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Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

dearstackexchange.com

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Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#391

Post by Traster »

brigandish wrote: post #342
Traster wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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: http…

I agree. I've had other devs call me all sorts, in public, and it's not nice. One Ruby committer called me an "asshat" on his Twitter feed, simply because he failed to read my pull request properly and then seemed unable to admit it. Weird. One maintainer on another project called me a troll for opening an issue. Recently, I had one of the Rubygems maintainers be rude to me for the heinous crime of… suggesting client…

I think the really obvious point is that there is actually a middle way. You don't need authoritarian enforcement of speech, you need communities willing to just step in and say "That's not appropriate". Someone confident and willing to just step into a Torvalds rant and say "Hi Linus, let's step away from the technical issues, this isn't the way you should be communicating your issues". Often here what we're seeing is that these bad acts are actually allowed to continue by the community and only challenged by the people at the receiving end of the attacks.

Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#392

Post by mthoms »

1shooner wrote: post #102
anon12345690 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

apparently anything on the site like a code example that talks about people like Bob and Alice cant use He and She - because it might offend the 0.01% of people who think that everyone needs to state their pronouns. apparently even saying They isnt enough. its what happens when you give in to the tiny minority that will always complain about something

When would a mod use pronouns anyway? It seems like an edge case of an edge case, in terms of gross count of incidents.

An edge case on the programming sites certainly. But they've grown beyond that.

The site in question deals with religion.

Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#393

Post by mthoms »

anon12345690 wrote: post #183
decebalus1 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 I feel I should care about this but I don't believe it's worth investing the time to go through walls of text of 'he said' 'she said' biased explanations. I'm probably better off..

how ironic lol, if you only knew that "he said" and "she said" is the whole problem because apparently you cant use pronouns anymore

Can you do us all a favour? Please stop incorrectly stating that the problem is with pronouns in general. It's been pointed out many, many times. The point of contention here deals with one person intentionally refusing to use the pronoun someone else has requested when addressing them.

Notice the emphasis on the words "intentional" and "them".

(To be clear, this comment in no way meant to justify S.O.'s horrendous handling of the situation)

Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#394

Post by lesstenseflow »

mcv wrote: post #359
koheripbal wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a unbelievable that we take the output of these seminars as gospel. They are just groups of people - with no more authority on what "proper behavior" is than the rest of us. ...and yet the community that supports them vehemently punishes anyone that strays from their constantly changing and often contradictory directives.

It's not gospel, it's a view. It's useful to understand people who have a different perspective. Their view may not be universal, but it's still a valid view.

“The moon is made of cheese. Disagreeing with that causes me intense emotional distress so no ‘decent person’ would do so.”

Are any views invalid?

Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#395

Post by crooked-v »

rogual wrote: post #287
crooked-v wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, not everything is political Name literally anything and I will point out its political implications.

Number theory!

Some Christian fundamentalists oppose modern set theory, which is an integral part of number theory: https://boingboing.net/2012/08/07/what-do-christian-fundamen...

Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#396

Post by zrobotics »

raxxorrax wrote: post #288
crooked-v wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, not everything is political Name literally anything and I will point out its political implications.

That would not constitute proof. But to humor you and me, what about cornflakes?

The food literally created due to political beliefs?

"The story of corn flakes goes back to the late 19th century, when a team of Seventh-day Adventists began to develop new foods to adhere to the vegetarian diet recommended by the church. Members of the group experimented with a number of different grains, including wheat, oats, rice, barley and maize. In 1894, John Harvey Kellogg, the superintendent of the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan and an Adventist, used these recipes as part of a strict vegetarian regimen for his patients, which also included no alcohol, tobacco or caffeine. The diet he imposed consisted entirely of bland foods. A follower of Sylvester Graham, the man cited as inspiration of graham crackers and graham bread, Kellogg believed that spicy or sweet foods would increase passions." [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_flakes

Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#397

Post by klyrs »

fortran77 wrote: post #380
klyrs wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you accept the trans community's claim that misgendering is an act of violence... I've found that members of the cisgender community almost uniformly take offense at being misgendered. And responses from the cisgender male community often include threats of physical violence, especially when one persistently misgenders them or challenges the validity of their maleness. That said, I'm rather troubled by Monica's…

I get misgendered all the time! I go by "Ruvi" (short for Reuven) and English readers see that as a female name. So on forums I get called "she". It's never bothered me.

> So on forums I get called "she". > > It's never bothered me.

Sounds like something a woman would say. Are you sure you're a man?

Note: I don't think this is an appropriate way to talk to folks -- but if your actual position is that it's totally okay to misgender everybody, then let's explore that. I've met lots of folks who claim that it's harmless, but typically it breaks down after I start treating them the way that I get treated on a near-daily basis.

Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#398

Post by Const-me »

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 just don't run into it myself.

I think the reason for that is you’re a web developer. The majority of the admins too. For less popular domain areas, the experience is very different. I run into the issue all the time. The experience became so disappointing that I stopped writing answers there. Here’s a couple examples where downvoters destroyed, or almost destroyed, good questions with my answers to them: https://stackoverflow.com/q/57323981/ https://stackoverflow.com/q/57064879/

Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#399

Post by fortran77 »

klyrs wrote: post #397
fortran77 wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get misgendered all the time! I go by "Ruvi" (short for Reuven) and English readers see that as a female name. So on forums I get called "she". It's never bothered me.

> So on forums I get called "she". > > It's never bothered me. Sounds like something a woman would say. Are you sure you're a man? Note: I don't think this is an appropriate way to talk to folks -- but if your actual position is that it's totally okay to misgender everybody, then let's explore that. I've met lots of folks who claim that it's harmless, but typically it breaks down after I start treating them the way t…

Mods!

Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#400

Post by u-dissolve »

greggman2 wrote: post #181
u-dissolve wrote: post #42

This reminds me of the time when stack exchange updated their terms of service to include an arbitration clause. The community was in uproar over this decision, yet the clause stands to this day. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/309746/a-new-2018-u... Stack overflow's terms of service is pretty terrible, receiving the worst rank in terms of user hostility on TOS;DR. https://tosdr.org/#stackoverflow

That hardly seems fair. For 99.99% of users everything they do on the site is publically available. There is no private messaging, no private anything. The entire history of everything on all sites being public is one of the explicit goals of the site. So "sharing with 3rd parties" means absolutely nothing. Those 3rd parties could scrape the site or they could download the archive. https://archive.org/details/stackex…

This simply isn't true - your most sensitive information is not public, yet is shared with 3rd parties. From their privacy policy:

"We collect location information about you including your IP address, your location, browser information, and how you came to the Stack Overflow Network."

(SO also collects your email address, interests, and employment status upon registration - this is not mentioned specifically in the privacy policy)

"This is the case for individuals who have registered for an account, and non-members who engage with the Stack Overflow Network by visiting our website(s) but who have not completed an account registration."

"We share this information with certain third-parties (e.g., talent recruiters, payment processors, and advertising providers)"

https://stackoverflow.com/legal/privacy-policy

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