Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

dearstackexchange.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 444 posts

Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#271

Post by TeMPOraL »

sytelus wrote: post #240
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…

SO is marvelously designed and I often discuss this with friends and colleagues. First imagine this: Experts who are often paid big dollars per hour are coming over and spending time in answering your questions for no apparent reason. The quality of content is very high when you compare with any other Q&A or even general social media website. I often find 50% of my programming answers at SO. If there is an accepted h…

> Experts who are often paid big dollars per hour are coming over and spending time in answering your questions for no apparent reason.

They do so for the same reason they did that before SO and SE existed. A good chunk of people like to help each other. Another (partially overlapping) chunk likes to have their knowledge challenged, another (also partially overlapping) like to show off their knowledge in front of their peers. This was what made the Internet tick since the earliest days.

SO happened to come from within the community (Jeff and Joel were known experts), and had the right features to eventually channel most of the drive I described above through itself. But it's not like SO created it. SO is also accumulating some anti-features these days (like well-known propensity for closing 90% of interesting questions as duplicates or off-topic, or the recent moderator dramas, or targeted advertising they snuck in), so their future is somewhat uncertain.

> Again, lot of these volunteers are highly paid IT/tech folks, not your ordinary 8chan Joe.

A lot of "8chan Joes" are highly paid IT/tech folks. Or at least I'd assume so, given that it's true for 4chan.

> They could have been doing anything else in their free time instead of technical answering questions at SO. (...) Again, no one gets paid for anything they do on SO.

People also answer SO question on their employeers' time.

> This is the beauty of gamification and extremely well designed community driven completely decentralized governance at its extreme.

SO wasn't a "big design up front". It evolved over time. Gamification helps a bit, but I question it's critical to get highly-trained professionals to answer complex technical questions for free. Again, a lot of highly-trained professionals do that simply because they like it. On SO, or on HN (one of the big points of this site), or on old-school forums, or on conferences, etc. etd.

Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#272

Post by jmkni »

shp0ngle wrote: post #43
King-Aaron wrote: post #4

I remember when Stack Exchange was about fixing broken code.

Stack Exchange started a lot of other sites on the side. Some of them are about religions, and that brings on politics. Since religion and politics are intertwined. https://christianity.stackexchange.com https://islam.stackexchange.com https://judaism.stackexchange.com https://buddhism.stackexchange.com https://hermeneutics.stackexchange.com https://hinduism.stackexchange.com

Don't forget Politics StackExchange! - https://politics.stackexchange.com/

Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#273

Post by krzyk »

Pfhreak wrote: post #59
anon12345690 wrote: post #48

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…

A persons that have trouble distinguishing colors are ~10%, but I don't see websites having option to turn colors off and use black and white (it would be nice, but I won't make it a end of the world event). Or I don't see moderator discussions that referring to something as "red" or "green" is bad for color blind people.

If one already uses gender neutral pronoun, it should be enough, if it is not, then that person is a jerk similar to e.g. someone that whats to be called a "sir" (as in "yes, sir").

Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#274

Post by pcl »

Traster wrote: post #263
pcl wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you say that?

There's two ways of reading this. You can read it from a technical perspective and take the message of something along the lines of "Don't invest your ego into unnecessary technical questions because it'll stop you having logical and productive discussions". But if this were written today in the context of something like this SE issue you could read it as tone deaf - a trans-man/women doesn't choose to face discrimin…

I see what you mean. I guess perhaps another way of characterizing PG's advice would be to keep your identity as small as possible, but no smaller.

I think it's a pretty good idea to think about how to not be a "Java programmer" or a "kitesurfer" (to pick two things that I could be identified as), since the former sets my brain up to be implicitly against, say, Kotlin or Haskell, and the latter sets my brain up to be against windsurfing. And I like all of those things too!

But certainly, there are things that are core to someone's identity, and I guess that's where each of us needs to find our own boundaries.

Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#275

Post by claudiawerner »

tinus_hn wrote: post #262
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…

Unfortunately StackExchange fell into the trap of trying to support social justice warriorisms. Either they will fold or they will come to realize that the only ways to deal with users that are preoccupied with genders, religion, sexual orientations and whatever protected class they can come up with are to lose them or ignore them. You can’t go along with their demands because there will always be a new demand, each…

I'm curious as to what part of the issue was about "social justice warriorisms", especially since Monica herself and most of the other mods who resigned were okay with the principle of calling people by the pronoun they prefer to be called by.

Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#276

Post by mcv »

beerandt wrote: post #184
sesuximo wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO the real issue here is not pronouns per se but rather it is SO's behavior in response (firing, ghosting, inconsistency).

No, it's pronouns. More generally, it's "I expect you to conform with the way I perceive the world, even if it's not the way you perceive it." The entire point of a pronoun is to convey my perceived relation to the noun. We do it all the time with possessives and formalities; if gender is truly a fluid, to-be-perceived, non-biological construct, then why shouldn't we treat it the same way?

I suspect the reason that some people are so insistent on preferred pronouns, is a backlash against people who insist on misgendering them. They've had to fight for every shred of recognition.

This could have been a complete non-issue if there hadn't been so much stubborn hate and disrespect towards transgender and non-binary people. A single case of misgendering would be easy to take as an honest mistake if it wasn't against a context of decades of hate and denial of their identity. So use of pronouns seems to have become the main signifier of whether they're getting the respect they deserve.

That doesn't make one particular view on the use of pronouns right or wrong, but it does make it complex and laden with a lot of baggage that not everybody is aware of.

Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#277

Post by loxs »

sqldba wrote: post #28

Shouldn’t the CTO fire the person who was directly responsible for firing Monica? Why isn’t that part of it?

Because the person responsible for firing Monica is "just doing their job", which is aligned with the political agenda.

Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#278

Post by mcv »

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…

Just do the best you can, try to be respectful of everybody, and be understanding when someone is not unhappy or offended. It's not something that needs to be a fight.

Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#279

Post by mkohlmyr »

claudiawerner wrote: post #275
tinus_hn wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately StackExchange fell into the trap of trying to support social justice warriorisms. Either they will fold or they will come to realize that the only ways to deal with users that are preoccupied with genders, religion, sexual orientations and whatever protected class they can come up with are to lose them or ignore them. You can’t go along with their demands because there will always be a new demand, each…

I'm curious as to what part of the issue was about "social justice warriorisms", especially since Monica herself and most of the other mods who resigned were okay with the principle of calling people by the pronoun they prefer to be called by.

Perhaps my reading of the situation is way off, but at the risk of making a fool of myself:

My understanding is that Monica wanted to use gender neutral pronouns throughout her writing as a general case, but that this was deemed "not good enough" (or indeed hateful) in the cases where someone has chosen specific pronouns. So I suppose this is what the GP is referring to. And I can't argue that it seems like a rather extreme position - although I'm happy to be persuaded otherwise.

Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#280

Post by Traster »

brigandish wrote: post #234
ben174 wrote: post #15

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.

It'll be here soon enough and it'll be interesting to see how it's handled, especially as the parties pushing for change tend to apply pressure as a group to those in authority (in our tech world, project leaders and moderators, but beyond it's appeals to universities or the media…) and flag/downvote (or worse) against those who show any dissent. The Opal project's little kerfuffle[0] a while back comes to mind, and…

I can't help but feel that NCoC isn't scaleable. "Let's all be reasonable" is a great strategy when a handful of people are working on something and they are all more interested in getting the job done than talking about it. But it runs straight into the fact that there actually are people - particularly in the open source community that are perfectly willing to shout abuse at other contributors until they quit: https://adtmag.com/blogs/dev-watch/2014/04/linus-torvalds-ra...
Post reply on HN