I'm kinda baffled by this complaint. [edit: OP has completely changed their post.]
I'd think most new SO users are looking for help or a solution to a problem. Why was not being able to vote yet so upsetting you abandoned the resource?
I got a stackoverflow account once they stopped requiring you to link to a Facebook or Google account but I've never done anything with it. It's seems somewhat difficult to contribute if you're an expert. The site seems to be geared more towards newbies in design and the community is hostile to them.
I suspect a lot of people who use Stackoverflow have now used it enough (grown up with it) that they don't have these kinds of problems anymore.
I read OP's point as a new user might want to hit the vote in the "thanks, this solved my problem" sense, but gets a rather surly "your vote is denied until you demonstrate that you are worthy" response. Entirely a relevant criticism given that we're discussing SO hostility here.
Edit: OP changed comment while I was writing this; leaving it anyway
Also, comments are prohibited for new users. I ran into this, and wanted to comment on answers I found (noting changes required for new versions of the language), etc., but couldn't. It basically caused me to not help other people for quite awhile until I could finally comment on other posts.
Glad to see an active approach is being taken. SO is a great resource and contains some of the best information on the web IRT programming.
If there was only one thing I could change it would be this:
If someone marks a question as duplicate, and closes, make them provide a link to the 'original' question and a brief summary as to why it is a duplicate.
Closing something as duplicate and then forcing the user who submitted the question to do more digging comes off as hostile, lazy, and even condescending. Sometimes the original question is lazy and un-researched, but in most cases it is hard to find the right search term for the problem you have.
Actually, if you browse up to the top, it tells you what question it's a duplicate of. But even I was thrown off a few days ago, when I couldn't find that link after a question I answered was marked as duplicate. It's just bad UX, I suppose.
Similarly I've had my questions being down-voted with no explanation. Or worse closed as "not a valid question" for no good reason.
The article suggests that the problem is that SO is too cruel to new clueless users. This isn't how it seems to me. Perfectly valid content gets down voted or closed.
That feels like it happens everywhere on the internet. Even here on HN, where you need a significant amount of "points" to downvote comments, you can still just get randomly down voted to oblivion based on a group of people just not agreeing with your content. Sometimes there just isn't rhyme or reason.
This! I have had several instances where some petty tyrant decided my question was a duplicate without providing proof. I questioned it and was given some snarky answer with a question number that was obviously dug up after my response. Looking at that question, it was clear that it was nothing like mine. On other occasions, when a link was provided, if you squinted, you might see the relationship but, for the life of me, I could not come up with a query based on my post that would cause the referenced link to come up. All this leads me to believe there are moderators out the, waiting for new questions that they can respond to first, whether or not they offer worthwhile advice.
The only way to close something as a duplicate is to provide a link to the duplicate. Plus I think each close as duplicate adds a 'Possible duplicate of <xxx>' comment to the question.
My favorite is when I do the digging, find a similar answer that misses a key nuance, link to it to help explain the difference, and then get marked as a duplicate to the question that I am saying is different with no explanation.
SO is a killer resource for me as a new-ish coder but man, there's an uphill climb before you can avoid making people mad while using it.
StackOverflow is good if you come there via a search.
Otherwise, in my experience, it is utterly worthless for getting actual answers.
For instance, I've asked a total of 4 questions on the DBA Stack Exchange. Almost all of them were specific but easily generalized, weren't answered anywhere else. Three of them would have been easily answered by someone with good knowledge of the relevant products. (The other was only answered by significant trial and error.) On three of them, I was the only person to answer. Each of those took hours of research. On the fourth, someone else answered, but didn't appear to actually understand the question.
On StackOverflow itself, I've asked a single question. A moderator told me to do what I explicitly stated in the question I didn't want to do, and closed it as a duplicate.
The bounties are equally useless: earlier today I sacrificed 90% of my DBA reputation to get around 6 more views on my question. I'm pretty sure most of the views I got are from me refreshing the question.
Agreed. Great if your question has already been answered, but it's less than useless if you have a question - it's actually counter productive and a waste of time. I'd given up on questions until seeing this post featured today, so I decided to ask my 3rd question in 7 years (SO). It was down voted within 5 minutes and no idea why. I'll just roll my own solution based on my own suggestion.
EDIT: A moderator helped me out on that last question, and refunded my reputation to let me ask a new, better-worded, question with a bounty. Thanks to that moderator.
Personally, My primary frustration with Stack(Exchange|Overflow) sites is that I _can_ help people there, but I would need to confirm with them with a comment... and I can't because I don't have the points (???) to comment ,but I can answer.
I end up closing the tab, If the site won't give me the basic tools to help someone, then what is the point of letting me sign up.
Them accepting your answer is your confirmation. Just answer and they usually will tell you whether it's correct or helpful. Comments should not be necessary in many cases.
As an aside, if anyone has a good heuristic to identify bad behavior on Stack Overflow, I'd be interested in looking into it since SO data is public. (please do not suggest "build an AI to identify toxic comments")
Here's something she complains about (she posted a screenshot of a comment): "If the error says line 49, it tells you exactly where the problem lies. If you post 7 lines of code here, we clearly cannot tell you what the problem is in line 49." [1]
I see nothing wrong with that.
As luck would have it, today some random stranger recognized me from my Stackoverflow profile at a Panera and asked me to help him debug his Django app. It was straightforward to fix because the error message described the problem exactly, but, for whatever reason, it wasn't apparent to him. I pointed this out, explained the problem, and showed him how to look for additional information based on the error message. Maybe this sounds softer in person, but there is nothing wrong with reminding people to pay attention to error messages, and the importance of giving people adequate amounts of information when you ask for their help.
Now, as a person who's answered many a question on Stackoverflow, I've had people threatening physical harm to me and my loved ones, as well as setting up Twitter accounts to harass me. To their credit, Stackoverflow admins always take swift action when actual harassment occurs. However, Twitter and Facebook seemed rather uninterested.
This also struck me - as far as some of the treatment I've seen and read about on SO, this is downright courteous. She didn't provide enough information to actually answer the question, so literally what the fuck did she want?
> as far as some of the treatment I've seen and read about on SO, this is downright courteous
> so literally what the fuck did she want
Help? Perhaps it was their first time writing a program, and they can't interpret error messages. This is exactly the kind of elitist behaviour people are discussing - and if you're unable to see how the answer might keep people away, then you have no business trying to help new users.
I think you're giving too much weight to the questioner's feelings, and none to the answerer's. Sure, the questioner might feel unwelcome when answers are curt and elitist. But also, the answerers might feel unwelcome when the questioners don't put in at least some effort in their question. Why do you privilege the questioners over the answerers? As a worst case scenario, how do you plan to supply unpaid volunteers who are willing to spend x10 the effort for each questioner? Many of the policies under fire here came out from people criticizing SO for having too many "spam" questions and not retaining experts' interest.
The answerer can choose not to engage and move on. That's where the difference is. The answerer is choosing to use language that is unwelcoming. The questioner does not know they are doing anything wrong.
I'm not suggesting the fix is to simply be nicer. There needs to be better incentives and tools to manage poor quality questions.
Here’s a slightly different response that is hopefully more welcoming.
“The error message says the problem is on line 49 but you haven’t shown that line in your example code. Can you please show the code referred to on line 49 and the surrounding code for context?”
I think power users on SO are frustrated by newer users not learning the rules and not helping themselves. But if you respond with kindness you’re teaching somebody (and that’s what answerers are there to do!) how to better contribute in future.
Make a Deep Learning bot inserting whatever ornamentation of sentences you like. You can choose multiple styles and personalize for whatever makes you feel good. Why require one single standard from everyone? The answer that was "offensive" was just a standard dry answer like you hear at any top university everywhere; I found "(brutal) exercise is left to the reader" way more offensive.
No one claimed the answer was offensive. It's unnecessarily condescending though. If you, as a senior developer, spoke to a junior developer on their first day at a new job in the same way, they'd be very unlikely to come to you for help in the future.
Learning how to interpret error messages and extract the important information is a skill. What may seem obvious to you may not be obvious to someone with barely any experience.
> was just a standard dry answer like you hear at any top university everywhere
Which makes it OK? If university lecturers are speaking to new students trying to learn in this way, they shouldn't be teaching new students.
I had gazillion encounters when senior engineers/managers were unbelievably condescending, especially when they saw a capable competitor in you. The keyword is resilience, are you going to gain this virtue, or are you going to complain everywhere and cry on all available shoulders, and then once you get what you wanted, start backstabbing anyone that helped you to keep them down and forget about what put you there? I was one of those "useful idiots" that was helping to my utmost capacity others, wasting time I could have spent working on bigger projects helping humanity. Every single case when those people got what they wanted stopped recognizing me and called me only when they needed something. I am no longer than person.
If you really want something, work on it to the full extent of your own capabilities, get ready to be beaten from left and right and figure out how to move forward. Don't expect help from around you. When somebody shows generosity to you, treat it as a wonderful bonus you try to return somehow someday, not a requirement.
> If you really want something, work on it to the full extent of your own capabilities, get ready to be beaten from left and right and figure out how to move forward. Don't expect help from around you.
This should not be an expectation of the world, and I'm sorry you've had the experiences you've had to see it as such. This is exactly what people are complaining about when they say tech is hostile. It's not just hostile to minorities, it can be hostile to everybody.
We can choose to do unto others, or we can choose to break that cycle and be more welcoming. If you're unable to do this on stackoverflow, then may I suggest you don't participate.
Frankly, resilience is necessity. The better you are, the more you are eclipsing the others, the stronger averse reaction you get everywhere. People could be your best friends until you escape their crab bucket, then you are suddenly a well-known enemy and rumors start spreading. I am no longer going out of my way to help those people; I believe they deserve where they are as they chose to stay in the bucket of their own loathing. But I am not going to be nasty to them at all. Their kids still have potential, so those are treated without indifference.
> Can you please show the code referred to on line 49 and the surrounding code for context?”
If you are paying me my hourly, I'll pretty please you to no end. Otherwise, I am not sure why I am expected to beg for people to give information that would help me help them.
Then move on and don't respond at all. Leave the begging to the users that want to help new users get better. There's a genuine complaint that responses to new users are often harsher than required. "I shouldn't have to beg for information" is not a valid response to that criticism.
Answerers have no idea about the skill level of the people asking the questions. Their english might not be so good. This might be the first time someone is programming and they don't know which line in a stack trace is particularly important. They Need Help. If you're not willing to help users at that skill level, then don't. But it's totally unfair to criticise them.
You misunderstand. If you are paying me, I have no problem letting you spend more of your money by not giving enough information to solve the problem. I will point out once, and if you express the desire that I spend more time validating you, I will gladly do that.
As it stands, you should keep in mind that you don't get to tell me what to do.
Telling someone "we can't figure out what's wrong on line 49 if you don't show us what's on line 49" is not condescending, rude, discriminatory, racist, sexist, etc etc at all. It is a factual statement that is aimed at pointing out exactly what the person who is seeking help needs to do to get said help.
Now, if I point something out like this, and I get a response like yours, I move on. Before moving on, however, I do vote to close the question because 1) there isn't enough information to diagnose the problem; and 2) the OP is unwilling to provide it.
If you think I did something wrong in my response to you, you can flag my response for moderator attention. If that is not resolved to your liking, you can post on Meta.
It is interesting to me that supposedly all these people who just want more niceness are the ones calling high-rep users and moderators assholes, insulting them indiscriminately etc.
As I mentioned before, you can always go on Meta, and suggest ways to improve https://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask . If a first time user fails to follow the recommendations therein, it is incumbent upon the people who are trying to help to point it out so the mistake can be corrected. If people persist in not following advice, instead accusing people of all sorts of nasty things, they are unlikely to get the help they want.
Keep in mind that some of these people may be writing the software for your bank or may end up next to you in that open floor plan office of yours. Helping them learn how to most effectively find answers to their questions may help you save time and aggravation later on.
> Telling someone "we can't figure out what's wrong on line 49 if you don't show us what's on line 49" is not condescending
You've edited the quote, leaving out the bits that are condescending. Here it is again:
> "If the error says line 49, it tells you exactly where the problem lies. If you post 7 lines of code here, we clearly cannot tell you what the problem is in line 49."
The second sentence is where the snark starts to creep in. The tone is unnecessary, and the word "clearly" can easily make the asker feel bad. That's where the condescension comes from. It's totally not clear to the person asking, or they wouldn't be asking the question as they are.
> If you think I did something wrong in my response to you, you can flag my response for moderator attention.
I think more of this should be happening, and more tools available to manage unhelpful answerers. I don't know what these tools should look like, but I have some ideas.
> I mentioned before, you can always go on Meta
A lot of these users are new! They don't know about Meta. Their first interaction with the site boils down to "wow you're dumb, can't you read?", and then they're gone for good. Someone brings up on a HN post that SO is elitist and the original asker, who now has some experience under their belt, confirms "yep, it was a horrible toxic place".
> Helping them learn how to most effectively find answers to their questions may help you save time and aggravation later on.
I totally agree. Helping people diagnose their issues and teaching them how to write good questions is fantastic. It can be done with a better tone than what's currently happening.
Some highly visible CEO of a developer community improvement startup pointed out some mean SO comments towards anonymous newcomers, then said those anonymous newcomers are actually women, so therefore SO is in fact sexist to its very core.
But if SO works with her company, she can help them not get called online by people like her. It’s literally a mob-style protection scam.
That medium post is downright nasty - if you know how people use "victimhood" to achieve their hidden goals, this is like 101 example. She should be ashamed of herself to use references of real suffering in making money and getting herself known by attacking established players in sneaky ways. Absolutely disgusting.
>Too many people experience Stack Overflow¹ as a hostile or elitist place, especially newer coders, women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups.
Women consider SO an elitist place? People of colour? What colour? Black? White? Marginalised groups? Which groups are those? Are people in SO hostile to Palestinians? Amputees? Such an accusation, where's the data to back it? I'm white and male and completely normal and let me tell you: everybody in SO behaves like a stuck-up twat to me. This has nothing to do with "diversity". Too many people are there sitting in a throne of points and medals and rubbish, closing comments and questions and editing whatever they see fit.
The truth of the matter is that you've had a code on conduct for a long time and everybody ignored it so this post is not going to change that. Why don't you just change the braindead voting system?
How does anyone even know what color or sex someone is on SO? Seems like those people are either imagining it or they're generally intimidated by programmers and their typical arrogant or blunt attitudes everywhere.
I saw an example a while back of an SO question about "how should I store gender (sex) in a database". Conflating the two may alienate or upset a transgender individual, without the participants in the Q&A ever being aware of that person. Maybe they're a new user with no ability to comment to point it out, and they just head elsewhere from then on.
Similarly, if minority groups are more prone to imposter syndrome, it may be that aggressive and blunt answers impact them disproportionately.
In both of these cases, it needn't be intentional or directed at any particular individual to have a disproportionate impact on a group of people. Just as a group can get a reputation of being a "boys club" without explicit "no girls" rules.
I too was wondering how this shakes out. The vast majority of <100 rep users I come across that ask pretty dicey questions have a default user profile picture or a picture of something that is not a person, not associated with an ethnic/religious/political group, etc. How can a group be intentionally or unconsciously hostile to POC and women when their photo is a stock photo provided by SO and their handle is user12098739578?
The keyword being experience. The same behavior is experienced differently by different people, and being in a group who is more at risk for self-doubt tends to produce the experience of hostility more easily.
Yep, I posted one question on SO and almost exactly 10 minutes later it got downvoted for being "not enough code to compile" or somesuch. Not really a warm welcome -- I have a pretty thick skin but was seriously considering just deleting the account.
Turns out there was exactly enough code to get a working answer (which I knew from the beginning when I chose what code to include), the problem was simply a matter of (undocumented) lib changes which were pretty obvious. I still don't understand why someone who had no idea what the problem was decided to downvote instead of just leaving it for someone more knowledgeable to deal with.
Now if I were a sensitive individual I can see how this could be construed as "not welcoming to &whatever_group_I_identify_with".
I don't disagree with the article in general but I was surprised by the women and people of color comments -- how does anyone know someone's gender or race on SO?
Of all the sites on the Internet, SO seems to be particularly well suited to the anonymity of posters -- even more so than HN because HN is more free form and conversational.
Maybe women and people of color just perceived SO as a more hostile place because they imagined the person on the other side of the keyboard as a white male (true or not) and took it as an attack on their gender/race, forgetting that they are anonymous.
> how does anyone know someone's gender or race on SO?
SO allows people to use an avatar image. I think for some time they were using images from Gravatar. So people were putting images of themselves in posts; or they didn't realise their gravatar image would be used.
From the paper: "although the computing field is generally unbalanced towards men, the community around this Q&A site [StackOverflow] seems to create and maintain higher barriers to entry for women."
How about that tribe of people who aren't mentally capable of phrasing a consice question and include proper context? They are constantly being discriminated against. I know, I used to be one.
>Why don't you just change the braindead voting system?
I think this is what it's really going to take for SO's culture to change. There's definitely a hostile/elitist bent to it, but the thesis that this has anything to do with oppression is just plain laughable, so let's cut this mass of empty virtue signaling away from the greater point and see what we're left with.
SO's niche has shifted as an effect of their own success. The early rules served to create a really great compendium of google-bait, the common "how do I do X in Y" questions from newbies that now have literal thousands of votes because they're genuinely useful and helpful. Now that the well-traveled roads are all plowed, it leaves only the extremely situational.
And if SO hates one thing, it's the extremely situational. When they're not downvoted, they're ignored, and when they're not ignored, they're closed with curt messages that either leave the asker wondering what the fuck they did wrong, or redirect to other questions that don't actually answer the situation the asker was asking about, or ask them to spend a bunch of time on a low-to-no productive feedback process (either arguing on meta or trying to get reopen votes) that won't actually accomplish the one thing they went to the site for.
Part of being a newbie is not having the mental context necessary to ask more effective questions, because you don't know enough about the thing you're asking about to have the information to put together a decent question in the first place!
From the article:
>Let’s reject the false dichotomy between quality and kindness. Quality matters because it means posts can help more people.
Great! That means referring to the users with derisive (and dare I say: non-welcoming and non-inclusive) terms like "help vampire" will stop, right?
Why is it that so many complaints about SO includes insults about users with high scores?
Very specifically calling out "they have a score higher than mine" as part of the description of the hostile behaviour. Isn't that a bit odd, wouldn't you expect them to only focus on the behaviour and the content, not the number next to the name?
Too many people are there sitting in a throne of points, and medals and rubbish, closing comments and questions and editing whatever they see fit.
Whereas the people without a throne of points who are closing questions and editing whatever they want, and commenting rudely, are .. not hostile? Is there an undercurrent of chip-on-shoulder points-resentment in the complaints in aggregate?
A throne of points implies you're spending a lot of time on SO, which begs the question: are you actually doing any useful work from which to draw the experience you're pretending to have when answering?
> Feelings have no “technically correct.” They’re just what the feeler is telling you. When someone tells you how they feel, you can pack up your magnifying glass and clue kit, cuz that’s the answer. You’re done.
This is such an important point and missed so often by technical types. Impressed to hear it stated so clearly here.
I'm sure no fan of dismissive, know-it-all programmers, but to play devil's advocate, who's injecting their feelings into a site with the explicit purpose of solely answering programming questions?
I think any tool which facilitates communication between 2 or more humans will involve emotions. I'd guess it's certainly likely to be the case on a forum for technical Q&A, for multiple potential reasons:
- the questioner and the answerer might have vastly different levels of experience & therefore struggle to exchange ideas in terms they both understand
- people might already be frustrated when they ask a question, since they may have already invested a lot of time trying (and failing) to solve a problem
- multiple answerers are competing to be the endorsed answer, and there are rewards associated with it
But that doesn't mean they should dominate everything we do.
Feelings shouldn't control us, they can guide us sure enough, but the moment they control us we might just as well climb back up the trees and go back to angrily flinging poo at each other.
Well said. People mostly want to avoid hurting others feelings, but that opens us up to an attack vector where a person or group demands that others change their behaviour so as to respect their feelings, but in bad faith a means of subjugating others. The Crybully exploit if you will.
This has become such a common feature of every debate that the angry mobs on the internet are a greater threat than government to freedom of speech.
I've actually had this argument with someone who was attempting to force the use of a framework because "I just feel it's easier."
As a good faith speaker, I agree with you. A native speaker should be self aware enough to not confuse an unsupported opinion with a "feeling", nor should we dismiss feelings.
However, frequently, feelings are used as a poor substitute for rationality. Therefore I reject the argument that feelings can't be debated or argued.
SO could make a site with all the same content, downvotes disabled, comments disabled, and all flags disabled. You would also get random upvotes to reinforce that your question was good. That would make everyone feel safe and appreciated since they are unable to see any negative comments towards them and their question.
I bet that will float higher in Google than the current SO since the questions will be more specific to your query and newer (since no "dupe" flags on every second or third question asked).
It's straight-up wrong though. A number of people feel unwelcome or hostile? Okay, out of how many?
There's always going to be a very small percentage of people who don't fit in in large groups, no matter how much you try to work with them. They're also the ones who tend to speak up, and StackOverflow's userbase is massive, so this number gets inflated to something that may seem like a lot, but really isn't that many - and may well be within the error margin for "people who won't fit in".
Typically moderation would push these people away, so they don't keep complaining, but StackOverflow, despite any issues it has, is too good a resource as-is.
Maybe they should make a stackoverflow for women. The answer doesn't have to be right, it just has to make you feel good.
Men built stackoverflow. Yes, those "technical types". Men can build things like this precisely because men value what is correct. If you want somewhere where feelings have a place you should stick to the creative arts.
> Maybe they should make a stackoverflow for women. The answer doesn't have to be right, it just has to make you feel good.
You're being a shithead. This isn't about men or women, and feelings are not exclusive to women. For example, I am sure it doesn't feel nice to be called a shithead.
However, it's inaccurate to assume that the problems on SO stem from how these mythological women feel. There's a disagreement and lack of clarity on the purpose of the site. That needs to be resolved.
Moreover, the site has become a big enough platform that it now it needs to answer the question whether it exists to serve the needs of the users, or primarily to serve its own assumed purpose.
I don't know why the SO blog chose to highlight women, poc etc. as the ones inconvenienced by this. Poor move on their part, as it seems to have targeted these populations as the cause of the problem.
I have not, but I think the point they're trying to make (but don't really agree with) is that of cultural norms, or more specifically, the cultural norm of overly-assertive, insensitive nerds (most of which who are younger white males), so that it's an unwelcoming environment to outsiders.
Probably true, but even shifting the demographic mix (with a large % of interactions on SO still being white male) is male Indian culture and communication style inclusive towards females and other groups? I may be off-base, but my experience is that Indian males are very point-blank and strongly assertive in their communication style, so the underlying assertion about inclusiveness would still ring true I think.
I got downvoted for answering some simple questions at stackoverflow.com for encouraging low quality questions. This was discussed in the article.
I can see why some people can get hostile as some questions are framed as please solve this for me. Usually people ask the posters to tell them what they had done but the tone of that request can be harsh.
I think the elitism is most prevalent in stackoverlow. The other stack websites seem less hostile.
About your last comment: I respectfully disagree.
I dabble in a handful of other stack sites, but the only one I have some real experience with (apart from SO itself) is the one devoted to tabletop roleplay gaming.
(I have a score of ~3500 on SO and ~2800 on RPG - i.e. respectively top 7% and top 13% just to give you an idea).
On the RPG site, especially in the last couple of years at least, there seems to be a certain fanatism among moderators in sticking to the most literal interpretation of the "rules" (e.g.: if a question is about "what system you would use simulate movie X?" it is strictly verboten to answer unless you describe having extensive experience with the system you suggest).
Rules and "quality" are fine, except that while I can understand that SO is used almost exclusively for job-related questions, so the quality of a question can potentially cost you much... I doubt that anyone will have their career ruined if they pick the wrong edition of D&D to replay Game of Thrones or - perish the though - miss some important errata on elvish footgear when creating their next character.
(I also dabble in a few more, like japanese language and martial arts but they are either less strict in general, better mannered or maybe there is so little traffic that moderators have no reason to obsess about "quality").
I think "being nice on the internet" is typically a learned skill, unfortunately. That said, sometimes comments that appear scathing are actually warranted criticism - perpetuating "bad" knowledge can be very harmful to the person using it and to those that use their products or code.
Some of the active users in the PHP tag (where I spend some time) have pre-made snippets for common issues, like SQL injection, deprecated function use, etc.
On really problematic code, this can lead to a stampede of comments, each mentioning a different issue with grim wording, which can be really unwelcoming even if they're completely correct.
> Too many people experience Stack Overflow as a hostile or elitist place, especially newer coders, women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups
Breaking that down...
"...people experience Stack Overflow as a hostile or elitist place..."
This is obvious just by looking at the discussions that happen here, or, even by observing the SO-related memes that bubble up to the top of Reddit programming subs. I have commented on it myself.
"...especially newer coders, women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups."
lol what?
Like most programmers, I use SO practically every day. I don't post much because that's usually a waste of time, but I land on SO from searching for errors all the time. I cannot recall ever, even once, seeing someone's race, sex, or orientation being mocked or even mentioned. As far as I can tell most users don't have full names or photos on their profiles. So it isn't even possible to know such things unless it was volunteered, and that never happens when asking questions about APIs and whatnot.
So what in the heck are they even talking about? I'm glad the issue is getting attention, but justifying like this strikes me as pointless virtue signaling. Perhaps they are trying to stem criticism from their power users who like SO the way it is.
It's almost like this was directly addressed in the article:
>especially the idea that women and people of color felt particularly unwelcome. There’s a weird paradox with bias. Those of us who have privilege, but care deeply about reducing bias should be uniquely positioned to help, but we struggle the hardest to recognize that we are (unintentionally) biased ourselves
And this line in your post:
>pointless virtue signaling.
Really nice recycled talking point. It also strikes at the heart of the above quote.
Bias is real, and privilege is real. I don't argue otherwise.
Let's be honest here. If you are able to post on SO at all, you are in the global top 10% of privilege. If you scale it down to a company, it's like the President vs a VP. I choose not to spend my energy splitting those hairs.
You are spending your energy attempting to ignore people's view points.
You called SO reacting to complaints and feedback "pointless virtue signaling" You are now attempting to say you personally wouldn't bother with what SO is doing (as if anyone asked) because other people are unfortunate enough to not have access to the same resources we do? Do I really need to illustrate how nonsensical that is?
I don't think what they mean is that when a minority goes to SO and they get a condescending response it's because of their race/ethnicity/gender.
What they mean is that, since minorities might have insecurities about their ability to code because there are not that many people who look like them in the industry, when they receive a condescending response their insecurities aggravate. Therefore, SO can be consider more hostile for minorities.
I like your explanation--I hadn't thought of it and it's less cynical/more charitable than the obvious alternative (virtue signaling). But wouldn't the same be true of anyone with heightened insecurities? Why highlight minorities?
Because the community doesn't identify with them? Specific insecurities isn't something that can be addressed at a platform level but general ones like "am I a member of the group of programmers because I am black/female/gay/trans" can be better targeted. So they probably won't help everyone by doing this but they can help a large group of unserved people.
We don't need to stop at group-level insecurities, we can just be kinder and more welcoming to everyone, thereby addressing _all_ insecurities. This has the added bonus of dodging the entirely unnecessary, divisive, and toxic political fights about which groups are the most victimized.
They probably have more data on minorities than on insecurities. Some ad networks can tell your gender and ethnicity with reasonable accuracy (especially in the aggregate). Stack Overflow might be affiliated to one of those, or use data mining algorithms similar to what they use.
They also run polls among their users, I believe. It's easier to ask about gender/race in a poll than about unspecified insecurities.
Well, the implication is still that hostility is somehow less serious or meaningful when directed at white men... I think you can imagine why that would make us uncomfortable.
Or worse, they're implying that minorities and women are all insecure and thin skinned which is the very behavior and thinking they're ostensibly trying to prevent.
That comment doesn't contradict my point at all. All it says is "Someone who has been bullied may interpret future slights as more of the same bullying."
That has absolutely nothing to do with race or gender, and I still think it's for more insulting to imply that people in specific demographics are more sensitive or insecure.
I think that the reason so many people find this implication palatable is that there are loads of examples of people saying, from experience, that it does in fact happen this way.
The idea is not that they're 'fundamentally' more sensitive or insecure; it's that they're _empirically_ more sensitive and insecure, due to the circumstances of reality.
Yours is a beautifully written and well-considered reply.
As someone who has had both academic and career success (and failures), I know I am capable as a developer and able to contribute meaningfully to technical discussions.
As a person of color, however, I have also experienced harassment by police, suspicious looks from shop owners, and outright hostility from drunken young men.
So, whenever I encounter what appears to be irrational anger or inexplicable disrespect, I cannot help but wonder and worry that I'm being poorly treated because of my race, even when I suspect that's not the case. The person who treats me poorly need not necessarily be discriminating against me because of my race, but I can never know and, of course, unless someone is calling me racial epithets such poorly behaved people are unlikely to admit bias.
It's sort of like being bullied in elementary school, and then high school, and then college, and then as a working adult. You never outgrow the bullying. Indeed, the bullying seems to get worse as one matures and loses the youthful physical characteristics which people often read as non-threatening.
So regardless of intention (and sometimes because of it), feeling discriminated against can be partly the result of lifelong experience and is probably fairly characterized as a form of post-traumatic stress disorder.
EDIT: remove two instances of repeated "as"; add "often"; remove comma; change pronoun.
Well said. I didn't understand this at all until the post yesterday "Walking While Black". Essays like that and comments like this are eye openers and should be spread wide to people of privilege. Perspective is powerful
I think what they mean is that because of their experiences they have less tolerance for hostility than you do.
Most of the time people are verbally hostile towards you nothing terrible ends up happening so you eventually learn to ignore minor hostility. However if you had the sort of bad experiences minorities have, you would learn to be wary of minor hostility, as it is often the precursor to major hostility or even physical harm.
You know how evolutionary psychologists often attribute human stupidity to adaptations that made sense in prehistoric times? Like your instincts tell you sugar is good for you because it used to be found mostly on fruit and nutritious berries, but nowadays the instinct leads you to eat junk food. In the modern world sugar has nothing to do with high food quality (just the opposite) but the instinct remains.
For minorities, their instinct to recoil at minor hostility is like that, except that instead of an ancient adaptation to deal with the life at the Savannah, it is the habit that helped you keep your sanity this very morning at the office when your asshole coworker yelled at you. In Stack Overflow nobody is going to yell at you or punch you or try to get you fired, but the instinct remains.
If you have less tolerance, how is that anyone else's problem?
Some people are also more prone to sunburn than others, but we don't say the sun needs to be less bright. You are in control of your own feelings. Yes, StackOverflow should generally have better language and reworked rules around content, voting and moderation, but that has nothing to do with how susceptible you are to comments on the internet.
Also why is it that minorities always comes down to not being male or white when half the planet is female and most of the planet is not white? Do we not have any other dimensions? It's a rather meaningless definition when used in context of a globally accessible site with anonymous user accounts where the audience already has a major commonality (interest in software development) that is far more inclusive than any irrelevant physical trait.
If some people are more prone to sunburn than others then you shouldn't have a developers' technical conference outdoors in the summer on a tropical area.
It may not be your problem or your responsibility to prevent other people's sunburns (they can buy their own sunscreen, right?) but I hope you realize that ignoring their preferences is shitty behaviour that will give you(r website) a bad reputation.
And it's not like protecting your conference from sunlight will benefit only the albinos. Sunburn resistance is not the same as immunity, so everyone benefits at least a little. Same with SO, even people with thick skin will benefit at least a little from a less toxic environment.
> even people with thick skin will benefit at least a little from a less toxic environment.
That argument is not entirely solid. After all the toxic environment is also the same environment that provides those answers. So if those two were positively correlated then decreasing toxicity could also drive down the answer quality. A cartoony scenario would be a stack overflow where everyone is busy assuring everyone else that their questions are good, non-stupid questions and they should be praised for asking them and wasting a lot of time on those instead of answering questions.
Of course we're unlikely to be at a global optimum here, so things can certainly be improved. You should just be more careful about analyzing those tradeoffs.
Yes, obviously. Personal responsibility instead of blaming others. In your scenario, some might like to be outside so how are you including them? That's the fallacy with trying to make everyone happy; it's impossible.
Anyways, that also was weird stretch of the analogy as it's the same as saying SO shouldn't allow any communication because some people may feel sad.
This thread is about people feeling that a comment was based on something when the reality is that they don't know. And because they don't know, saying it as fact doesn't make it so, hence we should not suddenly say that they are targeted just because they feel that they are targeted, even if they have a propensity to feel targeted more than others. Your feelings are your concern.
Exactly, if you are more prone to sunburn, wear more sunscreen. Same as handling your own feelings.
And yes, feelings are completely in your head. Things happen in the world and your mind reacts a certain way. Nobody else knows how you will react nor do they have any control of your consciousness.
> Exactly, if you are more prone to sunburn, wear more sunscreen. Same as handling your own feelings.
If you could "handle your feelings" as easily as putting on sunscreen, literally every psychotherapist would be out of work.
> And yes, feelings are completely in your head.
Anything you will ever perceive is "in your head". You don't control a lot of it. "Positive thinking" doesn't cure depression or schizophrenia.
> Nobody else knows how you will react nor do they have any control of your consciousness.
Human reactions are actually fairly predictable. Being rude, arrogant or condescending is generally off-putting. Some amount of control can be exerted as well, for instance, it will almost certainly be impossible for you to not briefly picture a TINY PINK ELEPHANT after having read this sentence.
It's not about easy or hard, the point is that it is under your control.
If your emotions are subconscious and you yourself aren't fully in control then how could you possible blame someone else for them? If it's that simple to be affected then you could just as easily affect yourself back to the state you want to be in, hence it is a circular argument without basis.
The world happens. You react. Equip and train yourself to react differently if you don't like the outcomes.
