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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

#651

Post by swyx »

wool_gather wrote: post #643
swyx wrote: post #474

I like the idea of a Beginner box. Github is doing the same with issue templates. I would suggest going one step further - give a “question quality” score made up by some algorithm that SO controls. could be machine learned, could just be a bunch of rules like a Linkedin Profile score. Gamify asking great questions, not just answering.

> give a “question quality” score made up by some algorithm that SO controls This exists, and in some cases the evaluation results in some JIT help for the poster. In other cases, it puts the post into a "Help and Improvement" queue where more experienced users are waiting to suggest (or directly make) improvements.

ok well double down on it. put a big honking number and an incomplete pie chart that yells at you for not achieving a 100% score on your question. subtlety is wasted on this stuff.

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

#652

Post by coryfklein »

KAdot wrote: post #644
coryfklein wrote: post #623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there’s no mechanism by which ... “women” ... can even be identified _No_ mechanism? Seriously? How about when the user is named "Jane Smith"? Or, heaven forbid, they actually use a PROFILE PICTURE with their ACTUAL FACE. Oh god the horror! I, as a white male with a caucasian sounding name have the privilege of being able to use my actual name on the internet. Women that want to be taken seriously don't even have t…

What is a "caucasian sounding name"? Do Zurab, Zahar, Zivadin, Zora or Artem sound like caucasian male names to you?

Yea, I am fairly certain I'm bastardizing the use of the word "caucasian" here. What I mean is that people with the name "Cory Klein" on their SO profile likely get treated differently than "Mohammud Bin Salmen" or "Lacey Richards".

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

#654

Post by svick »

your-nanny wrote: post #401
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…

There are two functions stack overflow serves: 1. Answering questions people ask, q&a 2. Answering the questions of people stopping by looking for answers. The output of the former needn't directly be the input consumed by the latter. Bad questions can be tolerated in the former but are intolerable in the latter (noise). Solution: A curated site of answers searchable by public drawn from the best of q and a from an i…

Except the great thing about SO is that if I have a super-obscure question, there is a good chance somebody already asked and answered it, so I can easily find the answer using Google.

With your system, I would not be able to find the answer, because it wouldn't be in the curated list.

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

#655

Post by wwweston »

hackits wrote: post #453
wolco wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad questions bad accepted answers go hand in hand.

Oh look a question, oh look bellow the accepted answer is the real answer to the question!

Yeah, this actually gets handled reasonable well by the combination of the accepted answer and voting dynamics. You can see which answer(s) everyone found most useful, and you can see the answer that the asker thought met their threshold.

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

#656

Post by svick »

nojvek wrote: post #645

To add a comment you need points, to get points you need to answer questions. Answering questions is a really really challenging thing to do because for all sorts of things you'd get kicked out. Not only that, but I went into negative because someone didn't like my answer about Typescript. That was it, I just use stackoverflow when google shows me a result. I won't contribute to it, because its ridiculously difficult…

> Answering questions is a really really challenging thing to do because for all sorts of things you'd get kicked out.

You're not going to get kicked out if you honestly try to answer questions.

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

#657

Post by rhapsodic »

vkou wrote: post #207
rhapsodic wrote: post #62

> It was hard to accept some of the (valid) criticism, > especially the idea that women and people of color felt > particularly unwelcome. The article fails to offer any examples women or POC were treated more shabbily because of their gender or color. Does anyone know where this is coming from?

It's not that they are getting worse treatment, it's that that the impact of the same treatment on them is worse.

> It's not that they are getting worse treatment, it's that that the impact of the same treatment on them is worse.

How so? Does the article say?

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

#658

Post by wool_gather »

swyx wrote: post #651
wool_gather wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> give a “question quality” score made up by some algorithm that SO controls This exists, and in some cases the evaluation results in some JIT help for the poster. In other cases, it puts the post into a "Help and Improvement" queue where more experienced users are waiting to suggest (or directly make) improvements.

ok well double down on it. put a big honking number and an incomplete pie chart that yells at you for not achieving a 100% score on your question. subtlety is wasted on this stuff.

Works for me!

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

#659

Post by rc-1140 »

ianamartin wrote: post #622
wheelie_boy wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the core problem is that they've focused too much on being like wikipedia (a single authoritative, comprehensive answer to each important question), and not enough on helping people to learn. Over time a site will grow a culture, and experts on the site will outweigh and overrule experts on the subject matter. In this case, we're also seeing answerers' needs outweigh askers'. If you could only meet the needs…

I agree with this. There are different goals for different people on SO, and while I think the blog is generally good and the idea for guiding questions is good, there's other low-hanging fruit here. We tend to forget that even really basic things like googling for an answer are learned skills. Some people are so green, they don't even know what they are looking for. They have some collection of objects that they wan…

> Some people are so green, they don't even know what they are looking for.

As a junior, I've run into this, especially since I have no mentor and I just kind of have to wing it when it comes to my own education. Example, I have an Android project where I use the HackerNews API to get the top stories, but I got the IDs and then the JSON for each all in one go. At the time, my thought was that I wanted to do this dynamically; I had no idea how to describe this to people for weeks. Then someone told me I was probably looking for "pagination". Boom, that was it. Don't know how to actually implement my own pagination still because all of the articles on it are trash and end up recommending the libraries for pagination anyway, but now I know!

One thing I've been pondering is if it's possible to have a sort-of "Junior's Dictionary" where a common (or semi-common) scenario is laid out and terminology is attached to it. Would have been great to know I was looking for pagination the entire time.

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

#660

Post by reitanqild »

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…

This is one of the things we've pointed out for years:

A lot of SOers seems to enjoy moderation a lot more than answering questions.

Unfortunately they even do get in the way of the rest of us.

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