Editors are parasites

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

On community sites, the folks who like to edit other people’s work tend to be the kinds of people who prefer to manage other people rather than do work. When there is no filter on who becomes an editor, the problem can sink a community.

I was a frequent contributor to StackOverflow [2] but have largely stopped for a number of reasons, the most important of which is I got a new job that took up much more of my time.
But another reason is that for me, as a (then) frequent answerer, it got a whole lot less interesting. This was due to two factors:
1. A lot of the low-hanging fruit had been answered so the questions became increasingly esoteric such that you were less likely to simply know an answer and had to spend more time researching. That extra time meant you were also less rewarded for the answer because less people were in a position to state that it was correct or not (if you consider karma a “reward”); and
2. The ceaseless campaign against “interesting” questions due to increasing closure due to “subjective and argumentative” and the fragmentation of SO into the many StackExchange sites (causing a lot of questions to be migrated).
There are three basic errors that Joel has (and Jeff had) made (IMHO):
1. Over-emphasis on editing.
In my mind there are three groups: askers, answerers and editors. Jeff & Joel made statements about editors are important and how editing is super-important, basically trying o elevate it to the same level as answering questions.
This is a problem.
Editors are the bureaucrats of the StackOverflow ecosystem. The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy [3]. The more editors you have the less each has to do. Rather than doing less, the kinds of people attracted to this kind of function prefer to simply create work for themselves.
What’s more, from Meta StackOverflow, from interacting from the people who edit a lot (and answer very little if anything), this simply reinforced my view: these are the kinds of people who destroy communities.
Those who can, answer. Those who can’t, edit.
I’ve seen many spurious edits to many of my higher voted answers. Some capitalize something. Others come along and uncapitalize it. I’ve seen people come and add lines to my answers saying I stole it from someone else (seriously).

Post external references

  1. 1
    http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4494016
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