
Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change - ingve
https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/stack-overflow-isnt-very-welcoming-its-time-for-that-to-change/
======
warent
I've experienced a form of hostility in StackOverflow just recently--as in a
couple of days ago. On a whim, I visited the website and answered a couple
questions, something I'd never done before. I realized it was actually a lot
of fun, so I started rapidly answering the all JavaScript questions I could as
they were asked.

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.

~~~
wwweston
> 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.

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.

~~~
wheelie_boy
I think the core problem is that they've focused too much on being like
wikipedia (a single authoritative, comprehensive answer to each important
question), and not enough on helping people to learn. Over time a site will
grow a culture, and experts on the site will outweigh and overrule experts on
the subject matter. In this case, we're also seeing answerers' needs outweigh
askers'.

If you could only meet the needs of one constituency, I'd say they made the
right choice to favor expert answerers, but I think there are other solutions.

Specifically, if I was trying to fix this I'd set up a two-tier system for
questions and answers. There are lots of people who would be happy to answer
questions, even if the question is a dupe, and even if it's not framed very
well. Give people points for answering these in a kind way, and moderate
around that.

For questions that are sufficiently well-asked, and not duplicates, elevate
them to a wikipedia-like status: allow them to be indexed by search engines,
make them easier to see by the expert answerers that dislike sifting through
novice questions, and moderate them for quality. Give points for people that
review and elevate high-quality, non-duplicate questions, or that edit
questions to become high-quality.

If there are very different personas that you're trying to appease, sometimes
a multi-tier system is appropriate.

~~~
warty
There's nuance here. There are plenty of cases where individuals ask XY
questions, meaning they've gone down a strange route to solve X and now need
help solving Y, and it's always been debated within the community on whether
you should solve X or oftentimes go to great lengths to solve Y. I've seen
many questions where a solution to X is answered and heavily downvoted. I'm
not sure how you resolve that.

Question: How do I #include a 500MB text file in my C++ code as a string? My
compiler explodes when I do this!

Me: Don't do this, your compiler isn't designed for this! Consider loading the
text from a file instead!

Comment: -1 Dude this isn't helpful. What if it's code golf and you need to
include a 500MB text file!? You never know. Get over yourself.

Stuff like this has happened to me so many times.

~~~
bad_user
Your kind of answer is precisely why I find SO useless.

When a user asks a question on X, it would be better to first assume that he
knows what he’s freaking doing.

E.g. yes there might be valid reasons for inserting 500 MB as a string, and
myself as another user desperately searching for an answer to it, I get pretty
annoyed when I see answers for a Y instead.

SO contributors should answer the freaking question first. Can it be done and
how. Otherwise the answer is of no use to people having the same question but
for a different problem. Not to mention that I’ve seen questions closed as
duplicates.

This is why I rarely go to SO for answers. I don’t want an opinionated forum,
I want a mailing list where people assume you’re a grownup that really wants a
solution to the question and not something else.

~~~
sosborn
The people that really need to know how to insert a 500mb string will actually
explain why they need to do so (beyond the typical “it doesn’t work”).

The ones that can’t explain why are almost always unaware of the actual
problem they need to solve.

~~~
bad_user
That's a pretty big assumption on your part. Unless you're going to cite some
SO stats or a study on it, I'm going to assume that you're wrong.

Also good questions shouldn't need explanations for the reason you're trying
to do something. It's not like I'm going to explain my business requirements
on a public forum to complete strangers.

And I'm going to mention this again — if the purpose of SO is to provide a
_searchable database_ of questions and answers, then the answer has to match
the question, not a supposed use case that the user may or may not have,
because that answer is then useless to others.

Of course you can include 500 MB in a separate file and read that. It's
totally uninteresting and now that SO question, along with its non-answer is
showing up in search results, having precedence over others. Which is a pity,
because I thought SO is a place where you can ask questions on obscure
features of the tools we're using.

~~~
warty
> Which is a pity, because I thought SO is a place where you can ask questions
> on obscure features of the tools we're using.

You can, as long as you're clear on why you need these obscure features. So
there's nuance... if someone asks "hi, I want to call `add` like `add(10, 20,
30)` and it's not working" and the answer is "Use `10 + 20 + 30` instead!",
they're answering the intent of the question. They've totally not answered the
original question (I want to call add) but OP is probably misguided.

It'd totally be fair to say "Oh, declare a function with 3 params and return
the sum, or even make a function with variable arguments, then enumerate over
each of them, summing into an accumulator. You can also do this as a
functional reduction. In fact, you can use the mapreduce framework to do this,
and here's how to create an adder circuit" \- Every tidbit of the above is
just... overkill.

I totally empathize with you - it sucks to google "how to do X given good
reasons Y Z" only to find a question "how to do X given terrible reasons A B"
that's answered by "don't do X"! I think the way that's respectful of others'
time is to ask another question and clarify why you truly need X.

If you've taught a multidisciplinary class, you'll have faced people who truly
are confused - EE students who want to understand, for example, "how do I
declare a 20 bit integer in C for this program that's running on Windows?"...

