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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

#551

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

AdeptusAquinas wrote: post #491
2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> 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?

Fair enough if you call people out when they know something about the person they're interacting with. But you're suggesting people are prejudiced because they thought the wrong thing.

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

#552

Post by Sacho »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #530
paulriddle wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We know because they tell us. But not marginalized groups also tell them. Now the question is who tells more? I think marginalized, because they read all these blogs and tweets about being opressed, shift their selective focus to minor injustices, and feel empowered to complain. The SJWs are the complainers, they are the warriors, that's why you hear from them more than from anybody else. They have the momentum of…

The only information we have from the blog post is that Stack Overflow has survey results telling them that marginalized groups feel particularly unwelcome, unless you have some other source of info I didn't notice. From that single datum, you've concluded that this is because marginalized groups must over-complain, and in fact, you claim to have achieved perfect certainly that most members of marginalized groups hav…

Alternatively, assuming good faith, he claims that this is a possible explanation, and that perhaps Hanlon fell victim to the very common base rate fallacy on his off-hand comment.

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

#553

Post by theyinwhy »

scardine wrote: post #349
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you not use autistic as an insult, please?

Dude, I don't. My 5 year old son is in the spectrum and I probably would be diagnosed as well by todays standard. We are lucky enough to be on the high-functional end of the spectrum but it is still taxing on the family. I can't possibly imagine how worst it is for more severe cases and I'm sorry if I offended you but many of my best friends are also borderline autistic and they are the best people I know.

Perception of insult is highly subjective.

Autistic and borderline are barely perceived as positive words in our society so I can follow the argument of insult when you describe wikipedia authors as borderline and autistic. Although I see that you did not mean to do harm with your sociological background.

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

#554

Post by Sacho »

Mithaldu wrote: post #517
scardine wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People feel intimidated on SO, specially if they have low self-stem. This is a real problem but not because veterans there are bad people - after all they are helping strangers on the Internet for free. I'm one of them[1]. Moderators there tend to be borderline autistic people obsessed with some subjects. Yes, we sound like jerks and some people there can be really infuriating but it is not personal: we are just obce…

> we do such a great work maintaining top quality questions You don't. Straight-up. You may think you do, but SO utterly fails at this. In almost all cases where i end up on SO in my research the accepted answer is trash, and the one below it is the real one.

The accepted answer is decided by the person asking the question - I'm not sure SO moderators are allowed to change an accepted answer(at the very least, they're heavily disincentivized to do so). I think your example is a case for more moderation, not less.

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

#555

Post by ctack »

juliangoldsmith wrote: post #332
protonimitate wrote: post #3

Glad to see an active approach is being taken. SO is a great resource and contains some of the best information on the web IRT programming. If there was only one thing I could change it would be this: If someone marks a question as duplicate, and closes, make them provide a link to the 'original' question and a brief summary as to why it is a duplicate. Closing something as duplicate and then forcing the user who sub…

StackOverflow is good if you come there via a search. Otherwise, in my experience, it is utterly worthless for getting actual answers. For instance, I've asked a total of 4 questions on the DBA Stack Exchange. Almost all of them were specific but easily generalized, weren't answered anywhere else. Three of them would have been easily answered by someone with good knowledge of the relevant products. (The other was onl…

Agreed. Great if your question has already been answered, but it's less than useless if you have a question - it's actually counter productive and a waste of time. I'd given up on questions until seeing this post featured today, so I decided to ask my 3rd question in 7 years (SO). It was down voted within 5 minutes and no idea why. I'll just roll my own solution based on my own suggestion.

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

#556

Post by dingo_bat »

warty wrote: post #497
dingo_bat wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

If only every moderator/admin was as reasonable as you!

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

#557

Post by Mithaldu »

Sacho wrote: post #554
Mithaldu wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we do such a great work maintaining top quality questions You don't. Straight-up. You may think you do, but SO utterly fails at this. In almost all cases where i end up on SO in my research the accepted answer is trash, and the one below it is the real one.

The accepted answer is decided by the person asking the question - I'm not sure SO moderators are allowed to change an accepted answer(at the very least, they're heavily disincentivized to do so). I think your example is a case for more moderation, not less.

I'm not saying less moderation is needed, but that the moderation itself being done is low quality.

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

#558

Post by Sacho »

jsmeaton wrote: post #388
Karunamon wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This also struck me - as far as some of the treatment I've seen and read about on SO, this is downright courteous. She didn't provide enough information to actually answer the question, so literally what the fuck did she want?

> as far as some of the treatment I've seen and read about on SO, this is downright courteous > so literally what the fuck did she want Help? Perhaps it was their first time writing a program, and they can't interpret error messages. This is exactly the kind of elitist behaviour people are discussing - and if you're unable to see how the answer might keep people away, then you have no business trying to help new user…

I think you're giving too much weight to the questioner's feelings, and none to the answerer's. Sure, the questioner might feel unwelcome when answers are curt and elitist. But also, the answerers might feel unwelcome when the questioners don't put in at least some effort in their question. Why do you privilege the questioners over the answerers? As a worst case scenario, how do you plan to supply unpaid volunteers who are willing to spend x10 the effort for each questioner? Many of the policies under fire here came out from people criticizing SO for having too many "spam" questions and not retaining experts' interest.

Here's a discussion to the same effect: https://twitter.com/robconery/status/974678531832610816?lang...

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

#559

Post by s2g »

abakus wrote: post #303
s2g wrote: post #226

I had hopes based on the title, but... > Too many people experience Stack Overflow¹ as a hostile or elitist place, especially newer coders, women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups. Maybe that's a problem. I don't know. I'd rather see them address the problem of rampant question closures for dubious reasons and people who like to treat questions like a damn medium post. edit: Okay so reading further…

I second that. They are avoiding the real problem by pretending to fight for social justices.

I think they see the problem, they are just dressing it up.

It's a tough problem, since community moderation of this sort seems to almost inevitably lead to some individuals who take it on themselves to obsessively shape the site to their own warped vision. Wikipedia has the same issue. Reddit avoids it by fracturing into small communities, and poor modding leads to death (or alt-right infiltration, ugh).

If they want to say it is worse for women and minorities, which could be entirely true, then my worry is they just try to bring those groups up to the often shitty baseline where perfectly reasonable seeming questions get closed meanwhile others have people rushing to provide a lousy answer so they can later expand it into overwrought 1000 word answers.

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

#560

Post by barrkel »

ItsMe000001 wrote: post #534
Joeri wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m in the same boat. 10k rep on SO and softeng.se, and I barely participate anymore. For me the most frustrating part is that the rules forbid vague questions with opinionated answers, but that at this point in my career most of the things I find interesting are all like that so there’s almost nothing I want to get answers to that I can ask. Software architecture questions are very difficult to ask without triggerin…

> Software architecture questions Are you trying to use SO or the Software Engineering site? https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/ They also have a site for software recommendations now, so they created alternative sites for some categories of questions forbidden on SO. I'm not sure if it hadn't been better to try to integrate it into SO though, using tags for example.

>> I’m in the same boat. 10k rep on SO and softeng.se

It's right there in the parent's text.

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