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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

#481

Post by ajross »

legostormtroopr wrote: post #443
marcAKAmarc wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are right that minority status rarely has to do with the mocking, but I also think this might be beside the point. I think really the concern is that people who might already feel like outsiders are easily discouraged and made to feel even more like an outsider. And as it turns out, it isn't even hard to identify as an outsider on stackoverflow, even if you are a great coder! I just checked out the stack…

Homogeneous if and only if you consider "white or European" to be a clear cultural classifier. Personally, I think that there are massive cultural differences between the US, Canada, UK, Australia, and every country in Europe. As an Australian, I'm a global minority and it might shock you but don't identify with many US cultural groups who are the overwhelming majority online.

Your point is what? Who cares if women or minorities feel unwelcome, they haven't walked a mile in your aussie shoes? Dude...

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

#482

Post by dbt00 »

6nf wrote: post #424
your-nanny wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think that a minority needs to be identified as such to feel unwelcome in a community? That is the premise of your rebuttal

If someone is being treated badly on SO - but there's no way to know the race or gender of that person, how can you say the bad treatment is because of their race or gender?

You're arguing against something that nobody said. Neither this post nor the people supporting this change on this thread and elsewhere have claimed that SO users admins or moderators are being explicitly or implicitly biased by race or gender in the way they are treating new users.

What they did say is that the general level of hostility leveled at all newcomers is something that users who are women and minorities frequently find unwelcoming and makes them feel uncomfortable about using stackoverflow at all.

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

#483

Post by freshhawk »

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…

It is a bizarre system, so I guess we shouldn't be surprised about the community it shaped.

The ways to get points combined with the way moderation powers slowly flow from them in this gamified rigid hierarchy is not a common approach. Only allowing a specific type of social interaction (objective questions whose answer(s) are of interest to many). It is weird.

I think it is really interesting that the community isn't much worse. At that scale and, lets be honest, with programmers giving programming advice? Why is that? Which of those aspects can be borrowed for other stuff?

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

#484

Post by justinzollars »

I've noticed this for years. As an early member of Stackoverflow with many internet points I've abused my privilege to reopen "bad questions". As someone who started his career in technology as a community college chemistry instructor, I've never been a fan of shutting people down when they ask a question.

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

#485

Post by pugworthy »

nagVenkat wrote: post #13

Some personal thoughts: I got downvoted for answering some simple questions at stackoverflow.com for encouraging low quality questions. This was discussed in the article. I can see why some people can get hostile as some questions are framed as please solve this for me. Usually people ask the posters to tell them what they had done but the tone of that request can be harsh. I think the elitism is most prevalent in st…

Have been down voted as well for the "easy ones", I sympathize.

Not all stacks are elitist, but some definitely are. I like the slow pace of some of the little ones like Arduino, etc.

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

#486

Post by d--b »

It's easy to say that SO is a hostile place when you get downvoted or closed for asking what seems like a perfectly fine question. This happened to me a couple of times and is pretty infuriating.

But it is also annoying to try and give back to the community and find newbies who are at times extremely rude and ask "do you haz teh codez" questions.

That's why this issue is so difficult to tackle. As an answerer, I downvote questions that are not well formed because I do not want other answerers to lose their time looking at that question.

I personally believe SO lacks "triage" for incoming questions. Not every c# answerer should read every c# question. A new question may be marked as "for triage" (maybe this step could be skipped for users with some reputation), then reviewed as such by some community members. Badly formed questions would go into a bin for helping the user differently than a normal question. other questions could be sent directly to super user, code review or computer science or what not...

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

#487

Post by jodrellblank »

hguhghuff wrote: post #106

So much could be fixed simply by removing downvoting, which is no different to a virtual slap in the face or shout of abuse. SO already has a variety of mechanisms for identifying issues with questions, why does it also allow people to yell random abuse without explanation via downvotes? The most disheartening, but completely expected, result of posting a question is that it will be very rapidly downvoted...not welco…

So much could be fixed simply by removing downvoting, which is no different to a virtual slap in the face or shout of abuse.

