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

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

#371

Post by InclinedPlane »

commandlinefan wrote: post #78
wwweston wrote: post #68

For everybody who's questioning the premise that there is some kind of special hostility to newbies, women, PoCs and others, consider this: * How would you know whether there's a difference between the experience of these groups and the baseline level of friction lots of people outside those groups experience? * For the sake of argument, assume for a moment that there is no difference, and what those who feel singled…

It just seems strange to say that a universal hostility is somehow worse on, say, women, than it is on everybody, given that they're admitting it's universal.

That's exactly how it works. When there is a universal hostility that precisely hits those who are the most marginalized, least secure, least powerful, etc.

Fundamentally we live in a world that is rife with systemic bias and oppression. Which means that things which hurt people without any intentional bias nevertheless serve as agents of increasing the underlying systemic bias.

If you steal ten thousand dollars from everyone in America completely "fairly" you will end up causing only a minor inconvenience to the rich while causing grievous harm to the poor, possibly forcing many of them into homelessness. If you inject everyone in America with the flu virus then you will kill some of the elderly and many immunocompromised or immunosupressed individuals. You cannot simply pretend that a system built by humans for use by humans is some force of nature where an implicit lack of overt bias is an excuse to ignore these issues.

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

#372

Post by bloaf »

setr wrote: post #266
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…

>(as arbiters and gatekeepers of all that is good against the raging unwashed hordes 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 d…

You do realize that much of wikipedia's success came at a time when the moderation standards were much lower than they are today, right? Indeed, I would suggest that the current high moderation standards at both Wikipedia and SO are not causes of success, but simply a manifestation of the iron law of bureaucracy [1].

People seem to think that duplicate questions are bad and something to be avoided. I think they're a terrific asset. It helps search-ability to have the same question phrased several different ways; especially when the ultimate goal is to funnel the searchers into the discussion page with the highest quality version of the question and answer. In my mind, the issue ISN'T that the mods are holding the gates against the barbarians, it is that the culture and SO itself has not given the mods the tools to convert what the "barbarians" are contributing into a valuable resource.

[1] https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html

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

#373

Post by bigger_cheese »

I attempted to use Stack Overflow about a week ago. In regards to a Javascript problem I was having. I do not know this language very well (at all) When it comes to JS I am deinately a newbie.

I kept on getting "undefined object" when I was trying use return value from an (external) library function. I could see in web browser debugger there was data but it wouldn't let me return. All the top results in google involving the libraries name + undefined object were from Stack Overflow and they did a decent job of explaining why I was experiencing the issue (in my case I was trying to mix synchronous and Asynchronous code). However pretty much all the suggested solutions were misleading - they all talked about using something called a callback.

I found a blog post buried among the other google results that had better solution - to use something called a "Promise". After doing some more googling I found out the Promise syntax is very recent (added in 2017) and the answers I was looking at from Stack Overflow were all from 2011-ish so rather frustratingly Stack Overflow was full of outdated information. The old topics were locked and I could not edit them so no way of helping other new users like myself who might be running into same issue - especially given these answers appear so high in google it was a frustrating experience.

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

#374

Post by [deleted] »

suavesav wrote: post #363

>> (It serves a valuable purpose by keeping signal high, but also suggests that we just might be Zuckerbots who aren’t even trying very hard to pass as actual humans) Why randomly attack Zuck? That is such an unnecessary meanness in an article about being nice to people :(

[deleted]

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

#375

Post by beevai142 »

The problem with stackoverflow is that answering questions sucks in the long term, for most people. It's basically an user support job, and if you are not suited for that sort of job eventually you start to lose patience with fools, of which there is no shortage on the internet.

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

#376

Post by freeflight »

bcoughlan wrote: post #305
freeflight wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 abou…

I was just thinking the same thing recently with all of the Facebook shenanigans. Anonymity was common sense on the net 20 years ago. Many who grew up in that time will recognise the sentence "We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias". The dream of the net was a world in which only words mattered. We sold that out when our Github account, SO profile, email address proved to be useful f…

Facebook is especially strange in that regard.

To this day it just feels weird writing people, I only know from the meatspace (friends&family), there. It's such an utterly different MO compared to my usual Internet-interactions that I sometimes struggle how to express myself just because I actually know these people.

That's why I kinda liked having the Internet and meatspace firmly separated, since they started bleeding into each other it feels like everything has just gotten needlessly more complicated and hostile.

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

#378

Post by droidist2 »

psyc wrote: post #359
notatoad wrote: post #84

Earlier 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?

I remember 2002-era Wikipedia. I personally found its openness far more valuable, but then other people became obsessed with making it just a bigger, hyperlinked, traditional encyclopedia. I believe something was lost.

Exactly, Wikipedia was great long before it was toxic, and I don't see the rise of micromanagers on the site to have been that beneficial, certainly not enough to justify the negatives they cause.

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

#379

Post by droidist2 »

vkou wrote: post #178
notatoad wrote: post #84

Earlier 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?

> 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. Wikipedia is quite valuable. These days, I find StackOverflow to be nearly-useless.

What changed to make StackOverflow to be less useful than it was?

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

#380

Post by setr »

bloaf wrote: post #372
setr wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>(as arbiters and gatekeepers of all that is good against the raging unwashed hordes 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 d…

You do realize that much of wikipedia's success came at a time when the moderation standards were much lower than they are today, right? Indeed, I would suggest that the current high moderation standards at both Wikipedia and SO are not causes of success, but simply a manifestation of the iron law of bureaucracy [1]. People seem to think that duplicate questions are bad and something to be avoided. I think they're a…

I'm thinking strict moderation goes hand in hand with size of the population; in low population environments, little to no moderation is sufficient. The people govern their own culture, and with sufficiently low immigration rates, they can adequately teach newcomers the culture.

But as the population increases, driveby-posting becomes the norm rather than the outlier, and large swathes of newcomers can join at once, the culture cannot be taught at a rapid enough pace to survive. It either degrades, or enforces itself by means of an iron fist.

My thinking essentially stems from eternal september. Wikipedia's early success did not require heavy moderation, but once it became the predominant wiki, it's survival, I think, neccitated it.

The details may have issues, but the overarching idea, defending the culture from the unwashed masses, might still be correct.

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