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Stack Overflow Admits It Hasn't Been Welcoming To 'Newer Coders, Women, People of Color, and Others'; Outlines How It Plans To Change That (stackoverflow.blog)
Paul Fernhout writes: Jay Hanlon, executive vice president of culture and experience at Stack Overflow, penned a column on the company's blog last week in which he admitted the "painful truth" that "too many people experience Stack Overflow as a hostile or elitist place, especially newer coders, women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups." Hanlon, added, "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. And results matter more than intentions." The post adds: "Now, that's not because most Stack Overflow contributors are hostile jerks. The majority of them are generous and kind. Sure, a few are... just generous, I guess? But our active users regularly express their frustration that we haven't done more to make outsiders feel more welcome. The real problem isn't the community -- it's us:
We trained users to tell other users what they're doing wrong, but we didn't provide new folks with the necessary guidance to do it right. We failed to give our regular users decent tools to review content and easily find what they're looking for. We sent mixed messages over the years about whether we're a site for "experts" or for anyone who codes."
We trained users to tell other users what they're doing wrong, but we didn't provide new folks with the necessary guidance to do it right. We failed to give our regular users decent tools to review content and easily find what they're looking for. We sent mixed messages over the years about whether we're a site for "experts" or for anyone who codes."
"Now, that's not because most Stack Overflow contributors are hostile jerks.
But they are.
It's the internet. Turn off the computer, turn 360 degrees, and walk away.
turn 360 degrees
sit down and turn on the computer. :D
"too many people experience Stack Overflow as a hostile or elitist place, especially newer coders, women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups."
New coders maybe, but are there people creating handle like "chick coder", "black overflow", "wheelchair windows", and other such names that tell everyone that they are a woman, person of color, or in some marginalized group?
This just sounds like more pc bullshit. It reminds me of the NY Times headline for the apocalypse "World ends tomorrow. Women, children, & minorities hit hardest."
How do you know what race or gender anyone is on StackOverflow? Do you have to submit a DNA test? How do they know their demographics? Are they spying on their users somehow?
It's like that for everyone. You don't get to be special from behind your keyboard.
Flip this on its head. Do you think (just as an example) a white male coder asking a question is coddled and treated with respect?
Maybe the culture of elitism / hostility should change, but let's not try to look at this as some SJW cause...
I get that a newbie can be easily identified; but how do you the if posters are " women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups" unless they say so? My guess is that that "most Stack Overflow contributors are hostile jerks" is probably not far off from the mark; because the internet no one cal tell if you are a dog. Recognize the fundamental problem, which is a community that has decided to do things a certain way. I have found, at least in technology oriented forums, there are far more people willing to flame a newbie than answer a question or at least point them to a tread that does. My guess is the flamers are finally feeling superior to someone and need to compensate for their feelings of inadequacy by dumping on others.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
*ouch*
Stack Overflow is a Q&A website how can you know the identity of the person on the other side to be rude based on the above mentioned criteria? Seems to me like its more of a Jerk problem than a "rude to women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups." But I guess using these terms is whats new hip and trendy right now to make the teens smile. like back in the 90's everything was "extreme"
How am I supposed to determine a person's race and gender from their stackoverflow posts? In that context why does any of it matter?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Maybe his 360 identifies as 180. Did you ever think of THAT, you geometrist?!?!?!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
when you can't even answer a question or append a comment without already having a "reputation", yet you can't get a reputation without having answered questions, then the site is blatantly restricting it to those who know how to game the system for reputation points rather than actual knowledge on a particular topic.
I'll still use it, but I've given up trying to figure out what the hell it takes to get them to let me comment on something.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
>Trying to greentext outside of your Mongolian basket weaving forums
Captcha: audacity
How do you know someone is black, a woman or in any other "marginalized group" on the internet UNLESS of course the person says so?
Which doesn't even tell you whether the person actually is in one such group, only that they claim to be. Because... hell, how would you determine that?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
While I do agree that their reputation system could be better, it's not exactly hard to understand, nor is it hard to get reputation. You need 50 rep to comment anywhere, and you can always comment on your own question & their answers. See https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges
I agree that most of the stuff I read on Stack Overflow is pretty high quality. Although it does tend towards the curt. That in itself is no bad thing: when I want an answer, I just want an answer - what buttons to press, I don't want to be lectured on principles, alternatives, the respondent's preferred alternative or what is in vogue that month.
But there are many people who reply, who seem to be mostly concerned with displaying their own talents for creating complexity out of simplicity, (imagined) superiority and opinions-as-fact. Few of them actually contribute anything worthwhile, but they do create a toxic environment that I can see, would deter people less thick-skinned from coming back.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
>imblying imblications
"The real problem isn't the community -- it's us:"
WRONG:
S.O. doesn't have a training program, nor does it spend and measurable effort to establish a communications baseline. The environment on S.O. is organic. This essentially proposes that socially engineering their entire contributor base is somehow a better solution. I assure you, it is not.
S.O. is hostile because it is the sparknotes of code. It attracts people who are batting above their league or are in too deep. Take these people are begin calling them on their bad decisions or problems born from lack of understanding and you end up with what S.O. is essentially.
Padding the walls and giving everyone service animals isn't going fix the fact that the problem is not just a social problem. It's actually barely even that. It's an issue more related to how difficult it is to communicate highly complex issues to people who do not have a full understanding of the foundation material.
S.O. victimizes itself with it's model. This isn't something they can just blame on "issue of the year". It will always be a lion's den, that's how it's made
I really don't know if SuperPHPCoder is white, black, male, female, gay,straight etc. How is identify politics relevant here?
I agree the culture on Stack Overflow can sometimes be annoying, or narrow minded. But why is it just "people of color, women, blah blah blah" that this is a problem for? I'd say it's more a problem that the people attracted to contributing the most are also the most narrow and controlling. But I don't see this as a gender problem.
Can't we just have problems that are problems for everyone, and not ones that are created by "white males"?
So I search for "how do I ", the results has stack overflow at the top, the page shows some technical answers, and I don't even read the usernames or know whether they are dwarves, troll or human, and what gender. So let's say I'm a black woman, can someone show me some examples how I would be insulted by Stack Overflow? Maybe I'm missing something. The only possible offense I see is people solving problems by google search.
Given my handle how do they know whether I'm a [ demographic ] or a [ demographic ]? I mean, google / facebook / doubleclick (bought by google?) et. al. know more about me than they are actually interested in but stackoverflow only knows that I don't have enough reputation for certain things, the questions I've asked and the answers I've offered. And the other stack exchange sites I have accounts with.
Statistically I'm a coder so extrapolate out from that maybe? But, besides newbs looking for people to solve simple problems who haven't even bothered to do a test case how does stackoverflow discriminate? I personally identify as an SJW (stackoverflow does not know this from my redis question) but this comes off as nutty trendy babble.
It used to be that anyone could write an article for Wikipedia, but now you need an "autoconfimed" account (wait a week and make 10 "draftspaced" edits) to contribute. Any popular article will have that restriction, leaving newbie contributors to edit articles on stubs of Iranian villages and obscure insects. If you are not in the clique, expect your edits reverted. Stack Overflow is becoming Wikipedia2, in a bad way.