~~~
galangalalgol
This removes a great deal of utility from the site. The majority of value in
the site is not answering one individuals question at a time. Every single
time I ask the search engine a programming question SO pops up as the first
result. Most of the time that link has the answer I need, but every single
time the conversation has violated some inane rule and has been shut down.
Every single time. The rules are wrong, it is that simple.

~~~
mistermann
> Most of the time that link has the answer I need, but every single time the
> conversation has violated some inane rule and has been shut down. Every
> single time. The rules are wrong, it is that simple.

Not 100% for me, but easily 30%. And you can almost taste the authoritarian
arrogance dripping from the moderators words. I was disappointed this
incredibly negative aspect of the site wasn't even mentioned in the post.

------
CM30
> Too many people experience Stack Overflow¹ as a hostile or elitist place

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.

~~~
javadocmd
> But this isn't true...

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.”

~~~
ItsMe000001
> > _Many people, especially those in marginalized groups do feel less
> welcome. We know because they tell us._

This particular argument is really bad IMHO. OP has a point - nobody knows who
you are. That means if some people feel they are treated worse it is due to
their own perception. After all, objectively they are not treated worse then
everybody else. Which to me sounds more like a bias in their perception. They
may have that perception for a reason, but that does not seem to me to be
something attributable to SO.

~~~
jsmeaton
People are not claiming they are being treated worse than less marginalised
people. They’re claiming they themselves do not feel welcome. It’s definitely
all about perception, but that doesn’t mean it’s invalid.

------
legostormtroopr
What the StackOverflow company fails to get is that their product is assholes
and industrial level asshole production.

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.

~~~
singularity2001
Good explanation, but what's the purpose of deleting duplicates and "off-
topic" questions other than saving some SO storage space?

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.

~~~
Izkata
Closing duplicates has multiple uses:

* Directs the asker to a place where their question has already been answered.

* Trains the user to search for an answer instead of blindly asking.

* Gets new answerers to put their answers all in one place so it's easier for others to find later.

* Not deleting it acts as a signpost for people searching on more variations of the same question.

Closing off-topic questions should be obvious: Prevent scope creep and limit
the "broken windows" effect.

------
TravelTechGuy
It's funny reading this article after seeing one of my questions from 2011
edited today, to remove the word "Thanks!" from the bottom.

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 :)

~~~
pishpash
Ratings already take care of curating. Why do you need assholes to curate?

~~~
Ajedi32
Same reason why HN has both up/down votes, and actual moderators.

~~~
singularity2001
And the reason is ... ?

What's wrong with comments just being grayed out, collapsed and moved to the
bottom if they are downvoted for being (too) stupid / trolling / fascist etc?

Moderators could just have more voting power.

~~~
singularity2001
OK reading the Medium post [0] I see that toxic comments were the starting
points here, not the rampant practice of closing questions for dubious
reasons.

[0] [https://medium.com/@Aprilw/suffering-on-stack-
overflow-c4641...](https://medium.com/@Aprilw/suffering-on-stack-
overflow-c46414a34a52)

~~~
shagie
I believe that these comments exist when the other tools of moderation of that
content have run out and the individuals are using the social moderation tools
of comments (that are nearly unlimited) to do that moderation. I further
believe that this rudeness could be reduced by improving the encoded
moderation tools (votes, close, delete) so that such questionsget up front
mentoring or guidance on how to search for the material before they are
posted.

It should also be noted that the author of the post has a consulting service
for improving diversity in the workplace (second paragraph) - there is a
promotional aspect to this post. Stack Overflow, as a very central and large
place that people perceive as being jerks is an easy and large target to push
against.

It is _also_ interesting that while this is being held up as an example (from
the post):

> I used vivid imagery, sure, but you’ll notice that in all my criticism of
> Stack Overflow, I avoid name-calling, personal attacks, and profanity. For
> the record, I do not endorse any criticism of Stack Overflow that resorts to
> these tactics, though I do feel compassion for the pain that leads to this
> kind of response.

that posts on HN (
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16936221](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16936221)
) are _not_ being held up to the same standard of avoiding name calling,
personal attacks and profanity.

------
protonimitate
Glad to see an active approach is being taken. SO is a great resource and
contains some of the best information on the web IRT programming.

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.

~~~
juliangoldsmith
StackOverflow is good if you come there via a search.

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.

~~~
ctack
Agreed. Great if your question has already been answered, but it's less than
useless if you have a question - it's actually counter productive and a waste
of time. I'd given up on questions until seeing this post featured today, so I
decided to ask my 3rd question in 7 years (SO). It was down voted within 5
minutes and no idea why. I'll just roll my own solution based on my own
suggestion.