Predictability does not mean causation, especially when it is not accurate 100% of the time and therefore subjective. Sure, when you yell at someone, they might become upset. But another person might not care at all. So are you now causing both anger and apathy in these individuals with the same statement? Or is it that they react as individuals instead and it's really under none of your control?
> It's not about easy or hard, the point is that it is under your control.
My point, if that hasn't been clear by now, is that your emotions are not under your control. Your physical reactions may or may not be.
> If your emotions are subconscious and you yourself aren't fully in control then how could you possible blame someone else for them?
People stimulate each other's emotions with their behavior, some behavior can certainly be measured to to elicit certain emotions. If I follow your argument, clearly people are in control of their behavior and they are also responsible for it (agreed). So, under certain circumstances, it should be possible to "blame" them, though I'm not focusing on that.
Your "solution" boils down to: "If you're so sensitive and not in control of your emotions, just go away."
That's fine, but not every community needs to have such "low" standards.
> The world happens. You react. Equip and train yourself to react differently if you don't like the outcomes.
An online community is not "the world", we get to design such environments. In "the world", there are tigers and lions, but you wouldn't argue to set them loose on main street just to make people stronger and more vigilant, would you?
> Predictability does not mean causation, especially when it is not accurate 100% of the time and therefore subjective.
That's a pretty weak argument though, in "the world" you always have to go by approximations, even in science we struggle to remove subjectivity completely.
> Sure, when you yell at someone, they might become upset. But another person might not care at all.
Let's say I had the desire to punch a random person in the face, there's certainly an off-chance that some masochist would love to have this happen to them. It's clearly a subjective reaction. Yet, it's not acceptable to go out punching people, don't you agree?
> So are you now causing both anger and apathy in these individuals with the same statement? Or is it that they react as individuals instead and it's really under none of your control?
I must appeal to your common sense. If some behavior of yours causes, for example "50% anger, 30% apathy, 19% annoyance and 1% joy" across a selection of subjects, then the chance that any of it is not negative is 1%. Yelling at people probably isn't so far off from that, DO YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT I MEAN? Sure, I can't predict with 100% certainty what the reaction will be, but if something is 99% bad, it'll better have some strong upside for me to accept it in my community. Yelling at people doesn't have that upside, it's generally frowned upon, so it's reasonable to not allow it. Of course, most people generally understand and follow that without it having to be made a rule.
I'm not sure what you're arguing because we're not discussing probabilities or socially acceptable behavior. We're talking about cause and effect, of self control over actions and feelings. The standard is that you should have personal responsibility and control your emotions, the highest standard there is.
Yes, there are obviously certain patterns of behavior and you shouldn't punch people, however it is completely within their control what they feel and do about it. They can choose to hit back, or ignore you. Just because everyone reacts with anger to something does not mean you must. It only means that it's a common reaction, nothing more, and has nothing to do with control over that action itself. They choose to do something, you can choose differently, even if you're 1 in a million. What about that is confusing?
Either you believe you have the will to control your emotions and actions or you don't. And if think you don't and it's really that simple to affect your emotions without any mental control, then you must also accept that you can impart that same effect by just doing different actions and making yourself feel differently.
> Also why is it that minorities always comes down to not being male or white when half the planet is female and most of the planet is not white?
Because that use of language about marginalized/disadvantaged/underrepresented groups arose specifically in the context of racial minorities in the US, at a time when Whites were both an overwhelming majority and socially dominant it of proportion to their numerical dominance; the language is sometimes extended to contexts where “minority” is not strictly to accurate (though note that the article here does not make that error, it refers to “women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups”, not “minorities”.)
EDIT:
Also,
> If you have less tolerance, how is that anyone else's problem?
That someone doing unconsented harm is not absolved of responsibility for that harm because the victim is unusually susceptible is the moral principle underlying the eggshell rule [0], which applies widely in civil and criminal law, so it's not exactly a novel principle.
This isn't about society, it's about a website with worldwide access using anonymous usernames. Nobody is inherently disadvantaged. The exact issue is harsh replies and actions that stem from the gamification dynamics and strict moderation. It has nothing to do with physical traits of the user on either side, especially when users are anonymous. Minorities and marginalized groups are nice to mention in the current PC climate but have little do with the actual topic.
Law is based on provable damages, which is why it's particularly focused on physical harm. Your feelings are not included in that. Experiencing an emotion is not damage. Also tort law means the defendant had a duty to act in a certain way and failed to do so, with the plaintiff proving the failure of that duty led to the harm. Intent also matters a great deal so unless you can now derive and prove intentions and duty behind StackOverflow comments, this example does not apply to this topic.
Yes, and I answered your question about where the pattern of using “minorities” as it was used there came from.
> This isn't about society, it's about a website with worldwide access using anonymous usernames.
How is that not part of society?
> Nobody is inherently disadvantaged.
The issue with disadvantaged, underrepresented, and/or marginalized groups has very little to do with inherent disadvantage, and the suggestion that it centrally is about that is fairly broadly offensive, since it implies that such groups are generally inherently inferior.
> The exact issue is harsh replies and actions that stem from the gamification dynamics and strict moderation.
Whether or not that’s true, it had nothing to do with the question you posed and I answered, so I don't see why it is being offered in response.
> Law is based on provable damages,
True.
> which is why it's particularly focused on physical harm.
This is far less true.
> Your feelings are not included in that.
Yes, they are included in the scope of legally cognizable harms. While the eggshell rules name references physical vulnerability, civil and criminal law address (and the eggshell rule applies to) emotional injuries, as well.
> Experiencing an emotion is not damage.
Torts like those of intentional and negligent infliction of emotional distress demonstrate the falsitt of this generalization of the law, as does the “suffering” part of “pain and suffering” damages in other torts.
I should preface this by saying this isn't directed at the parent I'm replying to. It's just the point where I couldn't read anymore without posting. What is offensive is Stack Overflow using this obsequious, cloying, patronizing language and false equivalence -- that women/PoC are broadly inexperienced ("newer coders, women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups") -- to virtue signal for more clicks and advertising dollars, or to push their recruiting effort. I find Stack Overflow's post shockingly distasteful. It takes a lot to offend me, but this is disgusting.
And couldn't they find a better person in this tech company to deliver this message than a white dude VP?
Then they explain that this is really, actually happening because the marginalized groups "do feel less welcome... because they tell us" (emphasis mine). Do these marginalized groups know how everyone else feels? Have the marginalized-but-anonymous users invented a telepathy device with which to gauge their feelings against others?
Please demonstrate how any Stack Overflow user can know that they feel something more or less than any other user.
It lumps them together in the same breath, obviously hoping to draw an equivalence in the minds of readers in order to make their preposterous proposition less offensive. Wielding identity politics as a means of creating marketing buzz is flatly vile.
Why are you even discussing tort law? Feelings are not damage. Has your emotional psyche has been permanently affected leading to challenges in how you function and cope in life? Feeling sad or frustrated or annoyed because your question was downvoted is not emotional distress. And what does this have to do with Stackoverflow? What's the duty of a commenter? How do you know the intent? Who's getting traumatized by that site specifically?
You're reaching here and if you are more affected than average by comments from other people (on SO or life in general) then perhaps you should work on that instead of claiming emotional suffering.
As I expressly stated, to demonstrate that two moral principals that contradict claims made upthread are well established in our society: (1) that the particular sensitivity of a victim to harm from a particular wrong doesn't mitigate the wrongdoers responsibility for the harm, and (2) that experiencing adverse emotional states is a harm.
I agree feeling targeted does not necessarily mean one has been targeted, and I do think that sometimes the feeling of being targeted is the result of past experience (comparable to post-traumatic stress disorder).
Though SO usernames are often pseudonymous, they are not always anonymous. For example, some SO profiles contain photographs of the user. Mine does.
Also, sometimes I search for information about users with whom I interact. I imagine others do the same.
We both agree "being targeted" is different than "feeling targeted". A third thing that is different than both of these is "being affected".
That is, even if someone from a marginalized group is not being targeted for being a member of a marginalized group, the negative effects of perceived hostility may be larger on people from marginalized groups than on people from dominant groups. Not always, but sometimes, and this is what SO seems to be taking to heart.
A few comments have suggested one solution is to improve the climate for everyone by welcoming new users with all their inexperience rather than discouraging them by enforcing standards of contribution achieved by elite longtime users. I wholeheartedly agree.
By encouraging newbies who don't yet know much, SO stands to grow its ranks and help newbies become experienced contributors. As a former educator, I know encouraging students in the directions they are doing well is much more pedagogically effective than tearing down students when they make mistakes.
Communities like SO would improve if they not only discouraged negativity but also encouraged non-elite participation. HN is one such community that does this well and the quality of the content here speaks for itself.
EDIT: reword first sentence; change "old-hands" to "experienced contributors"; add comma in second sentence.
I do not like this line of reasoning because it basically advocates walking on eggshells around everyone since it is not possible to model the potential fragility of mind of billions of humans.
I read some arguments that being drive-by downvoted without comments somehow made people unwelcomed. And you add to that that this is practically a form of PTSD.
If I am supposed to model people at the other end of the screen as "my downvote might trigger PTSD" then, mildly put, I do not find that model to be very helpful. I can't quite put my finger on it, but it seems like some sort of game-theoretic trap.
Disclaimer: I don't see myself as a kind person and asking me to spend extra mental energy just to be nice is like asking for a pound of my flesh. Thus the above may be motivated reasoning to ignore people who complain about the lack of kindness.
> I don't see myself as a kind person and asking me to spend extra mental energy
If you can't be kind, then the preferred action from you is for you to save your energy for the days when you can be kind. That's better for everyone involved.
This is not an argument, nor a definition. To save you the "energy", I'll remind you of the fact that these terms are extremely subjective. If you know what's "better for everyone" please share it with me, because I would like to know so I could act accordingly. I would also like you to tell me the means through which you came to that conclusion.
Failure to provide me with the necessary information will, in my opinion, confirm that what you were doing is just mere virtue signalling.
I believe it would be better for everyone if you told me what you believe[1] is better for everyone, so everyone who reads your comment might act accordingly in the best interest of others[2].
[1] Note that it's subjective.
[2] Where "best interest of others" is defined by you, which is subjective and probably inaccurate. On what basis do you have the nerve to claim you know what's better for everyone "involved"?
Look at my karma! I'm clearly oppressed, too. My down-voters are the reason I am experiencing great distress, needless anxiety, etc. Do they care? Of course not, but they expect me to care about their well-being.
P.S. You actually have been down-voted. Hilarious. Some people are seriously deluded.
EDIT: Immediately down-voted, shit, I'm going to continue whining about it instead of not giving a crap. What a hostile, and racist environment! I might as well be black, you bully! Stop giving me mental distress with your down-votes! I feel unwelcome!
EDIT 2: This comment has been flagged and people are unable to see the irony in that. Fascinating.
What if I really do experience mental distress and all of the above? I could literally copy paste those whiners' comments and still get down-voted while they are being protected. Why am I not being protected on the same basis? :(
Is it because you believe I'm lying? Am I not weak enough for you?
> It's sort of like being bullied in elementary school, and then high school, and then college, and then as a working adult. You never outgrow the bullying. Indeed, the bullying seems to get worse as one matures and loses the youthful physical characteristics which people often read as non-threatening.
It's not just the appearance of the people who bullies you. Bullying forces you to become more closed, and changes you fundamentally while you learn to resist it. Unfortunately, resisting bullying needs one to unlearn "inherent (baseline) trust" when meeting with new people, and unlearn "implicit trust" which is reinforced with the duration of civilized communication and relationships, because bullying can come from the least expected person at most unsuspected time.
Also, continuous bullying warps one's perception about discussion. Any sign of escalation causes any bullying victim to just change the subject and feel bad about itself, because bullying starts with (generally intentional) disagreement, then this disagreement is used for a basis for physical or psychological bullying. Bullied people may not hate from themselves, but they cannot be content with themselves either. They always think that something is wrong with them, and feel powerless to correct it, because continued bullying is only possible when the victim is bullied regardless of his/her character, intention, behavior or capacity.
Prolonged bullying really leaves deep wounds like trust issues, complete lack of self confidence, fear of communication and feelings of inferiority. These wounds are very hard to heal, because as time passes and one grows up, society thinks that these issues are over and doesn't care. Also, people don't seek help since these features are considered part of the character and deemed fixed after a certain age, but they are not.
Good friends, and a really caring person can change everything if the person wants to heal. It's hard, but not impossible.
How do I know this? Because I'm bullied for 10 years straight.
Also I feel like SO discourages any kind of personality showing, which in turn makes the place feel like it is occupied by a legion of "Zuckerbots". Not exactly an inclusive place for people who are proud of their identity and that identity strongly differs from "young cis hetero white male".
While I agree that SO can be hostile, I hardly think it's fair to assign the blame to SO for the insecurities of some users. If the answer is given without regard to race, religion, creed, sexual orientation, etc., then misconstruing it as doing so is the doing and fault of the asker.
It's looking for offense where there is none. Frankly, I have never seen racist comments on stackoverflow. I have seen curt, and even rude answers; but not bigotry.
At the risk of sounding intolerant, if for example, a black programmer takes personal offense at a brusque technical answer on SO, he/she can get the fuck over it. We are not on SO to talk about their insecurities. We are on SO to find answers to programming problems. It's not the community responsibility to tiptoe around a users self-esteem issues.
Again, this isn't to say SO couldn't be a kinder place, but dear god, spare us the bleeding heart spiel for once.
That scenario could be considered more hostile to any human having a bad day, week or year, so bringing minorities into it seems like an unnecessary distinction. There is a great deal of obsession with immutable identity in the west - it is remarkably distasteful, as someone happily outside that culture.
> I don't post much because that's usually a waste of time
That's the particular problem that they're trying to figure out, with a broader version of "waste of time". Either "asking a question is met with hostility", or "posting a response is met with hostility".
If that's true, I'd be really interested in knowing why. It's pretty hard to fix a problem if you don't even know what's causing it in the first place. (Especially since we've pretty much ruled out the possibility of racial or sexual discrimination.)
People can experience the same thing and have different reactions to it. Someone that already feels inadequate or like they don't belong as a programmer are likely to have a more negative reaction to SO's nonsense.
Then perhaps the real data point is bias about biases: operating in a profoundly neutral forum, blind to practically any "group" indication, individual "they're thinking X of me because I'm Y" bias emerges. This is something being increasingly noticed in general, but SO's study provides an interesting control experiment precisely because there is so little indication of group categorization.
I've spent years using StackOverflow. I've never seen any expressions of bigotry. One might get a hint of "group" based on linguistic style, but never have I seen bigoted comments based thereon. If someone feels unwelcome, it's either because they just feel that way without cause, or because of the content/tone of their comments - not their "group" - elicits such response.
While I do think it is true that you can only find "hints" of group bias when examining individual stackoverflow users, stackoverflow in general is known to have:
1. overwhelmingly dominant gender of population (92.9% of SO population)
2. overwhelmingly dominant race and ethnicity categorization (74.2% of SO population)
3. overwhelmingly dominant sexual orientation (93.2% of SO population).
(I left this ambiguous on purpose to ensure that my point is about the homogeneity of the population and not the specifically dominant demographic group. If you want more information, you can look for yourself for specifics about which way the numbers fall here - https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/).
My point is that the stackoverflow population in general is very homogeneous by certain categories.
Instead of looking for evidence of victimization, imagine how easy it would be for someone belonging to a StackOverflow minority category to get discouraged by StackOverflows fierce gatekeeping, especially with the knowledge that stack overflow is so demographically unlike this person. From the point of view of the marginalized, evidence of group categorization isn't needed beyond that fact that "StackOverflow is very very X, and I know that I'm Y." Any sort of gatekeeping from this point on can feel very discouraging, even if this isn't the intention of those who are gatekeeping.
What "gatekeeping"? The whole fascinating point is that there isn't any "gatekeeping" on SO. The demographics may be remarkably skewed, yes ... not for any categorical exclusion, but for self-selected choice to not engage.
If people choose to avoid a group, while that group in no way excludes them, why keep blaming the group?
By "gatekeeping", I'm referring to the efforts made to exclude certain content. By this definition (which I probably should have defined earlier), I would say that SO is founded on gatekeeping and that gatekeeping even makes SO the great resource that it is. After all, the quality of content on SO would surely go down if low quality content wasn't downvoted.
So I'm not "blaming the group", but instead I'm trying to make the point that when the current SO system is paired with a homogeneous user base will, it probably naturally become more an more homogeneous for the reasons stated above, unless an outside force enters the system.
I would argue that this isn't about fault or blame or guilt, but instead about deciding whether or not to take action to make SO a more inclusive place, especially for those who may be predisposed to feel exclusion in the context of SO.
For whatever it's worth, I'm a member of an out group on at least one of these and left the corresponding questions blank because I found them asinine in the context of that survey.
Perhaps that was a mistake; I'll reconsider next time around.
Back in the '90s after the Gulf War, many veterans started coming down with weird symptoms, eventually termed "Gulf War Syndrome." Some of these were quite real, but studies found the Gulf War veterans were, on the whole, healthier than the general population. But the guys who served there were convinced of it, and it made them pretty miserable to think they were sick and the government was covering it up.
When you tell someone they're sick, or unwelcome, or subject to bias, and especially if you're a neutral source, they're liable to believe you. The mind is incredibly suggestible.
So how much of these feelings are because we keep telling people that racism and other issues are a problem? I understand the impulse to not dismiss the problem, but it seems like feeling like you're surrounded by racists has to be almost as bad as the real thing.
> I cannot recall ever, even once, seeing someone's race, sex, or orientation being mocked or even mentioned.
If all you're doing is googling for mature, well-curated answers, then you're not seeing this. Go post a "dumb question" and see how you're treated.
And the contention isn't that people are being deliberately mocked, it's that they don't feel welcome, which is a different thing.
So... how might a woman (or whoever) not feel welcome? Maybe because the forum she's on sees people regularly doing stuff like saying discrimination is "not even possible", or mocking those talking about it for "pointless virtue signaling"? I mean, seriously: go back and read the very post you just typed: does that seem "welcoming" to you?
A “dumb question” is mocked because it’s dumb. No one knows who you are online, for example nothing about my username gives away my sex, race, religion or sexual orientation.
If some with a pseudonym like mine was mocked for asking a dumb question, their minority status would have nothing to do with it.
The manner in which it's mocked may disproportionately impact some groups. If (for example) minorities have higher levels of imposter syndrome, that sort of "you're an idiot" mockery might knock disproportionate numbers of minorities out of the field early on.
I think you are right that minority status rarely has to do with the mocking, but I also think this might be beside the point. I think really the concern is that people who might already feel like outsiders are easily discouraged and made to feel even more like an outsider. And as it turns out, it isn't even hard to identify as an outsider on stackoverflow, even if you are a great coder! I just checked out the stack overflow public survey for 2018 [https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018] - 92% of users are male, and 74.2% is white or European decent. Seems significantly homogeneous.
Homogeneous if and only if you consider "white or European" to be a clear cultural classifier. Personally, I think that there are massive cultural differences between the US, Canada, UK, Australia, and every country in Europe.
As an Australian, I'm a global minority and it might shock you but don't identify with many US cultural groups who are the overwhelming majority online.
The one thing I appreciate about SO is that its users aren't afraid to call out dumb questions for what they are. Seriously, the majority of new questions _are_ dumb, or at least misunderstand the point of SO being a canonical source for generalized questions relating to CS/programming.
Consider this recent question:
"Should I start edx cs50 course before any other JavaScript course, or in the middle, or after?"
This person _should_ get downvoted and told that this is not an appropriate question. Hopefully they come around after a while and learn what kinds of questions are helpful for the _community_ at large. Does it suck that they feel unwelcome? Yes. But that doesn't mean users should be forced to "be nice" just because of it.
> the point of SO being a canonical source for generalized questions relating to CS/programming.
NO.
The point of SO is NOT to be a "canonical source for generalized questions [and answers] relating to CS/Programming".
In fact, if you ask a "generalized question" it will be smacked down as "too broad". If you ask a CS question, it will be downvoted as off-topic.
SO is a place to ask certain kinds of very specific and answerable questions. Anything outside of that narrow band (hell, even most stuff that's perfect appropriate) gets smugly dismissed by petty assholes.
Honestly reading that I'm picturing Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons as a StackOverflow moderator and the personality type slots in so perfectly. Yes, those petty assholes.
I don't think what I said came across correctly. Of course overly broad questions will get downvoted. What I meant was, "questions that will likely benefit another person in the community". I.e. there is a sweet spot in terms of specificity. Asking for help about a very specific problem with a homework assignment or asking for advice about what class to take next are too specific and more than likely won't benefit anyone else.
Regarding your point about CS, I meant something like "within the broad range of questions related to practical computer science, specifically programming." Yes, I know there's another Exchange site for more theoretical Computer Science topics, where some questions might be more appropriate...
There are far, far more constructive ways to educate the asker of such a question than to outright tell them they're stupid. Especially because, while such a question might not be the most constructive, it being there doesn't hurt anyone at all.
It doesn't cost anything to be nice and to try and make the community feel more welcoming.
I wasn't talking about mean or hurtful language. I was talking about telling someone that their question isn't a good fit for SO. The consequence of that may be a feeling of being "excluded". So now everyone has to add a smiley face at the end of their comments when they say, "You didn't add any sample code. I don't know what you're asking help about" or "I can't understand your question, you should rephrase it"?
No, and I believe you're taking things way too far. And we've all seen pretty mean SO rejection messages. It doesn't take much to be polite in doing so. If you're going to come back with, "What if I'm polite and they still think I'm mean," well, then I don't know what to tell you. I do know that the answer is not to add actual hostility to the site just because you feel that a few people might take expectations of politeness too far.
Yeah, I can't see how you could be hostile to programmers but somehow _more_ hostile to programmers of a certain race without actually calling out somebody by race.
Any blatant case of racism or sexism is likely to be deleted, the tools for community moderation of seriously offensive content are pretty effective. That is not necessarily fast enough for the target of the abuse to never see it, but it does make it very unlikely that regular users stumble upon this.
Deleted comments are essentially invisible to regular users, and even for deleted answers you have to go and dig to see offensive content.
> justifying like this strikes me as pointless virtue signaling.
Agree 100%. This part is especially troubling:
> Feelings have no “technically correct.” They’re just what the feeler is telling you. When someone tells you how they feel, you can pack up your magnifying glass and clue kit, cuz that’s the answer.
If I say "The sky is blue" and you say "That's offensive to people who aren't blue", you're just wrong. End of story.
It's sad that this is even worth saying, but that's what our micro-aggression and victimhood-obsessed society has come to. People are practically competing to see who can be the most offended.
That's not what they said though. They said "if you want to know if someone feels welcome, and you ask them, and they say they don't feel welcome, then you're done researching whether or not they feel welcome".
You are right. What it seems like a lot of people in these comments are saying is that the question perhaps should not stop at "Do you feel welcome?" because that only explores feelings of one side, which is highly subjective. If you invite someone into your house, they come in with muddy shoes and make a mess even though you had a sign at the door asking them to please wipe their feet, they might feel unwelcome when you ask them to go back, read the sign, and take off their shoes. The invitee might be offended, but the homeowner is justified and their feelings and the entire situation need to be considered. It is not "End of Discussion" once someone is offended.
"If I say "The sky is blue" and you say "That's offensive to people who aren't blue", you're just wrong. End of story."
That's not even close to the situation at hand.
"People are practically competing to see who can be the most offended."
Aren't you, just now, being offended that people are, not even really being offended at things, but really at trying to listen to people saying that they don't feel welcome, and trying to address that? Why is trying to make a more welcoming and open community such a sin?
Slightly off-topic but I can't help picturing people on HN as anything different from what I look like. No black people, no women, no teenagers, no seniors, etc.
Everyone on HN is almost the same in my head.
I am not even sure adding a profile picture would change that.
People feel intimidated on SO, specially if they have low self-stem. This is a real problem but not because veterans there are bad people - after all they are helping strangers on the Internet for free. I'm one of them[1].
Moderators there tend to be borderline autistic people obsessed with some subjects. Yes, we sound like jerks and some people there can be really infuriating but it is not personal: we are just obcessive people with very low social skills. These OCD traits are both our weakeness and our superpower, why we do such a great work maintaining top quality questions and answers while sometimes sounding needlessly rude.
Being on the spectrum is not an excuse to be a jerk but many people will take "you are being pedantic" as a cumpliment because their brain is wired differently. Most of them will be more careful if you tell them they are hurting people even if they can't understand why.
The accepted answer is decided by the person asking the question - I'm not sure SO moderators are allowed to change an accepted answer(at the very least, they're heavily disincentivized to do so). I think your example is a case for more moderation, not less.
I think there's a pretty plausible answer here - StackOverflow is hostile to everyone, and that means people who already feel insecure or burdened by impostor syndrome or like they have to struggle to be recognized - even if they're not technically being treated any worse - end up experiencing that hostility and intimidating attitude even more.
It's not only insecurity; people with less patience for hostility will react to the hostility by leaving--not by hanging around, and certainly not by trying to earn hostility karma.
I hate if I help people, provide the correct answer but they never accept it. SO should encourage people to accept the correct answer somehow. Maybe force them to review answers to their questions before posting new questions.
I don’t believe SO has a field for race, so unless you put it in your profile or username I doubt anyone is even aware what colour you are or country you’re from.
It was few years ago, I asked a question and posted the code that I had written on a dynamic programming question. I used to keep a public profile had around 2k or so.
Dude(with a higher score than I had), left a comment. "You should consider another profession, you don't have aptitude for programming".
When I was active on SO I did often see unwelcoming behaviour. Closing questions as being dupes or offtopic, with no explanatory comments, was the most common thing. Infuriating too (and not only to new users) was the proliferation of bad edits, clearly undertaken by clueless people to try and amass points.
More of an irritant to me was the generally noisy and poor-quality content. I will only follow links to SO now in areas where I know enough to be able to filter for quality myself (usually it's wanting). From my perspective, the gamification schtick is a failure.
I've always felt the problem was the moderators have too much control. A bad or dictatorial moderator can ruin an SO board. Hanlon seems to imply moderator changes but doesn't say anything specifically. So, I'm dubious until this is directly addressed.
That works for site maintenance and garbage collection but it doesn't stop them appearing in search results which is where my problem lies
If I see a StackOverflow result in my search I'd wager there's a more than 50% chance it's a closed question without an answer. Sometimes I'll grant if it was marked dupe I may end up finding the answer, but honestly the only visits I really remember are those that are marked dupe and link to something sounding similar but completely unrelated
There seems to be a recent tendency where web-based business that wish to make changes to their platforms cite lack of inclusiveness for the main reason for the change.
SO is a trash fire. For everyone, not "women", not "people of color", not "people without color", not "groups". Everyone.
It's an openly hostile place where mods close questions unrelated to their expertise based on the whims of those in private chat rooms while belittling the questioner with those "your question was closed because X" explainer boxes.
It would be refreshing if they just said something like "We've realized that SO is a hostile place, and it's not better if you just happen to be a white man."
If you read their change list, nothing there has anything to do with "identity". It's just a list of very small tweaks.
I agree that SO has an arrogance problem and the diversity appeal is pandering, but the "trash fire" characterization is too hyperbolic. The site is still immensely useful if suboptimal.
SO is a trash fire that has some really great content down in the basement, [beware of leopard metaphor elided]. But the problem is the people on the ground floor that the average new user will run into are, to put not too fine a point on it, a buncha jerks.
Great place for finding answers to older common questions, really awful place for asking new ones.
> Great place for finding answers to older common questions, really awful place for asking new ones.
It might just be me, but I've found it substantially harder to find good Q/As on SO for newer topics and frameworks. You ask about a technology which existed in 2014 and there are high quality detailed posts all about it, with different viewpoints, upsides/downsides, etc. But you do the same with a technology popularized in 2017 (and I'm talking highly popular stuff) and yet slim pickings from SO.
I've seen that too, and strongly suspect that's because everyone that tries to post is beaten down by overzealous mods - so no one tries anymore. I don't.
You have to perfectly craft questions to sneak past the fast-close and you-should-do-X karma farming traps. It's not worth the time trying to predict how today's trolls will close your question.
It's only "immensely useful" if you seek the solution to a problem that's already been solved (and actually solved, not just happening to share a few keywords with a different problem and thus marked as a duplicate).
If your problem has not yet been solved (especially if it's similar enough to another problem to look like a "duplicate" to someone who does not actually understand the problem), then "trash fire" is hypobolic if anything (is that a word? It should be a word).
This comment is being deleted. Your account is downvoted and restricted from posting additional comments. Reason: "hypobolic" is too similar to "hyperbolic". Next time use the search function and avoid posting redundant comments.
There should be probably some limits that would prevent people from participting in closing questions outside their expertise. Expertise could be measured on how much points you have collected on related topics.
Sometimes you really need to deeply understand the topic to judge if a question is valid.
I always thought Stack Overflow/Exchange should have a way to filter questions from users with less than a certain amount of karma and any of those questions/ansers/comments should not be able to be down voted or closed as duplicate or low quality or off-topic (the most annoying close reason).
Anybody that gets annoyed by those questions can opt to not see them and focus on higher quality. Anyone that wants to help newbies can. Those people can also be marked as unfriendly or hostile and won't be able to answer newbie questions if they get a certain number of reports.
This seems like it would solve two problems: oft-repeated low quality questions annoying users who want more complex help, and encouraging newbies bc they won't be afraid of retribution.
Interesting idea, but what if not enough people are going to the "low quality corner" ?
Also it would be nice to know the current percentage of questions closed because they were classified as duplicate because these would still have to be closed (unless you want the database to explode).
That, or a spin off as Stack Overflow for Dummies. If I ask a question, frequently it's either too specific to be of much use, or it's too "simple" because I don't have a clue what I'm doing.
I've experienced a form of hostility in StackOverflow just recently--as in a couple of days ago. On a whim, I visited the website and answered a couple questions, something I'd never done before. I realized it was actually a lot of fun, so I started rapidly answering the all JavaScript questions I could as they were asked.
Suddenly a "higher ranking" individual started leaving comments on my answers that I needed to stop answering certain questions, and only address "well asked" questions. After reading the guidelines, I noted that neither I or the asker had broken any rules, so I commented that I felt I was being treated unfairly, and I asked where I could discuss further since the comments on my questions seemed inappropriate.
Suddenly another, even higher scoring person, deleted all the comments and locked my answer, noting that the discussion had stopped being productive. After that, my answers were left alone with no more meta criticism.
In my limited experience, it's a bizarre community.
I think it's significant though that both wikipedia and stack overflow, despite being ruled by petty assholes weilding the smallest amount of power in seemingly the stupidest way possible, have become two of the most valuable references in existence.
If there is a correlation, it's more likely that the sort of petty asshole who likes to feel important will prefer to invest more effort in a site that is valuable.
So the more valuable a site becomes, the more it will attract highly motivated but slightly sociopathic moderators.
If you create a new website with first 10 toxic users, it will never grow, because they will scare away any potential 11th user.
But if you create a new website with awesome users, it get useful content and grow. When it grows very large and attracts too many users, you will have to start moderating heavily. But moderating a website is an exhausting task, and awesome people usually have other things to do; so gradually the job will be taken by people hungry for some kind of power. Then the site becomes toxic.
> Let’s reject the false dichotomy between quality and kindness. Quality matters because it means posts can help more people. But a larger, more diverse community produces better artifacts, not worse ones. We need to stop justifying condescension with the pursuit of quality, and we need better tools and queues to help power users trying to keep quality high.
I would argue there are way too many variables in that question to present a strong argument either way. One thing I will say on it though is how much of our humanity are we ready to sacrifice on the altar of this mythical "meritocracy" that every online community, especially those built on or around code, seems to aim for?
And how long until we're ready to confront the fact that a lot of these meritocracies strangely produce very similar "top contributors" in terms of demographics, i.e. white, straight men?
I'm not getting into either side of it, I'm just saying that you have to admit it's an astonishing coincidence that online communities, started by, moderated by, largely inhabited by, and currently operated by white men seemingly always have a cadre of white men on the top as the "most valuable contributors" and nobody ever seems to wonder if all those things are connected.
Maybe the fears of POC/women are invalid. Maybe it's all a big damn misunderstanding. But I don't think it's right to have white men deciding if it is or not, and I don't think the best damn catalog of coding answers on the planet means a thing if everyone who isn't part of the in-crowd is too damn terrified to ask a question of it.
>One thing I will say on it though is how much of our humanity are we ready to sacrifice on the altar of this mythical "meritocracy" that every online community, especially those built on or around code, seems to aim for?
i don't mean to imply that we should preserve the toxic communities for the point of good content. but there seems to be a correlation here, and it's worth studying what positive effects the toxicity might create, otherwise it's going to be very difficult to re-create it without the toxicity and the sites that value the human creators over the content will always be at a natural disadvantage to the other sites.
I'd imagine you could exploit all kinds of humanities' worse tendencies (in this case, tribalism) and create something that is "better" in some measurements, the real challenge I think is objectively ranking different communities based on the quality of the content in question, and finding how that correlates to whatever, in this case, "tribe" is being used to make it.
IMHO, no problem ever, software related or otherwise has benefited or been solved better by way of having fewer brains involved, and the shortest path to having more brains is having more people, i.e. being more open and inclusive. It would seem to be that SO already has excellent tools to moderate quality without resorting to allowing users to treat each other in such a poor manner.
> The second basic pattern that Bion detailed: The identification and vilification of external enemies. This is a very common pattern. Anyone who was around the Open Source movement in the mid-Nineties could see this all the time. If you cared about Linux on the desktop, there was a big list of jobs to do. But you could always instead get a conversation going about Microsoft and Bill Gates. And people would start bleeding from their ears, they would get so mad.
Which can be seen in Stack Overflow (its the newbies that don't read that are messing everything up) and reddit (Stack Overflow aka Downvote and Duplicate). Each group is making their group stronger and a more firmer identification by vilifying the other group (merited or not).
This happens in all groups.