Too many people experience Stack Overflow as a hostile or elitist place, especially newer coders, women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups.
While I can readily believe it might be a hostile place to newbies, if it is experienced as a hostile place by "women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups" I guess that has nothing to do with Stack Overflow and everything with these people. Why do I believe that? Because gender and skin color are usually not obvious or even visible. Therefore they cannot influence how people treat members of these groups. Some people do use their real names, but due to the international character of Stack Overflow, even for many of these, it is not clear whether they're names for boys or girls.
Also, I can imagine the culture on Stack Overflow to be heavily influenced by Software Engineers - people that are used to giving and receiving no-nonsense feedback by the shipload; you cannot do code reviews if you're going to make a politically correct story out of them. Others may find this direct to-the-point approach to be "hostile". They just cannot handle the truth. Now I happen to be Dutch and apparently we're the most direct people in the world and I feel quite at home on Stack Overflow. I do NOT feel at home with people and cultures where "you are wrong" is considered an insult when in fact it is just a fact. Deal with it, people. It's efficient. Stack Overflow is meant to help your neocortex, not to comfort your cerebellum.
Now that I've RTFA, apparently that's exactly what's going on.
0x or or snor perron?!
Stack Overflow is operated by more than one person? WTF?
Is that a roll of dimes in your pocket or are you happy to see me?
I've used StackOverflow since it was created. It's definitely hostile to people who don't do any amount of effort before posting a question (maybe that's newcomers?) You can't be a contributor on that site for long without getting frustrated at seeing people post homework questions again-and-again. It's even fairly hostile to people who do their own research before posting - if you can't figure something out and you post your question you'll definitely get a "you're doing it wrong" answer, and you'll often get an, "if you'd architected your software completely differently you'd never even have a problem like this" kind of answer.
However, I've never seen racist or sexist content there. Ever. Where did that data come from?
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
... now that's damn funny, I don't care who you are.
I don't go to stack overflow to be welcomed. I go there to get answers to esoteric library and build errors that make no sense, or to copy pasta code that I could figure out myself but I don't want to.
I don't care in the slightest what the color, gender, or sexual persuasion of the person answering the question is. I don't even much care if they are nice or condescending so long as I get an answer.
Stop "white knighting", Jay Hanlon EVP of Culture and Experience of Stack Overflow. Your rhetoric won't get my questions answered more correctly, will probably lead to a degradation in the overall quality of the site, and your job title sounds made up.
ORLY? What if someone is simply offended by everything? You can't stop at feelz... you have to determine a reason. You'll end up making a bunch of changes and the complaints of "muh feelz" will keep rolling in until your site is a shell of its former self.
"Feelings have no 'technically correct'" is one of the dumbest things I've heard in, well, hours.
I have a "Zero Policy" tolerance.
*/
> sit down and turn on the computer
You turn on the computer, but nothing happens.
There is a screwdriver and a blue pencil on the desk. You hear the distant noise of a floor cleaning machine outside the office.
Exits are N, NW, kitchen door, office door.
The large numbers of MRAs and Incels both here and on Stack Overflow pretty much dictate that there will be an air of arrogance, misogyny, and racism, It's pretty sad how much they want to be on the top just so they can put down others. Obviously they didn't hate the class structure in high school , they just hated their position.
Kind of like Slashdot.
See https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges
So first, you have to check your privilege?
Once again Slashdot shows why it's design is genius.
SE displays everyone's rep publicly, and so becomes an MMORPG where people try to game the system as much as possible while hampering other people's efforts to compete with them. It also leads to low quality answers being posted just because, like Slashdot, first post often gets more attention and sets the tone for the whole thing.
Slashdot keeps karma mostly private. You can kind of infer it by seeing if people get a karma bonus, but it's pretty opaque. Even users can't see the actual number, just a vague indicator. Back in the data people used to karma whore by posting the text of TFA, but now Slashdotting isn't a thing any more that's quite rare.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I regret that I didn't join The Well (well.com) in the '80s when I had the chance. It is home to some of the most interesting minds on earth. I could join today, as member # ten million or so, but I would not ever get to interact with those interesting people. They have access to a different area of the site where they can conveniently share their thoughts with other elite members. Common folk can't go there.
And it has to be that way. If I were among the elite, would I want to be bothered by common rabble? I think not! I would go elsewhere in a hurry if that happened. Thus it has always been. Hollywood and sport celebrities and successful musicians all have ways to mingle with each other without the bother of fans and hangers-on.
...omphaloskepsis often...
It seems like this is mostly cause by the Interpersonal Skills Stack exchange, and also by the Politics one, where people go all out on their personal lie and get all butthurt about everything all the time. IPS in particular has to be one of the worst idea for a stack exchange website. I had to filter it out of the hot network questions because it only ever had morons asking about retarded situation, shit that doesn't matter or trying to get their feelings validated .
N
(Filter error: You can type more than that for your comment.)
Your game is buggy.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Best online old and new book and study materials store
Visit this site
www.amazinkart.com
Shame on you
Which is great, except the site pretty much only ever accepts answers from "established" users and ignores people with "low rep" making it nearly impossible to get the rep to be listened to.
Plus, as the summary alludes to, if you're "new" then everyone will rules-lawyer you, being quick to close questions for any reason they can come up with. Ask something that's slightly similar to an existing question? Closed as dupe. Doesn't matter that the previous question is now a decade old and the previous answer doesn't work. Ask something that could require some's opinion? Well, that's offtopic. Has to be a question that has a definitive answer. No asking "what's the best way to do this?" No asking "is there a better solution?"
I'm tired of watching correct answers getting downvoted while a wrong answer gets upvoted and accepted because the wrong answer came from someone with "high rep." There's a reason I don't bother asking questions or participating on StackOverflow.
I have never once even considered any personal information about anyone posting on stack overflow, other than, does the code solve my problem or point me in the right direction.
This sounds like more of the obsurd CoC being shoved down user's throats that git went through for not bending over backwards to appease cringy wierdos and freaks outside of the meritocracy that is ACTUAL CODE, instead based on delusional victimization politics that is the oppression olympics of intersectionality.
Unfortunately this bullshit has invaded technology.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The reason a "cis straight dude" was treated like that is because the more of him there are present at a pride parade, the more mainstream it looks.
Look, no matter how you feel about the sexual issues there, I can pretty much assure you that they celebrated him like that mainly because they felt that his presence was a net benefit to them. Nothing wrong with that, that's normal human behavior. What isn't normal is the expectation that this is just because of you or they're doing it because no benefit is coming their way.
In general, this is how a lot of the vocal women in this field want to be treated. They want people to actively make them feel good, they want people to openly solicit their opinions from day one, etc. I don't think this is necessarily representative of woman as a whole, but the vocal ones are positively addicted to displays of affirmation.