~~~
ruirr
Have you wondered why there are questions being upvoted just for a minute?

------
ggregoire
I've been an active user for 7 years… and I lived my very first case of
moderator abuse last week.

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...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41250087/how-to-deploy-a-
react-nodejs-express-application-to-aws)

Edit: the question has received 5 votes to reopen, thanks HN!

~~~
cpburns2009
This will be the downfall of Stack Overflow eventually. The rules for question
and answers try to be objective and specific, but they end up being too strict
and are making the site less useful over time.

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.

~~~
Rotareti
> This will be the downfall of Stack Overflow eventually. The rules for
> question and answers try to be objective and specific, but they end up being
> too strict and are making the site less useful over time.

I never really understood what their issue is with broad questions. There are
so many question from the early years of SO which became popular healthy Q&A
despite being "broad" and they are now too popular to get closed by some
trigger happy mod. Some of these questions wouldn't survive a minute if they
were asked today. The typical mod on SO shoots a question dead as soon as s/he
has the slightest suspicion. I guess the site would be better off with (a lot)
less mods.

------
wwweston
For everybody who's questioning the premise that there is some kind of special
hostility to newbies, women, PoCs and others, consider this:

* 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.

~~~
commandlinefan
It just seems strange to say that a universal hostility is somehow worse on,
say, women, than it is on everybody, given that they're admitting it's
universal.

~~~
wwweston
FWIW, it's possible both for hostility to be universal and for it to be harder
on some subgroup if either (a) that subgroup tends to be socialized in such a
way that they're less equipped to deal with/push back on hostility or (b) that
subgroup tends to be more agreeable or threatened by hostility by natural
temperament.

But overall... it doesn't matter much to me. Reducing universal hostility
seems like a positive goal no matter what. Even reducing localized hostility
that I'm not subject to means that the potential pool of contributors who
might be able to help me or others with problems on SO is larger.

------
lukev
> Feelings have no “technically correct.” They’re just what the feeler is
> telling you. When someone tells you how they feel, you can pack up your
> magnifying glass and clue kit, cuz that’s the answer. You’re done.

This is such an important point and missed so often by technical types.
Impressed to hear it stated so clearly here.

~~~
dfundako
SO could make a site with all the same content, downvotes disabled, comments
disabled, and all flags disabled. You would also get random upvotes to
reinforce that your question was good. That would make everyone feel safe and
appreciated since they are unable to see any negative comments towards them
and their question.

~~~
s73v3r_
I think the problem is that too many people think that "giving feedback" and
"being honest" require being mean. They don't.

~~~
dfundako
There are also lots of people who equate receiving negative, honest feedback
with being attacked.

------
Someone1234
> We set them up for failure, and our power users have been asking us to help
> them for ages.

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?"

~~~
deviationblue
The problem is that there is already such a wealth of information that exists
on SO, that some of the beginner questions I had starting out never needed
posting. So I can imagine a similar scenario for someone else, and hope that
they do a little searching around before posting.

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.

------
mmd45
My issue with the site is the opposite.

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".

~~~
the8472
> Please provide a way to flag a question

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)

~~~
mmd45
that invites a debate about the premise. i shouldn't need to justify my
constraints. i should be able to pose a problem and STATE the constraints. if
you don't believe that my constraints are real then you can feel free to not
answer my question but the SO regulars always feel the need to interact even
when they have nothing to add.

~~~
zbentley
> i shouldn't need to justify my constraints.

If you're asking people for free help and to spend their time understanding
how their _relevant_ but not _identical_ experiences may adapt to your
different-but-related problem, then yeah, you might.

If someone, even someone I respect, know personally, and work alongside, comes
up to me and says "I need to install a nearly-20-year-old version of MySQL
next to a modern software stack; help!" [0], I'm going to ask "why?" and maybe
"are you sure there's no other way to approach your goal?" first. Not
presumptuously or because I'm sure I know better, but because a) the answer
will help me better understand the problem and goal, and b) because sometimes
extremely competent, rational people really _do_ overlook the obvious
solutions, sometimes for days/weeks spent beating their head against the wrong
problem.

Sometimes the justification is as simple as "it's a business constraint
imposed from above". Sometimes it's a more complex story. Either way, wanting
to know that isn't asking too much.

[0]:
[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47350382](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47350382)

------
bitL
"Alright, I am a white male. I started programming when I was 10, winning
programming competitions as a kid, after years of hard work, sleepless nights
and study, heavily postponed pleasure and significant relationships, watched
with disbelief what other teenagers do instead of working on their future, I
am now suddenly privileged and biased, because I try to answer Stack
Overflow/Reddit/etc. questions straight to the point, and somebody instead
expects that I will provide them with complete answers including encouragement
for free, instead of them working hard on acquiring the necessary skills. Then
I get blamed that somebody felt bad about themselves, and suddenly I am the
problem."

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.

------
metalliqaz
From the linked article:

> 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.

