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Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

dearstackexchange.com

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Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#191

Post by oefrha »

sesuximo wrote: post #46
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…

This is the last straw for me. The ads were also out of control. Real documentation is better anyway!

> Real documentation is better anyway!

If SO was the alternative to real documentation to you, you’re probably part of the reason why SO quality has declined so much and why moderation got heavy-handed over time, with collateral damage: lazy ass users asking RTFM / I-can-haz-code questions.

(Years ago I answered questions for a while on SO, accumulated a few thousand points, and participated in modding queues. I know how bad the bottom 30% or more of SO questions are.)

Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#193

Post by steve19 »

vunie wrote: post #105
fortran77 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect you're right. I stopped participating in SE years ago not for "political" reasons like this, but because it seemed to be dominated by power-happy mods and people whose main goal was to collect points and not to help others. This kerfuffle, and I only got a little summary of it, makes my eyes glaze over. I'm certainly not against treating people with respect, but I'm not willing to stick my neck out for some…

I'm in the same place as you are, but in relation to wikipedia rather than stack overflow. I remember adding a [citation needed] tag to an inaccurate claim, and then discovering that my change has been reverted. The reason the moderator gave was that [citation needed] didn't look good on the page. How do you argue with people like that. I'm not going to spend hours reading on wikipedia's policies just make it better.…

Can you give an example on how to word a question?

Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#194

Post by Buge »

anon12345690 wrote: post #190
Buge wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean this quote: >June 2018: There was a TL discussion about gender-neutral pronouns and then "preferred pronouns". (I know they're not "preferred", but this was the phrasing used by the people bringing it up.) Some moderators who are not native English speakers expressed confusion. I said I avoid singular they for that reason, 95% of the time you can write around the problem, and (on SE) I'm offended when someon…

theyre editing posts for perceived or pretend offense if it was a specific person then theres nothing to edit because you would just use the pronouns and there wouldnt be any issue. they dont talk about anyone who specifically wanted different pronouns in that story

> theyre editing posts for perceived or pretend offense

Who are "they"? Monica in that part is upset about people coming along and adding weird grammar into her posts. Those people could be other mods, or could be even regular Stack Exchange users. At no point does she say Stack Exchange staff are editing her posts, or that the editors were following a Stack Exchange rule.

> then you would just use the pronouns and there wouldnt be any issue

Monica has said she never uses 3rd person singular pronouns. So no, she would not "just use the pronouns". And people have taken issue with the fact that she never uses 3rd person singular pronouns, that's the reason she was fired.

> they dont talk about anyone who specifically wanted different pronouns in that story

Just because Monica doesn't mention a specific person by name in the blog post doesn't mean there wasn't a specific person involved with the situation. I think it's very likely the story Monica is talking about involved a specific person.

Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#195

Post by corobo »

greggman2 wrote: post #167
wpietri wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I see lots of volunteers answering questions and only voting to close the bad ones and they are bad ones.

Before answering questions in future give them a bit of a Googling. Find the ones someone like yourself didnt spend time on, the ones that instantly got closed as off topic or duplicate or moderator was grumpy today so closed.

I get it, wealth of free information and that, sure. But these are the top results in Google. The top results, not a /new queue where you’re hiding. The pages that someone having this problem will visit.

From the visitor’s point of view, SO is a cesspool of power tripping mods who love to close questions.

The solution? SO should noindex closed questions and add canonical links for duplicates. Simple enough, tell the damn search engines things are closed/redirected as well as the user. It would improve the end user experience infinitely to stop arriving on what they perceive as unnecessarily closed questions.

Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#196

Post by nfoz »

anon12345690 wrote: post #170
damnyou wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

None of this is about posts involving hypothetical people (like Alice&Bob in cryptography examples). You're the only one who thinks that.

The topic is about when a real user asks that they be referred to with specific pronouns, and other people instead refer to them with different pronouns or avoid using gendered pronouns. This whole conversation is about real people.

Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#197

Post by alkonaut »

sytelus wrote: post #34
ldigas wrote: post #22

While, in the beginning, a very active user, I've long now given up on that network. I can't remember when was the last time I asked a question without being forced to defend it for a period of at least a few hours, why it shouldn't be closed as a duplicate, offtopic or ... It used to be an excellent network, but nowadays it's just script-kiddies-playing-admins/editors playground. It is no longer a productive technic…

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…

But my experience of the site (as an experienced long time user) is much more negatively affected by the “active moderation” than it is positively affected by it. I’d rather have ten duplicate questions for every question, than a race to ninja-downvote or close anything that is tangentially related to an existing question. The struggle to maintain quality in the content of the site appears to be destroying the quality of the experience of the site. In the end, if the experience is not good, nor will the content be if people stop visiting. I’m sure 99% of the negativity is coming from non-admins. The ninja downvotes and closevotes are coming from regular users.

I still visit but I basically stopped asking and answering because it’s just not worth the stress of having to defend my question or answer. I have a 10k rep account and I’m an experienced dev with a decent grip of English as a second language but I still never felt once that my answer was welcome or my question was good enough for the site. I can only imagine what a novice must feel when using SO.

Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#198

Post by OccamsMirror »

fenomas wrote: post #185
ldigas wrote: post #22

While, in the beginning, a very active user, I've long now given up on that network. I can't remember when was the last time I asked a question without being forced to defend it for a period of at least a few hours, why it shouldn't be closed as a duplicate, offtopic or ... It used to be an excellent network, but nowadays it's just script-kiddies-playing-admins/editors playground. It is no longer a productive technic…

I think much of what feels bad about StackOverflow now stems from the surprisingly braindead way it treats duplicate questions. Currently, moderators close the question with a link to the question they think it's a dupe of. Why not instead let people answer the question with a link to the answer that they think solves the poster's problem? If they're right then the asker can just accept that answer, and if not then p…

I've come across so many questions closed as dupes for answers that are years old. The tech has changed, the answer is not the same. The question is a duplicate, sure, but the correct answer is now different.

The mods are ignorant and quick to act poorly. StackExchange has sucked for several years at least.

Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#199

Post by damnyou »

anon12345690 wrote: post #170
damnyou wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There are already all sorts of controls over what people can and can't say in professional settings. You can't use the N-word or keep asking someone out after they've said no in a workplace environment. These controls exist for reasons that should be obvious with a moment of thought.

This is different from a public space where the rules are more relaxed (but there are still some controls). And you're welcome to be as shitty as you want in your own home.

Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#200

Post by barry-cotter »

Pfhreak wrote: post #161
barry-cotter wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 yea…

Trans and Gender Non-Confirming != Trans

Using that article as a source for trans population is like saying 40% of the US population are people of colour, therefore 40% of the US population is black.

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