For white and Asian men in this field, that level of affirmation is something we're probably never going to experience. We're closer to "we affirm you by continuing to pay you" than what was described by TFA, and we're fine with that. It is, frankly, bewildering to me, why I should respect someone who publicly displays a need for that level of affirmation. I've worked with plenty of women, and they didn't need it. I've worked with a few who did, and they were terrible on the job. So I don't see any value in this endeavor since it's clearly not scoped to kicking trolls' asses and telling people to focus on being constructive.
As judge said to opposing counsel, grow thicker skin.
The world is not always nice. I don't remember seeing race or sex indicators on post. I see people asking stupid questions and getting roasted, so what? If you don't want to get roasted, don't ask stupid questions.
I had a tech support person who I worked with, I would roast him when he asked stupid questions. After a while, he would come to me with the solution and have me confirm it. Or at least without a solution, he would have come with what had been ruled out and provided useful information that shows that he thought through the problem before coming to me.
Did I mention he was a white male? Or should that matter? Should I treat a woman or a someone of a different race differently by being nicer to them? Should I be nicer to someone based on their race or sex? Isn't that discrimination? Shouldn't I be an asshole to everyone equally and not discriminate? If someone is a dumb ass, treat them so regardless of sex or race?
Fight Spammers!
So in other words: "new coders, women, and people of color are too inferior and need special accommodations, because they're delicate flowers that don't have the capabilities of white men to join a group." - seriously, this special accommodations stuff really has to stop. Each time someone makes a new policy or law to help these people you're basically saying "you're not good enough, so we have to help you." If someone started to do this stuff for me, I'd be offended that they don't think I'm able to do something on my own
SO is a competitive environment, people are participating to get more points. People are obviously not going to welcome new people to compete against. I never liked the idea to begin with. I much prefer mailing lists or forums where people can actually have a conversation and even work together to solve a problem. We're even allowed to ask for opinions on those.
On stackoverflow, it takes 50 reputation points to be able to leave a comment on someone else's post. Getting 50 points is not that hard, at least in my experience. Before asking on stackoverflow, however... do research yourself, and see if you can figure out an answer before asking. If the information you've been able to find isn't helpful, it's good to indicate this in your question, as well as why particular sources were not helpful.
You'll start gaining a positive reputation almost immediately if your questions are clear, and you can show that you've made an honest attempt at trying to figure the answer out for yourself. In particular, when you are first asking the question, check out stack overflow's recommendations on possibly similar questions before you even get to the point of submitting your question. In my experience, as often as not, someone else has had a similar issue and it makes my asking superfluous.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I'm one of those rare people in the technology field who feel that we should try to be more inclusive. I've worked with a lot of people in the past who treat IT as their own little club and don't want to deal with newbie questions. And let's face it; our field doesn't exactly attract gregarious extroverts with amazing people skills the way sales or marketing does. Some interactions I've had over the years make me wonder how certain people get through the non-IT parts of their lives. The reality is that we attract a lot of very smart, opinionated people who don't have much of a filter. It's not everyone, but the egregious examples overshadow everyone else.
An example of this is Linus Torvalds and the Linux kernel developer crowd. Linus is famous for having zero filter whatsoever...usually he isn't wrong, but he certainly has no problem telling people how wrong they are and how right he is. Obviously he's a very smart guy and heads up a critical open source project, but you can be smart and not-a-jerk at the same time.
One other good example is trying to get into the DevOps space from the Ops side. There are tons of examples where people go out of their way to explain things to newcomers and I've been thankful for those while learning. On the other hand, you also encounter the developer types who feel that Ops is encroaching on their club. Sometimes, trying to get a worked example of how to do something in one of the 25,000 tools on offer today is like pulling teeth. I've gotten everything from "RTFM" to "You couldn't possibly understand this, don't bother." I'm one of those weird people who isn't a knowledge-hoarder and will teach anyone who is willing to learn something I know. Butting up against attitude like that is a very good way to discourage anyone from even trying to improve their lot in life.
That's ridiculous and boring. /., a site which removed right-to-left Unicode control codes and thus prevents use of the Hebrew language.
Should I get my dick cut off and get fucked in the ass, then I'll get a trophy?
What next, coffee mugs are racist because they don't make them for left-handed people?
The keyboard is racist : all keys are the same color.
My toilet is racist : it's white and I put brown turds in it. Toilet manufacturer should admit they didn't do enough to encourage black toilets and white turds.
The Al Nusra front is not inclusive enough : it should accept christian and jew terrorists.
Every company should hire 10% minimum communists.
There aren't enough dwarves working in Chinese restaurants, nor Muslims working in pig farms. This must be corrected.
Windows is racist : doors, walls and ceilings are underrepresented.
The C language is culturally intolerant. It doesn't accept my FOR I=1 TO 10 loops from BASIC.
Tampons are sexist : they don't make them for men.
Trump is homophobic : he didn't fuck Macron in the ass while letting the wives have fun between them.
This post is racist, because I am not a black female jew on wheel chair.
You are antisemitic, because you're reading
But you can answer a question (any question) with the starter reputation of 1 point.
You can also ask a question.
If your question or answer get upvoted, you get reputation.
Even if neither of those happens, by asking a question and accepting an answer, you get a minor amount of reputation (2 points).
Because it's run by assholes.
Half or more of the google search results lead to questions that have been closed as being redundant/dupe/inappropriate or have answers leading to some asshole's dead blog article.
or....... not?
Might makes right irrelevant.
Ask a straight forward question like, "how do I make X to cause Y to happen" and receive mostly two kinds of responses.
1. Have you tried using Z? No, I don't own Z I am using X. That's why I'm asking about X.
2. Why do you want to make X do Y? Well, because I want that. What does it m matter to you?
When you are really looking for one of three responses.
1. Do X this way and you can do Y. Best of all answers.
2. X can't do that, here are some alternatives. Second best answer.
3. X can't do that. Good. Short, sweet, to the point and now you won't waste anymore time on it.
"In my experience, as often as not, someone else has had a similar issue and it makes my asking superfluous." Which is a big part of why stackoverflow's reputation system is broken. Know what you're doing? You don't use it. Clueless? Every question that a few minutes on google would have solved up's your points on stackoverflow and gets half a dozen answers, while the questions that are difficult to solve are practically ignored.
The SJW issue aside, as I don't think that will ultimately affect the fate of SO. Too many times reasonable debate on a technical topic is squashed or the wrong answers are accepted. The way the site is structured and its policies means it doesn't iterate on finding the best answer. SO was a good experiment, but without a massive correction it's unlikely to be relevant.
People who are active on the site are rewarded and allowed more power and thus able to be even more active. This would be fine if their actions were always positive and valuable. But really any activity even stupid actions or early enforcement of site policy to the detriment of closing the topic is rewarded.
Luckily this is the Internet and a bit of search engine foo can turn up good leads to answer a question. Even a bad SO with a wrong answer can at least have some leads, so it's not totally worthless. But I frequently have to dig up proper papers for new coworkers who erroneously trust the content on SO.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
It could be that they are a dumb ass or you just need to tell them double dumbass on you.
You might not be able to tell the content of the character, but you can tell the content of the question. Sometimes you
Fight Spammers!
Given name correlates well with gender. Given name and surname correlate significantly with race. The correlation between name and disability is far weaker, limited mostly to certain genetic conditions that run in ethnic groups.