~~~
fidels
I don't think what they mean is that when a minority goes to SO and they get a
condescending response it's _because_ of their race/ethnicity/gender.

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.

~~~
mistersquid
Yours is a beautifully written and well-considered reply.

As someone who has had both academic and career success (and failures), I know
I am capable as a developer and able to contribute meaningfully to technical
discussions.

As a person of color, however, I have also experienced harassment by police,
suspicious looks from shop owners, and outright hostility from drunken young
men.

So, whenever I encounter what appears to be irrational anger or inexplicable
disrespect, I cannot help but wonder and worry that I'm being poorly treated
because of my race, even when I suspect that's not the case. The person who
treats me poorly need not necessarily be discriminating against me because of
my race, but I can never know and, of course, unless someone is calling me
racial epithets such poorly behaved people are unlikely to admit bias.

It's sort of like being bullied in elementary school, and then high school,
and then college, and then as a working adult. You never outgrow the bullying.
Indeed, the bullying seems to get worse as one matures and loses the youthful
physical characteristics which people often read as non-threatening.

So regardless of intention (and sometimes because of it), feeling
discriminated against can be partly the result of lifelong experience and is
probably fairly characterized as a form of post-traumatic stress disorder.

EDIT: remove two instances of repeated "as"; add "often"; remove comma; change
pronoun.

~~~
manigandham
How does that work if the usernames are anonymous? Saying you feel targeted
does not mean you are being targeted.

~~~
saint_fiasco
I think what they mean is that because of their experiences they have less
_tolerance_ for hostility than you do.

Most of the time people are verbally hostile towards you nothing terrible ends
up happening so you eventually learn to ignore minor hostility. However if you
had the sort of bad experiences minorities have, you would learn to be wary of
minor hostility, as it is often the precursor to major hostility or even
physical harm.

You know how evolutionary psychologists often attribute human stupidity to
adaptations that made sense in prehistoric times? Like your instincts tell you
sugar is good for you because it used to be found mostly on fruit and
nutritious berries, but nowadays the instinct leads you to eat junk food. In
the modern world sugar has nothing to do with high food quality (just the
opposite) but the instinct remains.

For minorities, their instinct to recoil at minor hostility is like that,
except that instead of an ancient adaptation to deal with the life at the
Savannah, it is the habit that helped you keep your sanity this very morning
at the office when your asshole coworker yelled at you. In Stack Overflow
nobody is going to yell at you or punch you or try to get you fired, but the
instinct remains.

~~~
manigandham
If _you_ have less tolerance, how is that anyone else's problem?

Some people are also more prone to sunburn than others, but we don't say the
sun needs to be less bright. You are in control of your own feelings. Yes,
StackOverflow should generally have better language and reworked rules around
content, voting and moderation, but that has nothing to do with how
susceptible you are to comments on the internet.

Also why is it that minorities always comes down to not being male or white
when half the planet is female and most of the planet is not white? Do we not
have any other dimensions? It's a rather meaningless definition when used in
context of a globally accessible site with anonymous user accounts where the
audience already has a major commonality (interest in software development)
that is far more inclusive than any irrelevant physical trait.

~~~
saint_fiasco
If some people are more prone to sunburn than others then you shouldn't have a
developers' technical conference outdoors in the summer on a tropical area.

It may not be your problem or your responsibility to prevent other people's
sunburns (they can buy their own sunscreen, right?) but I hope you realize
that ignoring their preferences is shitty behaviour that will give you(r
website) a bad reputation.

And it's not like protecting your conference from sunlight will benefit only
the albinos. Sunburn resistance is not the same as immunity, so everyone
benefits at least a little. Same with SO, even people with thick skin will
benefit at least a little from a less toxic environment.

~~~
the8472
_> even people with thick skin will benefit at least a little from a less
toxic environment._

That argument is not entirely solid. After all the toxic environment is also
the same environment that provides those answers. So if those two were
positively correlated then decreasing toxicity could also drive down the
answer quality. A cartoony scenario would be a stack overflow where everyone
is busy assuring everyone else that their questions are good, non-stupid
questions and they should be praised for asking them and wasting a lot of time
on those instead of answering questions.

Of course we're unlikely to be at a global optimum here, so things can
certainly be improved. You should just be more careful about analyzing those
tradeoffs.

------
StaticRedux
I always thought Stack Overflow/Exchange should have a way to filter questions
from users with less than a certain amount of karma and any of those
questions/ansers/comments should not be able to be down voted or closed as
duplicate or low quality or off-topic (the most annoying close reason).

