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One of the sources of overzealous actions on Stack Exchange

ˌəʊvəˈzɛləs

  • Excessively enthusiastic
  • Marked by excessive enthusiasm for and intense devotion to a cause or idea
  • With his overzealous attempts to impress, he only managed to annoy her

stæk əʊvə(r)ˈfləʊ

Stack Overflow is for professional and enthusiast programmers, people who write code because they love it. We feel the best Stack Overflow questions have a bit of source code in them, but if your question generally covers …

  • a specific programming problem
  • a software algorithm
  • software tools commonly used by programmers
  • practical, answerable problems that are unique to the programming profession … then you’re in the right place to ask your question!

metə ˌstæk əʊvə(r)ˈfləʊ

If your question is about:

  • Stack Overflow
  • Stack Exchange
  • Stack Overflow Careers
  • Promotions & Advertising
  • Support, feature requests, or bug reports for the core Stack Exchange engine that powers all Stack Exchange websites … it is welcome here.

Here is a graph of Stack Overflow users and Moderators showing how they spend time on Stack Overflow vs Meta StackOverflow. The big blue circle is Jon Skeet, to the bottom right (red circle) is Jeff Atwood

meta vs main

Though this is in 2009, it wouldn't be that wild of an assumption that currently

Users with high meta reputation aren't spending enough time on Stack Overflow (or they have lots of free time)

So now that we know that there are users who enjoy spending more time governing site policy on meta.stackoverflow.com than programming on the main site... what do you end up getting?

That's right. A separate community.

What happens when a portion of this community is given mod privileges on SE sites and then a chatroom (http://meta.stackoverflow.com/search?q=teacher%27s+lounge) to discuss network policies?

That's right. A tightly knit enthusiastic community that controls every SE site.

Stay with me here... because this is the fun part.

What happens when a question from pony.stackexchange.com is posted in said chatroom about an issue and pancakes.stackexchange, waffles.stackexchange.com, and others are compelled to enter into that site to state their opinion on that matter knowing fully well that

  • They are entering the site with 101 reputation (a new user)
  • They most likely don't know the background

Oh wait... no they are helping because they are enthusiastic? What's that? The community never saw this person before and is getting annoyed at said person's entitlement?

With his overzealous attempts to impress, he only managed to annoy her

Well shit.

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