--
The "everyone is mean" nature of some of the communities, I believe, comes from further down in the 'three things to accept':
> 2.) The second thing you have to accept: Members are different than users. A pattern will arise in which there is some group of users that cares more than average about the integrity and success of the group as a whole. And that becomes your core group, Art Kleiner's phrase for "the group within the group that matters most."
> The core group on Communitree was undifferentiated from the group of random users that came in. They were separate in their own minds, because they knew what they wanted to do, but they couldn't defend themselves against the other users. But in all successful online communities that I've looked at, a core group arises that cares about and gardens effectively. Gardens the environment, to keep it growing, to keep it healthy.
> Now, the software does not always allow the core group to express itself, which is why I say you have to accept this. Because if the software doesn't allow the core group to express itself, it will invent new ways of doing so.
When the core group lacks the tools necessary to maintain the vision / success of the site as a whole, they are going to find other ways to defend themselves from excessive workload. The easiest way is to be rude to people so they go away (and the overall workload is reduced).
I believe that this pairs with the (misguided?) efforts of Stack Overflow to become more inclusive by lowering barriers to participate (see design for #3) and making it harder for the core group to moderate content (be nice, changing close reasons, removing 10k rep flagging assistance, reducing 15k rep protection ability, a diamond moderator culture of "if it got upvoted it shouldn't be deleted unless there's vote fraud").
>I'm not getting into either side of it, I'm just saying that you have to admit it's an astonishing coincidence that online communities, started by, moderated by, largely inhabited by, and currently operated by white men seemingly always have a cadre of white men on the top as the "most valuable contributors" and nobody ever seems to wonder if all those things are connected.
Of course these things are connected, everything is. It isn't an astonishing coincidence at all, its the exact expected result given the environment.
Why does the color/gender matter? Flip it universally and do you feel the same way?
I can see it the other way too. Good content may lead to certain types of toxic communities. Possibly by encouraging people to police content more in an effort to "keep quality high/from falling", and putting artificially high bars on contributing.
> I think it's significant though that both wikipedia and stack overflow, despite being ruled by petty assholes weilding the smallest amount of power in seemingly the stupidest way possible, have become two of the most valuable references in existence.
Wikipedia is quite valuable. These days, I find StackOverflow to be nearly-useless.
I wouldn't say toxic communities produce better content.
I would say heavily moderated ones often do. That's because in general, a community without much in the way of moderation often becomes a wasteland filled with spammers and useless posts and misinformation, as seen on many webmaster forums over the years. If Stack Overflow and Wikipedia are doing well here, it's merely because their assholery has also stopped the SEO merchants and junk peddlers from turning it into Warrior Forums or Wikia.
But that doesn't mean a toxic community is better. It's entirely possible to have a fair, evenly moderated forum with a high level of quality control, as seen on the likes of Ask Historians over at Reddit.
A truly toxic community will eventually die or be replaced, as seen by one I won't name which banned people for making typos or disagreeing with the staff on any topic in history.
Edit: Though I think even this may be a simplification. Basically, a small or niche forum can be extremely relaxed yet still have a high level of quality (see my own Wario Forums site), but it'll have to make a decision between going downhill in terms of quality or becoming harsher on the moderation as it turns into a big board if it doesn't want to become a wasteland.
No, it is not that toxic communities produce better content, it is just the fact that encyclopedic content websites tend to atract borderline autistic people obsessed with some subject who sound like absolute jerks for everybody but themselves.
Dude, I don't. My 5 year old son is in the spectrum and I probably would be diagnosed as well by todays standard. We are lucky enough to be on the high-functional end of the spectrum but it is still taxing on the family. I can't possibly imagine how worst it is for more severe cases and I'm sorry if I offended you but many of my best friends are also borderline autistic and they are the best people I know.
Autistic and borderline are barely perceived as positive words in our society so I can follow the argument of insult when you describe wikipedia authors as borderline and autistic. Although I see that you did not mean to do harm with your sociological background.
I am curious as to how Stack Overflow is perceived as toxic.
Name calling of "borderline autistic" and "absolute jerk" would be met with fairly quick community moderation and condemnation there or on Wikipedia. Meanwhile, calling someone autistic as either a pejorative or an insult here (or reddit) is seemingly acceptable and is being defended.
> have become two of the most valuable references in existence
Well I'm not sure about that. Wikipedia is the better of the two, but that's a low bar. Articles are poorly written, inconsistent, and targeted at wildly variable levels of existing knowledge. I rarely use it for anything other quick lookups of trivial facts (and even then only for unimportant purposes). It's much-visited, but that's an indicator only of ubiquitous availability. I remember long ago reading some study or other comparing its quality favourably to old-fashioned encyclopedias, but it was just a fairly risible surface fact-checking operation. Of course Wikipedia is huge so there may be vast areas of excellent quality unrelated to my interests.
SO is worse, but a little more useful because of its narrower scope.
So, no, IMO toxicity of community and quality of output aren't related (in either direction).
I remember 2002-era Wikipedia. I personally found its openness far more valuable, but then other people became obsessed with making it just a bigger, hyperlinked, traditional encyclopedia. I believe something was lost.
Exactly, Wikipedia was great long before it was toxic, and I don't see the rise of micromanagers on the site to have been that beneficial, certainly not enough to justify the negatives they cause.
Personally I think it's just that knowledge-building communities that win the network-effects battle produce good content due to the number of smart and generous people in the world who find out about them, entirely despite their toxicity. But winning the network-effects battle also seems to lead inevitably to toxicity, so we may never have a counter-example non-toxic knowledge-building community to compare to.
I don't think that's the right way to think about it.
Rather, I would say that tightly-moderated communities of experts tend to produce better reference material ("wikis"). But this type of structure is "toxic" to discussions ("forums") and novices.
The SO founders and key contributors built a wiki. The site's incentive structure pointed in this direction so everyone was complicit in this outcome.
Now, site management seems to be saying that they want a "help-everyone" forum. They are -- like all big orgs with something to lose -- soliciting ideas, forming interdisciplinary committees, and giving "<3"-warming (yuk) speeches.
Given how ingrained the current culture is, I believe that meaningful change would entail significant risk.
Wikipedia and SO are two of the most valuable references in existence because they're the only examples in their niche due to the network effect. I think the toxicity or otherwise of their community environment is independent of that, and it would only change if the experience was sufficiently bad to drive most people to a vastly smaller competitor.
> Suddenly another, even higher ranking person, deleted all the comments and locked my answer, noting that the discussion had stopped being productive. After that, my answers were left alone with no more meta criticism.
I can't see from your story if the "even higher scoring person" ever declared his intentions to you, which he probably should, but it can be a pretty routine moderation action on forum sites in general to remove meta comments not contributing to the original question, after that discussion has been had.
In your story I could as well read that the lower rank moderator was told off about his interventions.
I personally very much like SO.
I have <1k rep after more than two years of use but it is fine for me.
I answer a question maybe 1 time a month and ask maybe 1 time a year.
However a friend of mine (that I believe as a better level in programming than me) has the same feeling of "bizzare community" that you have, so I know that the issue is complex.
That said I really have zero ideas about what they could do to improve the way they are seen by everyone without breaking the way the site currently works.
Have you heard about the term "help vampire" ?
Do you know how many people how do not take 3 minutes to search ?
Do you think that the number of questions will remain manageable if the bar is leveled down ?
Do you know that you are encouraged to edit questions to make them more "well asked" (at least if that is humanely possible) ?
In my opinion SO is a specific tool that is very different from a forum, a chat or a mailing list. SO should not be the only tool that people have to solve their programming problems and it should not try to morph into it.
I wonder if there's a bit of "5 Whys" going on here.
Most of the times I end up on Stack Overflow, I arrive via Google. I usually have to check for around 5 answers before I find one that hasn't been locked as "not constructive" or for some other arbitrary reason.
Is it any wonder that people find it easier to ask their own questions? The name "help vampire" is so telling of how SO mods see themselves (as arbiters and gatekeepers of all that is good against the raging unwashed hordes) and a symptom of the problem.
Don't aspire malice / incompetence to something that may well have a root cause within SO itself.
>Most of the times I end up on Stack Overflow, I arrive via Google. I usually have to check for around 5 answers before I find one that hasn't been locked as "not constructive" or for some other arbitrary reason.
Thats kind of the point though isnt it? The idea is that you should find the right question and answer and not the x-th repost of them.
Anyone familiar with the side know why reposts arent simply deleted instead of locked? It seems locking them only worsens the problem they aimed to combat?
Sometimes it's helpful to have a question that's worded differently so that there's multiple ways of finding the answer. And sometimes a duplicate question gets an even better answer than the original before it gets locked.
I haven't been active for a long time now so this may have changed.
Back then the reason behind locking rather than deleting was because the duplicate may be asked in a different way, using different keywords. So keeping it viewable allowed people searching for an answer to effectively have multiple entry points into finding the answer because perhaps they were googling the wrong combination of keywords to get the original to show up, but the duplicate would match.
The article addresses this nicely. Users not having significant knowledge of the community rules— including but not limited to how close another question must be to your question to be considered a duplicate, how specific the question must be, or how to effectively search for prior questions (“didn’t come up in a google search is probably most people’s standards”)— is not laziness. Even being inexperienced enough to not know how to properly ask a question isn’t laziness, it’s inexperience. Assuming people’s inexperience or unfamiliarity with community norms is laziness is a huge part of the problem.
Is it laziness if a novice has spent hours trying to figure something out and doesn't even know how to ask the question properly because of some fundamental misunderstanding or hole in their knowledge? I see and answer this sort of question on reddit occasionally. I'm sure there are times where I've dashed out "You're totally barking up the wrong tree, try ..." while I'm waiting for my code to build and saved somebody several(more) hours of hair pulling frustration.
>(as arbiters and gatekeepers of all that is good against the raging unwashed hordes
Its not untrue though, is it? Its really easy for such communities to really rapidly degrade.
That SO and wikipedia have both retained quality for so long, while also having strict moderators hunting a strong ideal, in areas where so many of their peers have fallen prey to the unwashed hordes, implies that it may not be so easy to discard the strategy.
It might even be necessary at such large volumes. The particulars of their activity might be maleable, but just approaching the problem (very) defensively might bot be.
You do realize that much of wikipedia's success came at a time when the moderation standards were much lower than they are today, right? Indeed, I would suggest that the current high moderation standards at both Wikipedia and SO are not causes of success, but simply a manifestation of the iron law of bureaucracy [1].
People seem to think that duplicate questions are bad and something to be avoided. I think they're a terrific asset. It helps search-ability to have the same question phrased several different ways; especially when the ultimate goal is to funnel the searchers into the discussion page with the highest quality version of the question and answer. In my mind, the issue ISN'T that the mods are holding the gates against the barbarians, it is that the culture and SO itself has not given the mods the tools to convert what the "barbarians" are contributing into a valuable resource.
I'm thinking strict moderation goes hand in hand with size of the population; in low population environments, little to no moderation is sufficient. The people govern their own culture, and with sufficiently low immigration rates, they can adequately teach newcomers the culture.
But as the population increases, driveby-posting becomes the norm rather than the outlier, and large swathes of newcomers can join at once, the culture cannot be taught at a rapid enough pace to survive. It either degrades, or enforces itself by means of an iron fist.
My thinking essentially stems from eternal september. Wikipedia's early success did not require heavy moderation, but once it became the predominant wiki, it's survival, I think, neccitated it.
The details may have issues, but the overarching idea, defending the culture from the unwashed masses, might still be correct.
No, SO has not retained quality. It’s a wasteland of promising questions that moderators turned into dead ends, to the point that finding an SO link relevant to your issue in a Google searches is practically guaranteed to leave you more frustrated than before. It pollutes the troubleshooting process with false hope.
Yeah, a haystack full of needles is better than a single needle in a haystack. That is to say: having the same information repeated tons of times is better than not being able to find the one canonical place the information is written.
Are those the only two options? How about a haystack full of maybe-needles, where each answer is subtly wrong because no one has the willingness to go through and vet all of them?
I often come across questions that are closed as being duplicates but are different in some important way that whoever closed it obviously doesn't understand.
I think you've touched on what's missing that could make it a more personable community--better communication.
I posted an image as a part of an answer once and it was removed with the reason "don't use third party image hosts". Thing is, I used i.stack.imgur.com which is the only method provided in the answer form on the site! I knew the user who did it but since my answer had been deleted, I had no way to contact him for any sort of appeal. It was a while before I tried contributing to the site again.
> Suddenly a "higher ranking" individual started leaving comments on my answers that I needed to stop answering certain questions, and only address "well asked" questions.
I love Stack Overflow, and it's sure a valuable if imperfect resource, but this is something that drives me bonkers about it.
If the question is intelligible enough to receive an answer, and if your answer is potentially helpful to the asker, then it's well-asked as far as I can tell, and the scoring system can take care of its relative utility.
The additional level of moderation doesn't seem to have added much value over my time participating. The closest thing I can think of as nice is combining duplicates, though moderators often seem to miss subtle differences between questions and in some cases information gets lost in the end. Generally, the moderation focus often seems legalistic or driven by artificial incentives rather than primarily focused on improving the breadth, depth, and quality of the site as a technical resource.
Honestly, I'm pretty sure that a significant portion of the hostility people experience is coming from moderation actions.
I might hope the SO team has the intention of going to town on that problem in general, but I don't see it specifically mentioned in today's discussion. I'm sure that if they took it deeply seriously and engaged with enough specific situations where it's been a problem, they could find ways to do better.
I think today's announcement is a really good indication, though, that they're listening to people who are having problems with their SO experience, not just to people who'd congratulate them for their (deserved!) accomplishments and for whom everything is more or less fine.
I think the core problem is that they've focused too much on being like wikipedia (a single authoritative, comprehensive answer to each important question), and not enough on helping people to learn. Over time a site will grow a culture, and experts on the site will outweigh and overrule experts on the subject matter. In this case, we're also seeing answerers' needs outweigh askers'.
If you could only meet the needs of one constituency, I'd say they made the right choice to favor expert answerers, but I think there are other solutions.
Specifically, if I was trying to fix this I'd set up a two-tier system for questions and answers. There are lots of people who would be happy to answer questions, even if the question is a dupe, and even if it's not framed very well. Give people points for answering these in a kind way, and moderate around that.
For questions that are sufficiently well-asked, and not duplicates, elevate them to a wikipedia-like status: allow them to be indexed by search engines, make them easier to see by the expert answerers that dislike sifting through novice questions, and moderate them for quality. Give points for people that review and elevate high-quality, non-duplicate questions, or that edit questions to become high-quality.
If there are very different personas that you're trying to appease, sometimes a multi-tier system is appropriate.
> I think the core problem is that they've focused too much on being like wikipedia (a single authoritative, comprehensive answer to each important question), and not enough on helping people to learn. Over time a site will grow a culture, and experts on the site will outweigh and overrule experts on the subject matter. In this case, we're also seeing answerers' needs outweigh askers'.
there's also the third, silent, probably much larger group, who neither asks questions nor answers them.
it seems as though the single authoritative, comprehensive answers is what helps those people the most.
> Specifically, if I was trying to fix this I'd set up a two-tier system for questions and answers. ... For questions that are sufficiently well-asked, and not duplicates, elevate them to a wikipedia-like status ...
I'm in that third group because I perceive SO as a 'no good deed goes unpunished' culture. I already went through that with Wikipedia, and I've got better things to do than fight insiders.
truestory. I've been doing this for 2 decades and I've only ever posted one question on SO because it was super obscure technical thing that was totally un-googleable. I know not to ask anything less obscure. For community and "normal" questions there's reddit. I also only answer questions on reddit. I know there's prestige and it's good resume material to answer on SO, but reddit is a community whereas SO is documentation. Answering on SO is too aggravating.
Except part of the problem is that it's not even doing a very good job of giving a good authoritative answer either.
In the earlier days, it was designed to straddle the line more with a wiki; there were "community wiki" questions and answers, but people couldn't get reputation for those, and if someone's question or answer was edited enough it would automatically converted to "community wiki". However, people would get upset about losing the potential karma, so that feature was taken away, and major edits to other people's answers that change the meaning of it started to be discouraged.
However, there's no way for anyone other the person who originally asked a question to change which answer is accepted. So if someone asked a question 10 years ago, and someone gave a bad answer or an answer that is now out of date but which was accepted, and those two people have now left the site, there's no good way to get the first answer to the question to be the correct one. You can write a better answer, and even if it's upvoted, there will still be the accepted answer ahead of it.
I've tried following the original, more wiki-like spirit of the site by editing such answers, and then gotten other people reverting me because the edit would "give reputation to someone who didn't deserve it."
I feel like the incentives, and balance, and community of the site are just off right now. It still serves a useful purpose, but it could be a lot better, but whenever I've tried making suggestions for how to improve, I've gotten so much pushback that I've just given up.
I just realized that here we got a point where DuckDuckGo is actually way better than Google. Having it as default I never stumble over this problem and usually find a pretty relevant answer in top results.
There's nuance here. There are plenty of cases where individuals ask XY questions, meaning they've gone down a strange route to solve X and now need help solving Y, and it's always been debated within the community on whether you should solve X or oftentimes go to great lengths to solve Y. I've seen many questions where a solution to X is answered and heavily downvoted. I'm not sure how you resolve that.
Question: How do I #include a 500MB text file in my C++ code as a string? My compiler explodes when I do this!
Me: Don't do this, your compiler isn't designed for this! Consider loading the text from a file instead!
Comment: -1 Dude this isn't helpful. What if it's code golf and you need to include a 500MB text file!? You never know. Get over yourself.
Yeah, this actually gets handled reasonable well by the combination of the accepted answer and voting dynamics. You can see which answer(s) everyone found most useful, and you can see the answer that the asker thought met their threshold.
I understand that sentiment, but for the overwhelming majority of poor questions the "if you really want to do that anyway" isn't useful to OP - they're clearly confused and looking for something else. In those cases, it's not worth your or the question asker's time to write an extended answer (especially if that goes from trivial to complex, overengineered, and esoteric). The StackOverflow community refers to these as XY questions.
Of course there are cases in favor of both sides here or there. If you have reasons to go the esoteric route, then you should simply explain why. If you're browsing from the internet, you have to understand you're reading a conversation between two individuals, catered to the question-asker and not the rest of the universe.
Your kind of answer is precisely why I find SO useless.
When a user asks a question on X, it would be better to first assume that he knows what he’s freaking doing.
E.g. yes there might be valid reasons for inserting 500 MB as a string, and myself as another user desperately searching for an answer to it, I get pretty annoyed when I see answers for a Y instead.
SO contributors should answer the freaking question first. Can it be done and how. Otherwise the answer is of no use to people having the same question but for a different problem. Not to mention that I’ve seen questions closed as duplicates.
This is why I rarely go to SO for answers. I don’t want an opinionated forum, I want a mailing list where people assume you’re a grownup that really wants a solution to the question and not something else.
That's a pretty big assumption on your part. Unless you're going to cite some SO stats or a study on it, I'm going to assume that you're wrong.
Also good questions shouldn't need explanations for the reason you're trying to do something. It's not like I'm going to explain my business requirements on a public forum to complete strangers.
And I'm going to mention this again — if the purpose of SO is to provide a searchable database of questions and answers, then the answer has to match the question, not a supposed use case that the user may or may not have, because that answer is then useless to others.
Of course you can include 500 MB in a separate file and read that. It's totally uninteresting and now that SO question, along with its non-answer is showing up in search results, having precedence over others. Which is a pity, because I thought SO is a place where you can ask questions on obscure features of the tools we're using.
> Which is a pity, because I thought SO is a place where you can ask questions on obscure features of the tools we're using.
You can, as long as you're clear on why you need these obscure features. So there's nuance... if someone asks "hi, I want to call `add` like `add(10, 20, 30)` and it's not working" and the answer is "Use `10 + 20 + 30` instead!", they're answering the intent of the question. They've totally not answered the original question (I want to call add) but OP is probably misguided.
It'd totally be fair to say "Oh, declare a function with 3 params and return the sum, or even make a function with variable arguments, then enumerate over each of them, summing into an accumulator. You can also do this as a functional reduction. In fact, you can use the mapreduce framework to do this, and here's how to create an adder circuit" - Every tidbit of the above is just... overkill.
I totally empathize with you - it sucks to google "how to do X given good reasons Y Z" only to find a question "how to do X given terrible reasons A B" that's answered by "don't do X"! I think the way that's respectful of others' time is to ask another question and clarify why you truly need X.
If you've taught a multidisciplinary class, you'll have faced people who truly are confused - EE students who want to understand, for example, "how do I declare a 20 bit integer in C for this program that's running on Windows?"...
This removes a great deal of utility from the site. The majority of value in the site is not answering one individuals question at a time. Every single time I ask the search engine a programming question SO pops up as the first result. Most of the time that link has the answer I need, but every single time the conversation has violated some inane rule and has been shut down. Every single time. The rules are wrong, it is that simple.
> Most of the time that link has the answer I need, but every single time the conversation has violated some inane rule and has been shut down. Every single time. The rules are wrong, it is that simple.
Not 100% for me, but easily 30%. And you can almost taste the authoritarian arrogance dripping from the moderators words. I was disappointed this incredibly negative aspect of the site wasn't even mentioned in the post.
95% of the time I want to do something in a clearly sub-optimal way is because I'm required to use an unmodifiable code base that forces a path.
But sometimes explaining how the situation arises:
* Violates NDA/secrecy/licensing agreements.
* It can be complicated to explain the conditions that created the situation to people that aren't working with a custom/proprietary tech stack.
* Is irrelevant. If the operation needed to solve my problem can be concisely stated, why type a distraction?
I remember one post where someone said something like: "It'd be better if you tried this, but if you really need to do X..." followed by an explanation that solved my problem. It made my day.
> When a user asks a question on X, it would be better to first assume that he knows what he’s freaking doing.
Yikes. SO is where I learned to program, and if this were the norm, I wouldn't have made it.
If I ask a question the premise of which suggests I'm _way_ off, I wanna know. I have to imagine this scenario is far more common than the one you outline, wherein the poster has arbitrary constraints on his/her problem that need to be respected.
Let the voting system decide which answers are useful for posterity & which aren't. But to the answerers who take the time to help askers tackle the spirit of a question--not just its text--I say: thanks.
When you are doing something at work, often you have to do something that seems absurd to a random person on the internet, simply because the easy, sensible way would rely on things and people that are not under your control. A lot of people come from a perspective where you should be able to administer everything in an organization yourself, and that doesn't happen in any place I've ever worked. The vast majority of my experience with 'real world' programming is working around institutional barriers and silos.
I find the attitude of "solve your problem by ignoring stated constraints" particularly irritating among database gurus, who should be more in tune with the business world than a lot of people.
When someone simply refuses to accept the constraints of a problem, it doesn't demonstrate intelligence, even if the problem as stated is insoluble; better to just ignore it. All they are really saying is "sucks to be you, glad I don't have to work there" which is boorish and unproductive.
None of that means that people don't sometimes go down a rabbit hole that they didn't need to. But know-it-alls generally need to step back and either disengage entirely or consider the constraints on a problem.
Question: I'm trying to do Y so I can do X. I know Z is the right way to do X, but I'm not allowed to do it for $BUSINESS_REASON that I have absolutely no control over.
Response 1: Don't use Y to do X. Use Z.
Response 2: $BUSINESS_REASON is stupid, fix that.
Then some time later I'll come back and post my work around, with fair warning it isn't the right way to solve problem X, but if you have to use Y this is the best I've found.
Mine too. As a result I ask a question on SO as a last resort, and spend more time preemptively addressing those kinds of unhelpful responses. It always seems like I have to make at least 3 exasperated comments to try to keep the question on track.
That's what's called an "XY problem": you want to do X, and someone wants to write about Y, so he tells you that you actually want to do Y instead of X, and goes on to explain Y in excruciating detail.
I am an active contributor to Quora, which employs similar mechanics but has much higher adherence to being nice. When I see a silly question, I write a direct answer to that silly question and then write an answer to the question that may have been implied by it. I've written answers on data destruction for drug dealers whose phones are due to be seized, for example.
StackOverflow tends to want to make questions valuable to more than just the asker, but it's really annoying to come to a question from Google and find that none of the answers actually address the question that was asked.
> There are plenty of cases where individuals ask XY questions, meaning they've gone down a strange route to solve X and now need help solving Y
In my experience I see more of the opposite: XY answers. I search for or ask X, and there's a bunch of "smart guys" trying to subvert a secret hidden context to the question resulting in a secret question Y. When I arrive from Google to see the Y answer on X question, the answer is useless because unmentioned condition Y doesn't apply to my scenario. Multiple answers are always great though, because sometimes there is a sane default answer, and one or more "well if Y applies, you might actually [...]". There's a lot of value in multiple answers with their nuances explained or why they're outdated or the new way explained, etc..
I think that will result in 10000 questions asking how do I add an entry to a vector. There are a lot of dear internet do my thinking for me, and no way those people are thinking or researching before posting
If there are people who need an answer, and people happy to provide that answer (and perhaps a bit of kind coaching on how to find answers in the future), what is the downside of letting them connect on stackoverflow? Nothing is forcing people to hang out in the novice area answering repetitive questions if they don’t want to.
The downside of disallowing ‘unworthy’ questions is that people feel made stupid for asking, and unwelcome. Also, people feel made stupid for answering, and unwelcome. There is plenty of elitism in tech, and you could keep the main stackoverflow for unique, well-asked questions, as well as adding the novice area.
The advantage of having a novice area of stackoverflow is that more people will use the site. While not every question will be great, the total number of great questions, and the total number of people helped, will be higher.
If there are people who need an answer, and people happy to provide that answer ... what is the downside ...?
Turnover/churn. If a Q/A site allowed basic questions then the site would be flooded with them since the population of novices greatly exceeds sophomores or experts. Moderation would need to keep up with silo-ing these Qs into the 'novice area' you propose. Experts would need to sift more to get to the interesting, challenging or novel Qs if moderation can't keep up, which might affect the retention of these users, thus diminishing the resource pool available on the site.
To me it's clear that tact and grace is called for, and is currently mostly missing, when directing askers of basic Qs to existing answers, whether on- or off-site but there is such a thing as tragedy of the commons. Some stewardship and curation is required to maintain an acceptable SNR.
> If a Q/A site allowed basic questions then the site would be flooded with them since the population of novices greatly exceeds sophomores or experts.
This is really excusing bad UI/UX (like surfacing existing answers while a user is typing a question) and a bad ranking algorithm. There is no such thing as "being flooded" only bad search algorithms, and bad UX. Google is "flooded" with a result set spanning the entire internet, and they manage to surface answers. Stack Overflow can do the same--they have more tools to rank and influence behavior (rewards, moderation, points) than google has because they control the site, its structure, and how it is gamified.
I agree with this. There are different goals for different people on SO, and while I think the blog is generally good and the idea for guiding questions is good, there's other low-hanging fruit here.
We tend to forget that even really basic things like googling for an answer are learned skills. Some people are so green, they don't even know what they are looking for. They have some collection of objects that they want in a certain order, but they don't know enough to know the name of the thing they are looking for is a sorting algorithm. Or you have a situation where someone needs a linked list, but they have no idea what to call it, so searching fails. I've seen genuinely bright people who are new to programming fail in this way and get really frustrated when people tell them to "just fucking google it" when they already did, but honestly didn't know what to call what they were looking for.
On the other side, you have some people who are not so interested in a single canonical answer to a well-formed question. There are people who really get a lot of enjoyment out of guiding people and teaching them.
I would say the quickest way to satisfy a lot of the dynamic here is to have a place to migrate really poor questions instead of just closing them down. Something like how-to.stackoverflow.com or whatever.
Yes, some people just don't want to learn and are looking for someone else to do their homework. It's true. But I think those are best evaluated by the kinds of people who want to hang out there and try to offer guidance rather than the population as a whole who is going for more of a nerdapedia site.
In other words, give the people who want to teach a place to teach, and give the general site a way to move those questions to that context. Let the teaching-focused users evaluate the genuinely bad actors.
> Some people are so green, they don't even know what they are looking for.
As a junior, I've run into this, especially since I have no mentor and I just kind of have to wing it when it comes to my own education. Example, I have an Android project where I use the HackerNews API to get the top stories, but I got the IDs and then the JSON for each all in one go. At the time, my thought was that I wanted to do this dynamically; I had no idea how to describe this to people for weeks. Then someone told me I was probably looking for "pagination". Boom, that was it. Don't know how to actually implement my own pagination still because all of the articles on it are trash and end up recommending the libraries for pagination anyway, but now I know!
One thing I've been pondering is if it's possible to have a sort-of "Junior's Dictionary" where a common (or semi-common) scenario is laid out and terminology is attached to it. Would have been great to know I was looking for pagination the entire time.
> The additional level of moderation doesn't seem to have added much value over my time participating. The closest thing I can think of as nice is combining duplicates, though moderators often seem to miss subtle differences between questions and in some cases information gets lost in the end. Generally, the moderation focus often seems legalistic or driven by artificial incentives rather than primarily focused on improving the breadth, depth, and quality of the site as a technical resource.
The problem is, they added the review queues, which prompts people to review questions on topics they might know nothing about, and give badges based on how much people review. So people go through those review queues and might be motivated to just get through things quickly without thinking very much about the effect of what they are doing; there is no meta review, no downside to just making hasty decisions that just prevent other people from engaging in useful discussion.
There is. There are "audit" questions designed to test whether the reviewer is paying attention. If they improperly vote to close a "good" audit question or improperly vote to leave open a "bad" one, they get banned from reviewing for a while.
OK, this may be a new feature, since I stopped paying close attention several years back when I got frustrated with the direction the community was going.
But I don't think that "audit" questions do much to address my issue. They enforce that someone is paying at least a little bit of attention; but they still emphasize things like voting to close a "bad" question, rather than helping the person asking the question ask a better question. They might help a little bit with people who are just not paying attention at all for questions which are black and white as to whether they are "good" or "bad" (such as blatant spam), but they don't help at all with pushing the "grey area" questions in the right direction.
That's the crux of the issue; the community is so focused on just cleaning up bad questions by closing them, rather than working with the person asking to help get them to be able to work better with the community.
There are far too many new questions each day for the people who are capable of mentoring an individual into asking a good question for Stack Overflow to scale.
Lets say that it takes 15 minutes in chat to help a person (who wants to be helped in asking a good question rather than getting the answer now).
Next, lets apply Sturgeon's law to Stack Overflow. There are 8000 questions a day and 90% of them are crap. Thats 7200 questions that need work. This is 1,800 hours of mentoring per day.
The close (and down vote) is such a minimal amount of work that it allows the group within the site that is striving for a particular vision of quality that it allows them to do the most they can. Furthermore, it is not infrequent that a person who provides assistant for trying to unravel a question from getting a "why can't you just help me now?" with assorted vulgarity interspersed.
On smaller sites, with a greatly reduced amount of questions per day the group capable of mentoring as well as moderating is able to spend the 15 minutes of time without significantly impacting the time taken to moderate and curate the rest of the questions.
With 8000 questions per day, its really hard to look at all of them. As I write this, there are only 16 people who have exhausted their close reviews for the day ( https://stackoverflow.com/review/close/stats - only 16 have 40 reviews). That doesn't show the people who are doing new questions, but it does give an idea of how shallow the bench of people who are spending time to moderate the site actually is.
Getting more people to help out would be great, but most people aren't doing anything to help.
There are also people who believe that up voting a newbie question and saying "welcome to the site" in the comments without improving the question is helpful.
The thing is, bad questions don't really matter in the grand scheme of things. If a question is bad, and it gets no answers, it will just languish. You don't need to do anything about it. Maybe have an auto-close after a week of inactivity or something. It probably doesn't really matter, as long as you actually sort questions by things like score, answer score, etc, so the bad questions just go down to the ends of all of the lists on pages no one ever browses to. Bits are cheap, a few bad questions being present on the site and not closed doesn't really hurt.
I don't expect every bad question will lead to a valuable mentorship opportunity. I've certainly encountered my fair share of those that weren't worth spending my time on.
Bad answers are more problematic; there's good reason to be vigilent about those.
And of course spam, obvious homework, and just completely incomprehensible questions should be closed instantly.
What I see is questions which are not phrased well but you can actually work out what they're asking being closed. So by the time I've written up an answer, the question is closed, and my answer is wasted. I can copy my answer elsewhere, and vote to re-open, maybe after editing the question to make it more clear, and it might get re-opened, but then I have to spend a lot more time and attention waiting for that. By closing out questions too aggressively, not only are people putting off newcomers, but also wasting the time of those answering questions.
Yeah, one of the things that really frustrates me about the review process is that they just incentivize taking some quick and easy action, not actually doing the right thing.
Effective moderation is not easy, and a very different skill set than answering technical questions, but the rep needed to perform many of these mod duties is just given to those who accrue enough rep.
There is a system known as the Roomba ( https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/92006 ) that will automatically delete questions. A question has a negative score, and has no answers will be deleted in 30 days. A question that is at 0 or less, has no answers, has a low view count, and has at most 1 comment will be deleted after a year. A question that is closed, negatively scored, no accepted answer, and no answers with a positive score will be deleted in 9 days.
So that does exist, but it takes a LONG time for it to get cleaned up in some cases. And if people jump in with a "this might answer your question, hope it helps", it will likely never get deleted.
> The toxicity is in all the unanswered questions.
---
> What I see is questions which are not phrased well but you can actually work out what they're asking being closed.
Consider fixing the question with an edit before writing the answer so that it won't be closed when you get around to writing an answer. This way its a good question from an earlier point in the life of the question. Furthermore, it makes it easier for other people to provide answers too. Leaving the question in a poor state with an answer makes it harder for the google only user to find the question and understand what is being asked.
---
Doing the right thing in review takes time. Many of the first post or triage reviews are done by people who haven't... fully bought into the philosophy of answers for people who haven't asked the question yet. They look ok to the standards of a 500 rep user who doesn't see what Jeff and Joel were trying for with Stack Overflow ( https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges/access-review-queu... ).
There's no instruction for people for how to help in the review queues. As such, everyone is doing their own thing with their own "this is the quality that I'd write at, it looks ok." The only way to correct this currently is with review bans... and that has its own problems with negativity and the perception of Stack Overflow as elitist.
