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Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change
231–240 of 739 posts
Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does that work if the usernames are anonymous? Saying you feel targeted does not mean you are being targeted.
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 eve…
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.
Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change
#233I've never seen minorities being mistreated on stack overflow. Does anyone have any examples?
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".
That just sounds like somebody being a jerk, but I don't see anything about minorities or calling out PoC in there.
Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change
#234It'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 makin…
I like how your [1] has 2 opposing opinions as the top comments, both at exactly 147 points.
> Whats wrong with hi or thanks? Boy what is this world coming to. Mundane mutes who just want answers.
> Kill it with fire. You want to do social you get on Facebook. :) I like the questions just to be questions (without any noise).
Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change
#235> 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 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.
Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change
#236I think the whole moderation thing is completely opaque. Last time I discussed this, and suggested some changes involving various "queues" and "waiting areas" for review etc - it turned out most of this already exists . There is a whole secret machinery behind the facade that somehow is hidden from users. I have been a user for years and never seen that. As far as I can see there are votes, close votes, and then ques…
One of the biggest problems, if not the biggest, for people in tech (especially new CS students, etc) is knowing how to ask the right questions. There's several 'layers' of tech-speak that people learn (or not) to adopt, and many ways of asking essentially the same question.
These practices of gatekeeping, being opaque, and failing to practice patience and interactive dialogue on SO are extremely frustrating, and cause the system to fail to support some of the people that most stand to benefit from the community. It creates an attitude of elitism, and while I see how these attitudes can be self-serving for the karma elites, and help create a perception of the community being concise and clean. But it leaves many people falling through the cracks, and when questions aren't answered within 3-5 replies, the threads are often locked, deleted, and otherwise 'swept under the carpet'.
For this reason, I don't contribute to SO at all anymore. If it comes up as a result in a Google search when I need help with something, I'll use the info made available, but otherwise I'm intentionally just a leech because I don't feel it's worth navigating all the negative aspects in order to contribute.
Edit: I do hope that the changes and attitude they've outlined in the OP blog post do help resolve a lot of what I've just described, and I do intend to re-evaluate my opinion after enough time has passed for real changes to manifest.
Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or: 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,…
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.
Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change
#238My issue with the site is the opposite. 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…
> Please provide a way to flag 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.
Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 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.
Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ratings already take care of curating. Why do you need assholes to curate?
Same reason why HN has both up/down votes, and actual moderators.
And the reason is ... ?
What's wrong with comments just being grayed out, collapsed and moved to the bottom if they are downvoted for being (too) stupid / trolling / fascist etc?
Moderators could just have more voting power.