Websites that build knowledge-based status hierarchies naturally end up being dominated by insecure know-it-alls.
Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change
151–160 of 739 posts
Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change
#152Glad 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 sub…
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.
Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change
#153A site whose founder banned greetings isn't very welcoming, go figure. https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/93989
Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change
#154Should they limit the amount of ”moderation” like activities one person can perform? It’s probably not good for the community if there are users who are mainly contributing by performing housekeeping tasks.
They do. You only get a certain number of review or close actions per day.
Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change
#155Will this stop the closure of questions that are legitimate and haven't been answered? Whoever is moderating and deciding which questions deserve legitimate answers is the problem. Everyone is snarky and bossy and can't just answer the damn question asked. I've noticed this on pretty much every developer help site, instead of answering what I asked they try giving advice... I know my issues better than they do, and the implementation details shouldn't matter. In some cases it's obvious someone is doing something wrong (let's say rewriting built-in string functions) but those cases are rare.
This article addresses NONE of the complaints I've seen against SO. You're basically saying "we will be nicer and more inclusive!" Who told you that was the problem, because it isn't. The problem is the mods/power users/unwritten rules.
Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change
#156> 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.
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 think the problem is that too many people think that "giving feedback" and "being honest" require being mean. They don't.
Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change
#157> 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
Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change
#158It's funny reading this article after seeing one of my questions from 2011 edited today, to remove the word "Thanks!" from the bottom. I've been on SO since 2009. I can confirm the community is getting harsher, less patient, and more exact. HOWEVER, I can see the other side. I see tons of questions that are not fit to be on the site: one-liners, opinions, "help me with my homework", and utter spam. Not to mention peo…
Here's the relevant Meta SO post about that [0] and the main meta SE discussion about it [1]. The guy posting [0] has 145k in reputation and writes comments along these lines:
> So I started to remove "Thanks in advanced", which in addition to being inappropriate for Stack Exchange, is a corruption of the English language, and needs to be stamped out before too many people decide that it's correct English (thus making it into correct English).
Basically hostile combined with lots of power in SO.
Edit: I've just seen that an answer to the Meta SO question above [0] got 12 down votes [2] is specifically suggesting what the Stack Overflow blog is - that we have to be more inclusive
If SO does want to be inclusive the pedants with power are going to get pretty annoyed.
But they're the ones that do a ton of the work so I'm interested to see how it works out.
I still think that I should defend SO, it's the most transparent place I know on the internet. They've done a good job trying to keep it inclusive but it's a ridiculously hard job especially on the scale of Stack Exchange.
[0]: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/288160/no-thanks-da...
[1]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2950/should-hi-than...
Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change
#159Note to myself: Stack Overflow is done. When political overtone and insane mods dominate a platform, it's over. The amount of non-sensical bans/closings of sensible questions or answers etc. recently is getting out of hand; now using "privileged", "bias" etc. rhetorics from official top management means C players made it to the top, as that's the only way they can compete, by making everybody around feel guilty.
If you complain about hostile environment in computing, go work in finance or retail for a few years.
Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change
#160> 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?
Feeling get injected into everything, because we're all humans with feelings, not robots.