Discourse PR as a Service
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Let’s start with the painful truth: Too many people experience Stack Overflow¹ as a hostile or elitist place ... Our employees and community have cared about this for a long time, but we’ve struggled to talk about it publicly or to sufficiently prioritize it in recent years.
Now, that’s not because most Stack Overflow contributors are hostile jerks.
But how do we really know that too many developers experience Stack Overflow as an unwelcoming or hostile place?
Filed under: too much
potential already for me to read the rest of the articleToo often, someone comes here to ask a question, only to be told that they did it wrong. They get snarky or condescending comments
Or sometimes, everything actually goes well, and they get an answer! So they thank the poster… only to be told that on Stack Overflow, “please” and “thank you” are considered noise.
But it’s totally cool to answer questions without giving a grilled poop sandwich about exactly what’s allowed.
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It appears whoever wrote that article got a good deal on a job-lot of 3's and <'s.
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.. and what's up with the comments section?
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Well, the nice thing about problems that relate to how people feel is that finding the truth is easy. Feelings have no “technically correct.” They’re just what the feeler is telling you. When someone tells you how they feel, you can pack up your magnifying glass and clue kit, cuz that’s the answer. You’re done.
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It was hard to accept some of the (valid) criticism, especially the idea that women and people of color felt particularly unwelcome...Many people, especially those in marginalized groups do feel less welcome. We know because they tell us.I mean, I agree that feelings are feelings. But hearing them doesn't mean that you're done. For instance, people in "marginalized groups" didn't feel welcome. Were these people being marginalized on SO? In the larger "tech" community? In society in general? Disappointed (as usual) that this sort of claim had no meat on it.
WE'RE GOING TO BE MORE INCLUSIVE!!!111
I have no idea what they mean by that. It doesn't sound like they want to address the real problems, which stem from their, "We want to be a repository of information and duplicates or imperfect questions are anathema and will be made unquestions" sort of attitude (which we've discussed around here a bunch).
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Saw this the other day and immediately thought "Haven't they been saying this same crud for years now?"
StackOverflow: it's Wikipedia for programmers! >:(
@pjh said in Discourse PR as a Service:
.. and what's up with the comments section?
Comments are locked. There's a few "threads" about it on their meta site.
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@boomzilla said in Discourse PR as a Service:
WE'RE GOING TO BE MORE INCLUSIVE!!!111
I have no idea what they mean by that. It doesn't sound like they want to address the real problems, which stem from their, "We want to be a repository of information and duplicates or imperfect questions are anathema and will be made unquestions" sort of attitude (which we've discussed around here a bunch).Also the whole "people who play our site like a video game to earn big InternetPointzzz are also the people who get the moderator abilities to (practically) define how the site works".
(Random example pulled from a random "popular question" today.)
Those people are all awful. Wikipedia showed that. Here we're seeing it again.
Someone on Hacker News when this was discussed there thought SO should just delete everybody's InternetPointzzz every 6 months. I liked that idea a lot.
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It was hard to accept some of the (valid) criticism, especially the idea that women and people of color felt particularly unwelcome.
Well of course they felt unwelcome, the only wrong part of that sentence is "particularly". They make everybody feel unwelcome, which obviously includes those groups.
@blakeyrat said in Discourse PR as a Service:
Someone on Hacker News when this was discussed there thought SO should just delete everybody's InternetPointzzz every 6 months.
But then you couldn't just close interesting* questions as "Closed - fuck off" and gain a trillion points by answering the same send me teh codez questions for a thousand times.
(*Subjectively, but I feel we all agree to a point that this is happening)
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@izzion said in Discourse PR as a Service:
Let’s start with the painful truth: Too many people experience Stack Overflow¹ as a hostile or elitist place ...
Yes, that is true. However it has absolutely nothing to do with a persons, race or gender.
Now, that’s not because most Stack Overflow contributors are hostile jerks.
No, that is EXACTLY the reason that people view Stack Overflow¹ as a "hostile or elitist place".
