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Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

dearstackexchange.com

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Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#161

Post by Pfhreak »

barry-cotter wrote: post #140
Pfhreak wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> If you are talking about trans people, it's estimated to be about 1-3% of people. 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

Health and Care Utilization of Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Youth: A Population-Based Study

Pediatrics Journal

https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/pediatrics/14...

Participants included 2168 (2.7%) students who identified as TGNC and 78 761 (97.3%) students who identified as cisgender.

There's a reason I give such a wide range. Maybe I should widen it to 0.5-3%, but I believe that in the past 5 years we've seen an increase in the number of people who feel comfortable with a trans or gender nonconforming identity.

Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#162

Post by tbyehl »

whatshisface wrote: post #103
peterwwillis wrote: post #57

Who else remembers the world before SE, when people just did exactly the same thing as SE, but on mailing lists, and we found answers via web search, and we didn't need all this moderation, categorization, voting, etc?

Stack exchange works a lot better for me than mailing lists did. Its greatest contribution is the near elimination of duplicate questions.

Except that every new question gets shut down as a duplicate and the older question being "duplicated" is 5 years old, full of obsolete answers, doesn't address the subtle differences in what people are asking, etc.

They want to use the Q&A format to build something Wikipedia-like for each site's subject areas but the incentive structure hasn't lead to Wikipedia-level content curation.

Mailing lists, sub-Reddits, forums... they all end up high duplicative. But people are also paying attention to all those duplicated answers, and the next go 'round they contribute an even better answer, and maybe that ends up in a FAQ or wiki and someone actually puts in the effort to keep it up-to-date.

Or Google figures out the best answer based on being newest, click rates, whatever other voodoo that they do. Which, in my experience, is almost never a Stack Exchange.

Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#163

Post by beerandt »

chimi wrote: post #13

Honest Question: Why continue to support stack exchange through this? They have shown themselves to be disingenuous at best. They are now profiting off free labor. They started it because ExpertsExchange was hiding answers. They rode the high horse to hypocrisy. Why continue helping people like that succeed? Why not just start a new one? Leave en masse to a new playground. Speak with your answers. Show the powers tha…

>Why continue to support stack exchange through this?

To exploit the new rules and demand everyone refer to you by your preferred pronoun of "God". If you're into that kind of thing.

Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#164

Post by zimpenfish »

dwaltrip wrote: post #158
sooheon wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PG has an essay with that title: http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html#f2n

I know. I don't think it fits well here.

It's not really a good essay though; it's "I'm a rich white dude who never has to think about how politics might affect me and I don't see why anyone else should either."

Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#165

Post by kevhito »

ShamelessC wrote: post #112
anon12345690 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

literally not the problem here more like people cant use Bob in an example and say He because "what if Bob is trans" comes up. cant even say "they" to be neutral because apparently "singular they" is offensive. this is dumb. its not a real problem for the site. the rest of us dont need to deal with all that because some people have nothing better to do.

I keep seeing this notion that the singular they is offensive. I thought its whole purpose was to be more inclusive. At what point did it become offensive and why is it considered to be offensive?

I was just recently at a gender-inclusivity seminar. The speaker asked everyone in the room to give their name, but specifically asked for NOT everyone to state their [preferred?] pronouns. Why not? Apparently the speaker is currently in a community were certain transgender members feel quite strongly that stating pronouns is itself problematic and hurtful.

For those of us not quite up to date on social movements, and for slow-moving organizations, this is obviously tricky to navigate. My workplace is just starting to encourage everyone to state their "preferred pronouns" prominently when introducing themselves and on all correspondence (e.g. in email signatures), and to avoid gendered pronouns when possible in many situations or at least use "singular they" (e.g. in abstract examples or documentation). Last week I thought that was quite progressive. This week I have learned that "preferred pronouns" is no longer an acceptable phrase, that "singular they" is offensive to some, that avoiding pronouns itself is problematic (at least in SE's CoC, apparently), and that asking someone to give pronouns is problematic and hurtful to some. I don't know where that leaves me or my workplace.

Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#166

Post by anon12345690 »

ShamelessC wrote: post #112
anon12345690 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

literally not the problem here more like people cant use Bob in an example and say He because "what if Bob is trans" comes up. cant even say "they" to be neutral because apparently "singular they" is offensive. this is dumb. its not a real problem for the site. the rest of us dont need to deal with all that because some people have nothing better to do.

