Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change
stackoverflow.blog
stackoverflow.blog
Suddenly a "higher ranking" individual started leaving comments on my answers that I needed to stop answering certain questions, and only address "well asked" questions. After reading the guidelines, I noted that neither I or the asker had broken any rules, so I commented that I felt I was being treated unfairly, and I asked where I could discuss further since the comments on my questions seemed inappropriate.
Suddenly another, even higher scoring person, deleted all the comments and locked my answer, noting that the discussion had stopped being productive. After that, my answers were left alone with no more meta criticism.
In my limited experience, it's a bizarre community.
I love Stack Overflow, and it's sure a valuable if imperfect resource, but this is something that drives me bonkers about it.
If the question is intelligible enough to receive an answer, and if your answer is potentially helpful to the asker, then it's well-asked as far as I can tell, and the scoring system can take care of its relative utility.
The additional level of moderation doesn't seem to have added much value over my time participating. The closest thing I can think of as nice is combining duplicates, though moderators often seem to miss subtle differences between questions and in some cases information gets lost in the end. Generally, the moderation focus often seems legalistic or driven by artificial incentives rather than primarily focused on improving the breadth, depth, and quality of the site as a technical resource.
Honestly, I'm pretty sure that a significant portion of the hostility people experience is coming from moderation actions.
I might hope the SO team has the intention of going to town on that problem in general, but I don't see it specifically mentioned in today's discussion. I'm sure that if they took it deeply seriously and engaged with enough specific situations where it's been a problem, they could find ways to do better.
I think today's announcement is a really good indication, though, that they're listening to people who are having problems with their SO experience, not just to people who'd congratulate them for their (deserved!) accomplishments and for whom everything is more or less fine.
Once I made an account and tried to be more active. I got told off for asking questions about issues I was having or because my answers weren't liked by someone with high rep.
I gave up on it. I never use my stackoverflow account. I use stackoverflow on a daily basis, to find preexisting issues around what I am working on and read possible solutions, but thats it. I don't consider logging in and asking about an issue I am having, let alone help anyone else.
I feel like the toxicity around the community has led me into that. I do feel like people on stackoverflow are elitists, thats what I am getting about it. I feel like they are playing on a different league than me and they make me feel lesser although I am pretty certain that am competent enough to succeed.
I am grateful for stackoverflow, but I definitely don't see using an account on there anytime soon, and its going to take a long long time for stackoverflow to win me over as a contributor :/
P.S - Out of about 30 devs I worked with in the past / working now with etc I've only seen 3 of them using stackoverflow by contributing to it, or when they get an issue they post about it. The rest of them use stackoverflow the same way I use it which proves a pattern here, at least on my personal circle.
No one seems to want to change. No one seems to want to even engage with criticism about the culture; they just push back and pile on when criticism is brought up.
After a couple times of seeing this kind of behavior, and pushing back, and then getting piled on by people rejecting the criticism, I started to get tired of it and withdrawing somewhat. Later on, I some blatant sexism in a chatroom that was laughed off when I pointed it out to the moderators.
I've pretty much given up. I'll occasionally reply to questions people ask on my existing answers or if I see something that needs an answer or edit I'll make it, but I don't really feel like fighting the overwhelmingly elitist, sexist, and uncaring attitude on the site.
I think that this post is a nice gesture, and good that it's coming from the company and not just another user, but I worry that's it's much too late. The community has been attracting people who like it the way it is, and repelling people like me who don't, for a long time.
Like, StackExchange admins: If you're getting flags, there's offensive material, the comments are blatantly off-topic, etc., then OK, I get that; you can step in and moderate. But that's a tiny fraction of the time. When people are having a normal discussion that turns out to be long, maybe don't be a jerk who deletes all the comments from that post and tells people to go somewhere else? It kills the entire discussion, mood, and everyone's enthusiasm, along with lots of gems that were in the comments but that wouldn't fit inside any answers. You really expect the community to turn out happy and welcoming when you keep punching all the breaths out of the users and kicking them to some other corner just because more than 5 of them decided to commit the sin of commenting and sharing thoughts on a topic?
I posted an image as a part of an answer once and it was removed with the reason "don't use third party image hosts". Thing is, I used i.stack.imgur.com which is the only method provided in the answer form on the site! I knew the user who did it but since my answer had been deleted, I had no way to contact him for any sort of appeal. It was a while before I tried contributing to the site again.
However a friend of mine (that I believe as a better level in programming than me) has the same feeling of "bizzare community" that you have, so I know that the issue is complex.
That said I really have zero ideas about what they could do to improve the way they are seen by everyone without breaking the way the site currently works.
Have you heard about the term "help vampire" ? Do you know how many people how do not take 3 minutes to search ? Do you think that the number of questions will remain manageable if the bar is leveled down ? Do you know that you are encouraged to edit questions to make them more "well asked" (at least if that is humanely possible) ?
In my opinion SO is a specific tool that is very different from a forum, a chat or a mailing list. SO should not be the only tool that people have to solve their programming problems and it should not try to morph into it.
I can't see from your story if the "even higher scoring person" ever declared his intentions to you, which he probably should, but it can be a pretty routine moderation action on forum sites in general to remove meta comments not contributing to the original question, after that discussion has been had.
In your story I could as well read that the lower rank moderator was told off about his interventions.
I've been frustrated when trying to contribute - you'll have two people helping each other and then some third party comes in and declares it not valuable, incorrectly says something is a duplicate, or starts deleting things for arbitrary reasons.
I just want the moderators to go away and leave us alone, it also makes me think stack overflow is successful in spite of this - not because of it.
In nutshell, current system is not ideal but it has been put in place after lots of thoughts. No one is going to disagree with being more respectful and kind however the solution to this problem is much more of a technical challenge.
If you have people doing that then there is a much bigger issue then what has been described by the EVP. My experience in general has been that there are a segment of users on StackOverflow that think they are better than everyone else and take every little opportunity they can to impress upon the rest of us how great they are in their own little world.
I'm not sure if they removed the comment or if some other moderator did, but it was gone within a couple of days. My karma loss remained. It's absolutely ridiculous over there sometimes and these sorts of interactions are one of the big reasons I stopped participating.
Some questions are clearly daft, the person hasn't done any prior research, the question is vague, the problem is not apparent and it's a big waste of time trying to help. These questions are often shut down mercilessly and I think that's probably the best thing for them, but I've no doubt it's a terrible experience for the guy asking the question. I think the SO blog post addressed it pretty well by outlining a more streamlined question form with clear prompts for each part of the question.
Other questions are not daft, but perhaps are not asked well. They need to be edited, re-framed, boiled down to the essential parts, an example included, the expected output included, that sort of thing. It's tiresome to run into questions like this over and over, and I can understand how people might comment out of frustration, but it's good to prompt the OP to fix their question up so it can (and probably will) be answered well. Kid gloves and kindness are important here, it's not always easy to ask a good question. The SO blog post went a long way to addressing this and I look forward to seeing some changes on the site.
Overall I think SO is a fantastic resource with many amazing contributors, so it's good to see them responding to this problem and I hope they can make it even better.
Note that these problems may not make answering the question impossible. If, for example, the headline/question is "How do I do this???", then you can still answer, provided the body is more specific.
But such a meaningless title makes it harder to spot the question in lists when you're searching, or willing to answer questions.
That's bad for the usefulness of SO, and moderators and other users who have spent a lot of time on the site may notice such problems far more than you do when first visiting it.
The ways to get points combined with the way moderation powers slowly flow from them in this gamified rigid hierarchy is not a common approach. Only allowing a specific type of social interaction (objective questions whose answer(s) are of interest to many). It is weird.