I just want to post a question. Or have a discussion. I couldn't care less if everyone on a particular platform is a white male, a black female or a transgender lesbian Eskimo. And you shouldn't care either.
The most vile form of racism is identity politics. Spend more time worrying about the REAL problem (hostile jerks) and less time worrying about imaginary "diversity" bullshit.
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@el_heffe said in Discourse PR as a Service:
"Now, that’s not because most Stack Overflow contributors are hostile jerks."
No, that is EXACTLY the reason that people view Stack Overflow¹ as a "hostile or elitist place".
I dunno. I suspect you'd find that he's correct if you went and crunched the numbers. However, most Stack Overflow contributions are from contributors who are hostile and elitist.
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@blakeyrat said in Discourse PR as a Service:
@boomzilla said in Discourse PR as a Service:
WE'RE GOING TO BE MORE INCLUSIVE!!!111
I have no idea what they mean by that. It doesn't sound like they want to address the real problems, which stem from their, "We want to be a repository of information and duplicates or imperfect questions are anathema and will be made unquestions" sort of attitude (which we've discussed around here a bunch).Also the whole "people who play our site like a video game to earn big InternetPointzzz are also the people who get the moderator abilities to (practically) define how the site works".
(Random example pulled from a random "popular question" today.)
Those people are all awful. Wikipedia showed that. Here we're seeing it again.
Someone on Hacker News when this was discussed there thought SO should just delete everybody's InternetPointzzz every 6 months. I liked that idea a lot.
I can be a real prick sometimes but I cannot imagine using the tone these people use ever. Just wow!
I'd feel real bad If is was the person asking the question. What I don't understand is this - Why is there no "Hey this seems like it is about networking but it seems you've posted it under games, Is there any particular reason?" before the "I'm voting to close the question cos you done fucked up". Being polite costs nothing.
Also, what pissssssssses me off is how April Wensel has been tweeting about this for a long time and nobody from stackoverflow really acknowledged it. It is really sad that what is essentially the first google result when you have a problem is filled with hostile motherfuckers.
Also, Is this where we get to call Jeff Atwood cunty?
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@stillwater said in Discourse PR as a Service:
Also, Is this where we get to call Jeff Atwood cunty?
Sure, that's appropriate everywhere.
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@stillwater said in Discourse PR as a Service:
I'd feel real bad If is was the person asking the question. What I don't understand is this - Why is there no "Hey this seems like it is about networking but it seems you've posted it under games, Is there any particular reason?" before the "I'm voting to close the question cos you done fucked up". Being polite costs nothing.
Also, these idiots don't understand that it's not really possible to have a strict categorization of things without overlap. Or they don't care and just want their pointz or opportunity to Make Decisions and feel important. Either way.
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@boomzilla They want the pointzzz so they can be the one to instantly delete other people's questions.
It's like Lord of the Flies, where the conch shell is in a computer database. And everybody on the island is Putin, looking for his medicine cabinet full of polonium.
The obvious solutions are:
- Either divorce moderator abilities from quantity of InternetPointzzz
- Periodically delete everybody's InternetPointzzz to ensure there's at least some turnover in the highest rank of moderator
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@blakeyrat I think they also need to change their policies with regard to what questions/comments/answers are allowed. But that might be because the moderators you complain about make and enforce these policies, I dunno.
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@topspin The site "runs itself" via the "meta" site. Where all the questions are related to how the site should run itself.
There's also a company behind it of course, which will say "fuck you" to 30,000 "meta" questions if it means they can run employment ads on the sidebar. Because those bring in the cha-ching.
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@blakeyrat said in Discourse PR as a Service:
There's also a company behind it of course, which will say "fuck you" to 30,000 "meta" questions if it means they can run employment ads on the sidebar. Because those bring in the cha-ching.
That's the least objectionable thing about the site. Something has to bring that in.
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Why was the whole fucking thing fucking gamified in the first place? I do not see a reason.
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@stillwater
The same reason that freemium mobile games structure their pacing the way they do. Give people the dopamine hit of points and badges and achievements, several of which are quickly attainable and you increase engagement. Which in SO’s case leads to chaching indirectly by those sidebar ads, instead of raking the users directly for pay2win. But same play on human addictiveness.