My Stack Overflow name is Damian Yerrick. What can you conclude from this about my gender?
Office Door
You open the office door and step out into the hallway. You see a Giant Troll pushing a floor waxer down the carpeted hallway towards you. His eye's glint maliciously.
To fight Troll turn to page 135.
To feed Troll turn to page 420.
To return to Office and close door turn to page 35
To run down Hallway away from Troll turn to page 67
I did not understand:
N
(Filter error: You can type more than that for your comment.)
Your game is buggy.
Recently a (white male) coder went into the JavaScript chat forum on SO. Just so we're clear, the chats have the same rules of conduct that the main site has.
They were arguing the merits of legalized prostitution on the JavaScript chat. The coder went on to explain that it was (a) wildly off topic and (b) not exactly inviting for a woman coder to go there expecting a discussion about a popular programming only to find a bunch of dudes discussing the finer points of paying women for sex.
The response was highly defensive and they proceeded to kick out the coder pointing out that prostitution in the context they were talking about had nothing whatsoever to do with JavaScript design or implementation.
So yeah, I'd say there was a problem well beyond "coddling."
We can better identify these people with little emblems or logos near their pseudonyms.
For example these ones may be used for a start :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_concentration_camp_badges#Table_of_camp_inmate_markings
How about when you know the answer to someone else's question but you haven't got the reputation required to even comment because you haven't asked anything?
Case in point: a few years back, nowhere was there details on what the quota exceeded error thrown when you try to set a local storage value in Incognito mode was all about. There was a very obscure bit of documentation buried in Apples site (plus it was incomplete). There was a question but no answer, only snarky comments about using localStorage in the first place. I knew the answer but couldn't give it.
Three years went by and then some high rep user posted (verbatim) Apple's documentation paragraph and got shedloads of XP for it, even though it still didn't answer the original question.
I call it XP as that is what it is, a game. And I couldn't even play it. So fuck it, I'll leech answers (when they are actually correct) and contribute nothing to a site that doesn't want me in their clique.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
Very few questions on Stack Overflow or any other Stack Exchange site require reputation to answer. The ones that require 110 reputation to answer have been "protected" because they have attracted low-quality answers from several other users that have since been deleted, often after they have appeared in Hot Network Questions. Even fewer protected questions are unanswered.
Back in the data people used to karma whore by posting the text of TFA, but now Slashdotting isn't a thing any more that's quite rare.
I wonder why quoting relevant bits from the featured article hasn't picked up more in the era of paywalls and of news publishers' animosity toward Firefox Tracking Protection. The way The Atlantic words its adblock wall help page, for example, strongly implies that anti-tracking tools are as harmful to publishers as flat-out ad blocking. Publishers like this could in theory back to a different set of ads that don't stalk viewers across websites to "retarget" them by showing them ads for things they just bought, but they don't feel like doing so because only interest-based ads pay a high enough CPM.
> press button on screwdriver
The screwdriver makes a whirly high pitched noise. It's a Sonic Screwdriver.
"Everybody's naked underneath" -- The Doctor
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Well, what did we think would happen when we taught kids to obsess about this carp?
They've grown up and taken over HR departments, websites ...
The first generation just theoretically "believes" stuff, but wouldn't want to actually see any of it in practice.
The second generation more thoroughly believes it, but still can sometime be reasonable.
The third generation thinks that ordinal numbers are the tools of oppressive old white men, and burns your house down for saying "third".
No it really has not. Slashdot contributing editors strike for click bait articles and emotional crap instead of hard engineering about technological innovations that will affect our lives and professions.
The feel that we are being overwhelmed with emotional slop has more to do with lazy contributors who do not wish to research, place phone calls, and get a real story. They see and read and retain the pattern for 'clicky news media' and then barf that back at us and pretend it has to do with technology.
Do not worry, you are not alone in thinking that this bullshit has invaded technology, it is what you are being led to believe. Think though about your own personal experience, have you ever seen women in any way shape or form harassed at work? Have you ever seen any incidents of racist etc? No, probably none or very few of us ever have. This is a made up problem that is trying to drag itself along the coat tails of the #metoo movement of indignant women. All if this is being done to attain viewers and therefore advertisement dollars.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I tried to play his game, entered N, tried to submit and received an error message on the form.
His game is buggy.
(it was my jab at being funny, clearly it didn't work out.)
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Unfortunately this bullshit has invaded technology.
Indeed. I expect that I'll be lucky to make it to retirement before I'm pushed out of my current tech job for not being of the correct race, sex, or sexual orientation.
Are all visible on the net at first glance?
Oh wait, no they aren't. Unless you publicize them or tout them in your user name or your comments.
Really, nobody gives a shit. Also, lots of people are rude jerks with a few are helpful ones. That's why moderation exists.
If you go to any open bulletin board expecting a welcome sign or some accolades because of your publicized personal attributes, you're in for a rude awakening.
executive vice president of culture and experience at Stack Overflow
uh huh. Man that sounds like a bullshit title. Well, as a primarily crowdsourcing site, that's actually right up Stack Overflow's alley. But... they made a position for this? They literally hired a guy to say these words. What else do you think he was going to say? You know how business people talk a lot about "best practices", ie, doing what everyone else does? "reaching out" is the current established best practice.
[SO is a] hostile or elitist place, especially newer coders
Yeah, I'd have to agree in part. It comes from being down in the trenches on the front line of customer service. And that's what it is, don't bullshit yourself. You're working a help-desk, for free, for magical internet points. And you're damn right I covet those magical points. I lie awake at night scheming how to get more. Respect and acknowledgement of my peers is right up there on Maslow's heirarchy of needs. Anyway, dealing with clueless idiots who don't even know how to ask a question about what they don't know is a pain in the ass and the typical stance is going to be "too broad, closed", and when they do ask a decent question about why they're fucking it up, it's going to be "don't do it that way, do it this way" and they're not going to like it. It's hard being ignorant. You have to work at fixing that. But there really should be a constant reminder to the contributors of SO that... you know... go easy on the idiots. You were an idiot when you started too.
women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups
Full stop. WHAT? How exactly does that happen when the grand sum of identiy on SO is a username? Sweet jesus, no one even KNOWS if you're a woman, person of color, from a marginalized group, or a fucking DOG. Unless you tell them. In which case you've made an effort to play the race card, marginalized card, dog card. And that's a dick move. Because it shouldn't fucking MATTER.
. . . Wait, through this entire thing he never comments on just exactly HOW this would be happening. Just "they report it as such". ....damn dude, if anything that's a rough sociology lesson that... certain groups complain more than others.
"Now, that's not because most Stack Overflow contributors are hostile jerks. The majority of them are generous and kind. Sure, a few are... just generous, I guess?