I think it is really interesting that the community isn't much worse. At that scale and, lets be honest, with programmers giving programming advice? Why is that? Which of those aspects can be borrowed for other stuff?
https://meta.stackoverflow.com
It's also worth noting that those who can lock discussions can also edit questions without approval (and others can with approval), so it's worth pushing back on editing the question into being "answerable", admittedly a non-binary state.
And little makes me sadder than comments on answers saying, “Don’t answer questions like this – it encourages them.”
The problem is that answering questions which are borderline low quality/too specific, etc or need imorovement before it can be answered are usually frowned upon because it encourages the asker to ask more low quality questions.
The abuse you got is not OK though. If I comment at all on such questions it is always polite.
What I think is also a big oroblem is closing questions as duplicates which are not duplicates.
As with every system I think the incentives are the culprit so I expect SO to improve on this soon. They should be able to since they have all the data to do so
A lot of SOers seems to enjoy moderation a lot more than answering questions.
Unfortunately they even do get in the way of the rest of us.
The extreme is some open source projects, in my experience.
True. There's definitely an elitist undertone at Stack Overflow, and the voting system has a huge effect on that...
> especially newer coders, women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups.
But this isn't true. No one knows anything about a user on Stack Overflow unless they explicitly announce it, and generally my perception seems to be a disdain towards newer members in general, not ones from any particular group.
Trying to make this about minorities feels like a desperate attempt to fit in with the 'social justice' sphere, and to virtue signal to people on sites like Twitter.
Still, the rest of the article seems fairly sane, and I guess this point stands out above all:
> Let’s reject the false dichotomy between quality and kindness
Because at the end of the day, we need to kill the 'brilliant jerk' archtype already. No, most intelligent people are not Dr House or Rick from Rick and Morty, and we shouldn't make the assumption that a community has to tolerate that sort of behaviour in order for it to be good. Moderate the community well, stop tolerating jerks because they're 'smart' and fix your voting systems, and Stack Overflow can easily become a great community to be part of again.
You completely missed this point. To quote the article:
> Many people, especially those in marginalized groups do feel less welcome. We know because they tell us.
Hanlon doesn't claim to know why the marginalized groups feel unwelcome. He doesn't even claim that the root cause is a bias of action -- conscious or subconscious -- on the part of SO's users or staff. What he said was these groups report at a higher than average rate the feeling of being unwelcome. That is a simple fact, and can only be dismissed at the cost of saying those people's opinions are not worth addressing. Acknowledging it, saying "maybe if we get creative we can improve it", is not virtue signaling, it's the most fundamental requirement to:
> shift from “don’t be an asshole” to “be welcoming.”
Why would you say this with such conviction when you don't know anything about what the team is doing behind the scenes? They do yearly surveys that do include things like culture / minority status as well as questions about inclusion.
I can't help but feel like this is just another white male majority site jumping to shut down this type of discussion before it even starts.
I'd rather look at the merits. If I recognize a good idea, I'm going to signal that I'm on board with it, so virtue signaling in itself is, at worst, a bit gauche.
The reason I'd avoid making these things about social justice is that it's very hard to show that social justice as a concept actually works to promote comity. When you put things in terms of oppressor and victim, you deepen divisions rather than heal them. When you search for reparations and retribution, you have to harm people.
> Because at the end of the day, we need to kill the 'brilliant jerk' archetype already.
We need to recognize that everyone shifts significantly towards the autistic side of the spectrum when they're online. You're looking at text, and trying to infer emotion from words, and do it quickly. That people are as good as they are reflects a fairly amazing amount of patience from the average person.
These "jerks" that we're going to brand intolerable and kick out are probably fairly decent people.
Honestly, most moderation systems would benefit hugely from a simple "please rewrite this post" feature.
Almost everyone on SO uses a variation of their real name. I suspect you are a smart enough person to know that that is far more than enough to engage in racial and sexual discrimination.
I understand what you're saying, and while you're correct, it doesn't change the fact about how people feel in a community.
There are really two groups here: newer coders, and marginalized groups within our profession.
Newer coders are less confident, and when you see the types of responses you see on SO, you're less likely to want to participate - nobody likes being told that they're stupid or not working hard enough, as an example.
For marginalized groups - primarily women, people who aren't white, and the LGBT communities, they already have to deal with sexism, racism, homophobia, and other forms of discrimination in their daily lives. When you have to worry about hostility in general, trying to participate in a community that does have a reputation to being hostile is even more difficult and frustrating. The fact that you don't know who an SO user is unless they volunteer the information simply doesn't matter.
> Trying to make this about minorities feels like a desperate attempt to fit in with the 'social justice' sphere, and to virtue signal to people on sites like Twitter.
This isn't about trying to make it only about minorities, and the post doesn't give that impression. It is, however, about making sure that everyone feels welcome, and that has to include thinking about and understanding WHY minorities aren't feeling welcome, even if there isn't explicit discrimination against them on the site.
>But this isn't true.
What do you make of their statement that "Many people, especially those in marginalized groups do feel less welcome. We know because they tell us."?
Given your astonishingly ignorant response, I can bet dollars to donuts that you are not.
Stack Overflow allows people to use photographs in their profile.
You're saying that women and POC are not allowed to be themselves. That they cannot use features everyone else is free to use. That they must lie about who they are in order to participate on the Internet
> But this isn't true. No one knows anything about a user on Stack Overflow unless they explicitly announce it,
They don't say it out in the open, they contact the SO admins directly or through surveys.
If you're in charge of a huge for-profit online community and your only source for demographic/marketing/public image information is your existing user profiles, you should probably start looking for a new line of work. There are many ways that they could find out what people in different demographic groups think of their service without even looking at their membership database.
StackOverflow has names and profile pictures. Users can choose not to have their own photo or name but some do and provides some identifiability. Though I agree about your general point that the primary and most obvious issue is with new users feeling less welcome than specific groups of people.
Thank you for saying this. I'm all for welcoming people from all walks of life to the coding community. But who is SO to say these particular people have been demoralized when most of its users are anonymous.
Newbie coders asking stupid questions on SO and getting snarky answers -- mostly because they didn't take the five minutes to see if their question was already asked -- transcends race, sexual orientation, gender and nationality.
???? There are names and profile pictures.
Every question is moderated by volunteers, who have curated every high value question there. From an askers perspective, sure you may have asked 1 slightly off-topic question, but for a reviewer, that’s the 30th off-topic question today - and SO gamifies reviewing so you are encouraged to do so.
I used to be on StackOverflow and had high enough rep to access nearly all of the moderation tools. The quantity of garbage that gets submitted daily is astounding. And when your contribution to the community of high quality content is keep quality up you get tired of saying “hey can you please add more code” for the 100th time and just hit dupe. Because if the asker isn’t trying, why should you?
Ultimately, this leads every reviewer to become an asshole, because to keep up with the quantity of rash coming in you need to be.
Primarily duplicate or lazy questions shouldn't even be seen by high-rep users most of the time. It's wasting everyone's time to maximize the exposure of those kind of questions. Low rep users could do with answering those kinds of questions, though - low-hanging fruit to get a leg up.
I have 35k rep and a 4 digit user id on SO. I've pretty much stopped using it for years, though. The one feature [1] I asked for, that would have kept me engaged, is a way of only showing questions from high-rep askers. Because I'd know they'd be interesting questions, and not trivially solved (because you know high rep users know how to Google things and do basic research). I'd also like the bar against "subjective" questions lowered in these kinds of questions, because questions that are matters of fact are almost always solved by sufficient use of Google or experimentation or intelligence, all of which can be assumed as a given for high rep users.
[1] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19659/search-filter...
Another:
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3987/can-we-filter-...