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@stillwater said in Discourse PR as a Service:
Why was the whole fucking thing fucking gamified in the first place? I do not see a reason.
People who love the idea of gamification rarely bother to actually measure it and see if it works.
My personal opinion is: it works for a time. Wikipedia was brought up to speed very quickly, probably because it's gamified based on article creation and productive edits. StackOverflow quickly filled up with all the stock questions and answers because it gamified those things.
Both of these sites though quickly reached a tipping point where the existing high-up people decided that the site wasn't "quality" enough, and changed their goals from making new articles/questions to deleting not good enough articles/questions. Once that occurs, the whole idea goes to shit.
Now new users aren't wide-eye excited open-minded people, they're the kind of people who stick around despite having their work deleted because they want a chance for revenge. The site goes from Minecraft to EVE Online in record time. Those people are of course also deletionists (that's the point of them sticking around), making it even harder for optimistic users to join, creating a solid wall of bullshit.
Now you have two groups: the "in" people who have no interest or incentive to make the site more inviting, and the "out" people who sit around and write articles about how fucking terrible the moderators on Wikipedia or SO are but aren't willing to put in the 500 hours it takes to get past the shit-slinging before they'd even have an iota of a chance to change the policies.
Both Wikipedia and SO have paid employees who could in theory break the deadlock, but so far on both sites they've failed to do anything meaningful. I guess partially because they don't want to alienate their "best" editors. (Without realizing that their "best" editors are the ones destroying their site.)
Whatever, I'm sure we'll see the whole cycle repeat it self on another site soon.
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@izzion Pointzz were also used as a proxy for community trust. Which isn't totally bonkers but can (and has) obviously lead to weird and pathological results. Including Discourse.
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@el_heffe said in Discourse PR as a Service:
I just want to post a question. Or have a discussion. I couldn't care less if everyone on a particular platform is a white male, a black female or a transgender lesbian Eskimo. And you shouldn't care either.
More importantly, you can't generally tell. So I don't see how it's affecting the site.
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@boomzilla said in Discourse PR as a Service:
Which isn't totally bonkers
Yes it is.
For example, you have a lot of community trust here, you don't generally abuse it, but you're a complete asshole in all other ways. In any normal community, your InternetPointzzz would be in the negatives.
There's no correlation between "people who would do well with administrative tools" and "people who other people vote up in conversations". Why would there be? Why would Atwood think there is?
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@anonymous234 said in Discourse PR as a Service:
More importantly, you can't generally tell. So I don't see how it's affecting the site.
Everybody on HackerNews misread that sentence too.
What they're saying is in that survey, minorities felt more unwelcome. They don't dive into why at all. They certainly never said that, somehow, the existing people on the website are more unwelcoming to minorities despite not knowing who is what race/gender. They're just reporting survey results.
Maybe minorities felt more unwelcome because they always feel more unwelcome. Maybe they feel more unwelcome when filling out surveys. Maybe they're more paranoid on average. Who knows? The article doesn't try to explain it.
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@blakeyrat said in Discourse PR as a Service:
For example, you have a lot of community trust here, you don't generally abuse it, but you're a complete asshole in all other ways. In any normal community, your InternetPointzzz would be in the negatives.
Now I'm blushing.
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@boomzilla Well stop slamming Jim Beam, it's only noon anyway.
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@blakeyrat said in Discourse PR as a Service:
@anonymous234 said in Discourse PR as a Service:
More importantly, you can't generally tell. So I don't see how it's affecting the site.
Everybody on HackerNews misread that sentence too.
What they're saying is in that survey, minorities felt more unwelcome. They don't dive into why at all. They certainly never said that, somehow, the existing people on the website are more unwelcoming to minorities despite not knowing who is what race/gender. They're just reporting survey results.
Maybe minorities felt more unwelcome because they always feel more unwelcome. Maybe they feel more unwelcome when filling out surveys. Maybe they're more paranoid on average. Who knows? The article doesn't try to explain it.