Bingo. He nailed that one. You know how people get PAID to work help-desk and put up with people's bullshit? You're not doing that here. You are depended upon people's generosity. You just kinda have to hope they're not assholes. Because you're not paying them to not be assholes. You want to enforce kindness? Fuck you, pay me.
where it’s practically impossible to find a single slur – our community takes them down in minutes. We don’t tolerate our female users being called “sweetie” or getting hit on. But we weren’t listening. Many people, especially those in marginalized groups do feel less welcome. We know because they tell us.
hmmm, he's repeated that a lot. Remember that, just because they tell you something doesn't mean it always reflects reality. There are people out there that will ALWAYS comment that they feel marginalized because they have a victum complex. Not many. But anything as big as SO will attract the long-tail of crazy. At this scale you have to look at percentages as a sociological construct. Assuming the rate of batshit insane in society is 3%, if less than 3% of the user-base are complaining about something, hey, you're beating the curve, congrats.
Users aren’t “too lazy” to search; searching takes less work than posting. (No solution suggested, he's just stating it makes him sad)
Haha, wut? Dude, no, you don't get it. Some people SUCK at readi
This is literally the stupidest thing I've ever read.
StackOverflow should fire any employees they have and close their doors because they're idiots.
I knew the answer but couldn't give it.
Of course you could!
Unless the question is locked or protected, anybody -- even unregistered users -- can post an answer.
What you couldn't do was post a comment to the question. But comments are not answers. You are not supposed to post answers as comments.
"Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 58 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment" -- slashdot, driving users away.
The problem with stack overflow is the same problem Wikipedia's users face as they are mercilessly terrorized by hoards of delete happy crusaders.
Everything is closed as "off-topic" and asking nuanced questions requiring any level of specialized experience gets the question closed because crusaders don't understand the question.
I think all of humanity should band together to develop effective measures for repelling terrorist crusaders.
Yeah, "executive vice president of culture and experience" is the first problem; a bullshit role is going to produce bullshit.
I've started disliking stackoverflow because they are too nice to newbies. Its turning into yahoo answers, shit questions, shit answers, people not accepting canonical answers... the real problem is the drop in quality of questions.
In my experience, this isn't PC bullshit. It's a legitimate problem.
Stackoverflow moderation *is* controlled by elitist bastards. The people who spend all day "cleaning up" Stackoverflow instead of using it as a tool for their real job have a very narrow definition of what is appropriate for the site. The vast majority of questions posted nowadays are voted as off-topic even if they are programming related, narrow enough to answer, and broad enough to help multiple users.
Why couldn't you give it? It takes no rep to post an answer.
An answer isn't supposed to be posted in a comment, anyways.
All users can ask or answer questions. New users cannot make comments partially to make sure new users learn that comments are not the appropriate place for answers.
These platforms may not have been built for meritocracy, but they attract it and have fostered it; Meritocracy is an exploration that ultimatly concludes that inferior techniques and approaches exist. Finding that optimal path requires a lot of passionate debate that often has a lot of swearing and cursing in it, and it requires ruthlessly eliminating flawed patterns of thinking, including especially the ruinous ego-driven thought process of young men (which, because those ego driven men work hard, is far superior to insecurity, which doesn't motivate as well; those kids do need motivation and thank god most of them base their ego's on making the world a better place). This is not privelage, it's the application of the scientific method among people who have, for generations, effectively been bred and trained to work this way, and they are not only ridiculously successful but are also leaving society behind. The rest of society calls it "privelage" but really, it's just a hell of a lot of hard work over a very, very long time; intelligence does get passed down generation to generation, and thinking techniques for using that intelligence get taught from parent to child and evolve over generations into something people who don't have the genes and training won't understand or comprehend.
That is producing a deluge of insecure people who fully cognize what "tea time" means (an entire class of people died off) and have decided they want to avoid going that route, but there's a problem. They are insecure to begin with, their minds are untrained and the knowledge and skills they need to really do well in todays society are not there. Their thinking is flawed and often toxic, and when they begin taking the baby steps they should've been taking as a young child, where do they go? They need to find experts to teach them, but they have no money and are often trying to escape destitution, so they go to these platforms. They ask basic questions that are flawed, and become a time-sink, a cost to using the platform.
You do not take human beings out of their homes, cart them by boat to the most technologically advanced country the world has ever seen with a completely incompatable culture, then put them through 300 years of slavery, breeding programs, cultural destruction and subjugation then sign a piece of paper and everything's OK. The real crime is teaching this unbelievably unrealistic history in public schools because what's been done, generationally, is too horrible for everyone to understand and should never be forgotten or repeated, ever, by anyone. You don't take uneducated people, who can't read and can barely do math, in their 20's and 30's at a time when the average lifespan was maybe 45 or 50, who have a completely devistated culture, and just simply teach them for 10 years and bam, they and their kids are fine. Segregation and sharecropping were crimes, but they were also compromises; that's how bad slavery and breeding people like cattle are. It takes 300 years to travel the road to hell, and it's going to take 300 years to get back to normal, and we're only halfway there.
It's 2018. What is it going to take to get them "caught up", and more importantly, what does that even mean and what does it cost?
Political correctness is a collection of superstitions rich people want the rabble to believe, BLM is a movement designed to turn desperate neighborhoods into war zones in order to drive out anyone who has the sense and force those who remain to deal with their bad thinking and problems. White privelage is an opiate that allows non-whites to believe whatever they want to believe and it further isolates them. Feminism, because it sells women on independance, an impossible image of what a male provider looks like, and sexual freedom, has become largely about putting women in disadvantageous situations in order to provide a supply of free, desperate pussy to rich men.
Welcome to the age of psychological warfare.
I don't know what the solutions are. The problems are uncogni
Every tech site has the "RTFM loser!" crowd, always will. I find it amazing that some feel the environment has to be changed to what some like and need. In order to be able to welcoming for all.
;)
As for a tech question, I want a different approach that I did not think about when I am dealing with a problem. I rarely post questions. I search and read, filter out the chaff and usually find what I am looking for.
It seems many that post questions, are just looking for the complete code for the solution to be posted so they can just cut and paste in to their work.
Now I have no problem with that, but I feel it makes them weaker coders.. The real trait I want to see in someone I work with or associate with is, The ability to discuss an approach and then they run with it. And find out if it works in the end or not.
In the end, I don't care if it is Facebook, Twitter or any social media or tech site. They are all loaded with individuals who spew hate. And I don't think that will ever be fixed or changed because that is the real world. And the internet just reflects the real world.
Just my 2 cents
I agree about made up problem. SO should pay its content creators (solution writers) just like how youtube pays its content creators.
OP: Why does my program crash?
other: Have you run it through the debugger?
OP: I'm so upset, I literally just can't.
other: Ah. Well, it is obviously just being mean. /s
OP: ikr? but I really need this to work.
other: Wellll... I looked at your code, and you're trying to call this privileged API, and...
OP: PRIVILEGED? PRIVILEGED? HOW COULD THIS BE? CODE IS SUPPOSED TO BE EGALITARIAN!
other: Ah, I meant to say that when you...
OP: Oh, so, this is MY fault? Why do you hate $VICTIM_TYPE
other: Yeah, imma gonna go get a job down at the pig farm with the guy didn't make his databases webscale ...
What kind of blog would you expect from someone whose title seemingly involves kowtowing to the hashtag du jour? Unsurprisingly the article is short on examples. The probability that a new coder has a question that hasn't already been answered has got to be close to zero. New questions on the other hand should be getting more esoteric. Newer coders on SO should be anonymous almost by definition.