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.

~~~
herogreen
Interesting idea, but what if not enough people are going to the "low quality
corner" ? Also it would be nice to know the current percentage of questions
closed because they were classified as duplicate because these would still
have to be closed (unless you want the database to explode).

------
minimaxir
As relevant context, the impetus for this post was likely this Medium article
+ initial tweet, which received replies from SO leadership:
[https://medium.com/@Aprilw/suffering-on-stack-
overflow-c4641...](https://medium.com/@Aprilw/suffering-on-stack-
overflow-c46414a34a52)

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")

~~~
nanis
Here's something she complains about (she posted a screenshot of a comment):
"If the error says line 49, it tells you exactly where the problem lies. If
you post 7 lines of code here, we clearly cannot tell you what the problem is
in line 49." [1]

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](https://twitter.com/aprilwensel/status/974859164747931650)

~~~
jsmeaton
Here’s a slightly different response that is hopefully more welcoming.

“The error message says the problem is on line 49 but you haven’t shown that
line in your example code. Can you please show the code referred to on line 49
and the surrounding code for context?”

I think power users on SO are frustrated by newer users not learning the rules
and not helping themselves. But if you respond with kindness you’re teaching
somebody (and that’s what answerers are there to do!) how to better contribute
in future.

~~~
bitL
Make a Deep Learning bot inserting whatever ornamentation of sentences you
like. You can choose multiple styles and personalize for whatever makes you
feel good. Why require one single standard from everyone? The answer that was
"offensive" was just a standard dry answer like you hear at any top university
everywhere; I found "(brutal) exercise is left to the reader" way more
offensive.

~~~
jsmeaton
No one claimed the answer was offensive. It's unnecessarily condescending
though. If you, as a senior developer, spoke to a junior developer on their
first day at a new job in the same way, they'd be very unlikely to come to you
for help in the future.

Learning how to interpret error messages and extract the important information
is a __skill __. What may seem obvious to you may not be obvious to someone
with barely any experience.

> was just a standard dry answer like you hear at any top university
> everywhere

Which makes it OK? If university lecturers are speaking to new students
__trying to learn __in this way, they shouldn 't be teaching new students.

~~~
bitL
I had gazillion encounters when senior engineers/managers were unbelievably
condescending, especially when they saw a capable competitor in you. The
keyword is resilience, are you going to gain this virtue, or are you going to
complain everywhere and cry on all available shoulders, and then once you get
what you wanted, start backstabbing anyone that helped you to keep them down
and forget about what put you there? I was one of those "useful idiots" that
was helping to my utmost capacity others, wasting time I could have spent
working on bigger projects helping humanity. Every single case when those
people got what they wanted stopped recognizing me and called me only when
they needed something. I am no longer than person.

If you really want something, work on it to the full extent of your own
capabilities, get ready to be beaten from left and right and figure out how to
move forward. Don't expect help from around you. When somebody shows
generosity to you, treat it as a wonderful bonus you try to return somehow
someday, not a requirement.

~~~
jsmeaton
> If you really want something, work on it to the full extent of your own
> capabilities, get ready to be beaten from left and right and figure out how
> to move forward. Don't expect help from around you.

This should not be an expectation of the world, and I'm sorry you've had the
experiences you've had to see it as such. This is exactly what people are
complaining about when they say tech is hostile. It's not just hostile to
minorities, it can be hostile to everybody.

We can choose to do unto others, or we can choose to break that cycle and be
more welcoming. If you're unable to do this on stackoverflow, then may I
suggest you don't participate.

~~~
bitL
Frankly, resilience is necessity. The better you are, the more you are
eclipsing the others, the stronger averse reaction you get everywhere. People
could be your best friends until you escape their crab bucket, then you are
suddenly a well-known enemy and rumors start spreading. I am no longer going
out of my way to help those people; I believe they deserve where they are as
they chose to stay in the bucket of their own loathing. But I am not going to
be nasty to them at all. Their kids still have potential, so those are treated
without indifference.

------
koala_man
I think there's a strong selection bias that makes newbie questions generally
sub-par.

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.

------
bcoughlan
I got downvoted to oblivion the first few times I asked questions on Stack
Overflow. It made me review the FAQ and rules and do my utmost to make it easy
for the people donating their time and expertise to help me.

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.

------
telltruth
There is a time that arrives for many companies where they stop being from
cool, fast, creative, whimsical to... well, just collection of business suits.
So first consider the fact that this is written by Jay Hanlon, EVP of Culture
and Experience. When you see titles like this for individuals working in full
time position at about the highest level of executive staff, you know what I
was talking about. To confirm my fear, I looked up if this EVP guy actually
has account on Stackoverflow. All I can find is jhanlon with no real profile,
no contributions and no real activity. So we indeed have a suit who has no
first hand experience with the product, it’s culture or experience. In typical
fashion of suits, this guy also stays on the safe side of “be kind” without
ever diving in to details, pro and cons, data or real remedies.