The user's question seemed like a fairly standard one: how can I force kill a goroutine. But actually there was a question underneath it. The issue wasn't that they needed to kill the goroutine it was that the library they were using didn't have a mechanism for timeouts.
The sad thing was there was a PR available that fixed the problem.
Its like arguing with someone who takes everything you say completely literally and makes no attempt at a charitable interpretation.
I'm really happy about this announcement. As a fairly high-ranked user myself (7.8k at the moment) I try to use the tools the site lets me access to counteract some of the nonsense directed at new and enthusiastic people and the unreasonable suppression of certain questions and answers, but there's only so much you can do when you don't have hours every day to go through the close votes and edit queues.
Heard so much from so many colleagues over the years about how SO is inaccessible and unwelcoming, and started to realise why. I'm glad SO themselves have been on the same journey, because they're far better placed to do something about it!
Related to this, I'm sick of the moderators deleting comments and moving discussions to chats on a whim just because they're seeing too many comment. They don't seem to realize they're not helping anybody; they keep doing this as if it's Truth ordered by God.
Like, StackExchange admins: If you're getting flags, there's offensive material, the comments are blatantly off-topic, etc., then OK, I get that; you can step in and moderate. But that's a tiny fraction of the time. When people are having a normal discussion that turns out to be long, maybe don't be a jerk who deletes all the comments from that post and tells people to go somewhere else? It kills the entire discussion, mood, and everyone's enthusiasm, along with lots of gems that were in the comments but that wouldn't fit inside any answers. You really expect the community to turn out happy and welcoming when you keep punching all the breaths out of the users and kicking them to some other corner just because more than 5 of them decided to commit the sin of commenting and sharing thoughts on a topic?
I agree with this -- sometimes the comments are more interesting and informative than the answer. And why is it ordained that "Comments aren't for extended discussion"?
Only a handful of upvoted comments are shown by default, you have to deliberately expand the list to see more, so why not retain them all? If someone wants to wade through 200 commments and add one of his own, what's the real harm? They could add an option for askers/answerers to "Stop notifications for new comments', if that's the issue.
Mm in my view they don't need a forum, they just need to get out of the way of the community. The tools are all there; they've designed them well. It's just their imposition of arbitrary unhelpful rules that's the problem.
No, please don't push things out to a forum - few would use a forum and it doubles the pages a searcher has to check to see if they've got the appropriate question/answer.
A lot of the time if there's many comments on a question or answer it's because there's some nuance that needs to be brought out or the answer has limitations etc. Someone arriving from search probably needs and wants to know that - and will take but a moment to decide if the comments look worthwhile enough to expand and read more.
SO displays it well enough technically by only picking out the top 4 or 5 comments. What SO needs is the mods leaving the comments well alone unless they're abusive or spam.
Stack Overflow has had problems with too many comments. In https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/204402/hide-trivial... there is a question about how much comments cost in terms of signal to noise. Do comments make finding good answers further down on the page harder to find? Do they make good answers get less votes?
Note that in that post, everyone who has a diamond after their name is a StackOverflow employee.
This is just a virch to appear on board with wider trends in the community, and addressing the issue you raised give StackOverflow no more recognition, advertising revenue, or standing in the community.
Yeah it's a weird mix of helpful content moderated by an irritating hall monitor like community wielding power and making changes nobody wants.
I've been frustrated when trying to contribute - you'll have two people helping each other and then some third party comes in and declares it not valuable, incorrectly says something is a duplicate, or starts deleting things for arbitrary reasons.
I just want the moderators to go away and leave us alone, it also makes me think stack overflow is successful in spite of this - not because of it.
> I just want the moderators to go away and leave us alone, it also makes me think stack overflow is successful in spite of this - not because of it.
You can use the chat site, message them directly (if their contact information is listed) or anything else you like to help someone with a useless/duplicate/beginner/help-vampire-ey question. You just aren't allowed to do it inside the reputation system to mine these kinds of answers for karma, and aren't allowed to do it inside the wiki system so you don't pollute the results of searches.
But the goal of SO is not for you two to have a chat - it's to produce quality questions and answers for future visitors. When SO's moderation team does its job well, you only see them "harassing" you. When they don't, you google your question and get vague, poorly-worded questions answered by incorrect one-liners. SO's moderation is an effort to balance three parties with conflicting interests:
- the people asking questions just want a solution for their specific problem, which may or may not be useful to SO. This can include homework problems, RTFM problems, vague and unclear questions, etc.
- the people answering questions want interesting questions that stimulate them to keep using the site. SO really needs those people to feel happy answering questions, otherwise no one will visit the site! You need experts providing quality answers, who can find something interesting.
- the people visiting the site after-the-fact. Those people are (usually) just googling a problem they have, but aren't willing to commit to a question. They need both the questioners and the answerers to have done their jobs, otherwise either the questions are too poor a quality to be sure it's the same problem, or the answers are too poor quality to be of use to them.
To all those groups, effective SO moderation looks antagonistic, because they wouldn't go to the site if it had awful moderation - it would just be "that useless place where no one answers your questions and you keep getting the same question over and over".
I think it is rare for a person to change its bullying behaviour. What SO should do is to review interactions and then remove all users demonstrating toxic behaviour and prevent them from registering again unless they can prove they successfully completed therapy.
I had a similar experience recently with a question I had answered years ago. A highly ranked user came in, complained in a comment about the fact I linked to documentation instead of copy pasting the docs into the answer then downvoted me causing a loss of 2 karma. I reported the comment because it was ridiculous this person is scanning questions which are years old to try and find things to nitpick.
I'm not sure if they removed the comment or if some other moderator did, but it was gone within a couple of days. My karma loss remained. It's absolutely ridiculous over there sometimes and these sorts of interactions are one of the big reasons I stopped participating.
The best practice in this case is to edit your answer to include the docs as well as the link, so the next user can find the answer in one place, preserved even when external links inevitably break, change, or disappear over time.
A good citizen would remove their downvote after you did that.
A better citizen would have just made the edit themselves to help everyone.
I have had similar issues on this site. I have had 3 high rep users of the site close a question I asked having never answered a single question in the technology I was referencing. That said I have never felt that because I was not white I was treated differently, how would anyone even know that? I guess they could go look for a profile picture before they answer?
If you have people doing that then there is a much bigger issue then what has been described by the EVP. My experience in general has been that there are a segment of users on StackOverflow that think they are better than everyone else and take every little opportunity they can to impress upon the rest of us how great they are in their own little world.
> That said I have never felt that because I was not white I was treated differently, how would anyone even know that? I guess they could go look for a profile picture before they answer?
> If you have people doing that then there is a much bigger issue then what has been described by the EVP.
Probably why the comments are disabled on that blog post. Doesn't want anyone pointing out the disconnects from reality.
> I have had 3 high rep users of the site close a question I asked
I have some mod privileges on SO and have been a user for ~8 years.
The best way to not have your question locked or deleted, is to ensure you're following the best practices for asking a question and include a Minimum Complete Verifiable Example (MCVE).
If you feel you've done both and still don't get a good experience, it's worth speaking out on Meta for more specific advice.
Most people on SO just want to help — it's easier to help on a question that meets these standards.
> having never answered a single question in the technology I was referencing
Moderator privileges are more about the style of a question/answer than the specifics of a particular tech. The moderation queues are irrespective of the tech tagged in the question.
I've never had a question closed, but do have to agree with JPGalt that there is a problem. A lot of power is vested in high-rep users who got to high rep by making lots of snap judgments. In the Qt tag, I frequently encountered high rep C++ developers guessing at answers. They knew the language, but were unfamiliar with the library and would make guesses at how things work. Then other C++ developers browsing the front page would upvote their answer because it sounded right (even if it was completely incorrect).
It's mildly annoying when wrong answers get voted up, but it's even more annoying when moderation tools are used that way. This new user got screwed over by high-ranking close voters who didn't actually read the question: https://stackoverflow.com/q/49847677/331041
That's an interesting point. I mostly answer in Python, HTML, and CSS, and haven't seen this happen over there.
It reminds me of when SO added the feature to make front-end code snippets in answers runnable. Perhaps an evolution of that is to provide the equivalent for backend code. Do you think this would solve the voting problem you described?
To the linked question - Do you know if it's possible to undo a "mark as dupe"?
Once I made an account and tried to be more active. I got told off for asking questions about issues I was having or because my answers weren't liked by someone with high rep.
I gave up on it. I never use my stackoverflow account. I use stackoverflow on a daily basis, to find preexisting issues around what I am working on and read possible solutions, but thats it. I don't consider logging in and asking about an issue I am having, let alone help anyone else.
I feel like the toxicity around the community has led me into that. I do feel like people on stackoverflow are elitists, thats what I am getting about it. I feel like they are playing on a different league than me and they make me feel lesser although I am pretty certain that am competent enough to succeed.
I am grateful for stackoverflow, but I definitely don't see using an account on there anytime soon, and its going to take a long long time for stackoverflow to win me over as a contributor :/
P.S - Out of about 30 devs I worked with in the past / working now with etc I've only seen 3 of them using stackoverflow by contributing to it, or when they get an issue they post about it. The rest of them use stackoverflow the same way I use it which proves a pattern here, at least on my personal circle.
> I gave up on it. I never use my stackoverflow account.
This roughly mirrors my experience...
I went through a period of engagement, which ended abruptly after an unpleasant interaction. The author of a semi-well-known niche library took time out of his day to poo-poo a highly specific answer to a highly specific issue. Thing is, the questioner and myself were using that library a bit differently than it's primary usage (broad data generation instead of test-data management).
So I had to debate with myself if I was really gonna be using my time explaining to someone I'd otherwise have loved to bump into at a conference that the world is a complicated place and sometimes I use butter knives to unscrew things regardless of what Ikea thinks about it... Haven't posted since.
I think it's a natural reaction to dislike questions that are asked without much attention to detail, contain spelling mistakes (often in the headline), don't use code formatting or otherwise make it more difficult to understand.
Note that these problems may not make answering the question impossible. If, for example, the headline/question is "How do I do this???", then you can still answer, provided the body is more specific.
But such a meaningless title makes it harder to spot the question in lists when you're searching, or willing to answer questions.
That's bad for the usefulness of SO, and moderators and other users who have spent a lot of time on the site may notice such problems far more than you do when first visiting it.
The right answer to this is to edit the question: fix the formatting, write a good title and select a good set of tags.
I feel that if I do this, maybe the questioner will learn from the edits for their future questions. And even if they don't, at least I've made the question potentially valuable for other people coming along later, which is the main point.
It is run by humans after all. Some of these humans, even in their high ranking are just that, humans. I usually avoid those types as they sometimes have an axe to grind and want to take it out on "underlings". My rep is high enough anyway there that those types are just pathetic.
Same! I'm definitely qualified to answer some of the questions and for some reason actually willing to do so but totally gave up investing my time in doing so after a couple of similar experiences.
I'm a high-scoring user who has been put off by this exact behavior. The problem is, the behavior is pervasive among other high scoring users, and whenever I advocate against this kind of behavior, I get a whole bunch of pushback about it.
No one seems to want to change. No one seems to want to even engage with criticism about the culture; they just push back and pile on when criticism is brought up.
After a couple times of seeing this kind of behavior, and pushing back, and then getting piled on by people rejecting the criticism, I started to get tired of it and withdrawing somewhat. Later on, I some blatant sexism in a chatroom that was laughed off when I pointed it out to the moderators.
I've pretty much given up. I'll occasionally reply to questions people ask on my existing answers or if I see something that needs an answer or edit I'll make it, but I don't really feel like fighting the overwhelmingly elitist, sexist, and uncaring attitude on the site.
I think that this post is a nice gesture, and good that it's coming from the company and not just another user, but I worry that's it's much too late. The community has been attracting people who like it the way it is, and repelling people like me who don't, for a long time.
Last time this subject came up on Hacker News here, I was inspired to post an idea I came up with after mulling the issue over a bit: mentors. I posted the idea on Meta here:
But while there definitely seems to be a movement afoot to tackle the issue, I can see why you're ready to give up. Look at the comments to my question and you'll find this (with a couple upvotes):
@klenwell 'users who downvote without comment or explanation other new users who have given some obvious attention to the composition of their question' I hear these things often. I don't see them when using SO, nor have I seen any evidence that such a set of users exists, and I have asked for such evidence, many, many times. None has ever been forthcoming. I have concluded that such users do not actually exist.
This after I provided a detailed personal account of this dynamic in action. I mean I guess I could start collecting timestamped screenshots or request the server logs from the Stack Overflow sysadmins. For now, I guess I'll just join the chorus of the disaffected here.
Yeah fixing this sort of thing is going to require a persistent and unpopular effort from the very top. They'll have to force out people who have contributed huge amounts of time to the community but who are nonetheless causing these issues. There will be a vociferous backlash. The lovey-dovey tone of the OP doesn't necessarily convince me that they have the stomach for it. But I hope they do, because I think it would improve things.
I’m in the same boat. 10k rep on SO and softeng.se, and I barely participate anymore. For me the most frustrating part is that the rules forbid vague questions with opinionated answers, but that at this point in my career most of the things I find interesting are all like that so there’s almost nothing I want to get answers to that I can ask.
Software architecture questions are very difficult to ask without triggering overbroadness. Another category that is off limits are getting started type questions, again they’re considered too vague (but that’s the whole point, the user doesn’t know where to start). And the illogical ban on pointing to research involving statistics also drives me batty. I’ve had arguments with moderators before where my answer was bad because it pointed to capers jones’ research, one of the most authorative sources of good software dev practices.
I always feel like it’s a game of dodge the moderator bot to get questions to not be closed, unless they’re of the boring easy to answer briefly and precisely variety.
At an arms length it really seems like there should be some kind of delineations of the questions.
"What document backend to use with Drupal?" is a question whose answers are in constant flux. It is a bad match for and Authoritative Language Compendium. But it's also the kinds of thing people wonder about, it's a relevant tech question, and the dialog around something like that is easily as valuable as the accepted answer since everyone is skinning a different cat.
So instead of "overly broad, no discussion for you" I'd rather see those questions get routed to "conversation-SO" instead of "reference-SO"...
> "What document backend to use with Drupal?" is a question whose answers are in constant flux. It is a bad match for and Authoritative Language Compendium. But it's also the kinds of thing people wonder about, it's a relevant tech question, and the dialog around something like that is easily as valuable as the accepted answer since everyone is skinning a different cat.
IIRC, they did something like that. It was called programmers.stackexchange.com, and I used it a couple times and it was great.
Then some power-that-be decided it "wasn't working" (probably because it didn't fit the SO only-kind-of-good-question rubric) and changed the focus be a clone of SO with some minor difference in emphasis.
People weren't interested in maintaining the early programmers.se site. It was a "what to browse when there's nothing else to do." As the crud started piling up the options were either abandon it completely (that was threatened) or clean it up along with the associated rules of what makes a good subjective question.
It takes a lot of work to maintain a free for all site by the community. It takes less work by the community to maintain a heavily moderated site.
The culture of a site is a reflection of how much work people are willing to put into keeping it that way.
You'll have to be more specific about what that "crud" is, as SO's culture seems to have a tendency to reclassify the baby as dirt and throw him out with the bathwater.
> the options were either abandon it completely (that was threatened) or clean it up along with the associated rules of what makes a good subjective question.
Seems like there should have been more options on the table than "abandon" or "remake in SO's image." SO has a better population to answer subjective questions than most of the alternatives it tries to push people towards. They really should have been more flexible.
> There’s an even longer list of things that really belong on the new Programmers Stack Exchange, which appears to be degrading into fairly stupid water-cooler nonsense, and could benefit from an infusion of more meaty subjects, like these proposals:
> It was a the era of "what should I name my cat?"
A lot of those links 404 for me, but a lot of that stuff could have been taken care of by being better at defining what was on and off topic, e.g. it's a site for subjective questions about programming, rather than programmers answering subjective questions. SO has the moderation resources to handle that.
SO might have had the moderation resources. The early PSE site didn't (as described in https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/200144 ). The moderation actions trying to deal with that were done mostly by diamond moderator fiat and occasionally Jeff or Joel saying "no."
The community that was there at the time wasn't doing any significant moderation or curation of those questions. Consider https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/4417... and consider is that useful? curated? Should "Quit my last job." (entire answer) be there? or "I tried to apply good programming technique to a language such as TI-83+ BASIC."? Count how many times "read books" or some variation is in that list.
It wasn't moderated or curated. Such pile on "give a pithy answer" was acceptable. And it made the site - trying for the more conceptual and architecture questions that Joel was asking for in his blog post harder to find, and they would get drowned out by the popular fun questions. That lead to https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/01/31/the-trouble-with-popul...
Its not that those aren't interesting questions, its that they are the wrong fit for that format. There are better places to ask for the best programming joke than Stack Overflow and Exchange sites.
And so, with the lack of moderation and curation from the fun days of Programmers.SE a different philosophy of the site was able to establish itself... and the site grew in activity.
The culture of a site is a proof of work. You have to work to maintain it. If there isn't work to do it, it can change. Its probably far to late to change to the less moderated version of the site again. However, if one wants to do that, actively work to curate the site so that those questions are acceptable.
MathOverflow has a fair number of fun and soft questions - but that comes at a lot of work of moderation and curation from the entire community... which they do. The community on other sites that wants those fun and soft questions has not shown as much a desire to curate them, and so others moderate them (not desiring to curate them either).
It's not a worthless question. If you're talking about subjective questions, obsessive curation is not the answer.
> Should "Quit my last job." (entire answer) be there?
Sure, considering there were better answers that had far more votes. It might have been better if it wasn't, and moderation could have taken care of it.
Answers like that are certainly not an indictment of the format.
> Its not that those aren't interesting questions, its that they are the wrong fit for that format. There are better places to ask for the best programming joke than Stack Overflow and Exchange sites.
That's never the kind of think I asked or liked at programmers.se, but like I said before, they threw the baby out with the bathwater.
You haven't really convinced me that subjective questions are "wrong for the format." All you've really shown it that an unmoderated free for all produces some garbage that doesn't fir in a high quality tech Q&A site.
The real answer for why programmers.se failed is probably that the powers-that-be weren't willing to spend the time and resources to meet a new challenge, so they gave up and did something else.
Its not a worthless question. However, its worth is drastically diminished by having so many answers, and so many joke answers in there. That people didn't want to curate it so that the joke answers and duplicate answers are removed and set a standard for providing an answer that is more than one line is why that type of question is closed - it takes too much time for the community that wants to maintain the site to curate it and keep it at a quality that matches the rest of the site.
The format that SE provides is a very direct Q&A that tries to cut out all of the excess and gives a single good answer. There are other sites that are better cut out for polling questions and other sites that do a better job of "what is the best ...?"
Trying to make everything fit in the SE framework puts a burden on the community that moderates and curates the material, and at some point people have said "enough" because they don't want to and others haven't stepped up to do it.
The "wrong for the format" is part of the design of the site. Note here that we're talking in a thread. You can follow the discussion. SE was designed to make discussions awkward. When there's a discussion on a site of significant scale, it becomes unmanageable and detracts from the Q&A focus. If that is a good design decision or a bad one is up to debate - but it is the design decision of SE. And there are so many other places where that discussion could be had. Why not ask that question here? or over on a competing discourse site ( https://www.askquestions.tech was started by April who wrote the post that sparked much of this)?
If Programmers (now Software Engineering) has failed is also up for debate. The name change wasn't so much of a "it failed" but rather "people keep getting the wrong impression of topicality" because yes, it took too much time to keep trying to keep the topic on what the powers that be wanted to moderate and no one else was willing to do the job of curating the content of the larger programmers scope... and after all, they're all volunteers - its really hard to make volunteers volunteer to do something they're not interested in doing.
I'm sure the moderator feels entirely justified by closing this question, and going by the rules they are perfectly right, but it still feels wrong to me to turn this user away instead of working with them to figure out a way to make their questions fit the website's format.
But, that takes a lot of work, and moderators are volunteers whose time is entirely on their own dime. I suspect that if the stackexchange network had paid moderators the outcome would be very different, but they probably don't have the funding model to support that. I myself also don't do moderator duties on the SE network, so I really shouldn't be blaming the moderators. I merely want to point out the frustration and the non-optimal outcome, not lay blame at the moderators' feet.
> No one wants the rules to change in a game that they perceive that they are winning (or have won). Moreso if they worked hard to win.
I'm one of those people who wants the rules to change in a game that I'm already winning. I worked hard to win; I fully engaged in the gamifiction, spending days at a time making sure I hit the max daily rep level, optimizing how I answered questions to get the highest score.
Even then, I tried to focus my optimization on ways that would help people more. For instance, one way to optimize is to post a very short quick answer, so you are able to get early upvotes before there's been a flood of answers for a question; but I would then edit and flesh out my answer. This has both advantages for reputation, since I could get early upvotes, and then later provide a more detailed comprehensive answer that would be likely to get further upvotes. It's also helpful for the person asking; it's possible that the very quick reply will be helpful, so they get an answer soon, but it's also possible that the more detailed reply with references to docs is what they need, so it's a way of making the gamification actually work to help people out more.
I think one of the big problems is when they added gamification of moderation. They added the review queues, which prompt you to review questions and answers that had been downvoted, voted to close, edited by other people, etc, and gave out badges based on numbers of reviews done. This means you'd go through a queue of questions and answers on topics you might know nothing about, and be prompted as for whether or not you agree with someone else's close vote or edit or the like.
When a question is not great, you could just vote to close it, or you could try to engage with the person asking the question and help edit it into a better form. I generally try to talk to the person asking and edit the question to be better; but getting internet points for getting through a lot of reviews quickly incentivizes people to make quick judgements, sometimes on topic they don't know much about. After they added the review queues, I found a lot more questions were being closed before you had a chance to answer or to engage with the person in comments to get them to clarify their question.
And while lots of people these days argue that closing a question is just a way to indicate that it's not up to standards but it can be fixed and re-opened, for people new to SO who aren't familiar with the culture it feels like a slap in the face and a rejection of their question. After a question is closed, it's a lot more likely that they'll just delete it, delete their account, or just stop participating.
Anyhow, yeah, there is an aspect of people not wanting to change the rules of a game that they are playing and winning; I just wish either the incentives were changed, or more people would take the view that the point of the scoring is as a rough measure of how much they are helping people out, and helping people out is the ultimate goal, rather than being an end in itself.
And I should also say that I'm not against closing truly bad or unsalvageable questions; I've had cases where I've tried to engage with someone to make their question better, and they just haven't made any effort, or cases in which people are obviously asking homework questions. But I really think that there should be some effort to help people out with asking their questions before just blindly deciding to close them out.
There's a delicate balance for moderators to achieve and I don't envy them.
Some questions are clearly daft, the person hasn't done any prior research, the question is vague, the problem is not apparent and it's a big waste of time trying to help. These questions are often shut down mercilessly and I think that's probably the best thing for them, but I've no doubt it's a terrible experience for the guy asking the question. I think the SO blog post addressed it pretty well by outlining a more streamlined question form with clear prompts for each part of the question.
Other questions are not daft, but perhaps are not asked well. They need to be edited, re-framed, boiled down to the essential parts, an example included, the expected output included, that sort of thing. It's tiresome to run into questions like this over and over, and I can understand how people might comment out of frustration, but it's good to prompt the OP to fix their question up so it can (and probably will) be answered well. Kid gloves and kindness are important here, it's not always easy to ask a good question. The SO blog post went a long way to addressing this and I look forward to seeing some changes on the site.
Overall I think SO is a fantastic resource with many amazing contributors, so it's good to see them responding to this problem and I hope they can make it even better.
In my experience, SO is just not useful anymore for asking questions.
All the easy questions that could be solved by just RTFM have been answered, many times.
And the more nuanced questions are fraught with bias (see: "The Definitive C++ Book Guide and List").
As for "boiling down" and "re-framing" questions, they won't get answered. Usually ever.
You'll get a few comments from people trying to help, with suggestions you've already tried, pitying your high-effort question with no answers. Then, you'll go search through the annals of your language, either to find that one guy twenty years ago published a piece of your puzzle in his blog, or that there's nothing at all in any sort of literature on how to solve your specific problem.
You'll then end up doing your own testing and research, spending an inordinate amount of time testing and verifying, until you come up with a brand spanking new type of abstraction that solves your problem perfectly. You'll write up your dissertation, post it on your question, and set it as "answered."
Then you'll curse under your breath at how f useless SO is, besides being an over-glorified forum / "selected excerpts from the manual."
I've stopped using SO, because I've realized all of your software problems can be solved with two things:
1). RTFM
2). Explore the software/language
Anything else, IMO, breeds bad habits. I say this as someone who used to rely solely on internet tutorials and other people's examples before I had to do work where my code had to be perfect or else I'd be out of a job/sued/[something violent].
I had to quickly learn how to do things myself and find the answers to my problems by straight scientific method and I know I've become a better software engineer because of it.
Having experience in both, I can say with conviction, that anyone who uses SO as anything more than a pair of training wheels that should be discarded after your first 6-12 months is liable to become a "bad" programmer (see: Ruby developer community).
You have a reasonable reply by nookoking, but you probably can't see it because he's banned.
nookoking, if you see this, maybe mail the mods. I have no idea why you'd be banned, your history looks fine, but all but your very first post are dead.
That seems to be the way it goes, at first.You basically need to visit the site every day and vote while editing typos and fixing other peoples mistakes.
It is a bizarre system, so I guess we shouldn't be surprised about the community it shaped.
The ways to get points combined with the way moderation powers slowly flow from them in this gamified rigid hierarchy is not a common approach. Only allowing a specific type of social interaction (objective questions whose answer(s) are of interest to many). It is weird.
I think it is really interesting that the community isn't much worse. At that scale and, lets be honest, with programmers giving programming advice? Why is that? Which of those aspects can be borrowed for other stuff?
I can comment on this from the "other side" since I have discussed this on meta.
The problem is that answering questions which are borderline low quality/too specific, etc or need imorovement before it can be answered are usually frowned upon because it encourages the asker to ask more low quality questions.
The abuse you got is not OK though. If I comment at all on such questions it is always polite.
What I think is also a big oroblem is closing questions as duplicates which are not duplicates.
As with every system I think the incentives are the culprit so I expect SO to improve on this soon. They should be able to since they have all the data to do so
Why do "low quality" questions matter? I don't believe "low quality" is really a problem.
Stack Exchange could have dealt with this by developing a mechanism for identifying and promoting general and well-written questions to search engines, and so on.
People sometimes have specific or incompletely formulated questions, and people sometimes enjoy figuring out answers to those questions.
By stamping on these situations, Stack Exchange quickly removed almost all of its potential contributor base.
> As I have said it encourages additional low quality questions which is more work for the mods.
"low quality" question could just be marked as such and kept mostly unmodorated. By marking them there is also an incentive to produce "high quality" questions. You could also make badges and reputation around it so asking good questions gets more rewarding.
Also, answering those "low quality" can really help the asker to understand his problem better and improve his problem solving ability, so maybe the next time he can provide better information in his question.
If you just close the question and tell people to go away you will just scare people off (which btw also leads to a smaller number of mods)
With all due respect, but this kind of report is pretty useless to the rest of us without any context. A link to the question and a copy of your deleted answer at least. It's not like every single complaint is valid - plenty of people complain whose treatment seems entirely justified. There are plenty of useless answers that SO has to deal with.
Let me present you other side of the story. I have been user of SO and significant level contributor for as long as it’s been there. Virtually every day there is onslaught of people asking questions that are trivially answerable by simple search or not well formed or not even legibly written. Everyday lot of people end up spending their time in answering these rathar than focusing on questions that are far more worth their time. You may say, well, leave it up to folks to what they want to answer. The problem is that it doesn’t work that way. Spammy question often ends up overwhelming limited screen space and good questions gets buried like a needle in the haystack. Even worse, lot of people go after trivial stuff just to get more points. Even more worse people who ask bad questions get encouraged to keep doing same things. You can see where this is going.
In nutshell, current system is not ideal but it has been put in place after lots of thoughts. No one is going to disagree with being more respectful and kind however the solution to this problem is much more of a technical challenge.
> Spammy question often ends up overwhelming limited screen space and good questions gets buried like a needle in the haystack.
This is one of the issues with SO. I'd love to find a good question. I'd be happy to spend some time on it and learn something. But instead there are lots of questions about why the guessing game doesn't wait for input the second time, what's this syntax error, why doesn't this "if" work. Questions that will maybe help one person, but could be deleted immediately afterwards and nobody would notice.
I don't even know what's the answer. Maybe a canonical "this is how you debug an if statement which doesn't work" or other topic answer would help. Maybe not.
It's also worth noting that those who can lock discussions can also edit questions without approval (and others can with approval), so it's worth pushing back on editing the question into being "answerable", admittedly a non-binary state.
They also outright get rid of questions that people provide good and helpful answers to. I once asked a question about a specific ML technique in regards to implementing in a specific c++ API. Higher ups said that the question was far too broad and against the guidelines, despite receiving at least 5 good answers to my questions before they got to it. They effectively shut up good conversation for the sake of a rule book they probably didn't write.
Asking a specific nuanced question results in a response of a) tell me what you are really trying to accomplish and i'll answer that question or b) don't do what you are doing.
Don't presume I don't know what I'm doing or know the right question to ask. This happens so often and is such a time waster I hesitate to use the site. Their culture even invites it by giving it a fancy name of the "xy problem".
Please provide a way to flag a question as "Don't respond with an XY question" or alternatively "I know what I am doing and still have a question".
You can do those with prose. Explain that you know what you're doing. Give an underlying reason that shows that your X is an X.
Answerers can only act on a) the information you provide b) heuristics they have based on seeing many other questions. If you do not provide a) then they'll have to fall back on b)
that invites a debate about the premise. i shouldn't need to justify my constraints. i should be able to pose a problem and STATE the constraints. if you don't believe that my constraints are real then you can feel free to not answer my question but the SO regulars always feel the need to interact even when they have nothing to add.
> if you don't believe that my constraints are real then you can feel free to not answer my question
But XY-problems exist and are not uncommon. Overconstrained questions also exist. How are people supposed to know that yours is not one of those without additional information?
If you're asking people for free help and to spend their time understanding how their relevant but not identical experiences may adapt to your different-but-related problem, then yeah, you might.
If someone, even someone I respect, know personally, and work alongside, comes up to me and says "I need to install a nearly-20-year-old version of MySQL next to a modern software stack; help!" [0], I'm going to ask "why?" and maybe "are you sure there's no other way to approach your goal?" first. Not presumptuously or because I'm sure I know better, but because a) the answer will help me better understand the problem and goal, and b) because sometimes extremely competent, rational people really do overlook the obvious solutions, sometimes for days/weeks spent beating their head against the wrong problem.
Sometimes the justification is as simple as "it's a business constraint imposed from above". Sometimes it's a more complex story. Either way, wanting to know that isn't asking too much.
> tell me what you are really trying to accomplish and i'll answer that question
That IS a valid question. The site would be nearly useless without that. Of course there are reasons why you may not want to do the obvious thing Y but have to do X to solve a particular problem, but for a nuanced and specific question that's really the most important thing in the question. If it's not there, the answerer will (rightly) assume you are trying to bang in a nail with a saw - no matter how nuanced the question is otherwise.
That is: to be a good question, you have to be very specific about what problem you are trying to solve, what solutions you can't use, and why it is that you have to go with a specific solution.
The site isn't a question and answer site, it's a problem and solution site. People don't go to stack overflow to find an answer to a question, but rather to solve the problem they have at hand. So to make your question as good as possible for those people it really needs to have a problem context, including rejected solutions. If those rejected solutions aren't in the question - they will come in the answers. That's good.
First time I asked question on SO I got a very curt response "this isn't a code writing service" and pretty much told to gtfo, but my question was very much asking for advice about _how to proceed as a beginner_ and I was clear about that. I was explicit in framing a coding a problem and asking for direction, not a solution to my homework.
Maybe it was the wrong site for that, but the elitist response, I think the question even got deleted by a mod along with the scathing comment, made me leave and only use SO as a reading resource. Never contributed and probably never will even though 8ish years later I have learned enough to be able to contribute.
> Too many people experience Stack Overflow¹ as a hostile or elitist place
True. There's definitely an elitist undertone at Stack Overflow, and the voting system has a huge effect on that...
> especially newer coders, women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups.
But this isn't true. No one knows anything about a user on Stack Overflow unless they explicitly announce it, and generally my perception seems to be a disdain towards newer members in general, not ones from any particular group.
Trying to make this about minorities feels like a desperate attempt to fit in with the 'social justice' sphere, and to virtue signal to people on sites like Twitter.
Still, the rest of the article seems fairly sane, and I guess this point stands out above all:
> Let’s reject the false dichotomy between quality and kindness
Because at the end of the day, we need to kill the 'brilliant jerk' archtype already. No, most intelligent people are not Dr House or Rick from Rick and Morty, and we shouldn't make the assumption that a community has to tolerate that sort of behaviour in order for it to be good. Moderate the community well, stop tolerating jerks because they're 'smart' and fix your voting systems, and Stack Overflow can easily become a great community to be part of again.
But how would you know about reactions to genre, skin color or other group if they weren't mentioned in the first place? And in that case why mention them at all on SO of all sites ? Or maybe it was about Perl coders? Be kind with them please.
My guess is that although you don't know the race/gender of the person there's a chance that they'll use a different questioning style. More senior/regular users then frown upon this different style not necessarily because they're being racist/sexist just because they don't like the way the question was asked.
I'm guessing the point here is that the named groups feel particularly unwelcome at SO; this can be the case without any opportunity for or evidence of discrimination. The blog post wasn't all that clear about how they got the data, but they seem to have data to that effect. It might mean that the expectations of the named groups are different from those of the average white male programmer, or it may only mean that everyone is put off by SO equally but SO is no longer willing to alienate everyone if it also means alienating the named groups.
Look at it from the other side. The person who is getting mean comments tells someone at SO about it (maybe via a survey). Then the SO admins notice that in the surveys women are overrepresented in the population of "people who complain about hostility".
