Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change • Hacker News Board

Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change

#241

Post by mark-r » Thu, Apr 26, 2018, 10:16 PM UTC

TravelTechGuy wrote: post #116

It'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…

In order to have any privileges whatsoever on SO, you need some rep points. You're supposed to get points by writing good questions and answers, but that's hard - and gets harder every day, as the good questions have mostly been asked already. One of the easiest ways to get rep points is to propose edits that later get accepted. "Cleaning up the site" is thus encouraged. That's probably how your "Thanks" got removed.

Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change

#242

Post by alkonaut » Thu, Apr 26, 2018, 10:16 PM UTC

mmd45 wrote: post #53

My 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…

> 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.

Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change

#243

Post by stuartd » Thu, Apr 26, 2018, 10:16 PM UTC

0x00000000 wrote: post #203

stuartd wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> one of my questions from 2011 edited today, to remove the word "Thanks!" from the bottom. A successful edit is a way to gain reputation, which is hard to get these days for new users. I know it feels a bit odd when someone else edits your question: you could roll it back, but then again why should you be bothered? It's the same question, with one less word.

I guess that explains why literally almost every single question and answer has been edited by a high ranking user to add a comma or change one word usually

No, not at all. Once you have earned enough reputation to have the right to edit a question without moderation, you don't gain any reputation from doing so. It's only given to editors under that threshold.

Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change

#244

Post by Fomite » Thu, Apr 26, 2018, 10:18 PM UTC

jakear wrote: post #200

CM30 wrote: post #59

> 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…

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.

Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change

#245

Post by mark-r » Thu, Apr 26, 2018, 10:18 PM UTC

squeaky-clean wrote: post #234

icc97 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

The idea of removing noise came from Jeff Atwood. He really took it to an extreme, and I think the site is worse for it.

Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change

#246

Post by mehrdadn » Thu, Apr 26, 2018, 10:18 PM UTC

warent wrote: post #45

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…

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?

Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change

#247

Post by saint_fiasco » Thu, Apr 26, 2018, 10:18 PM UTC

manigandham wrote: post #232

saint_fiasco wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

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.

Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change

#248

Post by stuartd » Thu, Apr 26, 2018, 10:19 PM UTC

pishpash wrote: post #120

TravelTechGuy wrote: post #116

It'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…

Ratings already take care of curating. Why do you need assholes to curate?

To reduce the signal-to-noise ratio.

Disclaimer: apparently I'm an asshole

Edit: not moderator

Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change

#249

Post by freeflight » Thu, Apr 26, 2018, 10:19 PM UTC

jakear wrote: post #200

CM30 wrote: post #59

> 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…

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.

> 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.

Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change

#250

Post by chefandy » Thu, Apr 26, 2018, 10:19 PM UTC

herogreen wrote: post #187

kristianc wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

I was not thinking of malice / incompetence but simply of laziness. Whatever the problem is it is easier to have people search for you.

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.