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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

#721

Post by ftarlao »

Giving more constructive comments/directions to newbies is important but I think that an high threshold for questions is still mandatory in SO.

Majority of people are lazy and don't like to think deeply or search first and.. it is normal for this lazy people to protest; rewards and punishments are needed for a society to work.

About the discrimination part, I have never seen "not respectful posts" for women or people of color... imho this is a no-problem for SO and I think that it is dangerous to create a discrimination case when there is none. Because in this way, you are creating artificial discrimination and real distance between people.

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

#722

Post by FuNe »

So -basically- SO says that a lot of its contributors behave like bullies but, being unable to actually yell at them (because SO needs them) tries to fuzzy out/alleviate the issue by taking the blame for them. I don't see any way that can work out. For what is worth I can testify my own little experience from that pit. * Contributors who downvote other answers without any excuse/explanation/commend (I guess it makes their own answer seem better). * A tiny minority of users ever upvoting (that's a largely thankless community). * Moderators that are being extra harsh with language usage (I'd say most of SO users are not native English speakers but this does not stop some native ones considering themselves somehow superior). *Extended usage of points, badges and several other facebooky notifications to tap into your dopamine receptors.

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

#725

Post by juliangoldsmith »

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…

EDIT: A moderator helped me out on that last question, and refunded my reputation to let me ask a new, better-worded, question with a bounty. Thanks to that moderator.

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

#726

Post by ctdonath »

marcAKAmarc wrote: post #674
ctdonath wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then perhaps the real data point is bias about biases: operating in a profoundly neutral forum, blind to practically any "group" indication, individual "they're thinking X of me because I'm Y" bias emerges. This is something being increasingly noticed in general, but SO's study provides an interesting control experiment precisely because there is so little indication of group categorization. I've spent years using St…

While I do think it is true that you can only find "hints" of group bias when examining individual stackoverflow users, stackoverflow in general is known to have: 1. overwhelmingly dominant gender of population (92.9% of SO population) 2. overwhelmingly dominant race and ethnicity categorization (74.2% of SO population) 3. overwhelmingly dominant sexual orientation (93.2% of SO population). (I left this ambiguous on…

What "gatekeeping"? The whole fascinating point is that there isn't any "gatekeeping" on SO. The demographics may be remarkably skewed, yes ... not for any categorical exclusion, but for self-selected choice to not engage.

If people choose to avoid a group, while that group in no way excludes them, why keep blaming the group?

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

#727

Post by Lionsion »

shagie wrote: post #665
Lionsion wrote: post #663

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was a the era of "what should I name my cat?" A lot of those links 404 for me, but a lot of that stuff could have been taken care of by being better at defining what was on and off topic, e.g. it's a site for subjective questions about programming, rather than programmers answering subjective questions. SO has the moderation resources to handle that.

SO might have had the moderation resources. The early PSE site didn't (as described in https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/200144 ). The moderation actions trying to deal with that were done mostly by diamond moderator fiat and occasionally Jeff or Joel saying "no." The community that was there at the time wasn't doing any significant moderation or curation of those questions. Consider https://softwareengineering.stacke…

> Consider https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/4417.... and consider is that useful?

Yes.

> curated?

It's not a worthless question. If you're talking about subjective questions, obsessive curation is not the answer.

> Should "Quit my last job." (entire answer) be there?

Sure, considering there were better answers that had far more votes. It might have been better if it wasn't, and moderation could have taken care of it.

Answers like that are certainly not an indictment of the format.

> Its not that those aren't interesting questions, its that they are the wrong fit for that format. There are better places to ask for the best programming joke than Stack Overflow and Exchange sites.

That's never the kind of think I asked or liked at programmers.se, but like I said before, they threw the baby out with the bathwater.

You haven't really convinced me that subjective questions are "wrong for the format." All you've really shown it that an unmoderated free for all produces some garbage that doesn't fir in a high quality tech Q&A site.

The real answer for why programmers.se failed is probably that the powers-that-be weren't willing to spend the time and resources to meet a new challenge, so they gave up and did something else.

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

#728

Post by shagie »

Lionsion wrote: post #727
shagie wrote: post #665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SO might have had the moderation resources. The early PSE site didn't (as described in https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/200144 ). The moderation actions trying to deal with that were done mostly by diamond moderator fiat and occasionally Jeff or Joel saying "no." The community that was there at the time wasn't doing any significant moderation or curation of those questions. Consider https://softwareengineering.stacke…

> Consider https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/4417... . and consider is that useful? Yes. > curated? It's not a worthless question. If you're talking about subjective questions, obsessive curation is not the answer. > Should "Quit my last job." (entire answer) be there? Sure, considering there were better answers that had far more votes. It might have been better if it wasn't, and moderation coul…

Its not a worthless question. However, its worth is drastically diminished by having so many answers, and so many joke answers in there. That people didn't want to curate it so that the joke answers and duplicate answers are removed and set a standard for providing an answer that is more than one line is why that type of question is closed - it takes too much time for the community that wants to maintain the site to curate it and keep it at a quality that matches the rest of the site.

The format that SE provides is a very direct Q&A that tries to cut out all of the excess and gives a single good answer. There are other sites that are better cut out for polling questions and other sites that do a better job of "what is the best ...?"

Trying to make everything fit in the SE framework puts a burden on the community that moderates and curates the material, and at some point people have said "enough" because they don't want to and others haven't stepped up to do it.

The "wrong for the format" is part of the design of the site. Note here that we're talking in a thread. You can follow the discussion. SE was designed to make discussions awkward. When there's a discussion on a site of significant scale, it becomes unmanageable and detracts from the Q&A focus. If that is a good design decision or a bad one is up to debate - but it is the design decision of SE. And there are so many other places where that discussion could be had. Why not ask that question here? or over on a competing discourse site ( https://www.askquestions.tech was started by April who wrote the post that sparked much of this)?

If Programmers (now Software Engineering) has failed is also up for debate. The name change wasn't so much of a "it failed" but rather "people keep getting the wrong impression of topicality" because yes, it took too much time to keep trying to keep the topic on what the powers that be wanted to moderate and no one else was willing to do the job of curating the content of the larger programmers scope... and after all, they're all volunteers - its really hard to make volunteers volunteer to do something they're not interested in doing.

The name change meta post is at https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions... (see also the linked questions).

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

#729

Post by jinushaun »

Can’t answer the question of gender and color since I’ve never experienced those kinds of problems on SO, but the site policies are definitely unwelcoming. The barrier to entry to ask and answer questions is really high. You have to earn it by voting on existing answers. I see good questions and good answers shut down all the time. I kind of wonder what the quality bar is for these moderators.

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

#730

Post by [deleted] »

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…

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