Then why the fuck even mention it? It is patently obvious that you cannot immediately tell peoples' race and gender. So therefore there is literally no reason to pop that statistic in there, especially when you know it will piss people off who would otherwise want to hear what you have to say.
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@pie_flavor Why ask me? I didn't write the fucking thing.
I wouldn't have mentioned it. I also wouldn't have added the "robot" snipe at Zuckerberg which is completely out-of-place in a document about how to treat people nicer.
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The whole "gamification" thingamawhatsit seems to me to be about quantity over quality, and somehow I think that most people tend to not see the difference. A million flies and so on. For the record: I am a software developer and I have used SO many, many times, but never ever once even looked at anyones "score" - I don't really even know how it is supposed to work or what it means there.
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@blakeyrat said in Discourse PR as a Service:
@stillwater said in Discourse PR as a Service:
Why was the whole fucking thing fucking gamified in the first place? I do not see a reason.
People who love the idea of gamification rarely bother to actually measure it and see if it works.
My personal opinion is: it works for a time.
I agree with that. I think however that the core issue is not really gamification though. Despite having its downside, it's clearly efficient at engaging people with the site and involving them.
The issue to me is what you mention in another post, that people contributing content are the same as the one who curate content (or posters vs. admins, or however you want to call it). This is the bit where it fails, hard. Because these are two totally different jobs, kind of like the difference between being a good technical person and being a good manager leading a team of technical persons.
Like you say, one solution is for the admins to be paid by the companies running the sites, rather than being picked by user's participation, but of course that costs money.
The annoying thing is that all medias across the history of medias have known fairly quickly about this difference between creators and editors, and have had both kinds, and know how to handle both to end up with a quality product. But like usual, "the internet is so revolutionary that we can't learn anything from centuries of human experience..."
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@remi said in Discourse PR as a Service:
But like usual, "the internet is so revolutionary that we can't learn anything from centuries of human experience..."
It'll be different this time! We are the people we've been waiting for.
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@izzion said in Discourse PR as a Service:
Let’s start with the painful truth: Too many people experience Stack Overflow¹ as a hostile or elitist place
let's start with a painful guess before even openinh the article: it was written by a whamen, not an actual IT person, or at least an SJW.
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@sh_code oh, close. a white knight.
and of course, no comments enabled.SO is a place to find answers and solutions. if you want to feel welcomed, go visit family or friends, where that feeling is, unlike on SO, relevant.
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@el-dorko said in Discourse PR as a Service:
The whole "gamification" thingamawhatsit seems to me to be about quantity over quality, and somehow I think that most people tend to not see the difference. A million flies and so on.
But only to a point. Once a gamified site has a certain amount of content, all the invested people with the internetpointzzz do nothing but try to delete all new incoming content. That's why a new Wikipedia article is deleted for being "low-quality" without even giving the writer a chance to improve the quality. That's why almost every SO question is instantly "vote to close" for some dumb reason.
@remi said in Discourse PR as a Service:
I agree with that. I think however that the core issue is not really gamification though. Despite having its downside, it's clearly efficient at engaging people with the site and involving them.
Why would you want to involve and engage people who are jerks who want to delete all the content?
@remi said in Discourse PR as a Service:
Like you say, one solution is for the admins to be paid by the companies running the sites, rather than being picked by user's participation, but of course that costs money.
I don't necessarily disagree, but I also never wrote that.
Do other people on this forum have this problem where people will just yank shit out of thin air and then claim you wrote it? I mean... what the hell.
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@sh_code said in Discourse PR as a Service:
SO is a place to find answers and solutions. if you want to feel welcomed, go visit family or friends, where that feeling is, unlike on SO, relevant.
Yeah it's great that people are assholes! We need more assholes in the world! This is a sane thing that a sane person would say!!!
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@stillwater said in Discourse PR as a Service:
Also, Is this where we get to call Jeff Atwood cunty?
That's the entire forums. Feel free.