I’ve actually came across a few very good questions where the author answered his own in a very concise manner. and guess what? He had over 1k upvotes. Those are the questions that SO is catering. Which leads me to believe that by design, SO will never be able to fulfill their wishes in the blogpost.
Edit: IMO closing duplicates makes sense, IFF users are asked 'does the linked duplicate answer you question' and confirm. Deleting only makes sense in case of exact duplicates, otherwise they might be useful variants worth linking.
1. Answering questions people ask, q&a
2. Answering the questions of people stopping by looking for answers.
The output of the former needn't directly be the input consumed by the latter. Bad questions can be tolerated in the former but are intolerable in the latter (noise).
Solution: A curated site of answers searchable by public drawn from the best of q and a from an internal site not indexable by google, etc.
"But then we'll be flooded by bad content!" (I can hear SO mods screaming in the distance.) If old, low-score posts are clogging your search results, that's a problem with your search algorithms, not with moderation.
I've been on SO since 2009. I can confirm the community is getting harsher, less patient, and more exact. HOWEVER, I can see the other side. I see tons of questions that are not fit to be on the site: one-liners, opinions, "help me with my homework", and utter spam. Not to mention people who clearly did not search the site, or even Google (many of Google's results come from SO), and ask a simple question asked a thousand times before. Bad questions and answers will stay online indefinitely, coming up in your future Google searches.
There has to be a balance. Comments should be less hostile, but posters should vet their questions before asking.
Perhaps the suggested structured form is the right way to go. If people will take some time to document their effort, and code, they'll gain appreciation for the time spent by someone reading their question and providing an answer.
PS: +1 on using Zuckerbot in an article not about Facebook :)
> So I started to remove "Thanks in advanced", which in addition to being inappropriate for Stack Exchange, is a corruption of the English language, and needs to be stamped out before too many people decide that it's correct English (thus making it into correct English).
Basically hostile combined with lots of power in SO.
Edit: I've just seen that an answer to the Meta SO question above [0] got 12 down votes [2] is specifically suggesting what the Stack Overflow blog is - that we have to be more inclusive
If SO does want to be inclusive the pedants with power are going to get pretty annoyed.
But they're the ones that do a ton of the work so I'm interested to see how it works out.
I still think that I should defend SO, it's the most transparent place I know on the internet. They've done a good job trying to keep it inclusive but it's a ridiculously hard job especially on the scale of Stack Exchange.
[0]: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/288160/no-thanks-da...
[1]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2950/should-hi-than...
A successful edit is a way to gain reputation, which is hard to get these days for new users.
I know it feels a bit odd when someone else edits your question: you could roll it back, but then again why should you be bothered? It's the same question, with one less word.
If there was only one thing I could change it would be this: If someone marks a question as duplicate, and closes, make them provide a link to the 'original' question and a brief summary as to why it is a duplicate.
Closing something as duplicate and then forcing the user who submitted the question to do more digging comes off as hostile, lazy, and even condescending. Sometimes the original question is lazy and un-researched, but in most cases it is hard to find the right search term for the problem you have.
Otherwise, in my experience, it is utterly worthless for getting actual answers.
For instance, I've asked a total of 4 questions on the DBA Stack Exchange. Almost all of them were specific but easily generalized, weren't answered anywhere else. Three of them would have been easily answered by someone with good knowledge of the relevant products. (The other was only answered by significant trial and error.) On three of them, I was the only person to answer. Each of those took hours of research. On the fourth, someone else answered, but didn't appear to actually understand the question.
On StackOverflow itself, I've asked a single question. A moderator told me to do what I explicitly stated in the question I didn't want to do, and closed it as a duplicate.
The bounties are equally useless: earlier today I sacrificed 90% of my DBA reputation to get around 6 more views on my question. I'm pretty sure most of the views I got are from me refreshing the question.
The article suggests that the problem is that SO is too cruel to new clueless users. This isn't how it seems to me. Perfectly valid content gets down voted or closed.
SO is a killer resource for me as a new-ish coder but man, there's an uphill climb before you can avoid making people mad while using it.
A moderator closed a 1.5 year old question[1] with 20 upvotes, 25 stars, 9000 views and an answer at 28 upvotes without any vote or consultation, because it was too broad for him. StackOverflow has all the tools to allow the users to moderate the platform by themselves, kinda democratically. From my experience, it works and the decisions are most of the time justified. Then it's mind blowing that someone can skip all the closing process/votes and close a well-rated question with a useful answer in his sole opinion.
And there is no way to report/flag/discuss a moderator actions on Stack Overflow. You can at least do that on Wikipedia.
[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41250087/how-to-deploy-a...
Edit: the question has received 5 votes to reopen, thanks HN!
Too broad has been the bane of my questions on StackOverflow. [0]
As cpburns2009 says in a sibling comment:
> When you're working with an unfamiliar technology, you frequently don't even know what to ask.
And if they don't, then provide some other place for questions which are exploring a field, or are more complicated than "How do I do X?"
0. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37610341/assigning-peopl... Note the tone of the comments...
What they should do is allow broad, general, subjective questions. That would allow for answers with general guidance instead of directly answering a broad question. It would also allow a clueless person to get some direction. When you're working with an unfamiliar technology, you frequently don't even know what to ask.
BTW: You can ask a question about it on meta, but based on your question I think the "too broad" closure is technically correct based upon the rules and how they're enforced.
(Also, that's a... very broad definition of "moderator abuse". The question is still there and no one can post an answer to compete with yours if it's closed.)
Yes there is. See Meta. E.g., see https://meta.stackoverflow.com/search?q=why+was+my+question+...
You can also flag your own question/answer.
As you say - then there doesn't seem to be any clear guidance about what you can do after it's deleted/closed. By luck I came across a friendly moderator in the chat that gave me hope of getting it re-instated. I wrote a Meta post how to get a post re-instated [1] which got some positive feedback from the moderators.
[0]: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/39887/37853
[1]: https://skeptics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4090/so-yo...
I LOVE the idea of flagging moderator actions - it doesn't have to be visible to non-mods, and I'm sure it could be abused, but I wish there was such a thing.
* How would you know whether there's a difference between the experience of these groups and the baseline level of friction lots of people outside those groups experience?
* For the sake of argument, assume for a moment that there is no difference, and what those who feel singled out are experiencing is the baseline friction that they've mistakenly correlated with some aspect of their identity. Then the only way to address the issue is to address that baseline. If StackOverflow does this, it will mean the experience improves for everyone.
(If there is a difference, then the experience improves for everyone and the world is a bit fairer.)
* Is there anything in the specific list of areas SO has identified for improvement that really seems like a bad idea?
- Let’s shift from “don’t be an asshole” to “be welcoming.” ... “I wasn’t just tolerated; I was made to feel like the community was actually better because I was there.”
- let’s start by working with the community and our community managers to start flagging and deleting unkind comments now.
- Let’s make it easier for new users to succeed.
- Let’s stop judging users for not knowing things.
- Let’s reject the false dichotomy between quality and kindness.
This is such an important point and missed so often by technical types. Impressed to hear it stated so clearly here.
Since feelings can't be verified it costs little to not be truthful.
There's always going to be a very small percentage of people who don't fit in in large groups, no matter how much you try to work with them. They're also the ones who tend to speak up, and StackOverflow's userbase is massive, so this number gets inflated to something that may seem like a lot, but really isn't that many - and may well be within the error margin for "people who won't fit in".
Typically moderation would push these people away, so they don't keep complaining, but StackOverflow, despite any issues it has, is too good a resource as-is.
Men built stackoverflow. Yes, those "technical types". Men can build things like this precisely because men value what is correct. If you want somewhere where feelings have a place you should stick to the creative arts.
