cogent points made by so many so far, I would just like to endorse this sentiment expressed by Tyler Lawson, which is the primary reason I favor migration now:
"I feel like a vote for no transition is essentially a vote to undergo a forced transition or migration some $n$ years down the line, and possibly under emergency circumstances."
I think Tyler has the correct historical perspective, which swamps all other concerns in my opinion.
I just started a new thread Implement the StackExchange API?, which I'd like some technically minded people to look at. I think it's a productive thing we can do now, irrespective of whether we migrate. Further, it's good insurance against bad stuff happening to us later. Finally, it may be something we can spend money on rather than mathematicians' time.
+1 Scott Morrison (3posts ago). Unfortunately, I do not see how we can be so special in the eyes of SE that they can make all these exceptions for us (perhaps they will! that would be nice) if we are just another site in their network. Clearly things which are verbal/written agreements are fine, but the 100 rep bonus or FAQ editing would require a hack to the software. That being said, your list goes a long way towards addressing the concerns at least on my behalf, and perhaps others'.
...also +1 for the immediately preceding post, written concurrently with mine.
Can someone explain to me why the 100 point bonus reputation is an issue? In particular, which of the privileges on an SE2 network are we worried about in particular?
Willie, I agree with you that there are very few significant drawbacks to the 100pt base for SE community members. However, there are a few privileges that could be bothersome:
Comment everywhere is an issue for obvious reasons. In addition, comments are very hard to monitor by moderators.
Edit community wiki is a potential issue since it opens the door to some restricted vandalism.
Voting down is somewhat of a problem. However, since it requires 125pts and each downvote costs some reputation, I doubt this will ever be a real problem.
Scott, I'm glad you mentioned that the ability to edit the faq would be a nice thing. At the risk of repeating myself, I would add that it is essential for community moderators to fully control the MO faq. The MO faq is our de facto mission statement (among other useful things). Without full control of the faq, we lose control of our mission, our freedom, and our identity.
To a lesser extent, I also deem it essential for us to maintain the MO meta that we want for our community. This meta has worked for a long time with very few problems. It could stand some improvements, but it is a sure bet that our current meta is better than the SE 2.0 meta.
"I feel like a vote for no transition is essentially a vote to undergo a forced transition or migration some $n$ years down the line, and possibly under emergency circumstances."
Agreed. This point is worth making twice: to the best of my knowledge, MO is currently still hosted on Fog Creek servers. Any long-term instability that people are worrying about coming from being tied to the future of a corporation already exists.
To be honest, the hosting situation makes me feel like a moocher who's overstayed his welcome. SE has been extremely generous in allowing the current arrangement to continue as long as it has, and I think some people are taking this generosity for granted.
Random Mathematician, I very strongly suggest you retract your comment (and appologize). Even if he would not have mentioned it himself in the discussion, I would find your comment unacceptable; supplying the mere information might (though not even sure about this) be acceptable in this case, yet insinuations about financial interests influencing the arguments are scandalous (even in that hypothetical scenario).
He thus has a financial interest in defending the corporation and convincing us to migrate. I usually find him pretty level-headed, and I was wondering why he was so vehement about defending SE on this thread. I thus did a little google search and learned this.
My internship is for a fixed period of time, and my pay is also fixed and does not depend on the success of the SE network.
Let me also clarify this "vehemence" issue. I believe I am the only MO user in this thread who has actually spoken to an SE employee in person (though perhaps Anton has as well). It's therefore easier for me to see them as actual people as opposed to faceless corporate automatons. The "vehemence" you observe is a result of me trying to inject a strong opposing voice into this discussion because it is all too easy to demonize people you have never met. (Some cognitive biases I think are relevant to this discussion: the fundamental attribution error, confirmation bias, and the availability heuristic.)
I'll also repeat that I am not 100% in favor of migration. There are still things I don't understand about the long-term viability of doing nothing, as well as the viability of OSQA, that I would like to understand before I "vote" for one thing or another. Again, if we reject migration I just want to make sure we're doing it because we actually think it would be a bad idea and not because we're so scared of non-mathematicians that we would rather do anything than be forced to work with them.
I think that if we do use the SE 2.0 meta, we should also ensure that voting privileges are extended only to those who have participated on MO (as opposed to those who have only participated on other sites). While I generally prefer MO's meta as having less clutter, I think Anton mentioned he could arrange the SE meta (if we used it), to display answers in chronological order, so as to make it more discussion-y. In that case it would not be so different, and in fact there would be one advantage: you can vote on posts to express(dis)agreement even without having to say anything. For instance, I would upvote the recent posts by Tyler Lawson, Scott Morrison, and Angelo Vistoli.
One point that has still not been addressed is whether being attached to the SE network would make the website less attractive in the eyes of mathematicians. As long as the current policies on meta.SO that many of us here appear not to agree with (i.e. closure/deletion/locking of complaining posts) are not extended to meta.MO (which seems a safe bet since Joel Spolsky has assured us that MO would remain self-moderating), I myself don't have any objections.