I find that people who ask dumb questions tend to be ignored. SO is a useful tool for many as it has quite a knowledgeable user base but asking that base to cater to people who haven't done a minute of research is ridiculous... they are volunteers at the end of the day!
This Slashdot article has been locked due to receiving numerous low-quality comments.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
White guy with dreads? Not sure who else you were thinking about that actually talks like that.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Maybe his 360 identifies as 180. Did you ever think of THAT, you geometrist?!?!?!
I think you have it backwards, his 180 identifies as 360. That's why he said 360.
Is that they obviously only use Google results for SO. SO added new features a bit ago with non tech related qna. If you check out those threads they are overrun with hostile white nationalist rhetoric.
Personally I applaud SO for acknowledging the issue and wanting to do something positive about it. The excusing the issue and saying it doesn't exist is typical of those that aren't impacted by these issues.
> yet you can't get a reputation without having answered questions
Yet another user who hasn't bothered to read the simple help pages, yet feels qualified to complain about the site being exclusionary. I'm willing to bet that 99% of the people who triggered this blog post are special snowflakes like you.
Here's a clue, since you seem to be sorely lacking in smarts: answers are only one way of earning reputation. I'd post a link to the page that tells you this (https://stackoverflow.com/help/whats-reputation), but I feel it would be wasted on your lazy, barely-literate ass.
If it is so easy to game for reputation, what does it prevents anyone doing it? Sounds more like excuses.
Which is great, except the site pretty much only ever accepts answers from "established" users and ignores people with "low rep"
That is not true at all. I've often upvoted answers from very low point users because they were really good. The problem is if what you are posting is NOT good, it will not get voted up... but that is more a problem for you to learn to write clearly, rather than complaining that people with low points never get voted up.
if you're "new" then everyone will rules-lawyer you, being quick to close questions for any reason they can come up with/
I've never seen questions rejected that should not have been. Care to post an explicit link to any question you feel was closed incorrectly?
Ask something that's slightly similar to an existing question? Closed as dupe. Doesn't matter that the previous question is now a decade old and the previous answer doesn't work.
Why does it matter if the previous question is a decade old? A primary answer not working is an issue but every time I've found something like that, I can pretty much always scroll down and find a newer (though lower scored) answer that DOES work, at which pointI upvote it. Sounds like you yourself are guilty of ignoring answers from people with low scores.
Ask something that could require some's opinion? Well, that's offtopic. Has to be a question that has a definitive answer. No asking "what's the best way to do this?" No asking "is there a better solution?"
Damn straight, THAT is the main reason why Stack Overflow was actually useful from the outset and remain so. It's not a damn chat board for you to war over tech opinion, it's a place where people with issues solve specific problems. Go somewhere else to argue and let the rest of us work.
There's a reason I don't bother asking questions or participating on StackOverflow.
My guess is because you cannot write questions nor answers well, or possibly the same mysterious force that prevents you from being able to register a real user on Slashdot. Usually AC posters are assholes, and if there's one thing Stack Overflow generally rejects it is assholes.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
As a user that joined almost two years ago, and has 35k in one group, and 50k overall, I beg to disagree. It it were as you described, nobody ever would be able to gain points.
"Too many people *experience* Stack Overflow as a hostile or elitist place..."
That's not the same as "Stack Overflow is not welcoming to women and people of color". Yes, often it's obvious that the poster is not a native English speaker. Beyond that it's impossible to tell the gender or complexion of a contributor. It's true that Stack Overflow is not particularly welcoming to newcomers who can't be bothered to read the FAQ. Pointing this out and closing yet another verbatim homework problem is not evidence of hostility.
I've been on SO for years and am one of the top posters to Software Engineering (https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/users/16929/kevin-cline). Content containing racist or sexist remarks, or that impugns the questioner's intelligence, is immediately removed by the community. Answers on Stack Overflow are provided by generous volunteers who try to provide accurate answers to technical questions. Perhaps Jay should create a new forum where novices seeking general advice can be directed before their question on Stack Overflow is closed and deleted.
10 INPUT "Whaddup, dog?: "; U$
20 PRINT "Yo! "; U$
30 INPUT "How many Steel Reserves youz wants, homey?: "; N
40 S$ = ""
50 FOR I = 1 TO N
60 S$ = S$ + "*"
70 NEXT I
80 PRINT S$
90 INPUT "Does youz wants some fried chicken, fool? "; A$
100 IF LEN(A$) = 0 THEN GOTO 90
110 A$ = LEFT$(A$, 1)
120 IF A$ = "Y" OR A$ = "y" THEN GOTO 30
130 PRINT "Latah, yo! "; U$
140 END
I personally haven't seen much in the way of hostile responses. It's certainly a lot better than, say, slashdot, where it often seems like the reasonable posters are outnumbered by the MRAs, Incels and other political extremists that care more about grinding their axe than furthering insightful discussion.
LOL
Indeed. Wikipedia, FreeBSD, now SO. I wonder why....
You enter North Pole. It is cold, but you can see the Sun at this time of the year. On the ground there is snow, but it will soon melt due to global warming.
Exits are N, W, S, E
Not true... in fact, exactly the opposite if a question is interesting.
It's far from impossible to be the first one to ask a particular interesting question... and while it's best to always initially assume that you are not, it's entirely fine to have done the initial research and then explain why existing answers you were able to find were not satisfactory.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
do we blame John Romero for the shitty screwdriver, John Carmack for 360 instead of 180, Trent Reznor for the distant noise, or just Khaaaaahhhhhhhn?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
case in point: any question on the front page.
Because on Stack Overflow you could be the literal dog and nobody would know. As long as your contributions are good, nobody would care either. So is this really a push to be "welcoming" to incompetents? If so, then Stack Overflow loses its value and people with a clue will simply move elsewhere.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
StackOverflow not Racist/Sexist/Ableist. As a middle aged white guy with 35 years experience as a programmer, let me assure you, StackOverflow isn't welcoming to ANYBODY. Every single interaction I've had with the site has been negative. Also, it's not just questions that get beat on, it's answers as well. Nothing like getting crap for answering a question the moderators don't want answered.
And the users themselves are pretty much against this:
https://meta.stackoverflow.com...
I got it, and I thought it was worth a chuckle.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
If the goal of your site is to generate only high quality questions and answers, most people who coming from sites with much more lax rule are going to be caught off guard and feel like the environment is hostel. I know I did. Once I learned that the rules were in place to prevent the site from turning into a bunch of unintelligible questions, and answers that were just comments, the system made sense.
Yes, waiting to be build rep so that you can be 'trusted' enough to do certain things is tough, but again, when you want incentivize community building community, drive-by questioners are inherently going to feel left out.
That's not to say a little AI / quick quiz to make sure first time visitors understand what the expectations are before posting wouldn't help (right now it's to easy to just click though the welcome/help).
They should give the option of allowing potentially silly or stupid questions/answers, just put them on a 2nd-tier. Show the "prime" or vetted messages by default, but have buttons/links to view the 2nd-tier messages.
