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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

#491

Post by AdeptusAquinas »

2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #409
AdeptusAquinas wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If people don't even know what gender you are/what color your skin is, can they actually be intentionally racist/sexist towards you? Not directly, but often indirectly since in such a situation it is common to assume you are a white male. That's a bit off-putting if you are not one, but you might put up with it rather than clarifying your gender/race if doing so opens you up to a risk of direct sexism/racism

I’m not even sure what to say to that. Other people assuming you are like them and treating you the SAME as they would treat all the other SO members is literally the outcome we want isn’t it? We’re being treated equally. But now people are being offended because they aren’t being treated differently based on information the other parties don’t have? What?

Try inverting your thinking - how would you like it if the only way you can get treated with respect is to allow others to assume you are something you are not? Its textbook alienation.

On SO its likely not as bad as the rest of the net, but it'd be naive to assume its perfect: harassment aside, I imagine obviously female commentators get a hefty dose of mansplaining thrown their way

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

#492

Post by interfixus »

When I end up on StackOverflow, it's almost always from something I searched on DDG. I haven't compiled a statistic, but it seems like most of the actually useful answers I find there belong to questions marked as not a good fit or whatever took some snarky moderator's fancy that day. So all too often, even if get my question answered, I leave the place with a net negative impression. And don't come back except if directed by DDG.

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

#493

Post by javadocmd »

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…

> But this isn't true...

You completely missed this point. To quote the article:

> Many people, especially those in marginalized groups do feel less welcome. We know because they tell us.

Hanlon doesn't claim to know why the marginalized groups feel unwelcome. He doesn't even claim that the root cause is a bias of action -- conscious or subconscious -- on the part of SO's users or staff. What he said was these groups report at a higher than average rate the feeling of being unwelcome. That is a simple fact, and can only be dismissed at the cost of saying those people's opinions are not worth addressing. Acknowledging it, saying "maybe if we get creative we can improve it", is not virtue signaling, it's the most fundamental requirement to:

> shift from “don’t be an asshole” to “be welcoming.”

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

#495

Post by bonesss »

muse900 wrote: post #312
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…

Similar experience here. Once I made an account and tried to be more active. I got told off for asking questions about issues I was having or because my answers weren't liked by someone with high rep. I gave up on it. I never use my stackoverflow account. I use stackoverflow on a daily basis, to find preexisting issues around what I am working on and read possible solutions, but thats it. I don't consider logging in…

> I gave up on it. I never use my stackoverflow account.

This roughly mirrors my experience...

I went through a period of engagement, which ended abruptly after an unpleasant interaction. The author of a semi-well-known niche library took time out of his day to poo-poo a highly specific answer to a highly specific issue. Thing is, the questioner and myself were using that library a bit differently than it's primary usage (broad data generation instead of test-data management).

So I had to debate with myself if I was really gonna be using my time explaining to someone I'd otherwise have loved to bump into at a conference that the world is a complicated place and sometimes I use butter knives to unscrew things regardless of what Ikea thinks about it... Haven't posted since.

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

#496

Post by bayofpigs »

alexbeloi wrote: post #393
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…

>> especially newer coders, women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups. >But this isn't true. What do you make of their statement that "Many people, especially those in marginalized groups do feel less welcome. We know because they tell us."?

It shows those who perceive themselves as victims see the world through victim tainted glasses where clearly none exist. It's frankly disgusting SO encourages such delusions. WTF is a marginalized group on a site where your affiliation is unknown?

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

#497

Post by warty »

dingo_bat wrote: post #458
warty wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nuance here. There are plenty of cases where individuals ask XY questions, meaning they've gone down a strange route to solve X and now need help solving Y, and it's always been debated within the community on whether you should solve X or oftentimes go to great lengths to solve Y. I've seen many questions where a solution to X is answered and heavily downvoted. I'm not sure how you resolve that. Question: Ho…

> Me: Don't do this, your compiler isn't designed for this! Consider loading the text from a file instead! A better answer would be: This is wrong because . Consider loading the text from the file. If you want to #include it anyway here's what you can try. This will ensure that the code golf people can do what they want and normal people try the recommended thing.

I understand that sentiment, but for the overwhelming majority of poor questions the "if you really want to do that anyway" isn't useful to OP - they're clearly confused and looking for something else. In those cases, it's not worth your or the question asker's time to write an extended answer (especially if that goes from trivial to complex, overengineered, and esoteric). The StackOverflow community refers to these as XY questions.

Of course there are cases in favor of both sides here or there. If you have reasons to go the esoteric route, then you should simply explain why. If you're browsing from the internet, you have to understand you're reading a conversation between two individuals, catered to the question-asker and not the rest of the universe.

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

#498

Post by warty »

bad_user wrote: post #488
sosborn wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 search…

> 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.

You can, as long as you're clear on why you need these obscure features. So there's nuance... if someone asks "hi, I want to call `add` like `add(10, 20, 30)` and it's not working" and the answer is "Use `10 + 20 + 30` instead!", they're answering the intent of the question. They've totally not answered the original question (I want to call add) but OP is probably misguided.

It'd totally be fair to say "Oh, declare a function with 3 params and return the sum, or even make a function with variable arguments, then enumerate over each of them, summing into an accumulator. You can also do this as a functional reduction. In fact, you can use the mapreduce framework to do this, and here's how to create an adder circuit" - Every tidbit of the above is just... overkill.

I totally empathize with you - it sucks to google "how to do X given good reasons Y Z" only to find a question "how to do X given terrible reasons A B" that's answered by "don't do X"! I think the way that's respectful of others' time is to ask another question and clarify why you truly need X.

If you've taught a multidisciplinary class, you'll have faced people who truly are confused - EE students who want to understand, for example, "how do I declare a 20 bit integer in C for this program that's running on Windows?"...

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

#499

Post by edem »

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…

I can comment on this from the "other side" since I have discussed this on meta.

The problem is that answering questions which are borderline low quality/too specific, etc or need imorovement before it can be answered are usually frowned upon because it encourages the asker to ask more low quality questions.

The abuse you got is not OK though. If I comment at all on such questions it is always polite.

What I think is also a big oroblem is closing questions as duplicates which are not duplicates.

As with every system I think the incentives are the culprit so I expect SO to improve on this soon. They should be able to since they have all the data to do so

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