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I'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".
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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.
Awareness of this phenomenon can change what we choose to do. 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.
> 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.
> To the extent that marginalized groups have a different style of communication than what is expected at SO, they will be treated differently.
I tend to visit SO when google brings me there, but personally I prefer looking in the docs or asking in IRC (though it depends on the channel), rather than deal with asking a question on SO again.
An interesting thing is that this does not seem to be network-wide, there are parts of the stackexchange network that seem much friendlier and more welcoming to new users.
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I personally very much like SO. I have 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" ?…
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…
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.
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…
Change closed due to being offtopic Honestly I just want them to noindex the questions that are closed so that they stop turning up in Google searches
I still find great results from questions that the Most Holy Keepers Of Stackoverflow Purity deem "off topic".
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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.