It's roughly comparable to choosing whether to view Slashdot's 0 and -1 ranked messages. If somebody really wants to see Python code in a goatse shape, so be it.
Table-ized A.I.
Nice!
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Walk into your computer? How is that going to help? You must be one of those "people of color, women or other outliers" I keep hearing about.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I signed up for an account around 2011. Answered a few questions, even had a few answered. I was using Reddit at the time and got sick of the gamification. Why do you need imaginary points to motivate you to help others? Can't we be content with a well-answered question? Displaying numbers creates bias in human behavior. If you want to retain voting but keep behavior as unbiased as possible, then don't display anything next to answers/comments except their vote buttons and the chosen answer.
Secondly, they suffer from the same problem Wikipedia does: territorial editors. I'm not wasting my time with a self-important fuckwit who, instead of moving a discussion or question to the right place, will outright close it and effectively shame you for not knowing the entire set of rules for that topic.
StackOverflow mixes the worst parts of small fan-forums and Reddit, to create a fiefdom and cult of topicality. No thanks.
Not that it matters, but I'm a (poor) white dude. I'm supposed to be part of the "privileged" group and yet... it never materializes. Maybe SO should focus on the whole experience rather than the demographics. Fix the social experience for *everyone* and you won't have to worry about specific demographics. They're a red herring anyway.
captcha: sediment. How fitting.
Fire that white guy who wrote the article. Why is there some white dude posting about white problems when its literally his job to fix it? Seriously. Start by firing him and see how he likes it.
The moderators are certainly a huge problem, it is quite common to find them posting nonsense from the hip and it being massively up voted, while more accurate and well considered answers get voted out of existence.
SO is gamified to the benefit of moderator not high quality content.
Spec||fic |nstances of discr|m|natio|| or G|FO.
To many of those high scoring moderators, have earnt those score answering those trivial homework questions and cannot even comprehend real world issues.
There is particular individual (who shall remain nameless) that continuously advocates using getters and setters in OO code.
When called out as a code smell, your other answers suddenly start attracting downvotes.
It still be amongst me favorite websites laddie.
You've only two years of experience and suddenly you're an expert on everything because you've spent your time gaming SO.
You are not the expert you think you are, which actually makes you the worst kind of coach.
You move north, tripping over a fallen file cabinet.
You are in a narrow corridor with flickering lights. Low growling noises are heard to the north, and the ceiling is wet.
There is an office water cooler here.
Exits are N, S.
(Filter error: You can type more than that for your comment.)
I give up, this game's shit.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
NSA, is that you?
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Last time I used the site I don't remember anything about race or gender. No one was asking, no one was telling. For all I knew everyone on the site was a transnigfag. Are there going to be badges now?
That is a very strange problem you are having. I'm active on a bunch of SO sites and I've never even cared much about what gets your reputation points. Just being active seems to work perfectly well.
From what I've seen, you should be able to answer. Some questions are closed or locked and only people with reputation can answer to those, but there are plenty of questions you can answer even when you just start.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
blah blah blah... you're not being nice to me.... whine...blah blah blah...
TOUGH SHIT. Get out your flame proof suit, put it on, DO THE RESEARCH AND THE WORK, grow a set, learn to code, and not take everything personally. Keep up or fall behind.
Don't like this? Find a different job.
With White nationalists is that they present themselves as really smart and their arguments as logical when they really aren't.
You can detect how people feel about a site and whether they feel it is hostile to groups with a simple survey. :) But please keep explaining to us how there is no way anyone can tell anything about groups of people that use a website and how they night experience it.
Roflcopters take flight at white nationalist idiocy.
Now SJWs gonna ruin my favorite copy pasta site.
Just out of curiosity: How would someone responding to a question on SO even know someone's race or gender? I suppose for people who use their real names that could sometimes give it away, but SO also allows pseudonyms. So it's rather confusing to me how that could be an issue at all.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
"Too many people experience Stack Overflow as a hostile or elitist place, especially newer coders, women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups."
Please take this social justice diversity waffle off this technology forum. I have no idea as to the rationale and where this is coming from. Real coders don't give a fuck as to what 'marginalized group' you belong to, as long as you can code. There was a test some time back where the code review was scrubbed of gender identity. The women coders actually came off worse, as presumably when reviewers know it was a woman they gave them a higher score.
It seems to be one of those universal constants - those most likely to tell others to RTFM are those who most likely need to RTFM themselves - or in the case of StackOverflow - actually bother to read the question before answering and unplug the feelgood finger from their own backsides.
I'll have you know my circles have 720 degrees to them, and I like them that way. Big, beefy circles with style.
You 360 circlelets need not apply. This is the detailed circles club.
By discussing geometry you are culturally appropriating the ancient Greeks and Egyptians. Fascist bigot.
Oddly, I couldn't. No idea why.
As for "no answers in comments", I have found that is one of the most broken rules and usually the most informative responses have tended to be in the form of comments, so I really don't know what to tell you.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
Oh god... the lurking horror. I never got past that cleaning machine
... nobody knows you're a dog.
Unless your username is fidoloveskongs982.
I see all the time answers to very old questions being updated on SO. Sometimes even the questions themselves, with sufficient privilege you can edit that to be more relevant also...
In fact I would say SO is VASTLY more a living document than Wikipedia, because Wikipedia is tainted by rich like moderators that will brook no change in a page that does not match a given ideological construct, evar. Meanwhile SO answers that are visited a lot get a lot of care by a lot of different people who just want the question and answer to be as good as it can be, there the concept of trying to be editorial actually works unlike Wikipedia where it is a big joke.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
When i browse SO I need tech info, anything else is just a distraction.
Experts don't just sign up and give expert advice on a whim.
Most of your experts started off as just 'people who knew how to code'.
They became experts using your site that was open to just 'people who knew how to code' where other 'people who knew how to code' would tell them what they did wrong.
Moderation of your content has been a responsibility since, well, forever ago.
Its the users content, but as long as you host it you get to deal with the first wave of BS, too.
So if you restrict access because you're afraid of being offensive, well... I hope it works out!
You're assuming I'm not Egyptian or Greek. Or identify as either! Now who's the fascist bigot...;)
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
It's a meme you dip
So people don't get fired for asking questions about this in companies? Tech companies don't hire "diversity officers" whose sole job seems to be to give companies that managed to avoid bureaucracy a way to still waste productivity?
I guess I must be imagining things.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Recently started using SO. You can answer questions without any reputation, it's just the commenting that requires reputation.
If my sibling comment is right and the required amount of reputation is 50, you will need to get five upvotes on an answer (10 points each), or say two accepted answers (15 points each) and two upvotes. Getting answers accepted isn't very easy though. A lot of people never accept answers, no matter how good they are. Also, new answerers are sometimes treated with suspicion. IIRC, my first answer ever got downvoted for a minor typo in the code, but most people are more interested in upvoting. I got voted up soon after I fixed the mistake.
Rather than knowing how to game the system, you just have to answer before somebody else does. Usually that means answering within the first 10 minutes or so, but this strongly depends on the subject matter. HTML/JavaScript questions will be answered fast and you will get sniped unless it takes some effort to answer the question.