Oh, when will the HN community step in to stop such flagrant abuses.”
See where unconditionally believing feelings gets you?
Your Power Users are the ones making SO toxic. They don't need better tools, they need to have their privileges pulled until they learn to use them responsibly.
The whole "SO is an encyclopedia not a help site" thing started this, and it encouraged a lot of "content curators" to the site, who view their role as squishing every question unless it meets their personal editorial standard (Wikipedia has this too but IS an encyclopedia!).
This post feels hollow. It is nice they're taking blame, but SO is still rotten at the core, the site needs something akin to a constitution setting out what the purpose of the site is. Everything else should flow down from the site's core purpose, not up from rules and "more <3!!!"
Is SO a "help site for newbies" or a "encyclopedia of programming knowledge?"
Sometimes you need to use 2 or 3 tangentially related posts together to see the bigger picture of how the question you were going to ask relates to the problem you wanted to solve. I mean, learning has always been that kind of tortuous process.
Maybe there needs to be a separate place on the site that's primarily help for newbies.
I assert this already exists, laid out in the inaugural blogs posts and formally codified in the tour and help centre.
Asking a specific nuanced question results in a response of a) tell me what you are really trying to accomplish and i'll answer that question or b) don't do what you are doing.
Don't presume I don't know what I'm doing or know the right question to ask. This happens so often and is such a time waster I hesitate to use the site. Their culture even invites it by giving it a fancy name of the "xy problem".
Please provide a way to flag a question as "Don't respond with an XY question" or alternatively "I know what I am doing and still have a question".
That IS a valid question. The site would be nearly useless without that. Of course there are reasons why you may not want to do the obvious thing Y but have to do X to solve a particular problem, but for a nuanced and specific question that's really the most important thing in the question. If it's not there, the answerer will (rightly) assume you are trying to bang in a nail with a saw - no matter how nuanced the question is otherwise.
That is: to be a good question, you have to be very specific about what problem you are trying to solve, what solutions you can't use, and why it is that you have to go with a specific solution.
The site isn't a question and answer site, it's a problem and solution site. People don't go to stack overflow to find an answer to a question, but rather to solve the problem they have at hand. So to make your question as good as possible for those people it really needs to have a problem context, including rejected solutions. If those rejected solutions aren't in the question - they will come in the answers. That's good.
You can do those with prose. Explain that you know what you're doing. Give an underlying reason that shows that your X is an X.
Answerers can only act on a) the information you provide b) heuristics they have based on seeing many other questions. If you do not provide a) then they'll have to fall back on b)
Now why would anyone with this profile want to contribute to Stack Overflow ever again? What's the point? They should just shut up, keep their knowledge to themselves and instead offer $2000/month training courses to those "less privileged". Instead of getting beaten for their generosity and wasting time answering badly formulated questions.
Specifically the solutions talked about will bring massive toxicity to the platform.
> Too many people experience Stack Overflow as a hostile or elitist place, especially newer coders, women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups
Breaking that down...
"...people experience Stack Overflow as a hostile or elitist place..."
This is obvious just by looking at the discussions that happen here, or, even by observing the SO-related memes that bubble up to the top of Reddit programming subs. I have commented on it myself.
"...especially newer coders, women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups."
lol what?
Like most programmers, I use SO practically every day. I don't post much because that's usually a waste of time, but I land on SO from searching for errors all the time. I cannot recall ever, even once, seeing someone's race, sex, or orientation being mocked or even mentioned. As far as I can tell most users don't have full names or photos on their profiles. So it isn't even possible to know such things unless it was volunteered, and that never happens when asking questions about APIs and whatnot.
So what in the heck are they even talking about? I'm glad the issue is getting attention, but justifying like this strikes me as pointless virtue signaling. Perhaps they are trying to stem criticism from their power users who like SO the way it is.
What they mean is that, since minorities might have insecurities about their ability to code because there are not that many people who look like them in the industry, when they receive a condescending response their insecurities aggravate. Therefore, SO can be consider more hostile for minorities.
If all you're doing is googling for mature, well-curated answers, then you're not seeing this. Go post a "dumb question" and see how you're treated.
And the contention isn't that people are being deliberately mocked, it's that they don't feel welcome, which is a different thing.
So... how might a woman (or whoever) not feel welcome? Maybe because the forum she's on sees people regularly doing stuff like saying discrimination is "not even possible", or mocking those talking about it for "pointless virtue signaling"? I mean, seriously: go back and read the very post you just typed: does that seem "welcoming" to you?
It's not.
Deleted comments are essentially invisible to regular users, and even for deleted answers you have to go and dig to see offensive content.
> Many people, especially those in marginalized groups do feel less welcome. We know because they tell us.
It may not not stand out to you, but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
Everyone on HN is almost the same in my head.
I am not even sure adding a profile picture would change that.
Moderators there tend to be borderline autistic people obsessed with some subjects. Yes, we sound like jerks and some people there can be really infuriating but it is not personal: we are just obcessive people with very low social skills. These OCD traits are both our weakeness and our superpower, why we do such a great work maintaining top quality questions and answers while sometimes sounding needlessly rude.
Being on the spectrum is not an excuse to be a jerk but many people will take "you are being pedantic" as a cumpliment because their brain is wired differently. Most of them will be more careful if you tell them they are hurting people even if they can't understand why.
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/users/444036/paulo-scardine?tab=pr...
That's the particular problem that they're trying to figure out, with a broader version of "waste of time". Either "asking a question is met with hostility", or "posting a response is met with hostility".
Agree 100%. This part is especially troubling:
> 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.
If I say "The sky is blue" and you say "That's offensive to people who aren't blue", you're just wrong. End of story.
It's sad that this is even worth saying, but that's what our micro-aggression and victimhood-obsessed society has come to. People are practically competing to see who can be the most offended.
>especially the idea that women and people of color felt particularly unwelcome. There’s a weird paradox with bias. Those of us who have privilege, but care deeply about reducing bias should be uniquely positioned to help, but we struggle the hardest to recognize that we are (unintentionally) biased ourselves
And this line in your post:
>pointless virtue signaling.
Really nice recycled talking point. It also strikes at the heart of the above quote.
Anybody that gets annoyed by those questions can opt to not see them and focus on higher quality. Anyone that wants to help newbies can. Those people can also be marked as unfriendly or hostile and won't be able to answer newbie questions if they get a certain number of reports.
This seems like it would solve two problems: oft-repeated low quality questions annoying users who want more complex help, and encouraging newbies bc they won't be afraid of retribution.
As an aside, if anyone has a good heuristic to identify bad behavior on Stack Overflow, I'd be interested in looking into it since SO data is public. (please do not suggest "build an AI to identify toxic comments")
I see nothing wrong with that.
As luck would have it, today some random stranger recognized me from my Stackoverflow profile at a Panera and asked me to help him debug his Django app. It was straightforward to fix because the error message described the problem exactly, but, for whatever reason, it wasn't apparent to him. I pointed this out, explained the problem, and showed him how to look for additional information based on the error message. Maybe this sounds softer in person, but there is nothing wrong with reminding people to pay attention to error messages, and the importance of giving people adequate amounts of information when you ask for their help.
Now, as a person who's answered many a question on Stackoverflow, I've had people threatening physical harm to me and my loved ones, as well as setting up Twitter accounts to harass me. To their credit, Stackoverflow admins always take swift action when actual harassment occurs. However, Twitter and Facebook seemed rather uninterested.
[1]: https://twitter.com/aprilwensel/status/974859164747931650
Some highly visible CEO of a developer community improvement startup pointed out some mean SO comments towards anonymous newcomers, then said those anonymous newcomers are actually women, so therefore SO is in fact sexist to its very core.