I keep seeing this notion that the singular they is offensive. I thought its whole purpose was to be more inclusive. At what point did it become offensive and why is it considered to be offensive?

none of the pronouns are offensive and we use the ones that fit 99% of the time but they is fine if you really want to be neutral

its only offensive if you listen to the 1 in a million people who want to make a big deal and control everyone elses speech

Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#167

Post by greggman2 »

wpietri wrote: post #116
sytelus wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this cry against moderators. These people are volunteerily giving their time to keep quality bar high without any payment. If these people weren't there then SO will be full of duplicates, off-topic and opinion based Q&A just like Quora. A general tendency I have seen is just to ask (often poorly stated) questions without doing simple search to see if it is already answered. Someone needs to respec…

I think SO is poorly designed as a system. It certainly does encourage people to ask not-so-great questions. It doesn't handle them particularly well. And then expects people to clean up the mess for free. Those people of course feel stressed and overwhelmed, so are inclined to be rude, aggressive, and hasty in their decisions. Like ldigas, I long ago gave up on SO because of bad moderation experiences. I'm grudgingl…

As someone who answers quite a few quesitons on SO I'd really like to see posts that were perceived as wrongfully closed to see if I agree (haha) and also to see how to fix the system.

Of course I have no hope that S.O. will change anything. When they started their "be nice" campaign I suggested the "CLOSED: This is a duplicate" message should be changed to "CONGRATS: This appears to be a duplicates so you win! There is already an answer [here]!"

In any case there are rules. One is "post the code you're having trouble with in the question, not a link offsite." The offsite link is useless if the code changes there or the offsite site goes offline. Some not insignificant percent of the time the question will just have a link to offsite code. I'll leave a comment saying effectively, "please add the code to the question" and then I vote to close, reason "missing code". The person never adds the code. Are they like you claiming S.O. is rude and unreasonable? Did they get their answer somewhere else and never come back to follow up? I have no idea.

Actually the rule is even more specific. "Make a minimal repo and post it the question itself". Almost no one makes a remotely minimal repo which is fine, but in general lots of people fail at the "repo" part period. In order to help them we'd need to download code, setup dev environments, make up test data, etc...."

What I do know is I often spend 30 to 240 minutes writing working examples for a single answer. I do that volunteerily for reasonable questions. When someone barfs out a "give me teh codez" question it can be very angering. They're basically asking for free labor. If that's not rude I don't know what is.

Here's a recent "give me free labor" question

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58206647/removing-the-ba...

Here's a recent "teach me an entire CS course" question

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58165198/how-to-process-...

And here's an answer I spent over 150 minutes on, trying to understand their code, trying to make a working sample, running into bugs, when I looked up 2.5 hours had passed.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58101753/drawing-a-torus...

And another more typical 30 minutes on this one

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58111380/in-webgl-the-pe...

note I'm not trying to brag. I hear your complaint often. I just don't run into it myself. Instead I see lots of volunteers answering questions and only voting to close the bad ones and they are bad ones.

Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#168

Post by dwaltrip »

zimpenfish wrote: post #164
dwaltrip wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know. I don't think it fits well here.

It's not really a good essay though; it's "I'm a rich white dude who never has to think about how politics might affect me and I don't see why anyone else should either."

Sorry, I edited my comment so your reply makes less sense now. Bad habit of submitting before I'm fully satisfied with the comment.

Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#169

Post by anon12345690 »

kevhito wrote: post #165
ShamelessC wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep seeing this notion that the singular they is offensive. I thought its whole purpose was to be more inclusive. At what point did it become offensive and why is it considered to be offensive?

I was just recently at a gender-inclusivity seminar. The speaker asked everyone in the room to give their name, but specifically asked for NOT everyone to state their [preferred?] pronouns. Why not? Apparently the speaker is currently in a community were certain transgender members feel quite strongly that stating pronouns is itself problematic and hurtful. For those of us not quite up to date on social movements, an…

this is the problem cause 99.9% of us know how to get along just fine without these weird pronoun rules

theyre literally making EVERYONE work harder and waste time to not offend a single person who probably doesnt even agree with these rules

Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#170

Post by anon12345690 »

damnyou wrote: post #150
anon12345690 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

basic respect? you realize these are code examples that sometimes talk about people and use normal pronouns that everyone understands just fine? if theres a example with bob and alice and we say he and she, whats the problem? do we really need to be extra careful in case Bob in the example is trans? Like thats really a problem? this doesnt have anything to do with basic respect. its just people who want to control ev…

Yes, if Bob asks you to use they/them pronouns then you should use they/them pronouns for Bob, just like if they ask you to use the name Robert. Intentionally using the wrong name or pronouns for someone is disrespectful, and would be considered an HR violation in a California workplace.

its just posts on the site not real people. chill. you need to realize context and not get all offended

and when you let someone control what you can and cant say because of their feelings its gonna be a bad time. california is already eating itself. is that really what you want?

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