Perhaps minorities already get enough abuse and hostility every day on meatspace, so they are less tolerant of even minor hostility over the Internet. Since they have a limited amount of fucks to give, so to speak, they are more likely to leave the site for good after an unpleasant interaction.
Think of minorities as the canary in the coal mine. They are more sensitive, so they start leaving the moment the environment starts to become toxic. Left unchecked, the toxicity will grow and push away everyone else too, so you can't just ignore them for being "snowflakes" or whatever.
Our culture encourages women and minorities to speak up. White men are expected to endure abuse in silence.
Consider how much attention complaints from women and minorities receive, and how little attention (and how much hostility) complaints from white men receive (unless those men are individually powerful, of course). People tend to repeat actions that are effective, so women and minorities learn to speak up, white men learn to keep their complaints to themselves.
Edit: I'd like to thank those who downvoted this comment for providing a live demonstration of the phenomenon.
Right. So let's not do that. Instead of waiting for minorities to speak up, you should complain right away when an online environment turns toxic.
Since we were not aware until today that minorities received more hostility on SO, that means users really don't know other users' gender and ethnicity, so it's not like anyone will call you a sissy girl for speaking up.
We have been complaining about hostility on SO for years.
It's debatable whether women and minorities actually do receive more hostility on SO, they're more likely to speak up, or SO's management is simply more responsive to their complaints.
It's also debatable whether we are living in a simulation or we are actually brains in a jar, or maybe only you are real and I'm a conversational AI.
But it's pointless to debate things that don't and can't change what we choose to do. Notice that all three of your proposed hypothesis can't change the fact that SO isn't very welcoming and they want to change that.
I think I get it. They could have chosen to act faster, before being forced to act by the politics of inclusivity.
I personally don't mind though. In my city many positive quality of life changes were made only after some disabled people complained. I benefit from those changes too, so I don't mind the delay as long as it eventually gets done.
I agree, if someone (SO, your city, or anyone else) finally improves their community in a way that benefits everyone, that's a good thing.
And if, as is often the case, past complaints had little effect until a particularly favored interest group spoke up, it's also an opportunity to listen more effectively to people who may have been ignored.
Totally agree. While I do think “newer coders” may very likely feel unwelcome, as an extension of the elitism issue, there’s no mechanism by which “people of color”, “women”, or “minorities” can even be identified... I fear people are subconsciously correlating these groups with “less able coders”. Obviously this correlation serves only to damage.
I should note that on several sites this isn't particularly true - for example, on Academia.SE it's pretty easy to know/guess and the questions are often about these marginalized groups.
...and when they make Hot Network Questions, the influx of people from Stack Overflow is highly correlated with an immediate drop in the quality of answers and essentially the ruination of the question, to the point that several high rep users, myself included, have asked if we could opt out of HNQ as a concept.
> there’s no mechanism by which “people of color”, “women”, or “minorities” can even be identified
That's a legit question: If people don't even know what gender you are/what color your skin is, can they actually be intentionally racist/sexist towards you?
Which makes me wonder if the actual wrong turn we took was making social media as prevalent as it is today. 20 years ago people on the www were really careful about sharing personal details. People liked their anonymity, there was equality in anonymity! Personal details were only exchanged with those deemed trustworthy enough after enough positive interaction.
But these days anonymity is nearly criminalized, while in some circles open self-display on social media is borderline worshipped as it has become the modern equivalent of "making it big on TV".
Somewhere in there is a relation between crappy TV casting shows, which most people only watch to see jurors be mean to the applicants, and social media. Nowadays social media are our modern TV casting shows and everybody can participate in being the nasty juror putting applicants down.
Note: I know that Stack Overflow ain't considered social media, but these days it feels like these dynamics are pretty much prevalent everywhere.
I was just thinking the same thing recently with all of the Facebook shenanigans. Anonymity was common sense on the net 20 years ago. Many who grew up in that time will recognise the sentence "We exist without skin color,
without nationality, without religious bias". The dream of the net was a world in which only words mattered.
We sold that out when our Github account, SO profile, email address proved to be useful for finding jobs or improving our social status.
To this day it just feels weird writing people, I only know from the meatspace (friends&family), there. It's such an utterly different MO compared to my usual Internet-interactions that I sometimes struggle how to express myself just because I actually know these people.
That's why I kinda liked having the Internet and meatspace firmly separated, since they started bleeding into each other it feels like everything has just gotten needlessly more complicated and hostile.
> If people don't even know what gender you are/what color your skin is, can they actually be intentionally racist/sexist towards you?
Not directly, but often indirectly since in such a situation it is common to assume you are a white male. That's a bit off-putting if you are not one, but you might put up with it rather than clarifying your gender/race if doing so opens you up to a risk of direct sexism/racism
Don't know about others, but for me the answer is:
A little bit. Not a huge amount, not because someone on the internet got it wrong. But because it is a reminder that I basically have to try and hide my gender on a huge part of the internet to not be harassed.
I already have to stay away from LinkedIn unless I am applying for a job due to guys thinking it is a dating site.
I have to pick ambiguous usernames that don't hint at gender.
I occasionally have to throw an account away on a site.
It bothers me that I basically have to pretend to be a dude on most of the internet because of assholes.
> It bothers me that I basically have to pretend to be a dude on most of the internet because of assholes.
At least on the Internet, you can pretend, in the meatspace, you simply can't.
I also wouldn't call these people assholes, it might be convenient but imho it's needlessly vilifying people for simply behaving like they are expected to and how they've behaved for the longest time.
Because for the longest time, and in most places to this day, males are expected to initiate contact, if they are interested in a relationship with a female.
Now, one could argue that's outdated and "sexist", but that doesn't change the fact that large parts of our societies (and our behavior) are still shaped by these expectations. It's not that people want to be assholes, people simply don't want to be alone and for the longest time, the most common and accepted solution for that was for males to initiate contact and woo the females.
Sadly this is an angle on all this that too often gets ignored in favor of some simplified narrative where all these guys are just a bunch of misogynists who consider women their property or something like that. While these types do exist too, it just feels dishonest to frame this whole issue like that.
Because as a male the reality of the situation pretty much boils down to this: You are either proactive and approach people or... you stay alone. I'm not trying to dramatize here, I'm just trying to point something out that seems to be largely ignored in these kinds of discussions.
Not everybody is a socialite who constantly meets new people without any effort, heck for the longest time we've been told that female brains are explicitly better at socializing that than male brains (or is that considered sexist now too?). So what are males supposed to do in this situation? Just sit tight until a female approaches them? That's pretty much a "forever alone" sentence for the vast majority of males.
That's why at some point for many males this becomes a simple issue of game theory: You can't meet new females without approaching new females, the more new females you approach the higher the likelihood that you will end up with one of them.
As sad and sterile as it might sound, in the end, it often just boils down to "trying often enough" and it's been that way for the longest time and I'm pretty certain this is engrained in our nature to a certain degree. Millions of years of behavioral evolution don't just vanish in a matter of years.
Yeah, kind of. True or not, I feel the assumption is that if I ask a sensible question or give a good answer, I must be a guy. I don't bother to correct, given the environment, so the stereotype is reinforced. But at the same time, I do want that gender ambiguity so I am treated as an equal. It's a funny catch-22.
Other people assuming you are like them and treating you the SAME as they would treat all the other SO members is literally the outcome we want isn’t it? We’re being treated equally.
But now people are being offended because they aren’t being treated differently based on information the other parties don’t have?
What “we” want is a bunch of kinda aligned stuff to accomplish reasonably similar goals.
I don’t think SO wants people to treat people the same by starting with the assumption that I am like you. I think they want the opposite. I think they want you to stop assuming things about the person you’re talking to altogether, and start baking that caution into your interactions.
Try inverting your thinking - how would you like it if the only way you can get treated with respect is to allow others to assume you are something you are not? Its textbook alienation.
On SO its likely not as bad as the rest of the net, but it'd be naive to assume its perfect: harassment aside, I imagine obviously female commentators get a hefty dose of mansplaining thrown their way
> how would you like it if the only way you can get treated with respect is to allow others to assume you are something you are not?
Fair enough if you call people out when they know something about the person they're interacting with. But you're suggesting people are prejudiced because they thought the wrong thing.
re: If people don't even know what gender you are/what color your skin is, can they actually be intentionally racist/sexist towards you?
Hmm, why do you think intentionally is important in that sentence?
It wouldn't surprise me at all if making the site unfriendly towards newcomers affected minorities more. That seems... bad? And if so, anonymity wouldn't fix it.
It's funny how being results-oriented seems to be counterintuitive to many people whenever a discussion touches on morality. Somehow the issue of good intentions (or lack thereof) overrides everything else.
Of course there are mechanisms. For example it is super easy to tell if an asker is indian, by their name. And often women chose names that allow a good guess. Other hints may also be contained in the name. Then there is the profile image, and of course the bio. And lastly, often the question itself can contain details that hint at things.
Yes, people can hide these characteristics, but they shouldn't need to.
> there’s no mechanism by which ... “women” ... can even be identified
_No_ mechanism? Seriously? How about when the user is named "Jane Smith"? Or, heaven forbid, they actually use a PROFILE PICTURE with their ACTUAL FACE. Oh god the horror!
I, as a white male with a caucasian sounding name have the privilege of being able to use my actual name on the internet. Women that want to be taken seriously don't even have that choice.
Sure over time women figure out that anonymizing their gender online is a wise strategy, but how many brand new programming-enthusiasts are going to learn this when they have negative first experiences on the most popular Q&A platform for programmers? How many never return to contribute because of those negative experiences?
It's no wonder you can't go to SO and find women, they either aren't contributing or they have effectively hidden themselves among the ranks of the men.
Yea, I am fairly certain I'm bastardizing the use of the word "caucasian" here. What I mean is that people with the name "Cory Klein" on their SO profile likely get treated differently than "Mohammud Bin Salmen" or "Lacey Richards".
meh. Loads of Asians pretending to be white women to see if they get away with more attention. Often in a while when they take photos we even see the reflection of the actual guy. They are have probably more "discrimination" for the bad questions than for being a "woman".
> Trying to make this about minorities feels like a desperate attempt to fit in with the 'social justice' sphere, and to virtue signal to people on sites like Twitter.
I'd rather look at the merits. If I recognize a good idea, I'm going to signal that I'm on board with it, so virtue signaling in itself is, at worst, a bit gauche.
The reason I'd avoid making these things about social justice is that it's very hard to show that social justice as a concept actually works to promote comity. When you put things in terms of oppressor and victim, you deepen divisions rather than heal them. When you search for reparations and retribution, you have to harm people.
Yeah, putting groups over the individual and dividing the world into oppressed vs oppressor is problematic to say the least.
Jordan Peterson is a good resource on this - he's studied it extensively and talks about it a lot. I'd recommend watching his lectures to anyone interested in learning about it.
After most of human history, humanity has achieved are astounding, world-changing successes in human rights (including democracy, liberty, etc.), civil rights, women's rights, etc.
I see the above as just an argument to do nothing, usually (I can't speak about the parent's motives) made by the enemies of justice, such as the white supremacists, to suit their agenda.
>> Let’s reject the false dichotomy between quality and kindness
> Because at the end of the day, we need to kill the 'brilliant jerk' archetype already.
We need to recognize that everyone shifts significantly towards the autistic side of the spectrum when they're online. You're looking at text, and trying to infer emotion from words, and do it quickly. That people are as good as they are reflects a fairly amazing amount of patience from the average person.
These "jerks" that we're going to brand intolerable and kick out are probably fairly decent people.
Honestly, most moderation systems would benefit hugely from a simple "please rewrite this post" feature.
> But this isn't true. No one knows anything about a user on Stack Overflow unless they explicitly announce it, and generally my perception seems to be a disdain towards newer members in general, not ones from any particular group.
Almost everyone on SO uses a variation of their real name. I suspect you are a smart enough person to know that that is far more than enough to engage in racial and sexual discrimination.
> Almost everyone on SO uses a variation of their real name. I suspect you are a smart enough person to know that that is far more than enough to engage in racial and sexual discrimination.
Note: A significant chunk of them, yes, but not almost everyone, as far as I know. Looking just at the front page right now, out of the 96 users, I see 7 users whose name begins with "user" (like "user2141351"), at least 13 who have names like "xyz" or "NRA" or "SSB" or "BmyGuest" or "saladi" etc... that's at least 20% of my sample.
To the extent that marginalized groups have a different style of communication than what is expected at SO, they will be treated differently. You don't have to explicitly know their background.
Come on now. This isn't some grand scheme to appeal to all of those social justice coders out there.
If you're in charge of a huge for-profit online community and your only source for demographic/marketing/public image information is your existing user profiles, you should probably start looking for a new line of work. There are many ways that they could find out what people in different demographic groups think of their service without even looking at their membership database.
Not the point. It isn't that SO is meaner to marginalized people because SO knows who they are. It's that marginalized people are more sensitive to being excluded, and less likely to voluntarily endure the hazing.
> But this isn't true. No one knows anything about a user on Stack Overflow unless they explicitly announce it, and generally my perception seems to be a disdain towards newer members in general, not ones from any particular group.
Why would you say this with such conviction when you don't know anything about what the team is doing behind the scenes? They do yearly surveys that do include things like culture / minority status as well as questions about inclusion.
I can't help but feel like this is just another white male majority site jumping to shut down this type of discussion before it even starts.
100% this. To say that the author of the post — whose job includes knowing whether women and minorities feel particularly unwelcome or not, based on actual data and talking to them — must have invented this point is rather outlandish. Based on what?
An online community can’t possibly be less welcoming to women, for example... because it has screen names? Because people don’t express open disdain for women like they do for newbies? You don’t have to be an expert on this stuff to know not to rush to hasty conclusions, especially in the face of evidence.
> To say that the author of the post — whose job includes knowing whether women and minorities feel particularly unwelcome or not, based on actual data and talking to them — must have invented this point is rather outlandish. Based on what?
Based on the fact that he did not share a bit of that data or any other kind of evidence. That's especially jarring on the Stack Overflow Blog, which is full of posts that are nothing but data.
It does not necessarily mean that there is no data, but it does make me suspicious.
There was no evidence shown, though. That almost certainly means it doesn't exist. Maybe they do know that most programmers fit a particular stereotype (white/asian man), but that isn't because other people find stackoverflow "unwelcoming".
Are you being sarcastic? It is impossible to prove that something does not exist. On the other hand, it is quite easy to check that the original submission does not contain any evidence.
It shows those who perceive themselves as victims see the world through victim tainted glasses where clearly none exist. It's frankly disgusting SO encourages such delusions. WTF is a marginalized group on a site where your affiliation is unknown?
If someone is being treated badly on SO - but there's no way to know the race or gender of that person, how can you say the bad treatment is because of their race or gender?
You're arguing against something that nobody said. Neither this post nor the people supporting this change on this thread and elsewhere have claimed that SO users admins or moderators are being explicitly or implicitly biased by race or gender in the way they are treating new users.
What they did say is that the general level of hostility leveled at all newcomers is something that users who are women and minorities frequently find unwelcoming and makes them feel uncomfortable about using stackoverflow at all.
>But this isn't true. No one knows anything about a user on Stack Overflow unless they explicitly announce it, and generally my perception seems to be a disdain towards newer members in general, not ones from any particular group. Trying to make this about minorities feels like a desperate attempt to fit in with the 'social justice' sphere, and to virtue signal to people on sites like Twitter.
Thank you for saying this. I'm all for welcoming people from all walks of life to the coding community. But who is SO to say these particular people have been demoralized when most of its users are anonymous.
Newbie coders asking stupid questions on SO and getting snarky answers -- mostly because they didn't take the five minutes to see if their question was already asked -- transcends race, sexual orientation, gender and nationality.
Doesn’t seem like OP is particularly welcome to people “from all walks of life”. For example, he seems to have a clear bias in denying the existience of toxic gaming communities [1], never mind Gamergate and it’s ties to white supremacy groups
> No one knows anything about a user on Stack Overflow unless they explicitly announce it
StackOverflow has names and profile pictures. Users can choose not to have their own photo or name but some do and provides some identifiability. Though I agree about your general point that the primary and most obvious issue is with new users feeling less welcome than specific groups of people.
I think the idea is that someone who feels less secure in their place in the programming community may be more powerfully affected by the same level of hostility than a nerdy middle-class white guy who grew up in gamer/internet culture and feels it’s his birthright. It takes a certain sense of entitlement to continue to participate in a community that rebukes you.
No. Entitlement would be to expect a community not to rebuke you despite the fact that you're breaking their guidelines and posting low quality content.
That's not the flip side, that's literally what I'm saying. To stick with the internet programming community after i.e. getting your StackOverflow question curtly dismissed requires a level of confidence that not everyone has.
On StackExchange, it's not "you" that isn't welcome, it's low quality content that is unwelcome. The humble thing to do when having been rebuked for posting low quality content is to accept the criticism and improve yourself. Expecting to be treated like a valued member of the community even though you posted some garbage is entitlement.
> No one knows anything about a user on Stack Overflow unless they explicitly announce it
For example, it's quite easy to tell you are a white male. What gave you away? The "I'm not listening and I know better than you that your concerns are not valid" part
If you think that attitude is limited to white males, I’d suggest widening your social circle. It in fact describes most people of every gender and ethnicity.
You completely missed this point. To quote the article:
> Many people, especially those in marginalized groups do feel less welcome. We know because they tell us.
Hanlon doesn't claim to know why the marginalized groups feel unwelcome. He doesn't even claim that the root cause is a bias of action -- conscious or subconscious -- on the part of SO's users or staff. What he said was these groups report at a higher than average rate the feeling of being unwelcome. That is a simple fact, and can only be dismissed at the cost of saying those people's opinions are not worth addressing. Acknowledging it, saying "maybe if we get creative we can improve it", is not virtue signaling, it's the most fundamental requirement to:
> shift from “don’t be an asshole” to “be welcoming.”
But not marginalized groups also tell them. Now the question is who tells more? I think marginalized, because they read all these blogs and tweets about being opressed, shift their selective focus to minor injustices, and feel empowered to complain. The SJWs are the complainers, they are the warriors, that's why you hear from them more than from anybody else. They have the momentum of complaining, so they are more likely to continue to complain. I'm certain most of them are addicted to complaining and will never stop, no matter what. Also, minorities have higher social status within those ranks, and therefore more likely to be SJW.
So it's not necessarily Stack Overflow's fault at all.
The only information we have from the blog post is that Stack Overflow has survey results telling them that marginalized groups feel particularly unwelcome, unless you have some other source of info I didn't notice.
From that single datum, you've concluded that this is because marginalized groups must over-complain, and in fact, you claim to have achieved perfect certainly that most members of marginalized groups have an addiction to complaining and will never stop, and therefore the only sensible course is to completely disregard any survey results saying that marginalized groups feel particularly bad about anything.
That's a pretty strong conclusion from hearing about a brief allusion to the results of a survey you didn't see. Your argument says a lot about you and very little otherwise.
Alternatively, assuming good faith, he claims that this is a possible explanation, and that perhaps Hanlon fell victim to the very common base rate fallacy on his off-hand comment.
> > Many people, especially those in marginalized groups do feel less welcome. We know because they tell us.
This particular argument is really bad IMHO. OP has a point - nobody knows who you are. That means if some people feel they are treated worse it is due to their own perception. After all, objectively they are not treated worse then everybody else. Which to me sounds more like a bias in their perception. They may have that perception for a reason, but that does not seem to me to be something attributable to SO.
People are not claiming they are being treated worse than less marginalised people. They’re claiming they themselves do not feel welcome. It’s definitely all about perception, but that doesn’t mean it’s invalid.
Is that a bias, or simply a different viewpoint than yours? Why are you going to so much effort to chase down the external postings of another HN user?
What he said was these groups report at a higher than average rate the feeling of being unwelcome
As a non-white I call shenanigans. My non-whiteness is very obvious in my SO profile pic and not once in 8 years of active use of the site has it ever come up, nor have I perceived being treated any differently. Also, no one ever asked me if I felt “unwelcome” nor is there a button to click for that, so I don’t know where this really comes from...
Else-net, there was a theory put out that if one feels marginalized already, then the perception of "Stack Overflow doesn't want my question, they down voted it because it lacks any code" is evidence of that marginalization even though its directed at everyone.
This seems likely. If you are mistreated for a given reason, you would likely attribute mistreatment elsewhere to having the same cause, and given that would be ones first impression of mistreatment, even with evidence that the mistreatment is for another more broader issue, people will likely contribute the mistreatment to the original reason they were mistreated in the first area. It is similar to making a bad first impression; it takes a lot more effort to correct a bad first impression than to maintain a good first impression.
With Stack Overflow, its also important to remember the 0th impressions of people finding the site through google.
Finding material that is off topic but preserved for some reason is often cited as a negative experience. The "I searched for XYZ and it was closed as not constructive" (note: not constructive hasn't been a valid close reason for several years).
This brings up the question of "should that material be findable on Stack Overflow if people are having such poor experiences when finding it?" and "are people finding the closed questions of yesteryear a disincentive to participate today?"
The finding things closed as a duplicate sign post isn't working as intended with redirecting them to the proper question - because when there is an answer to the question (that may or may not properly answer it) it prevents the logged out user from getting redirected to the duplicate.
The negative experience is that the interesting/useful questions/answers aren't rewarded.
It's bad that they are closed with harsh and false ("not constructive" on some of the most useful question there was...). It would be even worse if they were entirely removed so we couldn't find the answer.
> But this isn't true. No one knows anything about a user on Stack Overflow unless they explicitly announce it, and generally my perception seems to be a disdain towards newer members in general, not ones from any particular group.
I understand what you're saying, and while you're correct, it doesn't change the fact about how people feel in a community.
There are really two groups here: newer coders, and marginalized groups within our profession.
Newer coders are less confident, and when you see the types of responses you see on SO, you're less likely to want to participate - nobody likes being told that they're stupid or not working hard enough, as an example.
For marginalized groups - primarily women, people who aren't white, and the LGBT communities, they already have to deal with sexism, racism, homophobia, and other forms of discrimination in their daily lives. When you have to worry about hostility in general, trying to participate in a community that does have a reputation to being hostile is even more difficult and frustrating. The fact that you don't know who an SO user is unless they volunteer the information simply doesn't matter.
> Trying to make this about minorities feels like a desperate attempt to fit in with the 'social justice' sphere, and to virtue signal to people on sites like Twitter.
This isn't about trying to make it only about minorities, and the post doesn't give that impression. It is, however, about making sure that everyone feels welcome, and that has to include thinking about and understanding WHY minorities aren't feeling welcome, even if there isn't explicit discrimination against them on the site.
It’s hard to take your claims seriously, when you proudly and publically publish meandering rants (linked to your HN account) about how gaming communities are in no way toxic, while completely denying Gamergate, its ties to white supremacists and a wealth of other examples [1].
Pursuing someone's personal details or history and bringing them into HN threads as ammunition isn't allowed here, regardless of how wrong someone is. Whatever edge you gain in an argument is wiped out by the damage you do to the community by attacking someone this way. Please don't do it, and especially please don't do it in a bunch of different posts, as you did in this case.
He posted a HN comment that referenced an explicit link. That is not "personal." It's a publicly stated position, and one that sheds light on his true motivations on this subject.
I can see how it could seem that way, because I skipped some details.
There's a spectrum of these behaviors; some are outright doxxing but most aren't, and there's widespread disagreement about what to call them. When I said "pursuing personal details" I was referring to this spectrum. "Extraneous details" or "history" (edit: added above) might have been more accurate, but this is not the important distinction.
On HN, we've learned that when one user follows another's trail and comes back with ammunition to discredit them with, it lowers the discussion quality in a way that bodes ill for the community. You can see that clearly in this case; when someone finds four different places to post like that, they've crossed into something we don't want to become a norm here.
Whether the details were public or not doesn't change much. The real issue is that this genre of online shaming/war does more harm than good to a community like HN, which is trying for a different value system, so it's better to just keep it out of here.
> No one knows anything about a user on Stack Overflow unless they explicitly announce it,
Stack Overflow allows people to use photographs in their profile.
You're saying that women and POC are not allowed to be themselves. That they cannot use features everyone else is free to use. That they must lie about who they are in order to participate on the Internet
738 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 247 ms ] threadI'd think most new SO users are looking for help or a solution to a problem. Why was not being able to vote yet so upsetting you abandoned the resource?
Letting them vote seems like it'd quickly result in voting rings via a bunch of zero rep bot accounts.
I suspect a lot of people who use Stackoverflow have now used it enough (grown up with it) that they don't have these kinds of problems anymore.
Edit: OP changed comment while I was writing this; leaving it anyway
If there was only one thing I could change it would be this: If someone marks a question as duplicate, and closes, make them provide a link to the 'original' question and a brief summary as to why it is a duplicate.
Closing something as duplicate and then forcing the user who submitted the question to do more digging comes off as hostile, lazy, and even condescending. Sometimes the original question is lazy and un-researched, but in most cases it is hard to find the right search term for the problem you have.
The article suggests that the problem is that SO is too cruel to new clueless users. This isn't how it seems to me. Perfectly valid content gets down voted or closed.
SO is a killer resource for me as a new-ish coder but man, there's an uphill climb before you can avoid making people mad while using it.
Otherwise, in my experience, it is utterly worthless for getting actual answers.
For instance, I've asked a total of 4 questions on the DBA Stack Exchange. Almost all of them were specific but easily generalized, weren't answered anywhere else. Three of them would have been easily answered by someone with good knowledge of the relevant products. (The other was only answered by significant trial and error.) On three of them, I was the only person to answer. Each of those took hours of research. On the fourth, someone else answered, but didn't appear to actually understand the question.
On StackOverflow itself, I've asked a single question. A moderator told me to do what I explicitly stated in the question I didn't want to do, and closed it as a duplicate.
The bounties are equally useless: earlier today I sacrificed 90% of my DBA reputation to get around 6 more views on my question. I'm pretty sure most of the views I got are from me refreshing the question.
I end up closing the tab, If the site won't give me the basic tools to help someone, then what is the point of letting me sign up.
As an aside, if anyone has a good heuristic to identify bad behavior on Stack Overflow, I'd be interested in looking into it since SO data is public. (please do not suggest "build an AI to identify toxic comments")
I see nothing wrong with that.
As luck would have it, today some random stranger recognized me from my Stackoverflow profile at a Panera and asked me to help him debug his Django app. It was straightforward to fix because the error message described the problem exactly, but, for whatever reason, it wasn't apparent to him. I pointed this out, explained the problem, and showed him how to look for additional information based on the error message. Maybe this sounds softer in person, but there is nothing wrong with reminding people to pay attention to error messages, and the importance of giving people adequate amounts of information when you ask for their help.
Now, as a person who's answered many a question on Stackoverflow, I've had people threatening physical harm to me and my loved ones, as well as setting up Twitter accounts to harass me. To their credit, Stackoverflow admins always take swift action when actual harassment occurs. However, Twitter and Facebook seemed rather uninterested.
[1]: https://twitter.com/aprilwensel/status/974859164747931650
> so literally what the fuck did she want
Help? Perhaps it was their first time writing a program, and they can't interpret error messages. This is exactly the kind of elitist behaviour people are discussing - and if you're unable to see how the answer might keep people away, then you have no business trying to help new users.
Here's a discussion to the same effect: https://twitter.com/robconery/status/974678531832610816?lang...
I'm not suggesting the fix is to simply be nicer. There needs to be better incentives and tools to manage poor quality questions.
“The error message says the problem is on line 49 but you haven’t shown that line in your example code. Can you please show the code referred to on line 49 and the surrounding code for context?”
I think power users on SO are frustrated by newer users not learning the rules and not helping themselves. But if you respond with kindness you’re teaching somebody (and that’s what answerers are there to do!) how to better contribute in future.
Learning how to interpret error messages and extract the important information is a skill. What may seem obvious to you may not be obvious to someone with barely any experience.
> was just a standard dry answer like you hear at any top university everywhere
Which makes it OK? If university lecturers are speaking to new students trying to learn in this way, they shouldn't be teaching new students.
If you really want something, work on it to the full extent of your own capabilities, get ready to be beaten from left and right and figure out how to move forward. Don't expect help from around you. When somebody shows generosity to you, treat it as a wonderful bonus you try to return somehow someday, not a requirement.
This should not be an expectation of the world, and I'm sorry you've had the experiences you've had to see it as such. This is exactly what people are complaining about when they say tech is hostile. It's not just hostile to minorities, it can be hostile to everybody.
We can choose to do unto others, or we can choose to break that cycle and be more welcoming. If you're unable to do this on stackoverflow, then may I suggest you don't participate.
If you are paying me my hourly, I'll pretty please you to no end. Otherwise, I am not sure why I am expected to beg for people to give information that would help me help them.
Answerers have no idea about the skill level of the people asking the questions. Their english might not be so good. This might be the first time someone is programming and they don't know which line in a stack trace is particularly important. They Need Help. If you're not willing to help users at that skill level, then don't. But it's totally unfair to criticise them.
You misunderstand. If you are paying me, I have no problem letting you spend more of your money by not giving enough information to solve the problem. I will point out once, and if you express the desire that I spend more time validating you, I will gladly do that.
As it stands, you should keep in mind that you don't get to tell me what to do.
Telling someone "we can't figure out what's wrong on line 49 if you don't show us what's on line 49" is not condescending, rude, discriminatory, racist, sexist, etc etc at all. It is a factual statement that is aimed at pointing out exactly what the person who is seeking help needs to do to get said help.
Now, if I point something out like this, and I get a response like yours, I move on. Before moving on, however, I do vote to close the question because 1) there isn't enough information to diagnose the problem; and 2) the OP is unwilling to provide it.
If you think I did something wrong in my response to you, you can flag my response for moderator attention. If that is not resolved to your liking, you can post on Meta.
It is interesting to me that supposedly all these people who just want more niceness are the ones calling high-rep users and moderators assholes, insulting them indiscriminately etc.
As I mentioned before, you can always go on Meta, and suggest ways to improve https://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask . If a first time user fails to follow the recommendations therein, it is incumbent upon the people who are trying to help to point it out so the mistake can be corrected. If people persist in not following advice, instead accusing people of all sorts of nasty things, they are unlikely to get the help they want.
Keep in mind that some of these people may be writing the software for your bank or may end up next to you in that open floor plan office of yours. Helping them learn how to most effectively find answers to their questions may help you save time and aggravation later on.
You've edited the quote, leaving out the bits that are condescending. Here it is again:
> "If the error says line 49, it tells you exactly where the problem lies. If you post 7 lines of code here, we clearly cannot tell you what the problem is in line 49."
The second sentence is where the snark starts to creep in. The tone is unnecessary, and the word "clearly" can easily make the asker feel bad. That's where the condescension comes from. It's totally not clear to the person asking, or they wouldn't be asking the question as they are.
> If you think I did something wrong in my response to you, you can flag my response for moderator attention.
I think more of this should be happening, and more tools available to manage unhelpful answerers. I don't know what these tools should look like, but I have some ideas.
> I mentioned before, you can always go on Meta
A lot of these users are new! They don't know about Meta. Their first interaction with the site boils down to "wow you're dumb, can't you read?", and then they're gone for good. Someone brings up on a HN post that SO is elitist and the original asker, who now has some experience under their belt, confirms "yep, it was a horrible toxic place".
> Helping them learn how to most effectively find answers to their questions may help you save time and aggravation later on.
I totally agree. Helping people diagnose their issues and teaching them how to write good questions is fantastic. It can be done with a better tone than what's currently happening.
Some highly visible CEO of a developer community improvement startup pointed out some mean SO comments towards anonymous newcomers, then said those anonymous newcomers are actually women, so therefore SO is in fact sexist to its very core.
But if SO works with her company, she can help them not get called online by people like her. It’s literally a mob-style protection scam.
Women consider SO an elitist place? People of colour? What colour? Black? White? Marginalised groups? Which groups are those? Are people in SO hostile to Palestinians? Amputees? Such an accusation, where's the data to back it? I'm white and male and completely normal and let me tell you: everybody in SO behaves like a stuck-up twat to me. This has nothing to do with "diversity". Too many people are there sitting in a throne of points and medals and rubbish, closing comments and questions and editing whatever they see fit.
The truth of the matter is that you've had a code on conduct for a long time and everybody ignored it so this post is not going to change that. Why don't you just change the braindead voting system?
I used to participate in SO but also stopped because people were answering questions faster with better quality. That's a strength not a weakness.
Similarly, if minority groups are more prone to imposter syndrome, it may be that aggressive and blunt answers impact them disproportionately.
In both of these cases, it needn't be intentional or directed at any particular individual to have a disproportionate impact on a group of people. Just as a group can get a reputation of being a "boys club" without explicit "no girls" rules.
SO allows profile images. Are you saying POC and women should never use photos of themselves?
Turns out there was exactly enough code to get a working answer (which I knew from the beginning when I chose what code to include), the problem was simply a matter of (undocumented) lib changes which were pretty obvious. I still don't understand why someone who had no idea what the problem was decided to downvote instead of just leaving it for someone more knowledgeable to deal with.
Now if I were a sensitive individual I can see how this could be construed as "not welcoming to &whatever_group_I_identify_with".
Of all the sites on the Internet, SO seems to be particularly well suited to the anonymity of posters -- even more so than HN because HN is more free form and conversational.
SO allows people to use an avatar image. I think for some time they were using images from Gravatar. So people were putting images of themselves in posts; or they didn't realise their gravatar image would be used.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6542459/
From the paper: "although the computing field is generally unbalanced towards men, the community around this Q&A site [StackOverflow] seems to create and maintain higher barriers to entry for women."
I think this is what it's really going to take for SO's culture to change. There's definitely a hostile/elitist bent to it, but the thesis that this has anything to do with oppression is just plain laughable, so let's cut this mass of empty virtue signaling away from the greater point and see what we're left with.
SO's niche has shifted as an effect of their own success. The early rules served to create a really great compendium of google-bait, the common "how do I do X in Y" questions from newbies that now have literal thousands of votes because they're genuinely useful and helpful. Now that the well-traveled roads are all plowed, it leaves only the extremely situational.