But if SO works with her company, she can help them not get called online by people like her. It’s literally a mob-style protection scam.
If you know enough to do research and make MCVEs, you'll likely rubber duck your way into a solution instead of posting a clear and well formulated question.
This is why you get a pile of "Unable to checksum downloaded file" type questions with a 30 line code dump and vague "doesn't work" comment:
All the users who instead narrowed it down to their `if (sum="foo")` or `if [[ $sum=="foo" ]]` or whatever pitfall their language has will already have googled "how do I compare two strings" and discarded their draft.
I don't have a good solution, but I'm happy about the article's "new “beginner” ask page that breaks the question box into multiple fields". It'll help ensure all questions have actual/expected results, and the code section will hopefully clear a path for applying static analysis.
You know what I do when someone is mean to me on the internet? I roll my eyes, have a chuckle and get on with my day.
Stack Overflow has a huge problem in the last couple of years with the amount of unhelpful comment spam by karma junkies who know very little about the problem area. There is a problem of declining quality in answers, as answerers have abandoned the site because of frustrations with the low quality of questions.
SO was never designed for beginners. It was designed so that a good question can produce canonical, definitive answers that benefit thousands. Total beginners benefit more from a back-and-forth style to grasp concepts as traditional forums or chat communities cater for.
If they blame their declining utility on the conduct of the users waiting for the admins to do something about the ongoing Eternal September it will be their downfall.
Thankfully I am past the generation that has embraced the idea that having your ego bruised is the worst thing that can happen to you, so I'll just roll my eyes and move on.
If Joel is still running this thing he needs to wake up.
Whatever gains have come from the the means he has chosen come at the very real cost of the expertise that makes the site useful.
Eight, even six, years ago, when you clicked that link from Google to Stack, you got your answer, first time. Now you're lucky if you can find it among the broken code masquerading as a task-oriented question and copy-pasted answers that reply.
There’s a problem. Data backs this up.
A snarky dig at someone in a post about how SO wants to be less mean and snarky is an interesting editorial choice.
That's really true, not repeated enough, and much deeper than it appears.
On really problematic code, this can lead to a stampede of comments, each mentioning a different issue with grim wording, which can be really unwelcoming even if they're completely correct.
This blog post is all about how the users need to alter the way they use the product. I've always been a firm believer than software should be intuitive and should influence the users to use the software in the way the developers want. If you want users to act more kindly and welcoming, incentivize that behavior.
Some ideas for SO:
- Create new reputational incentives for kindness
- Offer the kindest users a vacation and write an article about them from time to time calling them out for acts of kindness
- Allow newbies to report unkind behavior which would hurt reputation of the offender
- Create workflow to assist the elite users in dealing with frustrating questions/answers/comments (a button to say, "It would help us if you clarified the question" would help eliminate a comment that says "You don't make sense idiot")
If you complain about hostile environment in computing, go work in finance or retail for a few years.
But it is also annoying to try and give back to the community and find newbies who are at times extremely rude and ask "do you haz teh codez" questions.
That's why this issue is so difficult to tackle. As an answerer, I downvote questions that are not well formed because I do not want other answerers to lose their time looking at that question.
I personally believe SO lacks "triage" for incoming questions. Not every c# answerer should read every c# question. A new question may be marked as "for triage" (maybe this step could be skipped for users with some reputation), then reviewed as such by some community members. Badly formed questions would go into a bin for helping the user differently than a normal question. other questions could be sent directly to super user, code review or computer science or what not...
I end up closing the tab, If the site won't give me the basic tools to help someone, then what is the point of letting me sign up.
I got downvoted for answering some simple questions at stackoverflow.com for encouraging low quality questions. This was discussed in the article.
I can see why some people can get hostile as some questions are framed as please solve this for me. Usually people ask the posters to tell them what they had done but the tone of that request can be harsh.
I think the elitism is most prevalent in stackoverlow. The other stack websites seem less hostile.
(I have a score of ~3500 on SO and ~2800 on RPG - i.e. respectively top 7% and top 13% just to give you an idea).
On the RPG site, especially in the last couple of years at least, there seems to be a certain fanatism among moderators in sticking to the most literal interpretation of the "rules" (e.g.: if a question is about "what system you would use simulate movie X?" it is strictly verboten to answer unless you describe having extensive experience with the system you suggest).
Rules and "quality" are fine, except that while I can understand that SO is used almost exclusively for job-related questions, so the quality of a question can potentially cost you much... I doubt that anyone will have their career ruined if they pick the wrong edition of D&D to replay Game of Thrones or - perish the though - miss some important errata on elvish footgear when creating their next character.
(I also dabble in a few more, like japanese language and martial arts but they are either less strict in general, better mannered or maybe there is so little traffic that moderators have no reason to obsess about "quality").
Not all stacks are elitist, but some definitely are. I like the slow pace of some of the little ones like Arduino, etc.
1. Points. They're very visible, giving you power. If you want power, you mine for points, and once you earn them, well you worked for your power, you use your power. You are expected by the powers-that-be to close questions for being bad, or for being duplicates, or whatever. In contrast, reddit doesn't focus on points. You focus on the name/flair. So the focus is hanging around and answering questions - in other words, it's more of a community than a way to show off your knowledge.
2. The communities are kept separate. For example, /r/Rust has a different community culture than, say, /r/golang. So they have different mods with different policies.
3. The lack of community moderation means that I don't have to be scared that 5 guys out of 5000 decide that my question "wasn't good enough" or "subjective", closing it. And yes, there are hard-code reddit communities. /r/askhistorians put's history.stackexchange.com to shame in rigor. To write an answer there, you're writing a term paper based of primary sources. So how do they do it? They have a team of moderators. Really, stackoverflow could be broken up into rust.stackoverflow.com and go.stackoverflow.com and python.stackoverflow.com, where each community elects[1] their knowledgeable moderators who know their community and respects them.
3. Unlike reddit, they're not trying to solve my problem. They're trying to be a large database of answers[2]. A wikipedia of programming or something (which is why duplicates are not just pointed out, but actively closed, and why "open ended discussion questions" are closed). The problem is that I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in getting my question answered. Now if you don't want to answer my question, that's fine. But it's up to the asker.
[1]. Another point - community elections means that there's politics involved. reddit allows one to easily fork a community, so if a significant group of users don't get along with /r/linux, they can fork and make /r/linuxos or something.
This would incentivize everyone to gain points by being helpful, rather than enjoying being an 'authority'.
I know that sounds like a meaningless distinction, but questions can be (and often are) closed for being too specific. Like, "this question is well-researched and well-presented, but you're not allowed to ask it here because it's unlikely to come up for anyone else."
That's such a bafflingly bizarre attitude that I really don't know what else to say.
I feel like the main goal of SO is to close questions without answering them unless someone sneaks in a good answer before it’s closed.
When I see a poorly worded question, I might comment with some suggestions for improving the question, then immediately start writing an answer. Before I'm done with the answer, it doesn't matter whether the asker had improved his question. It's probably already closed. That is to me one of the biggest issues, The "race" nature of Stackoverflow. Did you find an easily answerable but unanswered question? Don't write a good answer, write a quick one. Then maybe improve it. If your answer is the top one, you'll get upvotes forever. If it's the best one but stuck at the bottom - no upvotes. Same with questions. If your question was poor for 5 minutes, but is later fixed? Sorry. Closed. I just I don't get why the system wants to encourage someone to write the same question again, rather than improving one?
Worse, it seems moderators fall in this trap: it seems to be a rush to find things to moderate. They have so successfully gamified the notion of moderation and cleanup that it's now also a race. A suggestion: if there is any kind of point system, statistics, badges or anything like that - hide it from the mods themselves. It just shouldn't be gamified.