If Joel is still running this thing he needs to wake up.

~~~
wool_gather
This, so much. Jay Hanlon is the single worst thing that has happened to Stack
Overflow, hands down. His relentless focus on inclusion is all form and no
function: making things _seem_ nicer, without addressing the actual painpoints
experienced by all users, new or veteran. Those painpoints engender
frustration and lead to the hostility that comes from both sides. For all his
insistence on the primacy of people's feedback, he completely ignores and
dismisses the concerns of existing, engaged users.

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.

------
tqi
"...serves a valuable purpose by keeping signal high, but also suggests that
we just might be Zuckerbots who aren’t even trying very hard to pass as actual
humans"

A snarky dig at someone in a post about how SO wants to be less mean and
snarky is an interesting editorial choice.

~~~
wool_gather
Yes, this VP's disdain for Stack's core users is long-running, deep-seated,
and intensely hypocritical.

------
gavanwoolery
I think "being nice on the internet" is typically a learned skill,
unfortunately. That said, sometimes comments that appear scathing are actually
warranted criticism - perpetuating "bad" knowledge can be very harmful to the
person using it and to those that use their products or code.

~~~
dang
> I think "being nice on the internet" is typically a learned skill

That's really true, not repeated enough, and much deeper than it appears.

------
ryeguy_24
"You're driving our car wrong."

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")

~~~
wvenable
That's interesting since Joel himself made the point about how software design
influences community in 2003:
[https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/03/03/building-
communiti...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/03/03/building-communities-
with-software/)

------
bitL
Note to myself: Stack Overflow is done. When political overtone and insane
mods dominate a platform, it's over. The amount of non-sensical bans/closings
of sensible questions or answers etc. recently is getting out of hand; now
using "privileged", "bias" etc. rhetorics from official top management means C
players made it to the top, as that's the only way they can compete, by making
everybody around feel guilty.

If you complain about hostile environment in computing, go work in finance or
retail for a few years.

------
d--b
It's easy to say that SO is a hostile place when you get downvoted or closed
for asking what seems like a perfectly fine question. This happened to me a
couple of times and is pretty infuriating.

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...

------
benjojo12
Personally, My primary frustration with Stack(Exchange|Overflow) sites is that
I _can_ help people there, but I would need to confirm with them with a
comment... and I can't because I don't have the points (???) to comment ,but I
can answer.

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.

~~~
ygra
Them accepting your answer is your confirmation. Just answer and they usually
will tell you whether it's correct or helpful. Comments should not be
necessary in many cases.

~~~
ceejayoz
I think "confirmation" here means "additional information that confirms my
theory so I can write it up".

------
nagVenkat
Some personal thoughts:

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.

~~~
Pamar
About your last comment: I respectfully disagree. I dabble in a handful of
other stack sites, but the only one I have some real experience with (apart
from SO itself) is the one devoted to tabletop roleplay gaming.

(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").

------
greenhouse_gas
It's for several reasons (and why I personally find reddit (of all places!) a
much more welcoming and useful community):

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.

~~~
porker
Points are damaging, especially the way they've done them on StackOverflow.
It's fine for anyone who got in on it in the early days, or cares about
collecting them. But to make a better community the points need to decay
(exponential decay preferably) so there isn't such a power imbalance.

This would incentivize everyone to gain points by being helpful, rather than
enjoying being an 'authority'.

~~~
greenhouse_gas
The problem with points is that they become _the_ way to gauge your
reputation. In contrast, in fora like HN or reddit (where points are, well,
pointless) the _username_ is the way to gauge your reputation.

So I don't care how many points you have in HN, but people will notice if you
comment a lot and have deep knowledge.

------
PhasmaFelis
The weird thing about SO is that it's not for answering questions asked by
users. It's for pre-emptively answering questions that people might search for
later.

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.

~~~
Pulcinella
Yes there definitely seems to be a very bizarre criteria for questions that I
have never been able to parse. I often see questions closed as duplicates of
another, when they are definitely not. As you said, I have come across exact
questions that I have had, but they were closed three years ago as being too
specific. Questions will be marked closed as being “too opinion based” when
it’s a question like “why are singletons considered something that should be
avoided? Can someone provide me an example of a situation in which using one
would be bad?”

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.

------
alkonaut
I think the whole moderation thing is completely opaque. Last time I discussed
this, and suggested some changes involving various "queues" and "waiting
areas" for review etc - it turned out most of this _already exists_. There is
a whole secret machinery behind the facade that somehow is hidden from users.
I have been a user for years and never seen that. As far as I can _see_ there
are votes, close votes, and then questions just disappear.