And if SO hates one thing, it's the extremely situational. When they're not downvoted, they're ignored, and when they're not ignored, they're closed with curt messages that either leave the asker wondering what the fuck they did wrong, or redirect to other questions that don't actually answer the situation the asker was asking about, or ask them to spend a bunch of time on a low-to-no productive feedback process (either arguing on meta or trying to get reopen votes) that won't actually accomplish the one thing they went to the site for.
Part of being a newbie is not having the mental context necessary to ask more effective questions, because you don't know enough about the thing you're asking about to have the information to put together a decent question in the first place!
From the article:
>Let’s reject the false dichotomy between quality and kindness. Quality matters because it means posts can help more people.
Great! That means referring to the users with derisive (and dare I say: non-welcoming and non-inclusive) terms like "help vampire" will stop, right?
Very specifically calling out "they have a score higher than mine" as part of the description of the hostile behaviour. Isn't that a bit odd, wouldn't you expect them to only focus on the behaviour and the content, not the number next to the name?
Too many people are there sitting in a throne of points, and medals and rubbish, closing comments and questions and editing whatever they see fit.
Whereas the people without a throne of points who are closing questions and editing whatever they want, and commenting rudely, are .. not hostile? Is there an undercurrent of chip-on-shoulder points-resentment in the complaints in aggregate?
"Just participate until you get the points" is hard to do if your lack of points prevents you from participating.
So, imagine that level of hostility that you face but with even more additional hostility because you're eg a woman.
This is such an important point and missed so often by technical types. Impressed to hear it stated so clearly here.
- the questioner and the answerer might have vastly different levels of experience & therefore struggle to exchange ideas in terms they both understand - people might already be frustrated when they ask a question, since they may have already invested a lot of time trying (and failing) to solve a problem - multiple answerers are competing to be the endorsed answer, and there are rewards associated with it
This has become such a common feature of every debate that the angry mobs on the internet are a greater threat than government to freedom of speech.
"i feel that <an opinion>" is a different use of the word (nearly synonymous with "think")
unless you're a non-native english speaker, i'm almost 100% positive that you know the difference and are being intentionally obtuse
As a good faith speaker, I agree with you. A native speaker should be self aware enough to not confuse an unsupported opinion with a "feeling", nor should we dismiss feelings.
However, frequently, feelings are used as a poor substitute for rationality. Therefore I reject the argument that feelings can't be debated or argued.
Since feelings can't be verified it costs little to not be truthful.
Oh, when will the HN community step in to stop such flagrant abuses.”
See where unconditionally believing feelings gets you?
There's always going to be a very small percentage of people who don't fit in in large groups, no matter how much you try to work with them. They're also the ones who tend to speak up, and StackOverflow's userbase is massive, so this number gets inflated to something that may seem like a lot, but really isn't that many - and may well be within the error margin for "people who won't fit in".
Typically moderation would push these people away, so they don't keep complaining, but StackOverflow, despite any issues it has, is too good a resource as-is.
Men built stackoverflow. Yes, those "technical types". Men can build things like this precisely because men value what is correct. If you want somewhere where feelings have a place you should stick to the creative arts.
You're being a shithead. This isn't about men or women, and feelings are not exclusive to women. For example, I am sure it doesn't feel nice to be called a shithead.
However, it's inaccurate to assume that the problems on SO stem from how these mythological women feel. There's a disagreement and lack of clarity on the purpose of the site. That needs to be resolved.
Moreover, the site has become a big enough platform that it now it needs to answer the question whether it exists to serve the needs of the users, or primarily to serve its own assumed purpose.
I don't know why the SO blog chose to highlight women, poc etc. as the ones inconvenienced by this. Poor move on their part, as it seems to have targeted these populations as the cause of the problem.
I got downvoted for answering some simple questions at stackoverflow.com for encouraging low quality questions. This was discussed in the article.
I can see why some people can get hostile as some questions are framed as please solve this for me. Usually people ask the posters to tell them what they had done but the tone of that request can be harsh.
I think the elitism is most prevalent in stackoverlow. The other stack websites seem less hostile.
(I have a score of ~3500 on SO and ~2800 on RPG - i.e. respectively top 7% and top 13% just to give you an idea).
On the RPG site, especially in the last couple of years at least, there seems to be a certain fanatism among moderators in sticking to the most literal interpretation of the "rules" (e.g.: if a question is about "what system you would use simulate movie X?" it is strictly verboten to answer unless you describe having extensive experience with the system you suggest).
Rules and "quality" are fine, except that while I can understand that SO is used almost exclusively for job-related questions, so the quality of a question can potentially cost you much... I doubt that anyone will have their career ruined if they pick the wrong edition of D&D to replay Game of Thrones or - perish the though - miss some important errata on elvish footgear when creating their next character.
(I also dabble in a few more, like japanese language and martial arts but they are either less strict in general, better mannered or maybe there is so little traffic that moderators have no reason to obsess about "quality").
Not all stacks are elitist, but some definitely are. I like the slow pace of some of the little ones like Arduino, etc.
On really problematic code, this can lead to a stampede of comments, each mentioning a different issue with grim wording, which can be really unwelcoming even if they're completely correct.
That's really true, not repeated enough, and much deeper than it appears.
> Too many people experience Stack Overflow as a hostile or elitist place, especially newer coders, women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups
Breaking that down...
"...people experience Stack Overflow as a hostile or elitist place..."
This is obvious just by looking at the discussions that happen here, or, even by observing the SO-related memes that bubble up to the top of Reddit programming subs. I have commented on it myself.
"...especially newer coders, women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups."
lol what?
Like most programmers, I use SO practically every day. I don't post much because that's usually a waste of time, but I land on SO from searching for errors all the time. I cannot recall ever, even once, seeing someone's race, sex, or orientation being mocked or even mentioned. As far as I can tell most users don't have full names or photos on their profiles. So it isn't even possible to know such things unless it was volunteered, and that never happens when asking questions about APIs and whatnot.
So what in the heck are they even talking about? I'm glad the issue is getting attention, but justifying like this strikes me as pointless virtue signaling. Perhaps they are trying to stem criticism from their power users who like SO the way it is.
>especially the idea that women and people of color felt particularly unwelcome. There’s a weird paradox with bias. Those of us who have privilege, but care deeply about reducing bias should be uniquely positioned to help, but we struggle the hardest to recognize that we are (unintentionally) biased ourselves
And this line in your post:
>pointless virtue signaling.
Really nice recycled talking point. It also strikes at the heart of the above quote.
Let's be honest here. If you are able to post on SO at all, you are in the global top 10% of privilege. If you scale it down to a company, it's like the President vs a VP. I choose not to spend my energy splitting those hairs.
You called SO reacting to complaints and feedback "pointless virtue signaling" You are now attempting to say you personally wouldn't bother with what SO is doing (as if anyone asked) because other people are unfortunate enough to not have access to the same resources we do? Do I really need to illustrate how nonsensical that is?
What's your angle?
What they mean is that, since minorities might have insecurities about their ability to code because there are not that many people who look like them in the industry, when they receive a condescending response their insecurities aggravate. Therefore, SO can be consider more hostile for minorities.
They also run polls among their users, I believe. It's easier to ask about gender/race in a poll than about unspecified insecurities.
That has absolutely nothing to do with race or gender, and I still think it's for more insulting to imply that people in specific demographics are more sensitive or insecure.
The idea is not that they're 'fundamentally' more sensitive or insecure; it's that they're _empirically_ more sensitive and insecure, due to the circumstances of reality.
As someone who has had both academic and career success (and failures), I know I am capable as a developer and able to contribute meaningfully to technical discussions.
As a person of color, however, I have also experienced harassment by police, suspicious looks from shop owners, and outright hostility from drunken young men.
So, whenever I encounter what appears to be irrational anger or inexplicable disrespect, I cannot help but wonder and worry that I'm being poorly treated because of my race, even when I suspect that's not the case. The person who treats me poorly need not necessarily be discriminating against me because of my race, but I can never know and, of course, unless someone is calling me racial epithets such poorly behaved people are unlikely to admit bias.
It's sort of like being bullied in elementary school, and then high school, and then college, and then as a working adult. You never outgrow the bullying. Indeed, the bullying seems to get worse as one matures and loses the youthful physical characteristics which people often read as non-threatening.
So regardless of intention (and sometimes because of it), feeling discriminated against can be partly the result of lifelong experience and is probably fairly characterized as a form of post-traumatic stress disorder.
EDIT: remove two instances of repeated "as"; add "often"; remove comma; change pronoun.
Most of the time people are verbally hostile towards you nothing terrible ends up happening so you eventually learn to ignore minor hostility. However if you had the sort of bad experiences minorities have, you would learn to be wary of minor hostility, as it is often the precursor to major hostility or even physical harm.
You know how evolutionary psychologists often attribute human stupidity to adaptations that made sense in prehistoric times? Like your instincts tell you sugar is good for you because it used to be found mostly on fruit and nutritious berries, but nowadays the instinct leads you to eat junk food. In the modern world sugar has nothing to do with high food quality (just the opposite) but the instinct remains.
For minorities, their instinct to recoil at minor hostility is like that, except that instead of an ancient adaptation to deal with the life at the Savannah, it is the habit that helped you keep your sanity this very morning at the office when your asshole coworker yelled at you. In Stack Overflow nobody is going to yell at you or punch you or try to get you fired, but the instinct remains.
Some people are also more prone to sunburn than others, but we don't say the sun needs to be less bright. You are in control of your own feelings. Yes, StackOverflow should generally have better language and reworked rules around content, voting and moderation, but that has nothing to do with how susceptible you are to comments on the internet.
Also why is it that minorities always comes down to not being male or white when half the planet is female and most of the planet is not white? Do we not have any other dimensions? It's a rather meaningless definition when used in context of a globally accessible site with anonymous user accounts where the audience already has a major commonality (interest in software development) that is far more inclusive than any irrelevant physical trait.
It may not be your problem or your responsibility to prevent other people's sunburns (they can buy their own sunscreen, right?) but I hope you realize that ignoring their preferences is shitty behaviour that will give you(r website) a bad reputation.
And it's not like protecting your conference from sunlight will benefit only the albinos. Sunburn resistance is not the same as immunity, so everyone benefits at least a little. Same with SO, even people with thick skin will benefit at least a little from a less toxic environment.
That argument is not entirely solid. After all the toxic environment is also the same environment that provides those answers. So if those two were positively correlated then decreasing toxicity could also drive down the answer quality. A cartoony scenario would be a stack overflow where everyone is busy assuring everyone else that their questions are good, non-stupid questions and they should be praised for asking them and wasting a lot of time on those instead of answering questions.
Of course we're unlikely to be at a global optimum here, so things can certainly be improved. You should just be more careful about analyzing those tradeoffs.
Yes, obviously. Personal responsibility instead of blaming others. In your scenario, some might like to be outside so how are you including them? That's the fallacy with trying to make everyone happy; it's impossible.
Anyways, that also was weird stretch of the analogy as it's the same as saying SO shouldn't allow any communication because some people may feel sad.
This thread is about people feeling that a comment was based on something when the reality is that they don't know. And because they don't know, saying it as fact doesn't make it so, hence we should not suddenly say that they are targeted just because they feel that they are targeted, even if they have a propensity to feel targeted more than others. Your feelings are your concern.
Call me a radical, but people should have a modicum of social responsibility towards each other.
> Some people are also more prone to sunburn than others, but we don't say the sun needs to be less bright.
Luckily, we don't need to, having invented sunscreen.
> You are in control of your own feelings.
No you're not. Feelings are sneaky that way.
> Also why is it that minorities always comes down to not being male or white when half the planet is female and most of the planet is not white?
The blog post doesn't refer to anyone as "minority", but as "marginalized".
And yes, feelings are completely in your head. Things happen in the world and your mind reacts a certain way. Nobody else knows how you will react nor do they have any control of your consciousness.
If you could "handle your feelings" as easily as putting on sunscreen, literally every psychotherapist would be out of work.
> And yes, feelings are completely in your head.
Anything you will ever perceive is "in your head". You don't control a lot of it. "Positive thinking" doesn't cure depression or schizophrenia.
> Nobody else knows how you will react nor do they have any control of your consciousness.
Human reactions are actually fairly predictable. Being rude, arrogant or condescending is generally off-putting. Some amount of control can be exerted as well, for instance, it will almost certainly be impossible for you to not briefly picture a TINY PINK ELEPHANT after having read this sentence.
If your emotions are subconscious and you yourself aren't fully in control then how could you possible blame someone else for them? If it's that simple to be affected then you could just as easily affect yourself back to the state you want to be in, hence it is a circular argument without basis.
The world happens. You react. Equip and train yourself to react differently if you don't like the outcomes.
Predictability does not mean causation, especially when it is not accurate 100% of the time and therefore subjective. Sure, when you yell at someone, they might become upset. But another person might not care at all. So are you now causing both anger and apathy in these individuals with the same statement? Or is it that they react as individuals instead and it's really under none of your control?
My point, if that hasn't been clear by now, is that your emotions are not under your control. Your physical reactions may or may not be.
> If your emotions are subconscious and you yourself aren't fully in control then how could you possible blame someone else for them?
People stimulate each other's emotions with their behavior, some behavior can certainly be measured to to elicit certain emotions. If I follow your argument, clearly people are in control of their behavior and they are also responsible for it (agreed). So, under certain circumstances, it should be possible to "blame" them, though I'm not focusing on that.
Your "solution" boils down to: "If you're so sensitive and not in control of your emotions, just go away." That's fine, but not every community needs to have such "low" standards.
> The world happens. You react. Equip and train yourself to react differently if you don't like the outcomes.
An online community is not "the world", we get to design such environments. In "the world", there are tigers and lions, but you wouldn't argue to set them loose on main street just to make people stronger and more vigilant, would you?
> Predictability does not mean causation, especially when it is not accurate 100% of the time and therefore subjective.
That's a pretty weak argument though, in "the world" you always have to go by approximations, even in science we struggle to remove subjectivity completely.
> Sure, when you yell at someone, they might become upset. But another person might not care at all.
Let's say I had the desire to punch a random person in the face, there's certainly an off-chance that some masochist would love to have this happen to them. It's clearly a subjective reaction. Yet, it's not acceptable to go out punching people, don't you agree?
> So are you now causing both anger and apathy in these individuals with the same statement? Or is it that they react as individuals instead and it's really under none of your control?
I must appeal to your common sense. If some behavior of yours causes, for example "50% anger, 30% apathy, 19% annoyance and 1% joy" across a selection of subjects, then the chance that any of it is not negative is 1%. Yelling at people probably isn't so far off from that, DO YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT I MEAN? Sure, I can't predict with 100% certainty what the reaction will be, but if something is 99% bad, it'll better have some strong upside for me to accept it in my community. Yelling at people doesn't have that upside, it's generally frowned upon, so it's reasonable to not allow it. Of course, most people generally understand and follow that without it having to be made a rule.
Yes, there are obviously certain patterns of behavior and you shouldn't punch people, however it is completely within their control what they feel and do about it. They can choose to hit back, or ignore you. Just because everyone reacts with anger to something does not mean you must. It only means that it's a common reaction, nothing more, and has nothing to do with control over that action itself. They choose to do something, you can choose differently, even if you're 1 in a million. What about that is confusing?
Either you believe you have the will to control your emotions and actions or you don't. And if think you don't and it's really that simple to affect your emotions without any mental control, then you must also accept that you can impart that same effect by just doing different actions and making yourself feel differently.
Because that use of language about marginalized/disadvantaged/underrepresented groups arose specifically in the context of racial minorities in the US, at a time when Whites were both an overwhelming majority and socially dominant it of proportion to their numerical dominance; the language is sometimes extended to contexts where “minority” is not strictly to accurate (though note that the article here does not make that error, it refers to “women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups”, not “minorities”.)
EDIT:
Also,
> If you have less tolerance, how is that anyone else's problem?
That someone doing unconsented harm is not absolved of responsibility for that harm because the victim is unusually susceptible is the moral principle underlying the eggshell rule [0], which applies widely in civil and criminal law, so it's not exactly a novel principle.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggshell_skull
This isn't about society, it's about a website with worldwide access using anonymous usernames. Nobody is inherently disadvantaged. The exact issue is harsh replies and actions that stem from the gamification dynamics and strict moderation. It has nothing to do with physical traits of the user on either side, especially when users are anonymous. Minorities and marginalized groups are nice to mention in the current PC climate but have little do with the actual topic.
Law is based on provable damages, which is why it's particularly focused on physical harm. Your feelings are not included in that. Experiencing an emotion is not damage. Also tort law means the defendant had a duty to act in a certain way and failed to do so, with the plaintiff proving the failure of that duty led to the harm. Intent also matters a great deal so unless you can now derive and prove intentions and duty behind StackOverflow comments, this example does not apply to this topic.
Yes, and I answered your question about where the pattern of using “minorities” as it was used there came from.
> This isn't about society, it's about a website with worldwide access using anonymous usernames.
How is that not part of society?
> Nobody is inherently disadvantaged.
The issue with disadvantaged, underrepresented, and/or marginalized groups has very little to do with inherent disadvantage, and the suggestion that it centrally is about that is fairly broadly offensive, since it implies that such groups are generally inherently inferior.
> The exact issue is harsh replies and actions that stem from the gamification dynamics and strict moderation.
Whether or not that’s true, it had nothing to do with the question you posed and I answered, so I don't see why it is being offered in response.
> Law is based on provable damages,
True.
> which is why it's particularly focused on physical harm.
This is far less true.
> Your feelings are not included in that.
Yes, they are included in the scope of legally cognizable harms. While the eggshell rules name references physical vulnerability, civil and criminal law address (and the eggshell rule applies to) emotional injuries, as well.
> Experiencing an emotion is not damage.
Torts like those of intentional and negligent infliction of emotional distress demonstrate the falsitt of this generalization of the law, as does the “suffering” part of “pain and suffering” damages in other torts.
And couldn't they find a better person in this tech company to deliver this message than a white dude VP?
Then they explain that this is really, actually happening because the marginalized groups "do feel less welcome... because they tell us" (emphasis mine). Do these marginalized groups know how everyone else feels? Have the marginalized-but-anonymous users invented a telepathy device with which to gauge their feelings against others?
Please demonstrate how any Stack Overflow user can know that they feel something more or less than any other user.
The quote doesn't say women and PoC are broadly inexperienced, it says women, PoC, and the inexperienced are examples of marginalized groups on SO.
You're reaching here and if you are more affected than average by comments from other people (on SO or life in general) then perhaps you should work on that instead of claiming emotional suffering.
As I expressly stated, to demonstrate that two moral principals that contradict claims made upthread are well established in our society: (1) that the particular sensitivity of a victim to harm from a particular wrong doesn't mitigate the wrongdoers responsibility for the harm, and (2) that experiencing adverse emotional states is a harm.
Though SO usernames are often pseudonymous, they are not always anonymous. For example, some SO profiles contain photographs of the user. Mine does.
Also, sometimes I search for information about users with whom I interact. I imagine others do the same.
We both agree "being targeted" is different than "feeling targeted". A third thing that is different than both of these is "being affected".
That is, even if someone from a marginalized group is not being targeted for being a member of a marginalized group, the negative effects of perceived hostility may be larger on people from marginalized groups than on people from dominant groups. Not always, but sometimes, and this is what SO seems to be taking to heart.
A few comments have suggested one solution is to improve the climate for everyone by welcoming new users with all their inexperience rather than discouraging them by enforcing standards of contribution achieved by elite longtime users. I wholeheartedly agree.
By encouraging newbies who don't yet know much, SO stands to grow its ranks and help newbies become experienced contributors. As a former educator, I know encouraging students in the directions they are doing well is much more pedagogically effective than tearing down students when they make mistakes.
Communities like SO would improve if they not only discouraged negativity but also encouraged non-elite participation. HN is one such community that does this well and the quality of the content here speaks for itself.
EDIT: reword first sentence; change "old-hands" to "experienced contributors"; add comma in second sentence.
I read some arguments that being drive-by downvoted without comments somehow made people unwelcomed. And you add to that that this is practically a form of PTSD.
If I am supposed to model people at the other end of the screen as "my downvote might trigger PTSD" then, mildly put, I do not find that model to be very helpful. I can't quite put my finger on it, but it seems like some sort of game-theoretic trap.
Disclaimer: I don't see myself as a kind person and asking me to spend extra mental energy just to be nice is like asking for a pound of my flesh. Thus the above may be motivated reasoning to ignore people who complain about the lack of kindness.
If you can't be kind, then the preferred action from you is for you to save your energy for the days when you can be kind. That's better for everyone involved.
Failure to provide me with the necessary information will, in my opinion, confirm that what you were doing is just mere virtue signalling.
I believe it would be better for everyone if you told me what you believe[1] is better for everyone, so everyone who reads your comment might act accordingly in the best interest of others[2].
[1] Note that it's subjective.
[2] Where "best interest of others" is defined by you, which is subjective and probably inaccurate. On what basis do you have the nerve to claim you know what's better for everyone "involved"?
P.S. You actually have been down-voted. Hilarious. Some people are seriously deluded.
EDIT: Immediately down-voted, shit, I'm going to continue whining about it instead of not giving a crap. What a hostile, and racist environment! I might as well be black, you bully! Stop giving me mental distress with your down-votes! I feel unwelcome!
EDIT 2: This comment has been flagged and people are unable to see the irony in that. Fascinating.
What if I really do experience mental distress and all of the above? I could literally copy paste those whiners' comments and still get down-voted while they are being protected. Why am I not being protected on the same basis? :(
Is it because you believe I'm lying? Am I not weak enough for you?
It's not just the appearance of the people who bullies you. Bullying forces you to become more closed, and changes you fundamentally while you learn to resist it. Unfortunately, resisting bullying needs one to unlearn "inherent (baseline) trust" when meeting with new people, and unlearn "implicit trust" which is reinforced with the duration of civilized communication and relationships, because bullying can come from the least expected person at most unsuspected time.
Also, continuous bullying warps one's perception about discussion. Any sign of escalation causes any bullying victim to just change the subject and feel bad about itself, because bullying starts with (generally intentional) disagreement, then this disagreement is used for a basis for physical or psychological bullying. Bullied people may not hate from themselves, but they cannot be content with themselves either. They always think that something is wrong with them, and feel powerless to correct it, because continued bullying is only possible when the victim is bullied regardless of his/her character, intention, behavior or capacity.
Prolonged bullying really leaves deep wounds like trust issues, complete lack of self confidence, fear of communication and feelings of inferiority. These wounds are very hard to heal, because as time passes and one grows up, society thinks that these issues are over and doesn't care. Also, people don't seek help since these features are considered part of the character and deemed fixed after a certain age, but they are not.
Good friends, and a really caring person can change everything if the person wants to heal. It's hard, but not impossible.
How do I know this? Because I'm bullied for 10 years straight.
Edit: Clarify sentences.
People are encouraged to stay on-topic (nowadays known as: cyber-bullying) rather than spamming the site with irrelevant personal details.
It's looking for offense where there is none. Frankly, I have never seen racist comments on stackoverflow. I have seen curt, and even rude answers; but not bigotry.
At the risk of sounding intolerant, if for example, a black programmer takes personal offense at a brusque technical answer on SO, he/she can get the fuck over it. We are not on SO to talk about their insecurities. We are on SO to find answers to programming problems. It's not the community responsibility to tiptoe around a users self-esteem issues.
Again, this isn't to say SO couldn't be a kinder place, but dear god, spare us the bleeding heart spiel for once.
That's the particular problem that they're trying to figure out, with a broader version of "waste of time". Either "asking a question is met with hostility", or "posting a response is met with hostility".
> Many people, especially those in marginalized groups do feel less welcome. We know because they tell us.
It may not not stand out to you, but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
I've spent years using StackOverflow. I've never seen any expressions of bigotry. One might get a hint of "group" based on linguistic style, but never have I seen bigoted comments based thereon. If someone feels unwelcome, it's either because they just feel that way without cause, or because of the content/tone of their comments - not their "group" - elicits such response.
1. overwhelmingly dominant gender of population (92.9% of SO population)
2. overwhelmingly dominant race and ethnicity categorization (74.2% of SO population)
3. overwhelmingly dominant sexual orientation (93.2% of SO population).
(I left this ambiguous on purpose to ensure that my point is about the homogeneity of the population and not the specifically dominant demographic group. If you want more information, you can look for yourself for specifics about which way the numbers fall here - https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/).
My point is that the stackoverflow population in general is very homogeneous by certain categories.
Instead of looking for evidence of victimization, imagine how easy it would be for someone belonging to a StackOverflow minority category to get discouraged by StackOverflows fierce gatekeeping, especially with the knowledge that stack overflow is so demographically unlike this person. From the point of view of the marginalized, evidence of group categorization isn't needed beyond that fact that "StackOverflow is very very X, and I know that I'm Y." Any sort of gatekeeping from this point on can feel very discouraging, even if this isn't the intention of those who are gatekeeping.
[edit for format]
If people choose to avoid a group, while that group in no way excludes them, why keep blaming the group?
So I'm not "blaming the group", but instead I'm trying to make the point that when the current SO system is paired with a homogeneous user base will, it probably naturally become more an more homogeneous for the reasons stated above, unless an outside force enters the system.
I would argue that this isn't about fault or blame or guilt, but instead about deciding whether or not to take action to make SO a more inclusive place, especially for those who may be predisposed to feel exclusion in the context of SO.
Perhaps that was a mistake; I'll reconsider next time around.
When you tell someone they're sick, or unwelcome, or subject to bias, and especially if you're a neutral source, they're liable to believe you. The mind is incredibly suggestible.
So how much of these feelings are because we keep telling people that racism and other issues are a problem? I understand the impulse to not dismiss the problem, but it seems like feeling like you're surrounded by racists has to be almost as bad as the real thing.
If all you're doing is googling for mature, well-curated answers, then you're not seeing this. Go post a "dumb question" and see how you're treated.
And the contention isn't that people are being deliberately mocked, it's that they don't feel welcome, which is a different thing.
So... how might a woman (or whoever) not feel welcome? Maybe because the forum she's on sees people regularly doing stuff like saying discrimination is "not even possible", or mocking those talking about it for "pointless virtue signaling"? I mean, seriously: go back and read the very post you just typed: does that seem "welcoming" to you?
It's not.
If some with a pseudonym like mine was mocked for asking a dumb question, their minority status would have nothing to do with it.
As an Australian, I'm a global minority and it might shock you but don't identify with many US cultural groups who are the overwhelming majority online.
Consider this recent question: "Should I start edx cs50 course before any other JavaScript course, or in the middle, or after?"
This person _should_ get downvoted and told that this is not an appropriate question. Hopefully they come around after a while and learn what kinds of questions are helpful for the _community_ at large. Does it suck that they feel unwelcome? Yes. But that doesn't mean users should be forced to "be nice" just because of it.
The point of SO is NOT to be a "canonical source for generalized questions [and answers] relating to CS/Programming".
In fact, if you ask a "generalized question" it will be smacked down as "too broad". If you ask a CS question, it will be downvoted as off-topic.
SO is a place to ask certain kinds of very specific and answerable questions. Anything outside of that narrow band (hell, even most stuff that's perfect appropriate) gets smugly dismissed by petty assholes.
The petty assholes who spend hours of their time tediously cultivating one of the world's most useful resources? Those petty assholes?
Regarding your point about CS, I meant something like "within the broad range of questions related to practical computer science, specifically programming." Yes, I know there's another Exchange site for more theoretical Computer Science topics, where some questions might be more appropriate...
It doesn't cost anything to be nice and to try and make the community feel more welcoming.
Deleted comments are essentially invisible to regular users, and even for deleted answers you have to go and dig to see offensive content.
Agree 100%. This part is especially troubling:
> Feelings have no “technically correct.” They’re just what the feeler is telling you. When someone tells you how they feel, you can pack up your magnifying glass and clue kit, cuz that’s the answer.
If I say "The sky is blue" and you say "That's offensive to people who aren't blue", you're just wrong. End of story.
It's sad that this is even worth saying, but that's what our micro-aggression and victimhood-obsessed society has come to. People are practically competing to see who can be the most offended.
That's not even close to the situation at hand.
"People are practically competing to see who can be the most offended."
Aren't you, just now, being offended that people are, not even really being offended at things, but really at trying to listen to people saying that they don't feel welcome, and trying to address that? Why is trying to make a more welcoming and open community such a sin?
Everyone on HN is almost the same in my head.
I am not even sure adding a profile picture would change that.
Moderators there tend to be borderline autistic people obsessed with some subjects. Yes, we sound like jerks and some people there can be really infuriating but it is not personal: we are just obcessive people with very low social skills. These OCD traits are both our weakeness and our superpower, why we do such a great work maintaining top quality questions and answers while sometimes sounding needlessly rude.
Being on the spectrum is not an excuse to be a jerk but many people will take "you are being pedantic" as a cumpliment because their brain is wired differently. Most of them will be more careful if you tell them they are hurting people even if they can't understand why.
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/users/444036/paulo-scardine?tab=pr...
You don't. Straight-up. You may think you do, but SO utterly fails at this.
In almost all cases where i end up on SO in my research the accepted answer is trash, and the one below it is the real one.
In the entire blog, I still did not find what they have actually done to make it welcoming, other than shoving a CoC (pun-intended).
Dude(with a higher score than I had), left a comment. "You should consider another profession, you don't have aptitude for programming".
Latino here, never experienced a single thing they're claiming on their site. I've been using SO since around 2009.
More of an irritant to me was the generally noisy and poor-quality content. I will only follow links to SO now in areas where I know enough to be able to filter for quality myself (usually it's wanting). From my perspective, the gamification schtick is a failure.
Honestly I just want them to noindex the questions that are closed so that they stop turning up in Google searches
If I see a StackOverflow result in my search I'd wager there's a more than 50% chance it's a closed question without an answer. Sometimes I'll grant if it was marked dupe I may end up finding the answer, but honestly the only visits I really remember are those that are marked dupe and link to something sounding similar but completely unrelated
SO is a trash fire. For everyone, not "women", not "people of color", not "people without color", not "groups". Everyone.
It's an openly hostile place where mods close questions unrelated to their expertise based on the whims of those in private chat rooms while belittling the questioner with those "your question was closed because X" explainer boxes.
It would be refreshing if they just said something like "We've realized that SO is a hostile place, and it's not better if you just happen to be a white man."
If you read their change list, nothing there has anything to do with "identity". It's just a list of very small tweaks.
Great place for finding answers to older common questions, really awful place for asking new ones.
It might just be me, but I've found it substantially harder to find good Q/As on SO for newer topics and frameworks. You ask about a technology which existed in 2014 and there are high quality detailed posts all about it, with different viewpoints, upsides/downsides, etc. But you do the same with a technology popularized in 2017 (and I'm talking highly popular stuff) and yet slim pickings from SO.
You have to perfectly craft questions to sneak past the fast-close and you-should-do-X karma farming traps. It's not worth the time trying to predict how today's trolls will close your question.
If your problem has not yet been solved (especially if it's similar enough to another problem to look like a "duplicate" to someone who does not actually understand the problem), then "trash fire" is hypobolic if anything (is that a word? It should be a word).
Sometimes you really need to deeply understand the topic to judge if a question is valid.
Anybody that gets annoyed by those questions can opt to not see them and focus on higher quality. Anyone that wants to help newbies can. Those people can also be marked as unfriendly or hostile and won't be able to answer newbie questions if they get a certain number of reports.
This seems like it would solve two problems: oft-repeated low quality questions annoying users who want more complex help, and encouraging newbies bc they won't be afraid of retribution.
Suddenly a "higher ranking" individual started leaving comments on my answers that I needed to stop answering certain questions, and only address "well asked" questions. After reading the guidelines, I noted that neither I or the asker had broken any rules, so I commented that I felt I was being treated unfairly, and I asked where I could discuss further since the comments on my questions seemed inappropriate.
Suddenly another, even higher scoring person, deleted all the comments and locked my answer, noting that the discussion had stopped being productive. After that, my answers were left alone with no more meta criticism.
In my limited experience, it's a bizarre community.
Do toxic communities produce better content?
So the more valuable a site becomes, the more it will attract highly motivated but slightly sociopathic moderators.
If you create a new website with first 10 toxic users, it will never grow, because they will scare away any potential 11th user.
But if you create a new website with awesome users, it get useful content and grow. When it grows very large and attracts too many users, you will have to start moderating heavily. But moderating a website is an exhausting task, and awesome people usually have other things to do; so gradually the job will be taken by people hungry for some kind of power. Then the site becomes toxic.
> Let’s reject the false dichotomy between quality and kindness. Quality matters because it means posts can help more people. But a larger, more diverse community produces better artifacts, not worse ones. We need to stop justifying condescension with the pursuit of quality, and we need better tools and queues to help power users trying to keep quality high.
And how long until we're ready to confront the fact that a lot of these meritocracies strangely produce very similar "top contributors" in terms of demographics, i.e. white, straight men?
I'm not getting into either side of it, I'm just saying that you have to admit it's an astonishing coincidence that online communities, started by, moderated by, largely inhabited by, and currently operated by white men seemingly always have a cadre of white men on the top as the "most valuable contributors" and nobody ever seems to wonder if all those things are connected.
Maybe the fears of POC/women are invalid. Maybe it's all a big damn misunderstanding. But I don't think it's right to have white men deciding if it is or not, and I don't think the best damn catalog of coding answers on the planet means a thing if everyone who isn't part of the in-crowd is too damn terrified to ask a question of it.
i don't mean to imply that we should preserve the toxic communities for the point of good content. but there seems to be a correlation here, and it's worth studying what positive effects the toxicity might create, otherwise it's going to be very difficult to re-create it without the toxicity and the sites that value the human creators over the content will always be at a natural disadvantage to the other sites.
IMHO, no problem ever, software related or otherwise has benefited or been solved better by way of having fewer brains involved, and the shortest path to having more brains is having more people, i.e. being more open and inclusive. It would seem to be that SO already has excellent tools to moderate quality without resorting to allowing users to treat each other in such a poor manner.