These practices of gatekeeping, being opaque, and failing to practice patience and interactive dialogue on SO are extremely frustrating, and cause the system to fail to support some of the people that most stand to benefit from the community. It creates an attitude of elitism, and while I see how these attitudes can be self-serving for the karma elites, and help create a perception of the community being concise and clean. But it leaves many people falling through the cracks, and when questions aren't answered within 3-5 replies, the threads are often locked, deleted, and otherwise 'swept under the carpet'.
For this reason, I don't contribute to SO at all anymore. If it comes up as a result in a Google search when I need help with something, I'll use the info made available, but otherwise I'm intentionally just a leech because I don't feel it's worth navigating all the negative aspects in order to contribute.
Edit: I do hope that the changes and attitude they've outlined in the OP blog post do help resolve a lot of what I've just described, and I do intend to re-evaluate my opinion after enough time has passed for real changes to manifest.
Motivating example: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5664741/watching-variabl.... My first time trying to develop an android app in Eclipse, I had no idea a GUI-based app like Android could print to console, and assumed console and gui are mutually exclusive. I was trying to debug a large existing codebase in a very rudimentary way. In this question you'll see an answer that didn't really help me at +94 and the answer that did help me at -1.
Five years later, sure, that -1 answer is self evident. But at the time, that was the key to get me started on altering the codebase to my particular ends.
It's like a recommendation algo on Netflix: don't tell me what the most sophisticated film critic thought was the best movie if all I do is watch Pixar films; tell me what the best film was according to other Pixar movie enthusiasts was.
At the same time all the "question quality" stuff seems a purist loon crazy well beyond reason. There are many highly-upvoted and much-bookmarked questions that are reasonable and interesting and have useful, highly-upvoted answers but get closed and deleted for stupid reasons so only high-rank users can see them.
As for me I use to upvote (and hurry to answer if I can) reasonable and valid questions that others vote to close out of pure protest.
It's gross and corporate when Github does it in their "hosted with <3 at Github..." as well.
I think SO is mostly for "noobs", people that are asking how to add two numbers or use jQuery plugin. For me, it would be more useful if answers describe alternatives, big O and more context. Most answers just suggest copying few lines of code. Even for juniors, it is not good and just slows down growth.
I'll usually go extra mile to help someone out but I like my time and the platform to be respected. I often feel that people either expect for their minds to be read or are just bad at explaining there problem. I don't think SO community has to carry the burden of teaching people how to request help - I think it's a skill you earn by trying and failing. Sure your question got closed and someone pointed you to "how to ask a question" FAQ - just reformat your thoughts try again! It hurts nobody.
A lot of other issues like racism, sexism are pretty much unheard of so to me it seems like this article is very much just to pander some recent threads.
That could be a problem due to the search engines giving to much credits to SO whatever the content of the post (It is astonishing to see that if you post a question or an answer it pops up on the first page of Google within 2 minutes !).
Through natural daily interaction with the site (more than HN), built up a karma at 5K+. Why I found myself using it less?
The community aspect remained undefined and once the post police got a hold of the site, they interpreted the site to be only a technical reference, where technical discussion is allowed, instead of also a reference for soft skills and decision making that also were very popular.
Although asking such a question today will get the post closed, some of the insightful questions about how to approach software architecture, or a specific problem, continue to ironically generate me karma there.
Maybe it was the wrong site for that, but the elitist response, I think the question even got deleted by a mod along with the scathing comment, made me leave and only use SO as a reading resource. Never contributed and probably never will even though 8ish years later I have learned enough to be able to contribute.
Agree
> especially newer coders
Totally agree
> women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups.
What the actual F*?
More of an irritant to me was the generally noisy and poor-quality content. I will only follow links to SO now in areas where I know enough to be able to filter for quality myself (usually it's wanting). From my perspective, the gamification schtick is a failure.
The "best" way of asking a question may well not be as it was written the "first" time.
Or phrasing another way, remove the "older is better" bias.
Another example: currently, a new user, unfamiliar with the site, comes along, asks a basic question that has been asked a hundred times, and they ignore the "related questions" prompts. The community reacts by down-voting and closing their question, pointing to a better question. How about instead of "related questions", the question was immediately responded to with "related answers" instead? Rather than being snubbed for asking a simple question, new users would be encouraged by getting a quick response. As the questions would be grouped and the answers shared, low quality questions just wouldn't get much upvote attention, and could likely would get filtered out of searches and lists of "hot" questions, as they wouldn't be the best in a similar group of questions.
This is not at all a bad thought, and it's a perfect example of something that Stack (company) could have tried to actually address complaints rather than just papering over them and telling users they're too mean. Addressing the actual UX issues would do far more to improve interactions than just policing language.
Unfortunately, we've gone around the sun many times with plenty of smart proposals like this simply being ignored by the company.
I kept on getting "undefined object" when I was trying use return value from an (external) library function. I could see in web browser debugger there was data but it wouldn't let me return. All the top results in google involving the libraries name + undefined object were from Stack Overflow and they did a decent job of explaining why I was experiencing the issue (in my case I was trying to mix synchronous and Asynchronous code). However pretty much all the suggested solutions were misleading - they all talked about using something called a callback.
I found a blog post buried among the other google results that had better solution - to use something called a "Promise". After doing some more googling I found out the Promise syntax is very recent (added in 2017) and the answers I was looking at from Stack Overflow were all from 2011-ish so rather frustratingly Stack Overflow was full of outdated information. The old topics were locked and I could not edit them so no way of helping other new users like myself who might be running into same issue - especially given these answers appear so high in google it was a frustrating experience.
Why randomly attack Zuck? That is such an unnecessary meanness in an article about being nice to people :(
Hurt, and possibly needlessly so. I would also encourage reading about the flaws of said tests: https://qz.com/1144504/the-world-is-relying-on-a-flawed-psyc...
And then, put effort into your question:
- explain clearly what you've tried, and how it didn't work
- link to other resources that appear on the surface to be the answer, but really aren't because of x, y, and z reasons.
- provide code! don't just dump a metric tone of it in the answer though, provide only what is necessary to demonstrate the problem. if for some reason you can't provide the actual code for IP reasons, try to reproduce the problem separately with a very minimal example. for larger code samples, linking to Github gists or repos is a good idea.
I've asked very few questions over the years, and one of the main reasons is because I ended up finding the solution myself; the steps above force you to review your own work thoroughly, and lay out the problem clearly, so you might catch a mistake that wasn't obvious after cursing at your screen the first time around.
For those questions that I have asked, I've never been downvoted or had the question closed; at most no replies but that was it. If readers see you put in effort to ask a question, then they are also more inclined to put in effort to help.
Too many low effort questions make SO a pretty useless place nowadays IMO.
There should be like a StackOverflow for "bad" questions. If someone asks "How do I append to a list in python?" it wouldn't be closed but someone could just comment "read the #$# manual (link to docs here)".
BUT
there was almost everytime some smartass (with higher points than me and voted down my answer) who had some problem with that - bad words or word-order (i'm not kinding); too short answer etc.
So I left.
I wanted share my knowlidge but they didn't wanted them. Now admins/owners are crying. Just epic!
There was enough info the question to allow me to solve his issue, ok it wasn't a great question, but it was good enough IMO. I think his entire question ended up getting deleted and with it my answer.
This article addresses NONE of the complaints I've seen against SO. You're basically saying "we will be nicer and more inclusive!" Who told you that was the problem, because it isn't. The problem is the mods/power users/unwritten rules.
SO is a trash fire. For everyone, not "women", not "people of color", not "people without color", not "groups". Everyone.