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@sh_code said in Discourse PR as a Service:
SO is a place to find answers and solutions. if you want to feel welcomed, go visit family or friends, where that feeling is, unlike on SO, relevant.
You must either have the attitude of an annoying 12 year old or just be a plain old bitter cunt. Which one is it?
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@sh_code said in Discourse PR as a Service:
@sh_code oh, close. a white knight.
and of course, no comments enabled.SO is a place to find answers and solutions. if you want to feel welcomed, go visit family or friends, where that feeling is, unlike on SO, relevant.
Hey man, I am all for telling
to go run their genitals through a tree chipper, but SO is just fucking horrible. It is not a place to go ask questions and get answers. It is a place where you go answer a question and get it closed without an answer. It is what happens when you cross Wikipedia with a Linux community from the 90's.
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@blakeyrat said in Discourse PR as a Service:
@remi said in Discourse PR as a Service:
I agree with that. I think however that the core issue is not really gamification though. Despite having its downside, it's clearly efficient at engaging people with the site and involving them.
Why would you want to involve and engage people who are jerks who want to delete all the content?
You want to involve people to write content. That part works well with gamification. You don't want to give those people power to decide what content should be kept, but you still want them to keep writing content.
Think journalists vs. editors. Gamification works well to get a lot of journalists writing a lot of articles. It doesn't work at all to turn journalists into editors. Maybe a different form of gamification, specifically aimed at editors, might work, but I doubt it (because while it's fairly easy to use e.g. reading metrics to get a rough estimate of what a good article is, it's much more difficult to find similar metrics for what a good selection of articles is).
@remi said in Discourse PR as a Service:
Like you say, one solution is for the admins to be paid by the companies running the sites, rather than being picked by user's participation, but of course that costs money.
I don't necessarily disagree, but I also never wrote that. [snip rant]
Yeah, that was more "continuing on something you mentioned" than "like you said", my bad. But it would help if you were not so uptight about anyone displaying the slightest hint of not reading your mind properly. Just say what you've got to say and stop jumping at every single word, both you and the rest of the forum will enjoy discussing much more.
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@remi said in Discourse PR as a Service:
But it would help if you were not so uptight about anyone displaying the slightest hint of not reading your mind properly.
The exact problem is I don't want anybody trying to read my mind! I want them to read the words I put on the screen! If you're ever unclear about something, don't just guess what I meant, ask me.
@remi said in Discourse PR as a Service:
Just say what you've got to say
I do exactly that, but then these weirdos come along and start replying to shit I never said. That's the part I object to.
Anyway, whatever, it's so just fucking weird that people do that. At least you weren't putting words I disagree with entirely into my mouth, like has happened before.
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@blakeyrat said in Discourse PR as a Service:
I do exactly that, but then these weirdos come along and start replying to shit I never said. That's the part I object to.
Anyway, whatever, it's so just fucking weird that people do that. At least you weren't putting words I disagree with entirely into my mouth, like has happened before.
But half of the time it is something you said, just not in so many words. And you can't even figure it out after it's been explained to you. Sometimes we just wish you'd comprehend your own mind.
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@blakeyrat I understand what you are saying but by bringing that up again and again every time that occurs, even in cases where it doesn't matter (like here, since I'm not really twisting your words to make you say things that'd be really objectionable), all you are gaining is that other people will see you as an obnoxious <insert insult of your choice here> and will not want to engage with you in good faith any more. Doing it in an aggressive way (calling people weirdos etc.) only makes it worse. Seriously.
I know this might be hard for you, but if you want to have civil conversations with other people, you've got to admit that they will sometimes get what you say wrong, they will sometimes (willingly or not) twist it a bit. You've got to not over-react on every such instance (when it doesn't really matter to the flow of the discussion). This is not helping others discussing with you, this is not helping you discussing with others, and makes everyone angrier. It's just noise.
Or, in the wise words of a modern poet:
let it go! 
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@remi "Wow that Hitler was really a sharp guy!" - Remi.
So you're saying that doesn't bug you at all? Yes it's a made-up example, but in this case I'm the one who's clearly in the wrong, right? We all agree on that?