One of the interesting bits in there is:
> The second basic pattern that Bion detailed: The identification and vilification of external enemies. This is a very common pattern. Anyone who was around the Open Source movement in the mid-Nineties could see this all the time. If you cared about Linux on the desktop, there was a big list of jobs to do. But you could always instead get a conversation going about Microsoft and Bill Gates. And people would start bleeding from their ears, they would get so mad.
Which can be seen in Stack Overflow (its the newbies that don't read that are messing everything up) and reddit (Stack Overflow aka Downvote and Duplicate). Each group is making their group stronger and a more firmer identification by vilifying the other group (merited or not).
This happens in all groups.
--
The "everyone is mean" nature of some of the communities, I believe, comes from further down in the 'three things to accept':
> 2.) The second thing you have to accept: Members are different than users. A pattern will arise in which there is some group of users that cares more than average about the integrity and success of the group as a whole. And that becomes your core group, Art Kleiner's phrase for "the group within the group that matters most."
> The core group on Communitree was undifferentiated from the group of random users that came in. They were separate in their own minds, because they knew what they wanted to do, but they couldn't defend themselves against the other users. But in all successful online communities that I've looked at, a core group arises that cares about and gardens effectively. Gardens the environment, to keep it growing, to keep it healthy.
> Now, the software does not always allow the core group to express itself, which is why I say you have to accept this. Because if the software doesn't allow the core group to express itself, it will invent new ways of doing so.
When the core group lacks the tools necessary to maintain the vision / success of the site as a whole, they are going to find other ways to defend themselves from excessive workload. The easiest way is to be rude to people so they go away (and the overall workload is reduced).
I believe that this pairs with the (misguided?) efforts of Stack Overflow to become more inclusive by lowering barriers to participate (see design for #3) and making it harder for the core group to moderate content (be nice, changing close reasons, removing 10k rep flagging assistance, reducing 15k rep protection ability, a diamond moderator culture of "if it got upvoted it shouldn't be deleted unless there's vote fraud").
--
The entire article is a very interesting read. The author's credentials is also an interesting read - https://www.bloomberg.com/research//stocks/private/person.as... . Check what organizations he's a member of the board at.
Of course these things are connected, everything is. It isn't an astonishing coincidence at all, its the exact expected result given the environment.
Why does the color/gender matter? Flip it universally and do you feel the same way?
"When roles are reversed,
opinions are too"
Wikipedia is quite valuable. These days, I find StackOverflow to be nearly-useless.
I would say heavily moderated ones often do. That's because in general, a community without much in the way of moderation often becomes a wasteland filled with spammers and useless posts and misinformation, as seen on many webmaster forums over the years. If Stack Overflow and Wikipedia are doing well here, it's merely because their assholery has also stopped the SEO merchants and junk peddlers from turning it into Warrior Forums or Wikia.
But that doesn't mean a toxic community is better. It's entirely possible to have a fair, evenly moderated forum with a high level of quality control, as seen on the likes of Ask Historians over at Reddit.
A truly toxic community will eventually die or be replaced, as seen by one I won't name which banned people for making typos or disagreeing with the staff on any topic in history.
Edit: Though I think even this may be a simplification. Basically, a small or niche forum can be extremely relaxed yet still have a high level of quality (see my own Wario Forums site), but it'll have to make a decision between going downhill in terms of quality or becoming harsher on the moderation as it turns into a big board if it doesn't want to become a wasteland.
Autistic and borderline are barely perceived as positive words in our society so I can follow the argument of insult when you describe wikipedia authors as borderline and autistic. Although I see that you did not mean to do harm with your sociological background.
Name calling of "borderline autistic" and "absolute jerk" would be met with fairly quick community moderation and condemnation there or on Wikipedia. Meanwhile, calling someone autistic as either a pejorative or an insult here (or reddit) is seemingly acceptable and is being defended.
Well I'm not sure about that. Wikipedia is the better of the two, but that's a low bar. Articles are poorly written, inconsistent, and targeted at wildly variable levels of existing knowledge. I rarely use it for anything other quick lookups of trivial facts (and even then only for unimportant purposes). It's much-visited, but that's an indicator only of ubiquitous availability. I remember long ago reading some study or other comparing its quality favourably to old-fashioned encyclopedias, but it was just a fairly risible surface fact-checking operation. Of course Wikipedia is huge so there may be vast areas of excellent quality unrelated to my interests.
SO is worse, but a little more useful because of its narrower scope.
So, no, IMO toxicity of community and quality of output aren't related (in either direction).
Personally I think it's just that knowledge-building communities that win the network-effects battle produce good content due to the number of smart and generous people in the world who find out about them, entirely despite their toxicity. But winning the network-effects battle also seems to lead inevitably to toxicity, so we may never have a counter-example non-toxic knowledge-building community to compare to.
I don't think that's the right way to think about it.
Rather, I would say that tightly-moderated communities of experts tend to produce better reference material ("wikis"). But this type of structure is "toxic" to discussions ("forums") and novices.
The SO founders and key contributors built a wiki. The site's incentive structure pointed in this direction so everyone was complicit in this outcome.
Now, site management seems to be saying that they want a "help-everyone" forum. They are -- like all big orgs with something to lose -- soliciting ideas, forming interdisciplinary committees, and giving "<3"-warming (yuk) speeches.
Given how ingrained the current culture is, I believe that meaningful change would entail significant risk.
I can't see from your story if the "even higher scoring person" ever declared his intentions to you, which he probably should, but it can be a pretty routine moderation action on forum sites in general to remove meta comments not contributing to the original question, after that discussion has been had.
In your story I could as well read that the lower rank moderator was told off about his interventions.
However a friend of mine (that I believe as a better level in programming than me) has the same feeling of "bizzare community" that you have, so I know that the issue is complex.
That said I really have zero ideas about what they could do to improve the way they are seen by everyone without breaking the way the site currently works.
Have you heard about the term "help vampire" ? Do you know how many people how do not take 3 minutes to search ? Do you think that the number of questions will remain manageable if the bar is leveled down ? Do you know that you are encouraged to edit questions to make them more "well asked" (at least if that is humanely possible) ?
In my opinion SO is a specific tool that is very different from a forum, a chat or a mailing list. SO should not be the only tool that people have to solve their programming problems and it should not try to morph into it.
Most of the times I end up on Stack Overflow, I arrive via Google. I usually have to check for around 5 answers before I find one that hasn't been locked as "not constructive" or for some other arbitrary reason.
Is it any wonder that people find it easier to ask their own questions? The name "help vampire" is so telling of how SO mods see themselves (as arbiters and gatekeepers of all that is good against the raging unwashed hordes) and a symptom of the problem.
Don't aspire malice / incompetence to something that may well have a root cause within SO itself.
Thats kind of the point though isnt it? The idea is that you should find the right question and answer and not the x-th repost of them.
Anyone familiar with the side know why reposts arent simply deleted instead of locked? It seems locking them only worsens the problem they aimed to combat?
Back then the reason behind locking rather than deleting was because the duplicate may be asked in a different way, using different keywords. So keeping it viewable allowed people searching for an answer to effectively have multiple entry points into finding the answer because perhaps they were googling the wrong combination of keywords to get the original to show up, but the duplicate would match.
Its not untrue though, is it? Its really easy for such communities to really rapidly degrade.
That SO and wikipedia have both retained quality for so long, while also having strict moderators hunting a strong ideal, in areas where so many of their peers have fallen prey to the unwashed hordes, implies that it may not be so easy to discard the strategy.
It might even be necessary at such large volumes. The particulars of their activity might be maleable, but just approaching the problem (very) defensively might bot be.
People seem to think that duplicate questions are bad and something to be avoided. I think they're a terrific asset. It helps search-ability to have the same question phrased several different ways; especially when the ultimate goal is to funnel the searchers into the discussion page with the highest quality version of the question and answer. In my mind, the issue ISN'T that the mods are holding the gates against the barbarians, it is that the culture and SO itself has not given the mods the tools to convert what the "barbarians" are contributing into a valuable resource.
[1] https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
But as the population increases, driveby-posting becomes the norm rather than the outlier, and large swathes of newcomers can join at once, the culture cannot be taught at a rapid enough pace to survive. It either degrades, or enforces itself by means of an iron fist.
My thinking essentially stems from eternal september. Wikipedia's early success did not require heavy moderation, but once it became the predominant wiki, it's survival, I think, neccitated it.
The details may have issues, but the overarching idea, defending the culture from the unwashed masses, might still be correct.
I posted an image as a part of an answer once and it was removed with the reason "don't use third party image hosts". Thing is, I used i.stack.imgur.com which is the only method provided in the answer form on the site! I knew the user who did it but since my answer had been deleted, I had no way to contact him for any sort of appeal. It was a while before I tried contributing to the site again.
I love Stack Overflow, and it's sure a valuable if imperfect resource, but this is something that drives me bonkers about it.
If the question is intelligible enough to receive an answer, and if your answer is potentially helpful to the asker, then it's well-asked as far as I can tell, and the scoring system can take care of its relative utility.
The additional level of moderation doesn't seem to have added much value over my time participating. The closest thing I can think of as nice is combining duplicates, though moderators often seem to miss subtle differences between questions and in some cases information gets lost in the end. Generally, the moderation focus often seems legalistic or driven by artificial incentives rather than primarily focused on improving the breadth, depth, and quality of the site as a technical resource.
Honestly, I'm pretty sure that a significant portion of the hostility people experience is coming from moderation actions.
I might hope the SO team has the intention of going to town on that problem in general, but I don't see it specifically mentioned in today's discussion. I'm sure that if they took it deeply seriously and engaged with enough specific situations where it's been a problem, they could find ways to do better.
I think today's announcement is a really good indication, though, that they're listening to people who are having problems with their SO experience, not just to people who'd congratulate them for their (deserved!) accomplishments and for whom everything is more or less fine.
If you could only meet the needs of one constituency, I'd say they made the right choice to favor expert answerers, but I think there are other solutions.
Specifically, if I was trying to fix this I'd set up a two-tier system for questions and answers. There are lots of people who would be happy to answer questions, even if the question is a dupe, and even if it's not framed very well. Give people points for answering these in a kind way, and moderate around that.
For questions that are sufficiently well-asked, and not duplicates, elevate them to a wikipedia-like status: allow them to be indexed by search engines, make them easier to see by the expert answerers that dislike sifting through novice questions, and moderate them for quality. Give points for people that review and elevate high-quality, non-duplicate questions, or that edit questions to become high-quality.
If there are very different personas that you're trying to appease, sometimes a multi-tier system is appropriate.
there's also the third, silent, probably much larger group, who neither asks questions nor answers them.
it seems as though the single authoritative, comprehensive answers is what helps those people the most.
> Specifically, if I was trying to fix this I'd set up a two-tier system for questions and answers. ... For questions that are sufficiently well-asked, and not duplicates, elevate them to a wikipedia-like status ...
i think i'd very much like that to happen.
In the earlier days, it was designed to straddle the line more with a wiki; there were "community wiki" questions and answers, but people couldn't get reputation for those, and if someone's question or answer was edited enough it would automatically converted to "community wiki". However, people would get upset about losing the potential karma, so that feature was taken away, and major edits to other people's answers that change the meaning of it started to be discouraged.
However, there's no way for anyone other the person who originally asked a question to change which answer is accepted. So if someone asked a question 10 years ago, and someone gave a bad answer or an answer that is now out of date but which was accepted, and those two people have now left the site, there's no good way to get the first answer to the question to be the correct one. You can write a better answer, and even if it's upvoted, there will still be the accepted answer ahead of it.
I've tried following the original, more wiki-like spirit of the site by editing such answers, and then gotten other people reverting me because the edit would "give reputation to someone who didn't deserve it."
I feel like the incentives, and balance, and community of the site are just off right now. It still serves a useful purpose, but it could be a lot better, but whenever I've tried making suggestions for how to improve, I've gotten so much pushback that I've just given up.
I'm in that group and the problem is Google results seem to favor the recent, locked and left unanswered question over the so-called authoritative one
Question: How do I #include a 500MB text file in my C++ code as a string? My compiler explodes when I do this!
Me: Don't do this, your compiler isn't designed for this! Consider loading the text from a file instead!
Comment: -1 Dude this isn't helpful. What if it's code golf and you need to include a 500MB text file!? You never know. Get over yourself.
Stuff like this has happened to me so many times.
A better answer would be:
This is wrong because <reasons>. Consider loading the text from the file. If you want to #include it anyway here's what you can try.
This will ensure that the code golf people can do what they want and normal people try the recommended thing.
Of course there are cases in favor of both sides here or there. If you have reasons to go the esoteric route, then you should simply explain why. If you're browsing from the internet, you have to understand you're reading a conversation between two individuals, catered to the question-asker and not the rest of the universe.
When a user asks a question on X, it would be better to first assume that he knows what he’s freaking doing.
E.g. yes there might be valid reasons for inserting 500 MB as a string, and myself as another user desperately searching for an answer to it, I get pretty annoyed when I see answers for a Y instead.
SO contributors should answer the freaking question first. Can it be done and how. Otherwise the answer is of no use to people having the same question but for a different problem. Not to mention that I’ve seen questions closed as duplicates.
This is why I rarely go to SO for answers. I don’t want an opinionated forum, I want a mailing list where people assume you’re a grownup that really wants a solution to the question and not something else.
The ones that can’t explain why are almost always unaware of the actual problem they need to solve.
Also good questions shouldn't need explanations for the reason you're trying to do something. It's not like I'm going to explain my business requirements on a public forum to complete strangers.
And I'm going to mention this again — if the purpose of SO is to provide a searchable database of questions and answers, then the answer has to match the question, not a supposed use case that the user may or may not have, because that answer is then useless to others.
Of course you can include 500 MB in a separate file and read that. It's totally uninteresting and now that SO question, along with its non-answer is showing up in search results, having precedence over others. Which is a pity, because I thought SO is a place where you can ask questions on obscure features of the tools we're using.
You can, as long as you're clear on why you need these obscure features. So there's nuance... if someone asks "hi, I want to call `add` like `add(10, 20, 30)` and it's not working" and the answer is "Use `10 + 20 + 30` instead!", they're answering the intent of the question. They've totally not answered the original question (I want to call add) but OP is probably misguided.
It'd totally be fair to say "Oh, declare a function with 3 params and return the sum, or even make a function with variable arguments, then enumerate over each of them, summing into an accumulator. You can also do this as a functional reduction. In fact, you can use the mapreduce framework to do this, and here's how to create an adder circuit" - Every tidbit of the above is just... overkill.
I totally empathize with you - it sucks to google "how to do X given good reasons Y Z" only to find a question "how to do X given terrible reasons A B" that's answered by "don't do X"! I think the way that's respectful of others' time is to ask another question and clarify why you truly need X.
If you've taught a multidisciplinary class, you'll have faced people who truly are confused - EE students who want to understand, for example, "how do I declare a 20 bit integer in C for this program that's running on Windows?"...
Not 100% for me, but easily 30%. And you can almost taste the authoritarian arrogance dripping from the moderators words. I was disappointed this incredibly negative aspect of the site wasn't even mentioned in the post.
But sometimes explaining how the situation arises:
* Violates NDA/secrecy/licensing agreements.
* It can be complicated to explain the conditions that created the situation to people that aren't working with a custom/proprietary tech stack.
* Is irrelevant. If the operation needed to solve my problem can be concisely stated, why type a distraction?
I remember one post where someone said something like: "It'd be better if you tried this, but if you really need to do X..." followed by an explanation that solved my problem. It made my day.
Yikes. SO is where I learned to program, and if this were the norm, I wouldn't have made it.
If I ask a question the premise of which suggests I'm _way_ off, I wanna know. I have to imagine this scenario is far more common than the one you outline, wherein the poster has arbitrary constraints on his/her problem that need to be respected.
Let the voting system decide which answers are useful for posterity & which aren't. But to the answerers who take the time to help askers tackle the spirit of a question--not just its text--I say: thanks.
I find the attitude of "solve your problem by ignoring stated constraints" particularly irritating among database gurus, who should be more in tune with the business world than a lot of people.
When someone simply refuses to accept the constraints of a problem, it doesn't demonstrate intelligence, even if the problem as stated is insoluble; better to just ignore it. All they are really saying is "sucks to be you, glad I don't have to work there" which is boorish and unproductive.
None of that means that people don't sometimes go down a rabbit hole that they didn't need to. But know-it-alls generally need to step back and either disengage entirely or consider the constraints on a problem.
Question: I'm trying to do Y so I can do X. I know Z is the right way to do X, but I'm not allowed to do it for $BUSINESS_REASON that I have absolutely no control over.
Response 1: Don't use Y to do X. Use Z.
Response 2: $BUSINESS_REASON is stupid, fix that.
Then some time later I'll come back and post my work around, with fair warning it isn't the right way to solve problem X, but if you have to use Y this is the best I've found.
In my experience I see more of the opposite: XY answers. I search for or ask X, and there's a bunch of "smart guys" trying to subvert a secret hidden context to the question resulting in a secret question Y. When I arrive from Google to see the Y answer on X question, the answer is useless because unmentioned condition Y doesn't apply to my scenario. Multiple answers are always great though, because sometimes there is a sane default answer, and one or more "well if Y applies, you might actually [...]". There's a lot of value in multiple answers with their nuances explained or why they're outdated or the new way explained, etc..
The downside of disallowing ‘unworthy’ questions is that people feel made stupid for asking, and unwelcome. Also, people feel made stupid for answering, and unwelcome. There is plenty of elitism in tech, and you could keep the main stackoverflow for unique, well-asked questions, as well as adding the novice area.
The advantage of having a novice area of stackoverflow is that more people will use the site. While not every question will be great, the total number of great questions, and the total number of people helped, will be higher.
Turnover/churn. If a Q/A site allowed basic questions then the site would be flooded with them since the population of novices greatly exceeds sophomores or experts. Moderation would need to keep up with silo-ing these Qs into the 'novice area' you propose. Experts would need to sift more to get to the interesting, challenging or novel Qs if moderation can't keep up, which might affect the retention of these users, thus diminishing the resource pool available on the site.
To me it's clear that tact and grace is called for, and is currently mostly missing, when directing askers of basic Qs to existing answers, whether on- or off-site but there is such a thing as tragedy of the commons. Some stewardship and curation is required to maintain an acceptable SNR.
This is really excusing bad UI/UX (like surfacing existing answers while a user is typing a question) and a bad ranking algorithm. There is no such thing as "being flooded" only bad search algorithms, and bad UX. Google is "flooded" with a result set spanning the entire internet, and they manage to surface answers. Stack Overflow can do the same--they have more tools to rank and influence behavior (rewards, moderation, points) than google has because they control the site, its structure, and how it is gamified.
The only problem is if the question is not exact duplicate, but that doesn't happen very often with such easy questions.
We tend to forget that even really basic things like googling for an answer are learned skills. Some people are so green, they don't even know what they are looking for. They have some collection of objects that they want in a certain order, but they don't know enough to know the name of the thing they are looking for is a sorting algorithm. Or you have a situation where someone needs a linked list, but they have no idea what to call it, so searching fails. I've seen genuinely bright people who are new to programming fail in this way and get really frustrated when people tell them to "just fucking google it" when they already did, but honestly didn't know what to call what they were looking for.
On the other side, you have some people who are not so interested in a single canonical answer to a well-formed question. There are people who really get a lot of enjoyment out of guiding people and teaching them.
I would say the quickest way to satisfy a lot of the dynamic here is to have a place to migrate really poor questions instead of just closing them down. Something like how-to.stackoverflow.com or whatever.
Yes, some people just don't want to learn and are looking for someone else to do their homework. It's true. But I think those are best evaluated by the kinds of people who want to hang out there and try to offer guidance rather than the population as a whole who is going for more of a nerdapedia site.
In other words, give the people who want to teach a place to teach, and give the general site a way to move those questions to that context. Let the teaching-focused users evaluate the genuinely bad actors.
As a junior, I've run into this, especially since I have no mentor and I just kind of have to wing it when it comes to my own education. Example, I have an Android project where I use the HackerNews API to get the top stories, but I got the IDs and then the JSON for each all in one go. At the time, my thought was that I wanted to do this dynamically; I had no idea how to describe this to people for weeks. Then someone told me I was probably looking for "pagination". Boom, that was it. Don't know how to actually implement my own pagination still because all of the articles on it are trash and end up recommending the libraries for pagination anyway, but now I know!
One thing I've been pondering is if it's possible to have a sort-of "Junior's Dictionary" where a common (or semi-common) scenario is laid out and terminology is attached to it. Would have been great to know I was looking for pagination the entire time.
The problem is, they added the review queues, which prompts people to review questions on topics they might know nothing about, and give badges based on how much people review. So people go through those review queues and might be motivated to just get through things quickly without thinking very much about the effect of what they are doing; there is no meta review, no downside to just making hasty decisions that just prevent other people from engaging in useful discussion.
There is. There are "audit" questions designed to test whether the reviewer is paying attention. If they improperly vote to close a "good" audit question or improperly vote to leave open a "bad" one, they get banned from reviewing for a while.
But I don't think that "audit" questions do much to address my issue. They enforce that someone is paying at least a little bit of attention; but they still emphasize things like voting to close a "bad" question, rather than helping the person asking the question ask a better question. They might help a little bit with people who are just not paying attention at all for questions which are black and white as to whether they are "good" or "bad" (such as blatant spam), but they don't help at all with pushing the "grey area" questions in the right direction.
That's the crux of the issue; the community is so focused on just cleaning up bad questions by closing them, rather than working with the person asking to help get them to be able to work better with the community.
Lets say that it takes 15 minutes in chat to help a person (who wants to be helped in asking a good question rather than getting the answer now).
Next, lets apply Sturgeon's law to Stack Overflow. There are 8000 questions a day and 90% of them are crap. Thats 7200 questions that need work. This is 1,800 hours of mentoring per day.
The close (and down vote) is such a minimal amount of work that it allows the group within the site that is striving for a particular vision of quality that it allows them to do the most they can. Furthermore, it is not infrequent that a person who provides assistant for trying to unravel a question from getting a "why can't you just help me now?" with assorted vulgarity interspersed.
On smaller sites, with a greatly reduced amount of questions per day the group capable of mentoring as well as moderating is able to spend the 15 minutes of time without significantly impacting the time taken to moderate and curate the rest of the questions.
With 8000 questions per day, its really hard to look at all of them. As I write this, there are only 16 people who have exhausted their close reviews for the day ( https://stackoverflow.com/review/close/stats - only 16 have 40 reviews). That doesn't show the people who are doing new questions, but it does give an idea of how shallow the bench of people who are spending time to moderate the site actually is.
Getting more people to help out would be great, but most people aren't doing anything to help.
There are also people who believe that up voting a newbie question and saying "welcome to the site" in the comments without improving the question is helpful.
The first post review and triage queues are intended for providing this help. You can see that this doesn't always work well ( https://stackoverflow.com/review/first-posts/19570266 or https://stackoverflow.com/review/first-posts/19569647 - note the not even trying to fix the grammar of the question or asking for the necessary information or providing help on how to improve the question, just no action needed)
I don't expect every bad question will lead to a valuable mentorship opportunity. I've certainly encountered my fair share of those that weren't worth spending my time on.
Bad answers are more problematic; there's good reason to be vigilent about those.
And of course spam, obvious homework, and just completely incomprehensible questions should be closed instantly.
What I see is questions which are not phrased well but you can actually work out what they're asking being closed. So by the time I've written up an answer, the question is closed, and my answer is wasted. I can copy my answer elsewhere, and vote to re-open, maybe after editing the question to make it more clear, and it might get re-opened, but then I have to spend a lot more time and attention waiting for that. By closing out questions too aggressively, not only are people putting off newcomers, but also wasting the time of those answering questions.
> The first post review and triage queues are intended for providing this help. You can see that this doesn't always work well ( https://stackoverflow.com/review/first-posts/19570266 or https://stackoverflow.com/review/first-posts/19569647 - note the not even trying to fix the grammar of the question or asking for the necessary information or providing help on how to improve the question, just no action needed)
Yeah, one of the things that really frustrates me about the review process is that they just incentivize taking some quick and easy action, not actually doing the right thing.
Effective moderation is not easy, and a very different skill set than answering technical questions, but the rep needed to perform many of these mod duties is just given to those who accrue enough rep.
So that does exist, but it takes a LONG time for it to get cleaned up in some cases. And if people jump in with a "this might answer your question, hope it helps", it will likely never get deleted.
Its not that these questions hurt the site - bits are cheap. Its that they hurt the search results and the perception of the site. Admittedly a single reddit data point: https://www.reddit.com/r/stackoverflow/comments/8d15h4/10000...
> The toxicity is in all the unanswered questions.
---
> What I see is questions which are not phrased well but you can actually work out what they're asking being closed.
Consider fixing the question with an edit before writing the answer so that it won't be closed when you get around to writing an answer. This way its a good question from an earlier point in the life of the question. Furthermore, it makes it easier for other people to provide answers too. Leaving the question in a poor state with an answer makes it harder for the google only user to find the question and understand what is being asked.
---
Doing the right thing in review takes time. Many of the first post or triage reviews are done by people who haven't... fully bought into the philosophy of answers for people who haven't asked the question yet. They look ok to the standards of a 500 rep user who doesn't see what Jeff and Joel were trying for with Stack Overflow ( https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges/access-review-queu... ).
There's no instruction for people for how to help in the review queues. As such, everyone is doing their own thing with their own "this is the quality that I'd write at, it looks ok." The only way to correct this currently is with review bans... and that has its own problems with negativity and the perception of Stack Overflow as elitist.
The user's question seemed like a fairly standard one: how can I force kill a goroutine. But actually there was a question underneath it. The issue wasn't that they needed to kill the goroutine it was that the library they were using didn't have a mechanism for timeouts.
The sad thing was there was a PR available that fixed the problem.
Its like arguing with someone who takes everything you say completely literally and makes no attempt at a charitable interpretation.
Heard so much from so many colleagues over the years about how SO is inaccessible and unwelcoming, and started to realise why. I'm glad SO themselves have been on the same journey, because they're far better placed to do something about it!
Like, StackExchange admins: If you're getting flags, there's offensive material, the comments are blatantly off-topic, etc., then OK, I get that; you can step in and moderate. But that's a tiny fraction of the time. When people are having a normal discussion that turns out to be long, maybe don't be a jerk who deletes all the comments from that post and tells people to go somewhere else? It kills the entire discussion, mood, and everyone's enthusiasm, along with lots of gems that were in the comments but that wouldn't fit inside any answers. You really expect the community to turn out happy and welcoming when you keep punching all the breaths out of the users and kicking them to some other corner just because more than 5 of them decided to commit the sin of commenting and sharing thoughts on a topic?
Only a handful of upvoted comments are shown by default, you have to deliberately expand the list to see more, so why not retain them all? If someone wants to wade through 200 commments and add one of his own, what's the real harm? They could add an option for askers/answerers to "Stop notifications for new comments', if that's the issue.
Ooooh, You used the d word! Closed because Stack overflow is not for discussion.
What SO needs is a forum - not an ephemeral chat but a forum whose topics can be linked to the questions that people want to discuss.
A lot of the time if there's many comments on a question or answer it's because there's some nuance that needs to be brought out or the answer has limitations etc. Someone arriving from search probably needs and wants to know that - and will take but a moment to decide if the comments look worthwhile enough to expand and read more.
SO displays it well enough technically by only picking out the top 4 or 5 comments. What SO needs is the mods leaving the comments well alone unless they're abusive or spam.
Note that in that post, everyone who has a diamond after their name is a StackOverflow employee.
I don't think tacking on a forum is the right way to make it even better.
That's kind of what Meta is.
https://meta.stackoverflow.com
I've been frustrated when trying to contribute - you'll have two people helping each other and then some third party comes in and declares it not valuable, incorrectly says something is a duplicate, or starts deleting things for arbitrary reasons.
I just want the moderators to go away and leave us alone, it also makes me think stack overflow is successful in spite of this - not because of it.
You can use the chat site, message them directly (if their contact information is listed) or anything else you like to help someone with a useless/duplicate/beginner/help-vampire-ey question. You just aren't allowed to do it inside the reputation system to mine these kinds of answers for karma, and aren't allowed to do it inside the wiki system so you don't pollute the results of searches.
- the people asking questions just want a solution for their specific problem, which may or may not be useful to SO. This can include homework problems, RTFM problems, vague and unclear questions, etc.
- the people answering questions want interesting questions that stimulate them to keep using the site. SO really needs those people to feel happy answering questions, otherwise no one will visit the site! You need experts providing quality answers, who can find something interesting.
- the people visiting the site after-the-fact. Those people are (usually) just googling a problem they have, but aren't willing to commit to a question. They need both the questioners and the answerers to have done their jobs, otherwise either the questions are too poor a quality to be sure it's the same problem, or the answers are too poor quality to be of use to them.
To all those groups, effective SO moderation looks antagonistic, because they wouldn't go to the site if it had awful moderation - it would just be "that useless place where no one answers your questions and you keep getting the same question over and over".
I'm not sure if they removed the comment or if some other moderator did, but it was gone within a couple of days. My karma loss remained. It's absolutely ridiculous over there sometimes and these sorts of interactions are one of the big reasons I stopped participating.
A good citizen would remove their downvote after you did that.
A better citizen would have just made the edit themselves to help everyone.
If you have people doing that then there is a much bigger issue then what has been described by the EVP. My experience in general has been that there are a segment of users on StackOverflow that think they are better than everyone else and take every little opportunity they can to impress upon the rest of us how great they are in their own little world.
> If you have people doing that then there is a much bigger issue then what has been described by the EVP.
Probably why the comments are disabled on that blog post. Doesn't want anyone pointing out the disconnects from reality.
People extrapolate from names. ESPECIALLY if your name sounds indian.
I have some mod privileges on SO and have been a user for ~8 years.
The best way to not have your question locked or deleted, is to ensure you're following the best practices for asking a question and include a Minimum Complete Verifiable Example (MCVE).
https://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask
If you feel you've done both and still don't get a good experience, it's worth speaking out on Meta for more specific advice.
Most people on SO just want to help — it's easier to help on a question that meets these standards.
> having never answered a single question in the technology I was referencing
Moderator privileges are more about the style of a question/answer than the specifics of a particular tech. The moderation queues are irrespective of the tech tagged in the question.
It's mildly annoying when wrong answers get voted up, but it's even more annoying when moderation tools are used that way. This new user got screwed over by high-ranking close voters who didn't actually read the question: https://stackoverflow.com/q/49847677/331041
It reminds me of when SO added the feature to make front-end code snippets in answers runnable. Perhaps an evolution of that is to provide the equivalent for backend code. Do you think this would solve the voting problem you described?
To the linked question - Do you know if it's possible to undo a "mark as dupe"?
Once I made an account and tried to be more active. I got told off for asking questions about issues I was having or because my answers weren't liked by someone with high rep.
I gave up on it. I never use my stackoverflow account. I use stackoverflow on a daily basis, to find preexisting issues around what I am working on and read possible solutions, but thats it. I don't consider logging in and asking about an issue I am having, let alone help anyone else.
I feel like the toxicity around the community has led me into that. I do feel like people on stackoverflow are elitists, thats what I am getting about it. I feel like they are playing on a different league than me and they make me feel lesser although I am pretty certain that am competent enough to succeed.
I am grateful for stackoverflow, but I definitely don't see using an account on there anytime soon, and its going to take a long long time for stackoverflow to win me over as a contributor :/
P.S - Out of about 30 devs I worked with in the past / working now with etc I've only seen 3 of them using stackoverflow by contributing to it, or when they get an issue they post about it. The rest of them use stackoverflow the same way I use it which proves a pattern here, at least on my personal circle.
This roughly mirrors my experience...
I went through a period of engagement, which ended abruptly after an unpleasant interaction. The author of a semi-well-known niche library took time out of his day to poo-poo a highly specific answer to a highly specific issue. Thing is, the questioner and myself were using that library a bit differently than it's primary usage (broad data generation instead of test-data management).
So I had to debate with myself if I was really gonna be using my time explaining to someone I'd otherwise have loved to bump into at a conference that the world is a complicated place and sometimes I use butter knives to unscrew things regardless of what Ikea thinks about it... Haven't posted since.
Note that these problems may not make answering the question impossible. If, for example, the headline/question is "How do I do this???", then you can still answer, provided the body is more specific.
But such a meaningless title makes it harder to spot the question in lists when you're searching, or willing to answer questions.
That's bad for the usefulness of SO, and moderators and other users who have spent a lot of time on the site may notice such problems far more than you do when first visiting it.
I feel that if I do this, maybe the questioner will learn from the edits for their future questions. And even if they don't, at least I've made the question potentially valuable for other people coming along later, which is the main point.
The extreme is some open source projects, in my experience.
And little makes me sadder than comments on answers saying, “Don’t answer questions like this – it encourages them.”
No one seems to want to change. No one seems to want to even engage with criticism about the culture; they just push back and pile on when criticism is brought up.
After a couple times of seeing this kind of behavior, and pushing back, and then getting piled on by people rejecting the criticism, I started to get tired of it and withdrawing somewhat. Later on, I some blatant sexism in a chatroom that was laughed off when I pointed it out to the moderators.
I've pretty much given up. I'll occasionally reply to questions people ask on my existing answers or if I see something that needs an answer or edit I'll make it, but I don't really feel like fighting the overwhelmingly elitist, sexist, and uncaring attitude on the site.
I think that this post is a nice gesture, and good that it's coming from the company and not just another user, but I worry that's it's much too late. The community has been attracting people who like it the way it is, and repelling people like me who don't, for a long time.
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/365720/feature-requ...
Turned out somebody posted the almost exact same idea here almost 3 years earlier:
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/254205/opt-in-mento...
And StackOverflow even did an experiment with a different implementation last year:
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/365720/feature-requ...
