131–140 of 444 posts
I don’t understand why gender/pronouns is even being discussed. Someone’s personal feelings don’t really have any place in a question/answers site. It’s fine to respect a persons feelings and such when talking to a person but when answering a question or asking the question. The gender/pronoun is irrelevant.
Regardless of what SE should do with pronouns, a mod shouldn't get fired for clarifying
I suspect that the average user of SE will not care one bit about this whole drama. I do find it frustrating, puzzling, and sad how SE appears to have treated Monica Cellio. She provides an excellent summary (from her perspective) here: https://cellio.dreamwidth.org/2064709.html
one thing that I love about SE is that everyone is very professional. almost all answers are either sourced or can easily be seen to be correct. what I am worried is that if a lot of the normal mods quit and our replaced with new mods, who may be more political, SE will turn into Reddit where leftist politics prevail in all of the major subreddits and most responses to factual questions consist of options or unsource…
The reddit future is a very real possibility.
It's incredible that pronouns can bring down an entire community. Pick you battles please, we're losing good things because of this silly conflict.
“Keeping your identity small” has certainly gone out of fashion.
Disclaimer: I don't have a strong opinion about the specifics of the stackexchange case. Without knowing all of the details, it seems the actions and new policy was a bit extreme and will do more harm than good.
I'm totally out of the loop about what this drama is about, and I'll stay that way. These are unpaid community moderators. They are essentially volunteers doing this work because they want to. So let's ponder to ourselves and relate this to our own lives, what kind of relationship do we have with the organizations and people we do volunteer work with? If you're at a point where you're so dissatisfied that you're writ…
In some ways they have improved this old system because of their ability to bring relevant questions together in such a way that you can build up a pretty big view of your problem space.
In many ways they have worsened the old system, for example by deleting questions that did not have example code. As I have said here before when you are really stumped you might not be able to make any example code that does what you want.
However there is a similarity between the old and new system, people working for free because they love their languages (also maybe because it improves their profile in the language and allows them better consulting jobs, positions in the future)
In the old system if there were problems with how a mail-list or whatever solution was being run you would probably get something like this so it seems reasonable to me that people would do the same thing in the new system.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like they are so important they should have been compensated. I mean, if they were so critical to the success.
There are more forms of wealth than just cash. Some people find it rewarding to help others, and SE is set up to make it so that people could create the canonical answer to a particular question. This is a force multiplier so that helpful answers can reach a maximum audience. This probably won't continue to feel satisfying if SE doesn't show respect for its volunteers. The force multiplier only exists because the mod…
if you want to start assigning a dollar value to subjective experiences like that, the argument goes both ways. you should pay more to people who experience more emotional distress from their jobs. but in that case a majority of companies would probably go bankrupt, since most people despise their jobs.
I'm totally out of the loop about what this drama is about, and I'll stay that way. These are unpaid community moderators. They are essentially volunteers doing this work because they want to. So let's ponder to ourselves and relate this to our own lives, what kind of relationship do we have with the organizations and people we do volunteer work with? If you're at a point where you're so dissatisfied that you're writ…
I think you should invest the time to read what happened, the moderator the letter was written to support has her detailed write-up here [0]. [0] https://cellio.dreamwidth.org/2019/10/05/stack-overflow-fias...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Politics is part of every human endeavor: between kids on the playground, in the workplace, at the level of local, regional, national, and international governments and businesses. Politics and the negotiation of status and access between various in and out groups is a fundamental part of being human.
Thank you. There is a tendency in tech people to dismiss politics as less than important ("just politics", "just political"). It's a fundamental part of our social fabric.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Maybe don't volunteer there. StackExchange isn't even a charity, it's a private for-profit company. This. Stop giving your time for the profit of people who don't care about you. You want to help the community? You want to be respected? Great! Find some like-minded people, start a new site, maybe even make it a non-profit or at least democratic. But above all, stop making rich people richer off your labor
Yeah, it kills me when they say they are "people who have invested a lot in the network". Sorry, kids, but investors get stock. Employees get paid. And only non-profits have volunteers. Stack Exchange describes themselves as a "a hyper-growth enterprise software company" [1]. I have no idea why anybody's giving them free labor. I'll happily volunteer for Wikipedia. But until somebody sets up a non-profit Q&A site, th…
Ironic phrasing, considering that we parents invest insane amounts of time and money into kids. And no, we don't get stock. Not even a percentage of future earnings.
Yet we keep investing more and more anyway. Not all returns are financial.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is the implication that the LGBTQ+ community found it _more_ offensive to use e.g. "they" than "he" or "she"? I'm so confused. Wouldn't "they" (the gender neutral version) be _more_ inclusive? Is there some other alternative that's even better that I haven't considered? I hope I'm not offending anyone by asking this. Just trying to make sure I understand.
Monica wanted to write in a way such that she would never use the words "he", "she", or singular "they". Stack Exchange said it's not OK to write in a restricted way like that, the words must be used.
yea these pronouns affect like 0.01% of people but go ahead and worry about them instead of everyone else and youll ruin every community when are people gonna figure out that you cant make everyone happy and the people who whine about pronouns wont ever stop nice downvotes lol, cant handle the truth?
Pronouns affect most people. Most people use them. If you are talking about trans people, it's estimated to be about 1-3% of people. That's roughly one in thirty to one in a hundred people. That puts it at about the roughly same numbers as the number of redheads. It's uncommon, sure, but it's not totally minuscule. Trans folks are also one of the most likely (if not the most likely) minorities to suffer physical viol…
Transgender Demographics: A Household Probability Sample of US Adults, 2014
American Journal of Public Health
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5227939/
Transgender individuals made up 0.53% (95% confidence interval = 0.46, 0.61) of the population