All fresh questions appear on the homepage, but the homepage also has bumped questions. To get a page with only new questions, go to https://stackoverflow.com/questions
To see the fresh questions in your field of expertise, go to e.g. https://stackoverflow.com/tags/bash or https://stackoverflow.com/tags/java or whatever.
protected by s******n Sep 7 '17 at 18:00
Thank you for your interest in this question. Because it has attracted low-quality or spam answers that had to be removed, posting an answer now requires 10 reputation on this site (the association bonus does not count).
Would you like to answer one of these unanswered questions instead?
On Stackoverflow, a massively overwhelming number of the articles are cut short by nonsense such as the above example. Bid "help" that unfortunately gets ranked way up in the Google results.
We could, as a people, decide to say "fuck identity politics, fuck labels, fuck quotas" and just let people do what they want to do and help anyone get where they want to be and treat people like people.
You know a site is unfriendly when the policy is to NOT start a post with "hello" or end it with "thank you".
This is just some bizarre move to get stack overflow known to the general public. Everyone who has ever used stack overflow knows that nobody knows your gender, sexual orientation or color there and - most importantly - nobody cares. Really, absolutely no one.
Making such starements as attention grabbers is wholely irresponsible IMHO. It discredits both worthwhile effects on the social justice space and solidifies a common notion that nerds and the kind that associare are insensitive jerks. A stupid cliche that could use some social justice work of of very own.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Sorry about the typos.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Go fuck your prolapsed rectum with your Sybian.
I usually post questions on StackExchange sites whenever I run into some really out-there problem I'm struggling with for hours to days. The kinds of problems that maybe 2-3 people actually know how to even find the answer to. Those problems are handled particularly badly by StackExchange because you have to time the post with when people are awake and most active, if you don't the karma whores will quickly lock the post since they can't Google the answer while calling it ambiguous or broad or something of that nature. At that point you can't even repost it without investing considerable time to rephrase it because it will just get marked a duplicate (against the original locked post.) The biggest issue with StackExchange are the groups of people with 10k+ karma running moderation cartels.
every time I see that phrase attached to the top google result for a question, it reminds me of why I hate other programmers.
The least the respondents could do, would be to include a hyperlink to the place where the question was answered.
In this era of computing, the space to store duplicate question threads is of marginal cost, and the dupes dont go away anyhow.
If you don't want to be helpful, by giving a citation to the already existing answer, you could just do everyone who isnt a self-righteous prick a favor and not respond to the duplicates at all.
Not responding has the same effect of not answering a question as from announcing that it has already been answered without reference, therefore the only benefit is to make one's-self feel smugly superior.
I might feel different if the on-site search worked half as well as google used to (before google got in the business of removing links from results, and marketeers gave-'er-hell at optimization).
People go on Slashdot to find answers to coding questions. Why in fucks name would anyone bother (or even feel the need) to identify their gender or race, if they weren't deliberately baiting for a response?
If you're going to start a post (anywhere) with "as a black disabled lesbian", what response are you trying to ellicit in the first place?
Linux has too many white supremicist, patriarchal, heteronormative, cis-normative kernel modules anyway. I for one think the latest USB drivers are bordering on Islamaphobic, if not to say darn right xenophobic.
Lets suppose I am building a coffee shop in my neighbourhood and been running it for a short while.
The neighbours actually where extra nice when I was putting it all together:
- the carpenter gave me tables and chairs;
- the lady next door gave me very good-looking curtains and napkins;
- the baker offered me bread for free for the first couple of months;
- some neighbours also been helping running the shop in their spare time.
Business has been better than never, and I have got a lot of customers!
What should I do now:
Offer discounts for all the neighboors
OR
Has I heard other businesses businesses were doing:
"We particularly welcome people from other neighboords in this establishment, the farthest away the better. Free bread and reserved seats for them."
What is your advice?
Lets suppose I am building a coffee shop in my neighbourhood and been running it for a short while.
The neighbours actually where extra nice when I was putting it all together:
- the carpenter gave me tables and chairs;
- the lady next door gave me very good-looking curtains and napkins;
- the baker offered me bread for free for the first couple of months;
- some neighbours also been helping running the shop in their spare time.
Business has been better than never, and I have got a lot of customers!
What should I do now:
Offer discounts for all the neighboors OR
Has I heard other businesses businesses were doing:
"We particularly welcome people from other neighboords in this establishment, the farthest away the better. Free bread and reserved seats for them."
What is your advice?
I don't care if you're a gay, blackanese, transexual. Did you answer my PROGRAMMING-related question?
Yes? Thank you.
I tend to rant.
SO is already full of questions that can be answered in 10 seconds in a search engine. Pointing that out is not a problem IMHO. When I first started posting I was told the rules and now it's fine. You do have your occasional A@@hole but it's like that in society as well. Must be a new generation thing again, no effort, no reading, do it for me kind of attitude.
Hey now, you can ask or answer questions on SO without gaining any reputation. You do need to get an upvote before you can comment on posts, though.
My vote is to completely eliminate the moderation privileges and downvotes for users. Make the site purely based on positive reinforcement (upvotes) rather than downvotes, or one of the many moderation tags (duplicates, offtopic, unclear, etc). Only offensive questions should be able to be moderated.
"Community standards do not maintain themselves: They're maintained by people actively applying them, visibly, in public. Don't whine that all criticism should have been conveyed via private e-mail: That's not how it works. Nor is it useful to insist you've been personally insulted when someone comments that one of your claims was wrong, or that his views differ. Those are loser attitudes.
There have been hacker forums where, out of some misguided sense of hyper-courtesy, participants are banned from posting any fault-finding with another's posts, and told “Don't say anything if you're unwilling to help the user.” The resulting departure of clueful participants to elsewhere causes them to descend into meaningless babble and become useless as technical forums.
Exaggeratedly “friendly” (in that fashion) or useful: Pick one.'
– ESR, 2001
http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html#not_losing
Wow, I have a SO horror story to tell. For 2 consecutive years I was the #1 contributor on a low traffic Stack Exchange (Ebooks).
I eventually left the site for good after moderators took down too many of my contributions. I just grew sick of it.
The funny thing is, these moderators had no background in the subject; they almost never contributed an answer; they made the SE a worse place.
I finally posted this rant on my own domain because I grew weary of this nonsense: http://www.ghostlypopulations....
The underlying problem is that the moderators fail to understand context of a question and simply view everything as a bunch of rules needing to be followed.
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
You might be eaten by a grue.
Exits are N, W, S, E
If you're at the North Pole, then aren't the exits S, S, S, and S?
There is an opinion that following broader social trends as opposed to just sticking to own business makes big companies more resilient and thus more profitable long term.
So investors are getting this advice and pushing the company boards to invest in so called diversity and inclusion. And from then on it's purely corporate dynamics. Like if you only have a hammer everything looks like a nail to you.
Because we let it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You two should put 2+2 together. Because women were hired for the SO team, and whilst men are required to leave politics, football and religion at the door, nobody requires women to leave feminism at the door.