But if you then pointed out that you never said that, suddenly people started lecturing you as if you had done something wrong. Look at this very thread:
Me: "I never said that."
Remi: "Oh yeah sorry. BTW as advice you should just say what you mean to say."
Me: "That is literally exactly what I did, still you put words in my mouth, you even admitted you were wrong to do so, yet somehow it's now my fault?"I can't be the only one who finds this entire situation weird whenever it occurs.
Then as an added bonus we have Boomzilla swooping in to call me a dumb idiot moron stupid idiot dummy, a helpful reminder just in case you guys forgot for a second that I'm literally the dumbest person on earth.
Anyway if people "not engaging with me" also means they don't put words in my mouth, I'm a huge fan of that, how do we make that happen?
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@polygeekery said in Discourse PR as a Service:
@sh_code said in Discourse PR as a Service:
@sh_code oh, close. a white knight.
and of course, no comments enabled.SO is a place to find answers and solutions. if you want to feel welcomed, go visit family or friends, where that feeling is, unlike on SO, relevant.
Hey man, I am all for telling
to go run their genitals through a tree chipper, but SO is just fucking horrible. It is not a place to go ask questions and get answers. It is a place where you go answer a question and get it closed without an answer. It is what happens when you cross Wikipedia with a Linux community from the 90's.Mine never even got closed. Just ignored. I once got a badge/achievement/whatever on SO for asking questions that nobody responded to. How the f
does that level of gamification help with anything?I think I got one useful answer on SO maybe once in my life.
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@mott555 Oh I got that one too.
And yeah the biggest irony is that if you do everything they ask for:
- Do your own research
- Do your own debugging
- Only decide to ask if you're truly stumped
- Carefully craft a question with code examples
You still won't get your question answered if it takes more than 17 milliseconds to come up with the answer. Which is virtually guaranteed for everybody who does the top two bulletpoints there.
So they say they don't want "low quality questions" but refuse to answer high quality ones.
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@blakeyrat said in Discourse PR as a Service:
Anyway if people "not engaging with me" also means they don't put words in my mouth, I'm a huge fan of that, how do we make that happen?
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@blakeyrat Yes, that's exactly the thing. The more work you put in to make a quality question, the harder it usually is to come up with an immediate answer that requires no work, so you get nothing.
@mott555 said in Discourse PR as a Service:
Mine never even got closed. Just ignored. I once got a badge/achievement/whatever on SO for asking questions that nobody responded to. How the f does that level of gamification help with anything?
"tumbleweed"? Got that one.
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@blakeyrat You're the only one in this forum who consistently and systematically gets their panties in a twist for this kind of things. So either you're the only one who ever gets misread/misquoted, or that happens to everyone and you're the only one who, well, consistently gets their panties in a twist about it.
I'm not gonna make you change anyway, but don't get surprised that you're characterized by everyone as a bitchy ranter. 'cause that's exactly how it looks like when every other reply from you is complaining about how someone used the wrong word.
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@remi I don't care how you characterize me, the only thing I care about is you don't put words in my mouth. That's the only thing I've complained about here. Not sure why you think I care about all these other things you keep saying-- the only reason I made fun of your advice about "say what you mean to say" is because that's exactly what I did and it demonstrably didn't solve the problem of people putting words into my mouth. So it was stupid advice. It's like you turn left at an intersection, get into a car wreck, then later your buddy's like "well you should have tried turning left."
Now how about you shut up? I'm trying to drop the subject and you keep fucking dragging me back in.
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@izzion said in Discourse PR as a Service:
But it’s totally cool to answer questions without giving a grilled poop sandwich about exactly what’s allowed.
Catch22. If you don't mention what's allowed, then you might as well throw out the rulebook because no one's going to hunt that down before posting. Why? Because the vast majority of sites don't have groomed expectations.
"But you could do it nicely?!" Sorry, even mentioned what's allowed at any juncture in the posting is going to appear hostile. Hence the Catch22.
Stack Overflow Isn't Very Welcoming. It's Time for That to Change. - Stack Overflow