It's an openly hostile place where mods close questions unrelated to their expertise based on the whims of those in private chat rooms while belittling the questioner with those "your question was closed because X" explainer boxes.
It would be refreshing if they just said something like "We've realized that SO is a hostile place, and it's not better if you just happen to be a white man."
If you read their change list, nothing there has anything to do with "identity". It's just a list of very small tweaks.
Sometimes you really need to deeply understand the topic to judge if a question is valid.
Honestly I just want them to noindex the questions that are closed so that they stop turning up in Google searches
First part sure, last part.. No one knows who you are on Stack Overflow unless you make it known, so no. I don't think marginalized groups are treated any different, although perhaps they may take more offense. Now, if you said something like: Vim is the best. Perhaps that could be a marginalized group, but in reality, I don't think that's what was being discussed.
Everytime I ask a question I automatically expect it to be downvoted to hell, get marked as duplicate, "dont post your homework", etc. Doesn't really matter how well I try to phrase the question either. You can't please everyone and some of the mods go on powertrips
I treat SO simply as a potential place to get feedback and search for answers to issues I am facing. It sometimes comes at a cost of salty responses, downvotes and hostility but the pros outweigh the cons.
I don't know if this is still in place but it should be stopped. Saying thanks to someone who helps you is the most natural thing in the world, it's something normal humans do.
If you forbid it, then you become an unnatural place, a weird place that feels weird and uncomfortable.
You also become a kind of cult, where insiders know and accept how to behave weirdly. And cults are very unwelcoming to newcomers (kind of their point, actually).
Quora has a feature to comment on questions and not just answers, but it has been well-hidden on the mobile device despite my many pleas to make it more visible so we can improve the question before writing an answer.
Have you ever tried to describe an automotive noise in sufficient detail with enough precision so a mechanic can diagnose the problem? They can communicate with each other easily, but most people don't have that knowledge. That's how it is for non-expert programmers attempting to ask a question on SO. So, they ask it on Quora instead. :)
Dude(with a higher score than I had), left a comment. "You should consider another profession, you don't have aptitude for programming".
Latino here, never experienced a single thing they're claiming on their site. I've been using SO since around 2009.
We are all often times simply trying to learn and share. There is no one single, authoritative source. Millions of people have probably felt the same way after posting or researching an answer. It is really sad. It could have been great.
HN can get a little tight at times but all in all it is 100x better in terms of takeaway for the user.
I guess my only gripe with HN is it has a touch of that "uppity, d*ck, unwelcoming vibe" due to calculation of points. I feel like if an individual has honestly tried to engage/add value and posts/comments 45 times and has a score of 12 they will give up with a bad taste in their mouth. Not everyone fairs well with that kind of thing. It is hard to navigate the world let alone coming into a space like this and getting crushed by a bunch of anonymous handles.
All in all it has a similar impact on a user/readers reaction to their early engagement with the community.
Obviously some of us have thicker skin and some truly believe they are snowflakes...Can't win 'em all.
Your reply has been Cursed to Hades for not being stack overflowy enough, even though it was the accepted answer, and has received hundreds of votes. Also the whole question has been Excommunicated for not being mumblemumblemumble enough. Even though it was the highest voted question of all time, with thousands of responses from beloved members of the community. You both should feel ashamed of yourselves.
-by Vlad The Impaler, Feb 2 '14 at 20:41
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2c59xe/what_i_...
I love that they wanted to be an answers site. I hate that they forgot sometimes the answers people desperately need are, "What do you think is the right way to do this?" Or, "What's your favorite solution to this problem?" It could have been another Stack Exchange site, sure. But they just didn't do it. And they should have.
Way back when SO was new, I actually had quite a few karma points from my answers. I stopped going there/using it/answering questions when I was being denigrated for doing so by some elitist dickheads. I continue to deliberately stay away.
This exists, and in some cases the evaluation results in some JIT help for the poster. In other cases, it puts the post into a "Help and Improvement" queue where more experienced users are waiting to suggest (or directly make) improvements.
How long-standing you may ask? Here's my answer from _2010_ to https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/481/whats-the-singl...
I feel sorry for the poor n00bs who come here thinking it's awesome, ask a seemingly innocent question, and then get shouted/voted down for asking a dupe and not searching properly before they asked. And yes, I said 'shouted down', because despite what a lot of experienced users many think, that's what it'd feel like for a new user who's unfamiliar with the S/OFU culture.
What makes you believe that YOU know how it should be done? I am not saying that people shouldn't be nice but over and over and over we see these tech companies embark on social justice missions to set guidelines that end up backfiring because they underestimate the complexity of the range of possible human behavior.
At best, rules generally dont get enforced equally and at worst they become a disaster that affects the inner workings of what made the site worth visiting in the first place.
And this right here tells me what to expect will happen in the future
> the nice thing about problems that relate to how people feel is that finding the truth is easy. Feelings have no “technically correct.”
I love stack overflow and would hate to see it devolve into something that deviates from what it truly is about: code.
There are a LOT of answers that have huge numbers of upvotes that are simply wrong--mostly because things change and evolve.
SO is good for something which just came out in the last 6 months--anything older than 3 years needs to be treated with extreme skepticism.
I was a very early user of Stack Overflow, and racked up a bunch of karma long ago, but I fairly quickly felt pushed out. I felt that the site became less useful as a place for me to get answers, and I felt that it became much less welcoming as a place for me to answer questions. Much of that revolved around the increasingly militant gatekeeping and arcane rules the community adopted.
Nowadays, I mostly run across Stack Overflow when someone links a fascinating question thread which will - invariably - be locked for being the "wrong" kind of content. (Because of course it is.)
It is a bizarre, broken community, and one I don't think is meeting its original goals. (And I say that as someone who had what was, back in the day, a pretty high score.)
>there's also the third, silent, probably much larger group, who neither asks questions nor answers them.
>it seems as though the single authoritative, comprehensive answers is what helps those people the most.
I hope something good comes out of this effort from the SO team.
However, I just hope that this effort to be lenient though doesn't lead this site from being a fairly reliable site for learning purpose, to becoming "Quora 2.0". i.e far too many duplicates and far too many low-quality questions, that it actually drives away the current expert crowd away from the site.
This creates a bit of an issue at times where folks who know the answer and appreciate an elegant solution provide an answer that while 100% correct... also doesn't tell me much about WHY it is correct. I'm sure it is obvious to the voters, less so to me, and a lot of the "it worked" responses from the people asking make me think they just cut and pasted and I'm not sure learned either.
Having said that there are great people who provide multiple answers in their response with some detail. I don't expect a novel, but I do really appreciate those responses.
Majority of people are lazy and don't like to think deeply or search first and.. it is normal for this lazy people to protest; rewards and punishments are needed for a society to work.
About the discrimination part, I have never seen "not respectful posts" for women or people of color... imho this is a no-problem for SO and I think that it is dangerous to create a discrimination case when there is none. Because in this way, you are creating artificial discrimination and real distance between people.
Their issues aren't due to particular identity politics. It's been this way for a while.
Original HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4494016
This posts just looks like a a poor attempt at jumping on the whole "helping the marginalized" bandwagon without actually helping or doing any research.
> Let’s do something about comments. Condescension and sarcasm have been reluctantly tolerated in comments for too long. We’ll research possible feature changes, but let’s start by working with the community and our community managers to start flagging and deleting unkind comments now.
I'm sure there will be no backlash from what used to be their core user base.
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20080701090858/http://redwing.hut...
I don't think I've generally ever been disappointed with the Google-optimised workflow, but I've never cared much about scoring points on the site itself, and I only very rarely have to ask a question.
