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Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change
291–300 of 739 posts
Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 l…
> they can buy their own sunscreen, right?
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.
Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change
#293I'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…
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.
Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change
#294> 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…
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.
Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. Do toxic communities produce better content?
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.
Can you not use autistic as an insult, please?
Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change
#296> We set them up for failure, and our power users have been asking us to help them for ages. Your Power Users are the ones making SO toxic. They don't need better tools, they need to have their privileges pulled until they learn to use them responsibly. The whole "SO is an encyclopedia not a help site" thing started this, and it encouraged a lot of "content curators" to the site, who view their role as squishing ever…
The problem is that there is already such a wealth of information that exists on SO, that some of the beginner questions I had starting out never needed posting. So I can imagine a similar scenario for someone else, and hope that they do a little searching around before posting.
Sometimes you need to use 2 or 3 tangentially related posts together to see the bigger picture of how the question you were going to ask relates to the problem you wanted to solve. I mean, learning has always been that kind of tortuous process.
Maybe there needs to be a separate place on the site that's primarily help for newbies.
Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change
#297Earlier 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…
> 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.
Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change
#298I'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…
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.
Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change
#299If SO is listening, do one thing: Stop closing questions! It is incredibly frustrating.
Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change
#300I've never seen minorities being mistreated on stack overflow. Does anyone have any examples?
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.
People can make assumptions based on names and profile photos.