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Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

dearstackexchange.com

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Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#301

Post by TeMPOraL »

drusepth wrote: post #295
TeMPOraL wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I concur. You can see the same thing on HN, if you look closely. For a new or infrequent user, all comment threads are randos talking to other randos. For a frequent commenter who's been here for a while now, it's a community with a lot of transient commenters, but also a lot of regulars, who recognize each other's handles and sometimes carry discussions across time and multiple comment threads - and it's a big part…

I'd actually argue that that that context-heavy communication (carrying discussions across time and multiple comment threads) often makes the conversation worse from the point of view of those transient commenters (which, I'd guess, is a majority of HN? You probably know better than me on that, though). I'd classify myself as a transient commenter here since I don't recognize names even though I've been on HN since 2…

To my experience, "context-heavy communication" is rather subtle on HN, more of an inside joke if anything. I can't think of a case where a comment would seem off-topic if read by a transient commenter; it's just that over time, you start recognizing other regulars and their views on some topics, and sometimes you may remark on it. Like, I recall participating in comment threads that branched off into "I recall you saying X on a related thread some time ago; could you elaborate on that?" somewhere deep in the discussion. Or, I know to not reply about topic Y to a particular commenter, because we've been through a long discussion about it some time ago, and essentially agreed to disagree. Or, someone will joke that it's time to submit and upvote some Erlang stuff to HN, and the joke mysteriously stays upvoted because, well, it's an inside joke.

Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#302

Post by TeMPOraL »

scarface74 wrote: post #284
TeMPOraL wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I concur. You can see the same thing on HN, if you look closely. For a new or infrequent user, all comment threads are randos talking to other randos. For a frequent commenter who's been here for a while now, it's a community with a lot of transient commenters, but also a lot of regulars, who recognize each other's handles and sometimes carry discussions across time and multiple comment threads - and it's a big part…

I’ve been here for four or five years, and I only recognize two or three people by their username. I don’t pay attention to the people - only the comments.

I pay attention to comments first, too, but I can't help but remember the handles - especially if I had a back-and-forth with someone over the course of a day, and had to verify that I'm still replying to the same commenter. Like, I recognize your handle, I think we've been replying to each other on some thread some weeks ago.

(Then again, maybe I'm projecting, assuming more community in this place than there really is. I'm a HN addict after all.)

Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#303

Post by koheripbal »

blanche_ wrote: post #296
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.

Ben would you mind then being called she/her then if that is so silly? I'm a hetero woman and I've been called a male few times when gaming and this is not silly, people are rejecting your identity and I can't even imagine how bad this is for trans/NB people.

People are not "rejecting your identity" if they use the wrong pronoun. That is an emotional interpretation of an error.

Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#304

Post by TeMPOraL »

anon12345690 wrote: post #219
hoseja wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You certainly haven't been keeping up with Twitter culture if you think this.

twitter culture is outrage culture. its a bunch of maniacs yelling at each other and they should all be ignored

Should, but aren't. That's the problem.

Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#305

Post by tsukurimashou »

Symbiote wrote: post #245
Ixio wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my latest questions got as first comment : "Please use English punctuation when writing in English." Certainly polite but a bit jarring as a non-native speaker that feels fluent. Also a bit nonsensically-bureaucratic : I made the mistake because I didn't know any better, after the comment I still couldn't correct the mistake because I still didn't know any better, I wasn't even sure what rule of punctuation I…

> ... nonsensically-bureaucratic : I ... Maybe you put a space before a colon, and the eagle-eyed moderator spotted it :-) (English rarely has a space before a punctuation mark — except for a dash in British usage. Americans—I think—do this.)

Yeah exactly, in French for example you put a space before a colon, a question mark, exclamation mark, while in English you don't, it is quite hard to spot for a lot of people.

Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#306

Post by krallja »

jxramos wrote: post #238
shagie wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Give https://dev.to/stackoverflow/what-a-very-bad-day-at-work-tau... a read - the comment to which Sara replied and the response given. The reddit future is a very real possibility.

What's the "reddit future" a reference to?

> 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 unsourced "facts"

Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#307

Post by koonsolo »

blanche_ wrote: post #296
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.

Ben would you mind then being called she/her then if that is so silly? I'm a hetero woman and I've been called a male few times when gaming and this is not silly, people are rejecting your identity and I can't even imagine how bad this is for trans/NB people.

I run a product/community of teenage game developers. The girls in my community do not want to reveal that they are girls, probably because they do not want to stand out. So basically everyone thinks it's full of boys (especially the boys), but in reality 50% are girls. So it definitely depends on the person and circumstances how they want to be perceived.

With European names, I also saw plenty of times when wrong genders were assumed, but those things shouldn't be taken as malice. It would be weird for an adult to use that a a means for insult, so why not assume it's an honest mistake?

Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#308

Post by 1_player »

blanche_ wrote: post #296
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.

Ben would you mind then being called she/her then if that is so silly? I'm a hetero woman and I've been called a male few times when gaming and this is not silly, people are rejecting your identity and I can't even imagine how bad this is for trans/NB people.

I don't think the pronoun movement is about people using the wrong gender by mistake, and that's definitely not "rejecting your identity".

I'm male, and sometimes people outside my native country misread my name and read it as the feminine version of it. I've answered phone calls and gone to appointments where people were actually expecting a woman, not a fully grown man. That's people being silly, not rejecting my identity.

But I don't want any part in this discussion, like the OP in the article, I'll keep using "they" to refer to people on the internet.

Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#309

Post by WorkLobster »

cbm-vic-20 wrote: post #298
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.

Could all of this been avoided if SE had a field in user profiles that is basically "Please use the following pronoun when referring to me: _______"? The user could fill this in with She, He, They, Qwotzl, whatever.

You'd need to ask for at least three grammatical cases: nominative, accusative and possessive. We considered trying this a while back with our organisation's personnel tracker, but concluded it needed a disproportionate amount of user effort. So we abandoned it in favour of just stating the user's name and/or singular "they" everywhere (in line with UK GDS guidelines[1]).

[1] https://design-system.service.gov.uk/patterns/gender-or-sex/

Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#310

Post by JanisL »

drusepth wrote: post #265
xibalba wrote: post #5

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

As a self-described "average user of SE", I find this drama pretty similar to drama I've seen circling around the Quora "community" for the last 6 months or so: confusing. I use both SE and Quora to get answers, especially to extremely-niche questions. I understand that some people do use them for community and that people do interact and know each other on both platforms, but it's hard to understand complaints about…

> If you took away the community entirely, would it be any less useful?

The whole platform is based around the users creating questions and answers. The site puts much of the effort for curation and moderation on to the community, if you visit the chat rooms on there you'll find that there's groups of people who congregate there who do a disproportionate amount of that work of keeping things running smoothly.

So I think there is a risk of the site quality sliding substantially if the currently highly engage segment of the community there disengages.

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