Help Vampires are users who incessantly ask simple and/or previously-answered questions and provide nothing of value to the community. Over time, they can drive valuable contributors away.
That post (aside from being overly juvenile) is pure speculation and not backed by any sort of data that would suggest that "help vampires" impact the larger community.
It's an extremely condescending and unprofessional term to refer to your less experienced users. It really betrays the core problem with the SO staff. They've gone moderation mad and see the user base as the enemy.
They are real. The unwillingness or inability to do some basic research or mental flexibility to adjust generic guidelines to their particular case (maybe 1 step out of 5 needs to be skipped!) combined with their persistence makes them quite frustrating and an outsized time consumption.
The guy who only needs a single link to the right tutorial is easy to deal with and makes all sides happy.
The guy who asks a question because he didn't even bother to read the 5-page beginner's tutorial (you know because he comes back after 1-2 minutes) where answer somewhere further down... well... after seeing your 50th or 100th of that kind you just want to yell at them.
Others expect you to fix their pastebinned code for them and do not take prose for an answer. They don't want to understand what's going on and what they did wrong, they just want you to do it for them.
It perfectly encapsulates how those people are perceived. They drain the fun out of helping others. Playing language police is unlikely to gain you any more ears from people who feel drained by the vampires.
> ton of speculation about the impact of this type of thing, zero data.
Do you expect them to have a positive impact that would increase if moderation were decreased?
It's unprofessional for a company to refer to its users like this. Calling people names is childish and helps nothing.
> Do you expect them to have a positive impact that would increase if moderation were decreased?
My theory is that the cost of this behavior is near zero but "fighting" it is being used as cover for abusive mod behavior and a culture of intolerance that's chasing away high value users. I for one don't contribute to the site anymore and I know I'm not alone.
> It's unprofessional for a company to refer to its users like this.
You have to consider that this term is used by the community. That includes meta-discussion between the community and SO staff in the course of doing their job. So in a sense he is acting according to his profession.
What you call "calling names" is merely categorizing people according to their observable behavior. We categorize things and people every day. You could replace the term with another one, the underlying aspect of assigning a label to a cluster of behaviors remains unchanged. You would just end up treading the euphemism treadmill.
You cannot stop people from assigning labels to categorize negative patterns where someone else might end up offended by that label due to the negative connotations that the word will accumulate.
So why bother? Why not relabel it as "colloquial, but there's a story behind it" in your mind instead of asking everyone else to change their minds?
>abusive mod behavior and a culture of intolerance that's chasing away high value users.
If with "mod behavior" you mean downvotes and close votes, that's a large fraction of the user base that can do that and they can also be undone. While sometimes they might be doled out on a hair trigger it looks to me like there usually is some reason behind that, a reason which could be addressed by some changes to the question.
If you see it as a trade, haggling on a bazaar to provide a good question (that may serve future users) in exchange for a good answer (that may serve you) instead of draconian mods cracking down on you then those downvotes are nothing more than a "your offer isn't good enough" statement.
So maybe it is just a communication issue, to make it clear that users should have the expectation that they may need to refine their questions?
I have an interest in forums, but I'm not familiar with that "category".