I wouldn't worry about it. It's generally not something that gets noticed.
This probably got noticed because it set off some automatic warning that caused someone to look into it.
Three 500 rep bounties awarded to a single user in two minutes to answers that were from 2015 is a bit unusual. Users can only offer 3 bounties at a time and the maximum value for each is 500 rep.
Opening the December 10th and 11th sections shows 1590 reputation was removed - that's 1500 for bounties and 9 upvotes, some on the same posts. Three of the votes on the 10th were within the same minute with one two minutes later - that's not much time to actually judge the quality of the posts.
Additionally, just reading the answers, they don't seem to be particularly good answers - certainly not worthy of huge bounties.
Considering the age of the posts (2015), quality of the answers (low), and the rapidity of voting (high)... well...
What cost? Moderators are volunteers, not employees. The closest thing to paid moderators are the Community Management team but they only step in occasionally.
One of the biggest frustrations for people on SO is struggling to find a question that already exists - and then people get really angry when their question is closed as a duplicate... but what if the LLM could take proposed question text and point the person at an answered question so they don't even have to wait for an answer or a duplicate? It'd be much better than the current duplicate finder.
>but what if the LLM could take proposed question text and point the person at an answered question so they don't even have to wait for an answer or a duplicate?
From what I’ve read, it’s the opposite. Someone’s pronouns are they/them and Monica refused to refer to them with those pronouns. Monica will not use singular they, even as a personal pronoun.
According to the MSE FAQ, SO doesn’t care if you get it wrong as long as you’re willing to change the pronouns moving forward to reflect the correct ones. SO also prefers gender neutral writing (not using pronouns or using singular they) if you don’t know the correct pronouns for someone.
They don’t even require using pronouns at all unless avoiding it is really obvious (userx wrote in userx’s question that userx failed to find a solution - obvious example is obvious but I think it makes the point) but telling someone you refuse to use their pronouns is considered rude and moderators are expected to be willing to use correct pronouns.
In most cases, avoiding pronouns in day-to-day interactions is not noticeable. It’s more obvious when you interact with them (or talk about them) regularly.
No one is expecting anyone to memorize hundreds of pronouns for people you only talk to once.
For 10 people you probably don't need the middle level, only the low one, which is $5/seat/month. There's also non-profit and educational pricing if you're associated with one of those. It's 50 cents/seat/month for the low level or $1.10/user/month for the middle one. They mentioned it on MSO. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/367590
I think it's possible that they feel like Teams and Enterprise are really great (I use Teams at work and really like it) but that it's not really well-known. When I talk to other people, they're not aware of them but like the idea.
If you have a product people really like but it doesn't seem like people are aware of it and want to encourage more adoption, you go looking for places to advertise... but the people most likely to want a internal version of SO are the people using SO. That means the obvious place to advertise is on Stack Overflow.
I think it's a bit overboard to make it the focus of the home page rather than a secondary focus. But the homepage can change. It's already changed once.
Lots of companies make the centerpiece of their homepage their big new product. When Teams is better-known, it probably won't need to be so obviously marketed.
I think what makes this so jarring is that the first use of the homepage is for a specific reason rather than to talk about SO's primary purpose. If the page talked about how to ask/answer (something like a short version of the tour page) before it mentioned the other things (Teams, Jobs, etc) would that have been okay?
I don't generally find the homepage to be a stellar introduction to SO.
I actually mean the questions list (the pre-change view). As-is, the list of active questions is full of... well, junk. It'd be better to have the home page include some curated questions not luck-of-the draw stuff to show off the value of the site.
> You can be a 20k rep Stack Overflow account, but land on a Stack Exchange question from Google and it's a complete crapshoot if you'll even be able to upvote the question.
If you have 200+ rep on any one site, you can upvote on any other site (assuming you didn't spend/lose the rep somehow) if you actually create an account there. Downvotes require more rep (125), so that requires some participation on that specific site.