Incidentally, at some point or another, I have looked at the MO profiles at most (all?) of the mathematician participants in this thread, and it seems that, on average, we tend to be much younger than Jane Q. Mathematician (or even Jane Q. MOwer). I think it would be very interesting to hear, in addition, the views of those who have been in mathematics for, say, 20 years or longer.
@Akhil Mathew, I agree with Pete, I like this meta more than SE 2.0 meta. Voting in a discussion is useful only when we are taking a vote, it can be counterproductive for discussions in other cases. The Q&A format of SE 2.0 meta is clearly not designed for discussion and is intentionally designed to discourage it.
@Qiaochu Yuan, Your argument about the necessity of real-time intervention by SE employees is not convincing for me. As Joel noted, SE employees can't monitor the sites all the time either. I am sure at least one of the MO moderators will visit the site in a reasonable time and waiting a few hours is not a big deal. If it is a very urgent matter then MO moderators can be contacted using other methods like email (there is also flagging by ordinary users can solve many cases without even MO moderator intervention). Discussing rare situations is not helpful, it is not difficult to give similar "what if" arguments in the other direction. The point here is to make it clear that intervention by SE employees without approval of MO moderators is not acceptable and that is the rule, to break the rule they should have very convincing reasons that it was necessary to break the rule in that particular case.
@WillieWong, The main problem I see with the initial 101 rep for users coming from other SE sites is that it gives them a say (i.e. vote, comment, ...) without being part of the MO community, it can bias the votes on the main site, but more importantly it can bias the votes on the meta (and this does happen, someone links to a discussion on the meta in another site and suddenly we see a huge increase of views and votes by users who have never visited the site).
A propos 101 rep:
I don't think comment everywhere is that big an issue. If someone misbehaves in a comment, you can always flag it for moderator attention. It is pretty hard for moderators to not see that in the SE2 tools.
For votes: I agree partly. Insofar as meta is concerned, if we keep meta on this platform, that would not be a problem. Perhaps we can arrange to have a different rep threshold for voting? But I don't think that would be that much of an issue.
Community wiki edits: that could be a big issue.
If we identify specific things that we don't like, we can try to negotiate with SE to see if they can be changed to our liking, right?
I've realized my last post was perhaps unduely negative.
As Qiaochu says above, we are already hosted by StackExchange, and nearly every worry about calamity in the future because of a change in their business plan applies at least as much to our current situation.
the StackExchange software is really good, far better than we can expect to find elsewhere or produce ourselves.
Fog Creek does a fantastic job of handling all the heavy lifting, running webservers, backing up data, dealing with network outages, fixing critical bugs, etc. This is a gigantic advantage for us, and we should be very very pleased to be getting all this for free.
As such, if we eventually decide to migrate, I (and I think the other moderators) will be willing to cash in some of the community's goodwill, saying something along the lines of:
"Running mathoverflow without this support from Stack Exchange might not be viable. We're mathematicians busily writing papers, and trying to get jobs or tenure. Please bear with us, and try to see some of the downsides of joining the StackExchange network in this context."
I'm very happy to help write code that opens the door to future migration away from SE, and happy to put in effort finding funding for or managing any development work that we decide is necessary for such a migration. Nevertheless, it's important to remember the scale of the advantage we gain by piggybacking on Stack Exchange.
We're mathematicians busily writing papers, and trying to get jobs or tenure. Please bear with us, and try to see some of the downsides of joining the StackExchange network in this context.
We (the MO community at large) certainly shouldn't take lightly the commitment of those of you who have created MO and keep it running. If moving to SE2.0 eases that burden, and you would like to do it, then that reason alone would be enough to convince me.
I do also find Tyler Lawson's first point very persuasive.
That said, I think Scott's list of requirements makes a great starting position for a negotiation.
It seems to me that many people's concerns about migration would be greatly alleviated by us keeping this meta. Is that a fair assessment? That seems like a pretty reasonable thing to ask SE for.
The only concern I can think of at the moment that wouldn't be alleviated by keeping this meta is the concern that senior mathematicians might be put off by the association with the SE 2.0 network. But this seems like more of a mild temporary setback to me than anything else. MO was an "internet thing" before it became important, and MO 2.0 will perhaps be slightly more of an "internet thing," but as long as everything keeps running smoothly it shouldn't take much more effort to get used to. Perhaps some brave volunteer should poll some such mathematicians? I don't think the people I have in mind frequent meta.
The meaning of "internet thing" escapes me. Do you just mean it appears on a website? If so, I don't see how moving to another site makes it "more" or "less" of an internet thing.
Well, take Twitter, for example. My impression (and it is only an impression) is that senior mathematicians consider such things faddish, a product of a modern obsession with social applications, and overall a waste of time. It is possible (and I am pretty sure I saw a related point raised earlier, which is why I mention it) that SE 2.0 will seem more like such things. Perhaps this is a non-issue, which would be fine with me.