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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."
Firstly - yeah, how do you tell. StackOverflow doesn't have avatars and the poster's name appears underneath their comment. You'd have to really go out of your way to find out if someone was a women or gay or whatever unless that user is screaming it.
Secondly - what are "newer coders" doing in that group. That's not a protected status or marginalized group (unless they are suggesting that it's got more minorities in it than the rest of stack overflow, but I see little evidence of that). From a business perspective, obviously they need to find a way to engage that group without frustrating more experienced contributors - but that's not really in the same category as being more inclusive to people of color.
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?!
But they are.
I understand where this is coming from. I have use SO for years and built a reputation, but just the other day I posted a careful question of the type I had been doing for years and got downvoted with an "does not show research" justification.
That was irritating. Then I got some answers and it got upvoted again and the answer(s) I got were very useful. As usual. So my latest went from -1 to 0 and the answer I got is now a 3. So the downvote was clearly either disregardable or not justified in the first place.
From repeated experiences like this and complaints I see in places like quora I have the following take on it:
1. There are a lot of jerks with high reputation on SO who just seem to delight on stomping on newbies or actually anyone they can just for the ego stroke.
2. There are a lot of low value posts on SO that actually do deserve to be downvoted simply because they are obviously some junior student programmer who doesn't understand their homework and are hoping that someone will do it for them. I can understand an reasonable veteran getting annoyed at this and responding by acting like a jerk even if they really aren't.
3. SO should implement a "Homework" tag and encourage new users to use it so their posts can be judged by a different standard and filtered out by those who don't want to see it. Or maybe just have a completely separate site for them which is more focused on mentoring than individual Q&A wiki-like articles.
Hostile or not, many of my programming question google searches end up with a SO link and I will continue to use the service. I wish I had the time to contribute more but I don't. At the end of the day I don't care if the guy who answers my question is a jerk or not but over they years SO has given me exposure to some pretty amazing people.
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
I'm glad SO management is finally taking this problem seriously. I have a good reputation on the site (~5000), and the situation has gotten so bad that I literally cannot post a question without it being overwhelmed by trolling "administrators" (other users with too much rep for their own good) within a few minutes. And the worst part is, they barely, if at all read the question before downvoting or trying to close the post.
Some do a search for questions with similar keywords and mark as duplicate and close even if they don't understand the topic area well enough to distinguish the difference between similar posts (same keywords != same question). Even for carefully written, well researched questions, some ask for an impossible bar of pre-preparation, such as making an entire open-source repro project to demonstrate the issue you're experiencing. When you're working for a company making propritary software under tight deadlines, this is an impossible request to fulfill.
And then, of course, once you have a downvote or two, the non-hostile person out there that might actually have the answer to your question no longer gets it highlighted in their feed and never even sees it.
All in all, asking questions on SO has become an absolutely miserable experience.
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.
You're exactly right. Here's whats also happening: people who aren't used to getting treated like white male native English speaking software developers are getting treated like them. I guess they don't like it.
On the bright side, us white male English speaking software developers get to benefit from social justice by proxy because we might be women or minorities.
Anybody going into such a situation with a handle that screams "I AM MINORITY/FEMALE! I AM BETTER THAN YOU!" gets what they deserve. I have zero compassion for this particularly nasty species of jerk.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Why do you want to make X do Y? Well, because I want that. What does it matter to you?
When people ask for help on a specific task, it's possible that the thing they actually want to do is different from the thing they have asked for help on. Providing context for why they want to do that makes it easier to judge if this is happening, and can potentially save a lot of time and frustration in the future.
http://xyproblem.info/
Ask me about repetitive DNA