I've been re-imagining it lately as:

- Upvotes - comment-tags, with set comments (previously, reasons for downvoting). - no downvote option

Then questions would be marked like:

- 4 upvotes - 2 people tagged 'I might be able to answer, but I'm not sure exactly what you want to know, please clarify what you are asking' - 1 person tagged 'this looks like an XY question, please explain your reason for doing it this way as it looks like there is a more sensible approach and it's not clear whether you know that' - 1 person tagged 'this question looks like you are asking for help without trying to solve the problem yourself, and putting effort in to help people who are not showing their own effort feels like an unfair request' - 2 people tagged 'I was willing to help, but I stopped reading because it is too difficult to follow (average reading time by people who tagged this: N seconds)'

And there would be no way to get a negative score, only languish at 1. The scoring system would have to be reworked to handle that. There could also be positive tags, 'I am interested in the answer to this question', 'I think this is clear'. Things visible down the left hand side of the question where the downvote button was, not hidden behind "close (2)" with broad, vague reasons "this or that or maybe this or anything similar".

Particularly, things which could be said in comments, but nobody wants to type out over and over, and which can be tagged anonymously so you can have the ease of drive-by-anonymous-downvoting but with mandatory specific feedback having to choose why, and without the slap-in-face effect for the recipient.

That would avoid the slap in the face element of downvoting, and avoid the ubiquitous back and forth "Why the downvotes?" / "don't whine about downvotes" / "I didn't downvote but it might be because X" / "people shouldn't be allowed to downvote without giving reasons" / "they are explicitly allowed to by the site design" / "these comments have been moved to chat".

Downvotes are nothing but pure negative, so hey, wanna remove some of the negative from SO? It’s obvious what to do.

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

#488

Post by bad_user »

sosborn wrote: post #476
bad_user wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your kind of answer is precisely why I find SO useless. When a user asks a question on X, it would be better to first assume that he knows what he’s freaking doing. E.g. yes there might be valid reasons for inserting 500 MB as a string, and myself as another user desperately searching for an answer to it, I get pretty annoyed when I see answers for a Y instead. SO contributors should answer the freaking question firs…

The people that really need to know how to insert a 500mb string will actually explain why they need to do so (beyond the typical “it doesn’t work”). The ones that can’t explain why are almost always unaware of the actual problem they need to solve.

That's a pretty big assumption on your part. Unless you're going to cite some SO stats or a study on it, I'm going to assume that you're wrong.

Also good questions shouldn't need explanations for the reason you're trying to do something. It's not like I'm going to explain my business requirements on a public forum to complete strangers.

And I'm going to mention this again — if the purpose of SO is to provide a searchable database of questions and answers, then the answer has to match the question, not a supposed use case that the user may or may not have, because that answer is then useless to others.

Of course you can include 500 MB in a separate file and read that. It's totally uninteresting and now that SO question, along with its non-answer is showing up in search results, having precedence over others. Which is a pity, because I thought SO is a place where you can ask questions on obscure features of the tools we're using.

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

#489

Post by javadocmd »

legostormtroopr wrote: post #201

What the StackOverflow company fails to get is that their product is assholes and industrial level asshole production. Every question is moderated by volunteers, who have curated every high value question there. From an askers perspective, sure you may have asked 1 slightly off-topic question, but for a reviewer, that’s the 30th off-topic question today - and SO gamifies reviewing so you are encouraged to do so. I us…

Maybe the solution to this is stop requiring (or tacitly encouraging) moderators to pull weeds and block all the bad questions, but rather allow them some sort of feature to identify particularly good questions.

"But then we'll be flooded by bad content!" (I can hear SO mods screaming in the distance.) If old, low-score posts are clogging your search results, that's a problem with your search algorithms, not with moderation.

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

#490

Post by jodrellblank »

jaghaj662 wrote: post #9

>Too many people experience Stack Overflow¹ as a hostile or elitist place, especially newer coders, women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups. Women consider SO an elitist place? People of colour? What colour? Black? White? Marginalised groups? Which groups are those? Are people in SO hostile to Palestinians? Amputees? Such an accusation, where's the data to back it? I'm white and male and completely…

Why is it that so many complaints about SO includes insults about users with high scores?

Very specifically calling out "they have a score higher than mine" as part of the description of the hostile behaviour. Isn't that a bit odd, wouldn't you expect them to only focus on the behaviour and the content, not the number next to the name?

Too many people are there sitting in a throne of points, and medals and rubbish, closing comments and questions and editing whatever they see fit.

Whereas the people without a throne of points who are closing questions and editing whatever they want, and commenting rudely, are .. not hostile? Is there an undercurrent of chip-on-shoulder points-resentment in the complaints in aggregate?

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