On Meta Stack Overflow, Reddit, Twitter, your grandmother’s Facebook account, Hacker News, Medium, we often read criticisms of content moderation on Stack Overflow. Users report instances of unfair closures, unrelated duplicates, downvotes without an explanation; really, anything that can be perceived as unwelcoming behavior on the part of Stack Overflow content moderators.

I’ve been a decently active content moderator for years. I want to challenge the belief that we, the Stack Overflow content moderators, are out to get you. The reality is less sinister: we are here to scrutinize content and prune what’s inappropriate so you can contribute more productively and so others can find higher quality answers more quickly.

I thought it might be interesting to shine a light on what content moderators have to deal with on any given day. To that end, I’ve authored this post to expose an entire day of my content moderation activities, with commentary!

I keep repeating the terms content moderator/moderation to distinguish between site moderators (little ♦ next to their user name) and their responsibilities and regular users who have gained moderation privileges. Going forward, I’ll be referring to the latter.

Stack Overflow moderation privileges

You can find a summary of my activity on my Stack Overflow profile, here. As of this writing, I’ve gained all the privileges listed above. Unfortunately for our purposes here (but as a guard against revenge votes), some of the actions granted are not public. For example, you won’t be able to see when I vote up or down on a post. Similarly, you cannot audit all the posts I’ve voted to close (although my user name will show up on individual posts where my vote contributed to their closure). I’ll be sharing my actions, whether they’re publicly visible or not.

Vote counts are restricted per day. Here are the rules governing how they are calculated. The actions I’m presenting below all occurred between December 8th and December 9th, 2019. During that time, I exhausted all my close votes, all my delete votes, and, I think, all of my up/down votes.

Historically, I’ve mostly contributed to the popular java , spring , and related tags. But since I participate in moderation with the help of people in the SO Close Vote Reviewers chat group, I did also vote on posts in unrelated tags during that day.

As a reminder, here is Stack Overflow’s Help Center document describing on-topic and off-topic subjects. Here’s the article on voting up and here’s the article on voting down. These are provided as guidance. Unless you’re abusing the privilege by targeting a specific users, you’re free to vote as you see fit.

You can probably tell from the size of your scrollbar that there is a lot of content to follow. It’ll be split up by post on which I acted. After every post, you’ll find a link like this one to skip to the end of the article

> Jump to Summary

Let’s begin, in a mostly chronological order. Spoiler alert: it’s not pretty.