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.

~~~
marzell
One of the biggest problems, if not the biggest, for people in tech
(especially new CS students, etc) is knowing how to ask the right questions.
There's several 'layers' of tech-speak that people learn (or not) to adopt,
and many ways of asking essentially the same question.

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.

------
stillsut
Give me a 'noob' view of answers: Disregard (or even reverse) super-user
downvotes on answers, and never delete anything other than spam.

Motivating example: [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5664741/watching-
variabl...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5664741/watching-variables-
contents-in-eclipse-ide). 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.

------
qwerty456127
I can hardly imagine how can StackOverflow be specifically hostile to women or
racial minorities. I have never witnessed anybody being rude to another person
for just their gender or skin colour there. Do anybody even care about who the
author of a question or an answer is? A question is either interesting or
nonsensical or normal, an answer is either useful or not. I don't think many
people care to explore the author profile to write a gender/racially-specific
answer/comment, also nobody is forced to disclose their race, sex or real name
on StackOverflow AFAIK.

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.

------
Slippery_John
It's hard. I used to answer regularly, but it's draining to have to sort
through a flood of bad questions. Rather than turning into a jerk, I just gave
up answering. I feel like the cross-section of people with lots of domain
knowledge and people who have the personality to let them gracefully triage
questions for extended periods is tiny.

------
ajkjk
Ugh. I find the use of `<3` in sentences so incredibly off-putting and fake,
even in an otherwise well-intentioned point. I imagine that it's not just me.

It's gross and corporate when Github does it in their "hosted with <3 at
Github..." as well.

------
Chyzwar
In my opinion SO is not very useful. The longer I code less likely I search
SO. I prefer to read docs, search on issue tracker or just read the source
code.

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.

------
mbfg
I'm curious, how do you know a persons ethnic group or sexual orientation, or
other categorizing group on stack overflow, unless you the person wants that
information out there? I can certainly understand some responses and/or
behavior are troublesome, but i don't get the tie in between the bad answers
tied to certain groups. Their certainly can be a superiority complex problem,
but it seems to be more around people's sense of their mastery of a language,
or technology, or coding style or whatever. I certainly haven't traveled to
all corners of stackoverflow but have contributed a good bit, and yes, my java
is better then your java (or whatever) is present, but is it really tied to
people's identities?

------
kabacha
As a pretty big contributor to stackoverflow I feel that this is getting blown
out of proportion.

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.

~~~
jgtrosh
I pretty much agree with the sentiment, but it seems to me that what you're
condoning (i.e. showing what was done wrong and then the culprit will try
again and improve) is problematic for many newbies. Think of the many students
in math class who fear the idea of being told they're wrong more than the
actual problem. I enjoy building a work environment where I can be expected to
be corrected and I can safely correct people, but that is not a given in a
public forum. I think the answer is to enable newbies to partake in a try-
fail-try cycle but in a much more forgiving/inviting environment. The
difficulty is in improving/designing that without sacrificing the overall
quality of the forum.

------
commandlinefan
More than once, I've googled a question, had the top hit be SO, clicked
through it to see my exact question asked... with the top answer "haven't you
ever heard of Google, n00b?"

~~~
herogreen
I would be genuinely interested in seeing such a question.

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
!).

------
j45
StackOverflow initially was very, extremely warm and welcoming. It's mission
to replace the dodgy EE was noble.

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.

------
ewar-woowar
First time I asked question on SO I got a very curt response "this isn't a
code writing service" and pretty much told to gtfo, but my question was very
much asking for advice about _how to proceed as a beginner_ and I was clear
about that. I was explicit in framing a coding a problem and asking for
direction, not a solution to my homework.

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.

------
6t6t6t6
> Too many people experience Stack Overflow¹ as a hostile or elitist place

Agree

> especially newer coders

Totally agree

> women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups.

What the actual F __*?

~~~
askvictor
see
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16935488](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16935488)

------
JorgeGT
A site whose founder banned greetings isn't very welcoming, go figure.
[https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/93989](https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/93989)

~~~
herogreen
There are no greetings either on HN (just noting).

~~~
mike00632
Hi!

------
crispinb
When I was active on SO I did often see unwelcoming behaviour. Closing
questions as being dupes or offtopic, with no explanatory comments, was the
most common thing. Infuriating too (and not only to new users) was the
proliferation of bad edits, clearly undertaken by clueless people to try and
amass points.

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.

------
DougBTX
Random idea: replace the terminology of "duplicate" questions with "similar"
questions. Add a mechanism where, if an answer could apply to two very similar
questions, show the answer in both places. Rather than closing a question as a
"duplicate", add UI to group "similar" questions, eg, rather than filtering
out "duplicate" questions from search results, instead show "similar"
questions as groups, with the "best" questions and answers shown first in that
group.

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.

~~~
wool_gather
> Random idea: replace the terminology of "duplicate" questions with "similar"
> 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.

------
bigger_cheese
I attempted to use Stack Overflow about a week ago. In regards to a Javascript
problem I was having. I do not know this language very well (at all) When it
comes to JS I am deinately a newbie.

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.