This Association Bonus (100 free rep on all sites as a reward for earning 200 on one) is designed to address a lot of your concerns. It allows upvoting, flagging and commenting. If you see something that should be closed, you can flag it for closure to bring it to the attention of users with sufficient rep to close or indicate non-answers as such so that higher rep users can vote to delete them.
The system as-is definitely leads to a lot of confusion, though. The explanation I've heard for the siloing of reputation between the sites is that reputation is an indication of trust and expertise in using a specific site. If you know how what's on or off topic on SO, that doesn't necessarily mean you know what's on or off topic on Puzzling or InfoSec. Each site has slightly different cultural expectations, and the belief - which maybe should be tested - is that that expertise doesn't cross between sites.
One part of the problem here is that someone can spend hours using a site and know what's on topic or what should be deleted or downvoted or closed and still never have any reputation on that site... and on the other end of that spectrum, you can find very high rep users who either don't use those moderation tools or use them incorrectly because they haven't actually taken the time to understand how the community expects them to be used.
It's a hazy indicator of expertise at best but it's also a relatively low-effort one to implement. It takes work to balance it and decide what actions warrant a reputation reward but it's okay. Finding a better/different way to achieve this indication of expertise and privilege may be worth considering and may allow users to "test out" in a privilege to earn it without needing a specific amount of points. This would allow invested users access to privileges without requiring them to also be expert askers or answerers.
> If you have 200+ rep on any one site, you can upvote on any other site
Yeah that's if you create an account there. Land on a random SE site from Google or from the Hot Network questions and chances are you don't even have an account.
The site looks exactly like Stack Overflow, but if I press the upvote button I get an annoying error and the person who wrote that answer doesn't get any points.
If I do create an account, every time I infrequently visit that site I'm met with an annoying banner to "remember to upvote". Despite the fact that I upvote Stack Overflow questions daily. You can't win.
Editing is the other major place where I feel this annoyance. On Stack Overflow I edit a ton of posts to correct typos, grammar, code formatting, and capitalization. But I can't donate my free labor on SuperUser or AskDifferent. I'm not going to add these minor edits to a review queue. So the sites are just worse off because of arbitrary site siloing.
> Each site has slightly different cultural expectations, and the belief - which maybe should be tested - is that that expertise doesn't cross between sites.
I'd very much question that belief. Maybe for the more esoteric sites, but a good user on Stack Overflow is going to be right at home on SuperUser, Ask Different, or any of the myriad slightly-different-but-mostly-the-same tech sites with slightly different focuses.
Earning reputation on Stack Overflow can be a really slow, tiring process. As others have mentioned, suggesting edits is one way to get there. For each that gets accepted, you earn +2 rep. I earned 25 rep this way and it was a slog.
The easiest way to get 100 rep on SO, though, is to get 200 rep on any other site on the network. This is called the Association Bonus. Enjoy movies or cooking or video games or board games? Go post questions/answers on those sites and get some votes. There are 170+ sites on the network and because they're lower-volume, earning rep is often faster because posts are more visible.
I'm not sure which sites you've tried so far, but it is possible to do and even have some fun doing it.
This probably got noticed because it set off some automatic warning that caused someone to look into it.
Three 500 rep bounties awarded to a single user in two minutes to answers that were from 2015 is a bit unusual. Users can only offer 3 bounties at a time and the maximum value for each is 500 rep.
The reputation history for the account can be seen here - https://stackoverflow.com/users/4616250/user4616250?tab=repu...
Opening the December 10th and 11th sections shows 1590 reputation was removed - that's 1500 for bounties and 9 upvotes, some on the same posts. Three of the votes on the 10th were within the same minute with one two minutes later - that's not much time to actually judge the quality of the posts.
Additionally, just reading the answers, they don't seem to be particularly good answers - certainly not worthy of huge bounties.
Considering the age of the posts (2015), quality of the answers (low), and the rapidity of voting (high)... well...
I don't think you have anything to worry about.