I can imagine other improvements but all would hurt the site popularity in the short-term. Enough that I doubt SO would ever implement them. This is probably at the core of why the reputation for SO continues to worsen over time.
Hopefully they can turn it around since the core features of the site are invaluable.
I tend to visit SO when google brings me there, but personally I prefer looking in the docs or asking in IRC (though it depends on the channel), rather than deal with asking a question on SO again.
An interesting thing is that this does not seem to be network-wide, there are parts of the stackexchange network that seem much friendlier and more welcoming to new users.
But on the other hand, there's a ton of great stuff, and a lot of users have invested serious time providing extremely helpful answers.
It's a really bizarre place.
That was it, I just use stackoverflow when google shows me a result. I won't contribute to it, because its ridiculously difficult unless you make it your mission to get over the hostility from elite users.
You're not going to get kicked out if you honestly try to answer questions.
In my humble opinion, there should be also a system that ensures increased power is applied correctly. SO does not have this, and that's a major problem.
It is definitely an issue the way community treats new users. My guess is that when going through review queues, one gets into that mode.
On the other hand, it would kill the website if it was drowned with low quality duplicate questions and vague questions with no details - which are asked and closed constantly. (Just look at what superuser has become)
We (the human being) that must be fixed.
BTW: I have registered at least 3 Accounts to ask silly programming Questions when i was beginner and Stackoverflow managed to kick me in the motivations everytime i was stuck at something.
That's why the only fora that are fun are either vote-based or almost entirely unmoderated.
I consider StackOverflow read-only these days, it's years since I've bothered to ask anything, and I definitely don't bother to answer anything.
SO already has a variety of mechanisms for identifying issues with questions, why does it also allow people to yell random abuse without explanation via downvotes?
The most disheartening, but completely expected, result of posting a question is that it will be very rapidly downvoted...not welcoming at all. AND everyone gets this face slap upon posting a question, but I can see how minorities might feel that are being singled out by the sites typical negative response to pretty much all questions.
Sadly, even here on HN you can almost feel the joyful glee with which people can anonymously knock something down with downvotes and no need to explain.
Downvotes on SO should either be removed entirely, or it should cost 2 SO points to make 1 downvote.
Downvotes are nothing but pure negative, so hey, wanna remove some of the negative from SO? It’s obvious what to do.
I've been re-imagining it lately as:
- Upvotes - comment-tags, with set comments (previously, reasons for downvoting). - no downvote option
Then questions would be marked like:
- 4 upvotes - 2 people tagged 'I might be able to answer, but I'm not sure exactly what you want to know, please clarify what you are asking' - 1 person tagged 'this looks like an XY question, please explain your reason for doing it this way as it looks like there is a more sensible approach and it's not clear whether you know that' - 1 person tagged 'this question looks like you are asking for help without trying to solve the problem yourself, and putting effort in to help people who are not showing their own effort feels like an unfair request' - 2 people tagged 'I was willing to help, but I stopped reading because it is too difficult to follow (average reading time by people who tagged this: N seconds)'
And there would be no way to get a negative score, only languish at 1. The scoring system would have to be reworked to handle that. There could also be positive tags, 'I am interested in the answer to this question', 'I think this is clear'. Things visible down the left hand side of the question where the downvote button was, not hidden behind "close (2)" with broad, vague reasons "this or that or maybe this or anything similar".
Particularly, things which could be said in comments, but nobody wants to type out over and over, and which can be tagged anonymously so you can have the ease of drive-by-anonymous-downvoting but with mandatory specific feedback having to choose why, and without the slap-in-face effect for the recipient.
That would avoid the slap in the face element of downvoting, and avoid the ubiquitous back and forth "Why the downvotes?" / "don't whine about downvotes" / "I didn't downvote but it might be because X" / "people shouldn't be allowed to downvote without giving reasons" / "they are explicitly allowed to by the site design" / "these comments have been moved to chat".
Downvotes are nothing but pure negative, so hey, wanna remove some of the negative from SO? It’s obvious what to do.
First they wanted all content, then they started to go for quality, whatever that means.
But the culture they built doesn't change as fast as the shareholders like, often it never changes and they lose users to a new service.
The best you can do is harness jerks - that's what capitalism does; that's what stackoverflow does.
The problem is high-karma jerks, because "maybe they are right to be a jerk about your helpfulness" and you can't do anything about them anyway.
Traditional clubs/organisations like Rotary International, masons, toastmasters, churches or even AA might have more insight on making an organization welcoming, yet preserving rules.
I would love it if copy and forms could have at least some impact, so looking forward to see how this goes.
I can see how you can tell someone is a newer coder on the internet by their questions. But how can anyone possibly tell if someone is in a "marginalized" group unless they go about broadcasting seemingly because you want to claim some greater virtue.
The internet was created by misfits (today called "marginalized" I guess) where everyone was accepted based on their ideas and no one knew if you were a man, woman, dog, or dolphin? It seems that it became popular and the real world just brought it's problems with it.
on_the_internet_no_one_knows_you_are_a_dog.png
PS If you're wondering if the implicit bias test is real. It isn't. It is fake science. https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-false-science-of-implicit-b...
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I rarely ask questions anymore but, when I did, they have never been downvoted or questioned because ... I follow the rules ... but too many people come their and treat it like a forum (it's not) or like (shudder) reddit. That's when they get themselves into trouble.
I'm a high rep user and visit every day. I don't answer many questions anymore because, nowadays, they are mostly about canned software (CMS, frameworks, etc.) and not real programming. So I help clean things up and I'm one of those guys who lets you know when you've violated the rules. "Can someone give me teh codez?" is my favorite. Believe it or not, it gets asked every day and I help close at least three every day.
And I get irritated.
Must everything be about race or sex? Yeah, I am a little annoyed that so many of my questions get shot down on Stack Overflow, but other members cannot infer my sex or race from my SO handle. I am a guy from a racial group not under-represented in tech.
> It was hard to accept some of the (valid) criticism,
> especially the idea that women and people of color felt
> particularly unwelcome.
> Too many people experience Stack Overflow¹ as a hostile or elitist place, especially newer coders, women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups.
Maybe that's a problem. I don't know.
I'd rather see them address the problem of rampant question closures for dubious reasons and people who like to treat questions like a damn medium post.
edit:
Okay so reading further that is what it's about.
What the hell does it have to do with minorities and women?
oh they told them they feel less welcome. Did they say why, cause I don't see it here.
This just feels like dressing up a very real, very broad problem as an issue for women and people of color so they can get extra bonus points by focusing on it.
Women consider SO an elitist place? People of colour? What colour? Black? White? Marginalised groups? Which groups are those? Are people in SO hostile to Palestinians? Amputees? Such an accusation, where's the data to back it? I'm white and male and completely normal and let me tell you: everybody in SO behaves like a stuck-up twat to me. This has nothing to do with "diversity". Too many people are there sitting in a throne of points and medals and rubbish, closing comments and questions and editing whatever they see fit.
The truth of the matter is that you've had a code on conduct for a long time and everybody ignored it so this post is not going to change that. Why don't you just change the braindead voting system?
I will say that being curt in some contexts has its advantages for the community. Linus is kind of notorious for being a bit ruthless in responding to various requests/suggestions. You have to be to some regard in order to set a high bar and drive success. I've been on SO since the very beginning and have had my own feathers a bit ruffled by responses I got when I was being sloppy. It drives quality. After a minor rebuke or two, I really try to put as much thought and effort into my questions as possible. I'm asking a group of strangers to solve my problem, I have certain responsibility to make it as easy on them as possible.
TL;DR - This exists but effects everybody not just women or poc. It could be more polite, but a bit of harshness drives quality.