But while there definitely seems to be a movement afoot to tackle the issue, I can see why you're ready to give up. Look at the comments to my question and you'll find this (with a couple upvotes):
@klenwell 'users who downvote without comment or explanation other new users who have given some obvious attention to the composition of their question' I hear these things often. I don't see them when using SO, nor have I seen any evidence that such a set of users exists, and I have asked for such evidence, many, many times. None has ever been forthcoming. I have concluded that such users do not actually exist.
This after I provided a detailed personal account of this dynamic in action. I mean I guess I could start collecting timestamped screenshots or request the server logs from the Stack Overflow sysadmins. For now, I guess I'll just join the chorus of the disaffected here.
Software architecture questions are very difficult to ask without triggering overbroadness. Another category that is off limits are getting started type questions, again they’re considered too vague (but that’s the whole point, the user doesn’t know where to start). And the illogical ban on pointing to research involving statistics also drives me batty. I’ve had arguments with moderators before where my answer was bad because it pointed to capers jones’ research, one of the most authorative sources of good software dev practices.
I always feel like it’s a game of dodge the moderator bot to get questions to not be closed, unless they’re of the boring easy to answer briefly and precisely variety.
"What document backend to use with Drupal?" is a question whose answers are in constant flux. It is a bad match for and Authoritative Language Compendium. But it's also the kinds of thing people wonder about, it's a relevant tech question, and the dialog around something like that is easily as valuable as the accepted answer since everyone is skinning a different cat.
So instead of "overly broad, no discussion for you" I'd rather see those questions get routed to "conversation-SO" instead of "reference-SO"...
IIRC, they did something like that. It was called programmers.stackexchange.com, and I used it a couple times and it was great.
Then some power-that-be decided it "wasn't working" (probably because it didn't fit the SO only-kind-of-good-question rubric) and changed the focus be a clone of SO with some minor difference in emphasis.
It takes a lot of work to maintain a free for all site by the community. It takes less work by the community to maintain a heavily moderated site.
The culture of a site is a reflection of how much work people are willing to put into keeping it that way.
You'll have to be more specific about what that "crud" is, as SO's culture seems to have a tendency to reclassify the baby as dirt and throw him out with the bathwater.
> the options were either abandon it completely (that was threatened) or clean it up along with the associated rules of what makes a good subjective question.
Seems like there should have been more options on the table than "abandon" or "remake in SO's image." SO has a better population to answer subjective questions than most of the alternatives it tries to push people towards. They really should have been more flexible.
The enforcement notice was with https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions... (which also lists a lot of the water cooler days of PSE links).
The history is described in https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3415 . Also give https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/17/merging-season/ a read. Note the:
> There’s an even longer list of things that really belong on the new Programmers Stack Exchange, which appears to be degrading into fairly stupid water-cooler nonsense, and could benefit from an infusion of more meaty subjects, like these proposals:
A lot of those links 404 for me, but a lot of that stuff could have been taken care of by being better at defining what was on and off topic, e.g. it's a site for subjective questions about programming, rather than programmers answering subjective questions. SO has the moderation resources to handle that.
The community that was there at the time wasn't doing any significant moderation or curation of those questions. Consider https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/4417... and consider is that useful? curated? Should "Quit my last job." (entire answer) be there? or "I tried to apply good programming technique to a language such as TI-83+ BASIC."? Count how many times "read books" or some variation is in that list.
It wasn't moderated or curated. Such pile on "give a pithy answer" was acceptable. And it made the site - trying for the more conceptual and architecture questions that Joel was asking for in his blog post harder to find, and they would get drowned out by the popular fun questions. That lead to https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/01/31/the-trouble-with-popul...
Its not that those aren't interesting questions, its that they are the wrong fit for that format. There are better places to ask for the best programming joke than Stack Overflow and Exchange sites.
And so, with the lack of moderation and curation from the fun days of Programmers.SE a different philosophy of the site was able to establish itself... and the site grew in activity.
The culture of a site is a proof of work. You have to work to maintain it. If there isn't work to do it, it can change. Its probably far to late to change to the less moderated version of the site again. However, if one wants to do that, actively work to curate the site so that those questions are acceptable.
MathOverflow has a fair number of fun and soft questions - but that comes at a lot of work of moderation and curation from the entire community... which they do. The community on other sites that wants those fun and soft questions has not shown as much a desire to curate them, and so others moderate them (not desiring to curate them either).
Yes.
> curated?
It's not a worthless question. If you're talking about subjective questions, obsessive curation is not the answer.
> Should "Quit my last job." (entire answer) be there?
Sure, considering there were better answers that had far more votes. It might have been better if it wasn't, and moderation could have taken care of it.
Answers like that are certainly not an indictment of the format.
> Its not that those aren't interesting questions, its that they are the wrong fit for that format. There are better places to ask for the best programming joke than Stack Overflow and Exchange sites.
That's never the kind of think I asked or liked at programmers.se, but like I said before, they threw the baby out with the bathwater.
You haven't really convinced me that subjective questions are "wrong for the format." All you've really shown it that an unmoderated free for all produces some garbage that doesn't fir in a high quality tech Q&A site.
The real answer for why programmers.se failed is probably that the powers-that-be weren't willing to spend the time and resources to meet a new challenge, so they gave up and did something else.
The format that SE provides is a very direct Q&A that tries to cut out all of the excess and gives a single good answer. There are other sites that are better cut out for polling questions and other sites that do a better job of "what is the best ...?"
Trying to make everything fit in the SE framework puts a burden on the community that moderates and curates the material, and at some point people have said "enough" because they don't want to and others haven't stepped up to do it.
The "wrong for the format" is part of the design of the site. Note here that we're talking in a thread. You can follow the discussion. SE was designed to make discussions awkward. When there's a discussion on a site of significant scale, it becomes unmanageable and detracts from the Q&A focus. If that is a good design decision or a bad one is up to debate - but it is the design decision of SE. And there are so many other places where that discussion could be had. Why not ask that question here? or over on a competing discourse site ( https://www.askquestions.tech was started by April who wrote the post that sparked much of this)?
If Programmers (now Software Engineering) has failed is also up for debate. The name change wasn't so much of a "it failed" but rather "people keep getting the wrong impression of topicality" because yes, it took too much time to keep trying to keep the topic on what the powers that be wanted to moderate and no one else was willing to do the job of curating the content of the larger programmers scope... and after all, they're all volunteers - its really hard to make volunteers volunteer to do something they're not interested in doing.
The name change meta post is at https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions... (see also the linked questions).
Are you trying to use SO or the Software Engineering site?
https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/
They also have a site for software recommendations now, so they created alternative sites for some categories of questions forbidden on SO.
I'm not sure if it hadn't been better to try to integrate it into SO though, using tags for example.
It's right there in the parent's text.
https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/3698...
I'm sure the moderator feels entirely justified by closing this question, and going by the rules they are perfectly right, but it still feels wrong to me to turn this user away instead of working with them to figure out a way to make their questions fit the website's format.
But, that takes a lot of work, and moderators are volunteers whose time is entirely on their own dime. I suspect that if the stackexchange network had paid moderators the outcome would be very different, but they probably don't have the funding model to support that. I myself also don't do moderator duties on the SE network, so I really shouldn't be blaming the moderators. I merely want to point out the frustration and the non-optimal outcome, not lay blame at the moderators' feet.
No one wants the rules to change in a game that they perceive that they are winning (or have won). Moreso if they worked hard to win.
I'm one of those people who wants the rules to change in a game that I'm already winning. I worked hard to win; I fully engaged in the gamifiction, spending days at a time making sure I hit the max daily rep level, optimizing how I answered questions to get the highest score.
Even then, I tried to focus my optimization on ways that would help people more. For instance, one way to optimize is to post a very short quick answer, so you are able to get early upvotes before there's been a flood of answers for a question; but I would then edit and flesh out my answer. This has both advantages for reputation, since I could get early upvotes, and then later provide a more detailed comprehensive answer that would be likely to get further upvotes. It's also helpful for the person asking; it's possible that the very quick reply will be helpful, so they get an answer soon, but it's also possible that the more detailed reply with references to docs is what they need, so it's a way of making the gamification actually work to help people out more.
I think one of the big problems is when they added gamification of moderation. They added the review queues, which prompt you to review questions and answers that had been downvoted, voted to close, edited by other people, etc, and gave out badges based on numbers of reviews done. This means you'd go through a queue of questions and answers on topics you might know nothing about, and be prompted as for whether or not you agree with someone else's close vote or edit or the like.
When a question is not great, you could just vote to close it, or you could try to engage with the person asking the question and help edit it into a better form. I generally try to talk to the person asking and edit the question to be better; but getting internet points for getting through a lot of reviews quickly incentivizes people to make quick judgements, sometimes on topic they don't know much about. After they added the review queues, I found a lot more questions were being closed before you had a chance to answer or to engage with the person in comments to get them to clarify their question.
And while lots of people these days argue that closing a question is just a way to indicate that it's not up to standards but it can be fixed and re-opened, for people new to SO who aren't familiar with the culture it feels like a slap in the face and a rejection of their question. After a question is closed, it's a lot more likely that they'll just delete it, delete their account, or just stop participating.
Anyhow, yeah, there is an aspect of people not wanting to change the rules of a game that they are playing and winning; I just wish either the incentives were changed, or more people would take the view that the point of the scoring is as a rough measure of how much they are helping people out, and helping people out is the ultimate goal, rather than being an end in itself.
And I should also say that I'm not against closing truly bad or unsalvageable questions; I've had cases where I've tried to engage with someone to make their question better, and they just haven't made any effort, or cases in which people are obviously asking homework questions. But I really think that there should be some effort to help people out with asking their questions before just blindly deciding to close them out.
Some questions are clearly daft, the person hasn't done any prior research, the question is vague, the problem is not apparent and it's a big waste of time trying to help. These questions are often shut down mercilessly and I think that's probably the best thing for them, but I've no doubt it's a terrible experience for the guy asking the question. I think the SO blog post addressed it pretty well by outlining a more streamlined question form with clear prompts for each part of the question.
Other questions are not daft, but perhaps are not asked well. They need to be edited, re-framed, boiled down to the essential parts, an example included, the expected output included, that sort of thing. It's tiresome to run into questions like this over and over, and I can understand how people might comment out of frustration, but it's good to prompt the OP to fix their question up so it can (and probably will) be answered well. Kid gloves and kindness are important here, it's not always easy to ask a good question. The SO blog post went a long way to addressing this and I look forward to seeing some changes on the site.
Overall I think SO is a fantastic resource with many amazing contributors, so it's good to see them responding to this problem and I hope they can make it even better.
All the easy questions that could be solved by just RTFM have been answered, many times.
And the more nuanced questions are fraught with bias (see: "The Definitive C++ Book Guide and List").
As for "boiling down" and "re-framing" questions, they won't get answered. Usually ever.
You'll get a few comments from people trying to help, with suggestions you've already tried, pitying your high-effort question with no answers. Then, you'll go search through the annals of your language, either to find that one guy twenty years ago published a piece of your puzzle in his blog, or that there's nothing at all in any sort of literature on how to solve your specific problem.
You'll then end up doing your own testing and research, spending an inordinate amount of time testing and verifying, until you come up with a brand spanking new type of abstraction that solves your problem perfectly. You'll write up your dissertation, post it on your question, and set it as "answered."
Then you'll curse under your breath at how f useless SO is, besides being an over-glorified forum / "selected excerpts from the manual."
I've stopped using SO, because I've realized all of your software problems can be solved with two things:
1). RTFM
2). Explore the software/language
Anything else, IMO, breeds bad habits. I say this as someone who used to rely solely on internet tutorials and other people's examples before I had to do work where my code had to be perfect or else I'd be out of a job/sued/[something violent].
I had to quickly learn how to do things myself and find the answers to my problems by straight scientific method and I know I've become a better software engineer because of it.
Having experience in both, I can say with conviction, that anyone who uses SO as anything more than a pair of training wheels that should be discarded after your first 6-12 months is liable to become a "bad" programmer (see: Ruby developer community).
nookoking, if you see this, maybe mail the mods. I have no idea why you'd be banned, your history looks fine, but all but your very first post are dead.
The ways to get points combined with the way moderation powers slowly flow from them in this gamified rigid hierarchy is not a common approach. Only allowing a specific type of social interaction (objective questions whose answer(s) are of interest to many). It is weird.
I think it is really interesting that the community isn't much worse. At that scale and, lets be honest, with programmers giving programming advice? Why is that? Which of those aspects can be borrowed for other stuff?
The problem is that answering questions which are borderline low quality/too specific, etc or need imorovement before it can be answered are usually frowned upon because it encourages the asker to ask more low quality questions.
The abuse you got is not OK though. If I comment at all on such questions it is always polite.
What I think is also a big oroblem is closing questions as duplicates which are not duplicates.
As with every system I think the incentives are the culprit so I expect SO to improve on this soon. They should be able to since they have all the data to do so
Stack Exchange could have dealt with this by developing a mechanism for identifying and promoting general and well-written questions to search engines, and so on.
People sometimes have specific or incompletely formulated questions, and people sometimes enjoy figuring out answers to those questions.
By stamping on these situations, Stack Exchange quickly removed almost all of its potential contributor base.
As I have said it encourages additional low quality questions which is more work for the mods.
"low quality" question could just be marked as such and kept mostly unmodorated. By marking them there is also an incentive to produce "high quality" questions. You could also make badges and reputation around it so asking good questions gets more rewarding.
Also, answering those "low quality" can really help the asker to understand his problem better and improve his problem solving ability, so maybe the next time he can provide better information in his question.
If you just close the question and tell people to go away you will just scare people off (which btw also leads to a smaller number of mods)
In nutshell, current system is not ideal but it has been put in place after lots of thoughts. No one is going to disagree with being more respectful and kind however the solution to this problem is much more of a technical challenge.
This is one of the issues with SO. I'd love to find a good question. I'd be happy to spend some time on it and learn something. But instead there are lots of questions about why the guessing game doesn't wait for input the second time, what's this syntax error, why doesn't this "if" work. Questions that will maybe help one person, but could be deleted immediately afterwards and nobody would notice.
I don't even know what's the answer. Maybe a canonical "this is how you debug an if statement which doesn't work" or other topic answer would help. Maybe not.
You can sort by most upvoted unanswered questions.
https://stackoverflow.com/unanswered/tagged/?tab=votes
A lot of SOers seems to enjoy moderation a lot more than answering questions.
Unfortunately they even do get in the way of the rest of us.
https://meta.stackoverflow.com
It's also worth noting that those who can lock discussions can also edit questions without approval (and others can with approval), so it's worth pushing back on editing the question into being "answerable", admittedly a non-binary state.
Asking a specific nuanced question results in a response of a) tell me what you are really trying to accomplish and i'll answer that question or b) don't do what you are doing.
Don't presume I don't know what I'm doing or know the right question to ask. This happens so often and is such a time waster I hesitate to use the site. Their culture even invites it by giving it a fancy name of the "xy problem".
Please provide a way to flag a question as "Don't respond with an XY question" or alternatively "I know what I am doing and still have a question".
You can do those with prose. Explain that you know what you're doing. Give an underlying reason that shows that your X is an X.
Answerers can only act on a) the information you provide b) heuristics they have based on seeing many other questions. If you do not provide a) then they'll have to fall back on b)
But XY-problems exist and are not uncommon. Overconstrained questions also exist. How are people supposed to know that yours is not one of those without additional information?
If you're asking people for free help and to spend their time understanding how their relevant but not identical experiences may adapt to your different-but-related problem, then yeah, you might.
If someone, even someone I respect, know personally, and work alongside, comes up to me and says "I need to install a nearly-20-year-old version of MySQL next to a modern software stack; help!" [0], I'm going to ask "why?" and maybe "are you sure there's no other way to approach your goal?" first. Not presumptuously or because I'm sure I know better, but because a) the answer will help me better understand the problem and goal, and b) because sometimes extremely competent, rational people really do overlook the obvious solutions, sometimes for days/weeks spent beating their head against the wrong problem.
Sometimes the justification is as simple as "it's a business constraint imposed from above". Sometimes it's a more complex story. Either way, wanting to know that isn't asking too much.
[0]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47350382
That IS a valid question. The site would be nearly useless without that. Of course there are reasons why you may not want to do the obvious thing Y but have to do X to solve a particular problem, but for a nuanced and specific question that's really the most important thing in the question. If it's not there, the answerer will (rightly) assume you are trying to bang in a nail with a saw - no matter how nuanced the question is otherwise.
That is: to be a good question, you have to be very specific about what problem you are trying to solve, what solutions you can't use, and why it is that you have to go with a specific solution.
The site isn't a question and answer site, it's a problem and solution site. People don't go to stack overflow to find an answer to a question, but rather to solve the problem they have at hand. So to make your question as good as possible for those people it really needs to have a problem context, including rejected solutions. If those rejected solutions aren't in the question - they will come in the answers. That's good.
Maybe it was the wrong site for that, but the elitist response, I think the question even got deleted by a mod along with the scathing comment, made me leave and only use SO as a reading resource. Never contributed and probably never will even though 8ish years later I have learned enough to be able to contribute.
True. There's definitely an elitist undertone at Stack Overflow, and the voting system has a huge effect on that...
> especially newer coders, women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups.
But this isn't true. No one knows anything about a user on Stack Overflow unless they explicitly announce it, and generally my perception seems to be a disdain towards newer members in general, not ones from any particular group.
Trying to make this about minorities feels like a desperate attempt to fit in with the 'social justice' sphere, and to virtue signal to people on sites like Twitter.
Still, the rest of the article seems fairly sane, and I guess this point stands out above all:
> Let’s reject the false dichotomy between quality and kindness
Because at the end of the day, we need to kill the 'brilliant jerk' archtype already. No, most intelligent people are not Dr House or Rick from Rick and Morty, and we shouldn't make the assumption that a community has to tolerate that sort of behaviour in order for it to be good. Moderate the community well, stop tolerating jerks because they're 'smart' and fix your voting systems, and Stack Overflow can easily become a great community to be part of again.
> But this isn't true. No one knows anything about a user on Stack Overflow unless they explicitly announce it,
They don't say it out in the open, they contact the SO admins directly or through surveys.
Perhaps minorities already get enough abuse and hostility every day on meatspace, so they are less tolerant of even minor hostility over the Internet. Since they have a limited amount of fucks to give, so to speak, they are more likely to leave the site for good after an unpleasant interaction.
Think of minorities as the canary in the coal mine. They are more sensitive, so they start leaving the moment the environment starts to become toxic. Left unchecked, the toxicity will grow and push away everyone else too, so you can't just ignore them for being "snowflakes" or whatever.
Our culture encourages women and minorities to speak up. White men are expected to endure abuse in silence.
Consider how much attention complaints from women and minorities receive, and how little attention (and how much hostility) complaints from white men receive (unless those men are individually powerful, of course). People tend to repeat actions that are effective, so women and minorities learn to speak up, white men learn to keep their complaints to themselves.
Edit: I'd like to thank those who downvoted this comment for providing a live demonstration of the phenomenon.
Since we were not aware until today that minorities received more hostility on SO, that means users really don't know other users' gender and ethnicity, so it's not like anyone will call you a sissy girl for speaking up.
It's debatable whether women and minorities actually do receive more hostility on SO, they're more likely to speak up, or SO's management is simply more responsive to their complaints.
But it's pointless to debate things that don't and can't change what we choose to do. Notice that all three of your proposed hypothesis can't change the fact that SO isn't very welcoming and they want to change that.
Rather than ignoring or mocking complaints from white men, we could choose to listen.
I personally don't mind though. In my city many positive quality of life changes were made only after some disabled people complained. I benefit from those changes too, so I don't mind the delay as long as it eventually gets done.
And if, as is often the case, past complaints had little effect until a particularly favored interest group spoke up, it's also an opportunity to listen more effectively to people who may have been ignored.
...and when they make Hot Network Questions, the influx of people from Stack Overflow is highly correlated with an immediate drop in the quality of answers and essentially the ruination of the question, to the point that several high rep users, myself included, have asked if we could opt out of HNQ as a concept.
That's a legit question: If people don't even know what gender you are/what color your skin is, can they actually be intentionally racist/sexist towards you?
Which makes me wonder if the actual wrong turn we took was making social media as prevalent as it is today. 20 years ago people on the www were really careful about sharing personal details. People liked their anonymity, there was equality in anonymity! Personal details were only exchanged with those deemed trustworthy enough after enough positive interaction.
But these days anonymity is nearly criminalized, while in some circles open self-display on social media is borderline worshipped as it has become the modern equivalent of "making it big on TV".
Somewhere in there is a relation between crappy TV casting shows, which most people only watch to see jurors be mean to the applicants, and social media. Nowadays social media are our modern TV casting shows and everybody can participate in being the nasty juror putting applicants down.
Note: I know that Stack Overflow ain't considered social media, but these days it feels like these dynamics are pretty much prevalent everywhere.
We sold that out when our Github account, SO profile, email address proved to be useful for finding jobs or improving our social status.
To this day it just feels weird writing people, I only know from the meatspace (friends&family), there. It's such an utterly different MO compared to my usual Internet-interactions that I sometimes struggle how to express myself just because I actually know these people.
That's why I kinda liked having the Internet and meatspace firmly separated, since they started bleeding into each other it feels like everything has just gotten needlessly more complicated and hostile.
Not directly, but often indirectly since in such a situation it is common to assume you are a white male. That's a bit off-putting if you are not one, but you might put up with it rather than clarifying your gender/race if doing so opens you up to a risk of direct sexism/racism
It bothers me that I basically have to pretend to be a dude on most of the internet because of assholes.
At least on the Internet, you can pretend, in the meatspace, you simply can't.
I also wouldn't call these people assholes, it might be convenient but imho it's needlessly vilifying people for simply behaving like they are expected to and how they've behaved for the longest time.
Because for the longest time, and in most places to this day, males are expected to initiate contact, if they are interested in a relationship with a female.
Now, one could argue that's outdated and "sexist", but that doesn't change the fact that large parts of our societies (and our behavior) are still shaped by these expectations. It's not that people want to be assholes, people simply don't want to be alone and for the longest time, the most common and accepted solution for that was for males to initiate contact and woo the females.
Sadly this is an angle on all this that too often gets ignored in favor of some simplified narrative where all these guys are just a bunch of misogynists who consider women their property or something like that. While these types do exist too, it just feels dishonest to frame this whole issue like that.
Because as a male the reality of the situation pretty much boils down to this: You are either proactive and approach people or... you stay alone. I'm not trying to dramatize here, I'm just trying to point something out that seems to be largely ignored in these kinds of discussions.
Not everybody is a socialite who constantly meets new people without any effort, heck for the longest time we've been told that female brains are explicitly better at socializing that than male brains (or is that considered sexist now too?). So what are males supposed to do in this situation? Just sit tight until a female approaches them? That's pretty much a "forever alone" sentence for the vast majority of males.
That's why at some point for many males this becomes a simple issue of game theory: You can't meet new females without approaching new females, the more new females you approach the higher the likelihood that you will end up with one of them.
As sad and sterile as it might sound, in the end, it often just boils down to "trying often enough" and it's been that way for the longest time and I'm pretty certain this is engrained in our nature to a certain degree. Millions of years of behavioral evolution don't just vanish in a matter of years.
"They" is a good compromise.
Other people assuming you are like them and treating you the SAME as they would treat all the other SO members is literally the outcome we want isn’t it? We’re being treated equally.
But now people are being offended because they aren’t being treated differently based on information the other parties don’t have?
What?
I don’t think SO wants people to treat people the same by starting with the assumption that I am like you. I think they want the opposite. I think they want you to stop assuming things about the person you’re talking to altogether, and start baking that caution into your interactions.
On SO its likely not as bad as the rest of the net, but it'd be naive to assume its perfect: harassment aside, I imagine obviously female commentators get a hefty dose of mansplaining thrown their way
Fair enough if you call people out when they know something about the person they're interacting with. But you're suggesting people are prejudiced because they thought the wrong thing.
This identity politics bullshit is an anti-intellectual cancer. Truth is universal, race, gender, etc have nothing at all to do with it.
Hmm, why do you think intentionally is important in that sentence?
It wouldn't surprise me at all if making the site unfriendly towards newcomers affected minorities more. That seems... bad? And if so, anonymity wouldn't fix it.
It's funny how being results-oriented seems to be counterintuitive to many people whenever a discussion touches on morality. Somehow the issue of good intentions (or lack thereof) overrides everything else.
Yes, people can hide these characteristics, but they shouldn't need to.
_No_ mechanism? Seriously? How about when the user is named "Jane Smith"? Or, heaven forbid, they actually use a PROFILE PICTURE with their ACTUAL FACE. Oh god the horror!
I, as a white male with a caucasian sounding name have the privilege of being able to use my actual name on the internet. Women that want to be taken seriously don't even have that choice.
Sure over time women figure out that anonymizing their gender online is a wise strategy, but how many brand new programming-enthusiasts are going to learn this when they have negative first experiences on the most popular Q&A platform for programmers? How many never return to contribute because of those negative experiences?
It's no wonder you can't go to SO and find women, they either aren't contributing or they have effectively hidden themselves among the ranks of the men.
I'd rather look at the merits. If I recognize a good idea, I'm going to signal that I'm on board with it, so virtue signaling in itself is, at worst, a bit gauche.
The reason I'd avoid making these things about social justice is that it's very hard to show that social justice as a concept actually works to promote comity. When you put things in terms of oppressor and victim, you deepen divisions rather than heal them. When you search for reparations and retribution, you have to harm people.
Jordan Peterson is a good resource on this - he's studied it extensively and talks about it a lot. I'd recommend watching his lectures to anyone interested in learning about it.
I see the above as just an argument to do nothing, usually (I can't speak about the parent's motives) made by the enemies of justice, such as the white supremacists, to suit their agenda.
> Because at the end of the day, we need to kill the 'brilliant jerk' archetype already.
We need to recognize that everyone shifts significantly towards the autistic side of the spectrum when they're online. You're looking at text, and trying to infer emotion from words, and do it quickly. That people are as good as they are reflects a fairly amazing amount of patience from the average person.
These "jerks" that we're going to brand intolerable and kick out are probably fairly decent people.
Honestly, most moderation systems would benefit hugely from a simple "please rewrite this post" feature.
Almost everyone on SO uses a variation of their real name. I suspect you are a smart enough person to know that that is far more than enough to engage in racial and sexual discrimination.
Note: A significant chunk of them, yes, but not almost everyone, as far as I know. Looking just at the front page right now, out of the 96 users, I see 7 users whose name begins with "user" (like "user2141351"), at least 13 who have names like "xyz" or "NRA" or "SSB" or "BmyGuest" or "saladi" etc... that's at least 20% of my sample.
> To the extent that marginalized groups have a different style of communication than what is expected at SO, they will be treated differently.
If you're in charge of a huge for-profit online community and your only source for demographic/marketing/public image information is your existing user profiles, you should probably start looking for a new line of work. There are many ways that they could find out what people in different demographic groups think of their service without even looking at their membership database.
Why would you say this with such conviction when you don't know anything about what the team is doing behind the scenes? They do yearly surveys that do include things like culture / minority status as well as questions about inclusion.
I can't help but feel like this is just another white male majority site jumping to shut down this type of discussion before it even starts.
An online community can’t possibly be less welcoming to women, for example... because it has screen names? Because people don’t express open disdain for women like they do for newbies? You don’t have to be an expert on this stuff to know not to rush to hasty conclusions, especially in the face of evidence.
Based on the fact that he did not share a bit of that data or any other kind of evidence. That's especially jarring on the Stack Overflow Blog, which is full of posts that are nothing but data.
It does not necessarily mean that there is no data, but it does make me suspicious.
OK, using that reasoning, what evidence do you have to support your statements? What evidence do you have that supports the reasoning quoted above?
>But this isn't true.
What do you make of their statement that "Many people, especially those in marginalized groups do feel less welcome. We know because they tell us."?
What they did say is that the general level of hostility leveled at all newcomers is something that users who are women and minorities frequently find unwelcoming and makes them feel uncomfortable about using stackoverflow at all.
Thank you for saying this. I'm all for welcoming people from all walks of life to the coding community. But who is SO to say these particular people have been demoralized when most of its users are anonymous.
Newbie coders asking stupid questions on SO and getting snarky answers -- mostly because they didn't take the five minutes to see if their question was already asked -- transcends race, sexual orientation, gender and nationality.
[1] https://gamingreinvented.com/nintendoarticles/no-the-gaming-...
StackOverflow has names and profile pictures. Users can choose not to have their own photo or name but some do and provides some identifiability. Though I agree about your general point that the primary and most obvious issue is with new users feeling less welcome than specific groups of people.
Given your astonishingly ignorant response, I can bet dollars to donuts that you are not.
For example, it's quite easy to tell you are a white male. What gave you away? The "I'm not listening and I know better than you that your concerns are not valid" part
[1] https://gamingreinvented.com/nintendoarticles/no-the-gaming-...
You completely missed this point. To quote the article:
> Many people, especially those in marginalized groups do feel less welcome. We know because they tell us.
Hanlon doesn't claim to know why the marginalized groups feel unwelcome. He doesn't even claim that the root cause is a bias of action -- conscious or subconscious -- on the part of SO's users or staff. What he said was these groups report at a higher than average rate the feeling of being unwelcome. That is a simple fact, and can only be dismissed at the cost of saying those people's opinions are not worth addressing. Acknowledging it, saying "maybe if we get creative we can improve it", is not virtue signaling, it's the most fundamental requirement to:
> shift from “don’t be an asshole” to “be welcoming.”
But not marginalized groups also tell them. Now the question is who tells more? I think marginalized, because they read all these blogs and tweets about being opressed, shift their selective focus to minor injustices, and feel empowered to complain. The SJWs are the complainers, they are the warriors, that's why you hear from them more than from anybody else. They have the momentum of complaining, so they are more likely to continue to complain. I'm certain most of them are addicted to complaining and will never stop, no matter what. Also, minorities have higher social status within those ranks, and therefore more likely to be SJW.
So it's not necessarily Stack Overflow's fault at all.
From that single datum, you've concluded that this is because marginalized groups must over-complain, and in fact, you claim to have achieved perfect certainly that most members of marginalized groups have an addiction to complaining and will never stop, and therefore the only sensible course is to completely disregard any survey results saying that marginalized groups feel particularly bad about anything.
That's a pretty strong conclusion from hearing about a brief allusion to the results of a survey you didn't see. Your argument says a lot about you and very little otherwise.
That's an anstoundingly lack of emapthy and self-awareness. Also extra points for the unironic use of SJW.
This particular argument is really bad IMHO. OP has a point - nobody knows who you are. That means if some people feel they are treated worse it is due to their own perception. After all, objectively they are not treated worse then everybody else. Which to me sounds more like a bias in their perception. They may have that perception for a reason, but that does not seem to me to be something attributable to SO.
[1] https://gamingreinvented.com/nintendoarticles/no-the-gaming-...
As a non-white I call shenanigans. My non-whiteness is very obvious in my SO profile pic and not once in 8 years of active use of the site has it ever come up, nor have I perceived being treated any differently. Also, no one ever asked me if I felt “unwelcome” nor is there a button to click for that, so I don’t know where this really comes from...
Finding material that is off topic but preserved for some reason is often cited as a negative experience. The "I searched for XYZ and it was closed as not constructive" (note: not constructive hasn't been a valid close reason for several years).
This brings up the question of "should that material be findable on Stack Overflow if people are having such poor experiences when finding it?" and "are people finding the closed questions of yesteryear a disincentive to participate today?"
The finding things closed as a duplicate sign post isn't working as intended with redirecting them to the proper question - because when there is an answer to the question (that may or may not properly answer it) it prevents the logged out user from getting redirected to the duplicate.
The negative experience is that the interesting/useful questions/answers aren't rewarded.
It's bad that they are closed with harsh and false ("not constructive" on some of the most useful question there was...). It would be even worse if they were entirely removed so we couldn't find the answer.
Is it a fact? I'd like to see the evidence behind that claim, so I asked for that: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/366692/41071.
???? There are names and profile pictures.
I understand what you're saying, and while you're correct, it doesn't change the fact about how people feel in a community.
There are really two groups here: newer coders, and marginalized groups within our profession.
Newer coders are less confident, and when you see the types of responses you see on SO, you're less likely to want to participate - nobody likes being told that they're stupid or not working hard enough, as an example.
For marginalized groups - primarily women, people who aren't white, and the LGBT communities, they already have to deal with sexism, racism, homophobia, and other forms of discrimination in their daily lives. When you have to worry about hostility in general, trying to participate in a community that does have a reputation to being hostile is even more difficult and frustrating. The fact that you don't know who an SO user is unless they volunteer the information simply doesn't matter.
> Trying to make this about minorities feels like a desperate attempt to fit in with the 'social justice' sphere, and to virtue signal to people on sites like Twitter.
This isn't about trying to make it only about minorities, and the post doesn't give that impression. It is, however, about making sure that everyone feels welcome, and that has to include thinking about and understanding WHY minorities aren't feeling welcome, even if there isn't explicit discrimination against them on the site.
[1] https://gamingreinvented.com/nintendoarticles/no-the-gaming-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
He posted a HN comment that referenced an explicit link. That is not "personal." It's a publicly stated position, and one that sheds light on his true motivations on this subject.
I think this statement is disingenuous.
There's a spectrum of these behaviors; some are outright doxxing but most aren't, and there's widespread disagreement about what to call them. When I said "pursuing personal details" I was referring to this spectrum. "Extraneous details" or "history" (edit: added above) might have been more accurate, but this is not the important distinction.
On HN, we've learned that when one user follows another's trail and comes back with ammunition to discredit them with, it lowers the discussion quality in a way that bodes ill for the community. You can see that clearly in this case; when someone finds four different places to post like that, they've crossed into something we don't want to become a norm here.
Whether the details were public or not doesn't change much. The real issue is that this genre of online shaming/war does more harm than good to a community like HN, which is trying for a different value system, so it's better to just keep it out of here.
Stack Overflow allows people to use photographs in their profile.
You're saying that women and POC are not allowed to be themselves. That they cannot use features everyone else is free to use. That they must lie about who they are in order to participate on the Internet