~~~
jacobush
True but you could add your own answer.

------
suavesav
>> (It serves a valuable purpose by keeping signal high, but also suggests
that we just might be Zuckerbots who aren’t even trying very hard to pass as
actual humans)

Why randomly attack Zuck? That is such an unnecessary meanness in an article
about being nice to people :(

------
throwaway613834
> I’d encourage you to take these implicit bias tests, specifically the Race
> IAT and the Gender-Career IAT. If you’re like me, they’re going to hurt.

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...](https://qz.com/1144504/the-world-is-relying-on-a-flawed-
psychological-test-to-fight-racism/)

------
GenericsMotors
A good rule of thumb for asking questions on StackOverflow is to only do it as
a last resort.

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.

~~~
LandR
Exactly this. I've had a couple of issues I've wanted to go to stack overflow
with but in the process of clearly elucidating my problem, I've ended up
solving it / realising what my issue was.

Too many low effort questions make SO a pretty useless place nowadays IMO.

------
ivanhoe
It's hard to make a balance between "anybody can ask anything" and "usable for
professionals to quickly find the best solution". In my (many) years online
I've seen a number of great dev forums becoming popular and then quickly
becoming overwhelmed with newbie chit-chat and same questions asked over and
over. And I don't mean there's anything wrong with it, it's a natural progress
of things, there's always many more beginners at any given time so they
overrun the space and that causes the level of discussions to water down. Of
course beginners deserve their space as much as anyone else, if not more, but
problem is that interests of those two groups don't overlap much, you just
can't a balanced mix of newbie and advanced topics that both side will
appreciate equally, it never works. I think it's the best (only?) solution to
draw a clear line, make SO Start and SO Pro, and then relax the rules on the
Start side, and make them more strict on the side meant for experienced users.
And of course, don't tolerate assholes on either side. Just my $0.02.

------
Rainymood
The problem, and I'm personally guilty of this as well, is that sometimes you
have a small quick problem and you're stuck. You quickly whip up some text and
post it to stackoverflow. Then you get aweful reactions because you didn't put
enough effort in your question and SO isn't going to make your homework. The
point is that a lot of people have quick and dirty questions and don't need a
full answer of half a page. All they need is a push in the right direction but
SO is exactly __not __what that is about. SO is a site for detailed questions
with detailed and high-quality answers. The point is that there are a lot of
"low-hanging" fruit questions and SO is the best place to go, alhtough it is
not meant for that.

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)".

~~~
thinkingemote
I find IRC to be best for quick and dirty questions. But there's still
etiquette and finding the right room

------
dionian
has anyone here ever seen women or people of color treated poorly on SO? I
haven't but maybe I'm not paying enough attention

~~~
bdcravens
I have not, but I _think_ the point they're trying to make (but don't really
agree with) is that of cultural norms, or more specifically, the cultural norm
of overly-assertive, insensitive nerds (most of which who are younger white
males), so that it's an unwelcoming environment to outsiders.

~~~
commandlinefan
But most actual programmers are Indian, not young white males...

~~~
bdcravens
Probably true, but even shifting the demographic mix (with a large % of
interactions on SO still being white male) is male Indian culture and
communication style inclusive towards females and other groups? I may be off-
base, but my experience is that Indian males are very point-blank and strongly
assertive in their communication style, so the underlying assertion about
inclusiveness would still ring true I think.

------
waydowntogo
I tried answer questions the best way I could and I had nice respond from
asker mostly like it

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!

~~~
ruirr
As a non-English living in a country where English is not even an official
language, I strive to write good quality answers, either technically or in
grammar. A good answer takes an investment of time to write. If someone is not
willing to take some time to correct the English and research an answer, it is
natural low-quality answers are not welcomed. It takes less work answering
them ourselves than improving bad answers. Furthermore, what the owners are
asking is that 90% of the users take care of the 10% that generates noise for
free, and are telling the majority of the user base there are others that are
more important than them.

~~~
forapurpose
To reduce redundancy:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16947508](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16947508)

------
deft
Will this stop the closure of questions that are legitimate and haven't been
answered? Whoever is moderating and deciding which questions deserve
legitimate answers is the problem. Everyone is snarky and bossy and can't just
answer the damn question asked. I've noticed this on pretty much every
developer help site, instead of answering what I asked they try giving
advice... I know my issues better than they do, and the implementation details
shouldn't matter. In some cases it's obvious someone is doing something wrong
(let's say rewriting built-in string functions) but those cases are rare.

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.

------
Randgalt
I've always felt the problem was the moderators have too much control. A bad
or dictatorial moderator can ruin an SO board. Hanlon seems to imply moderator
changes but doesn't say anything specifically. So, I'm dubious until this is
directly addressed.

------
politician
There seems to be a recent tendency where web-based business that wish to make
changes to their platforms cite lack of inclusiveness for the main reason for
the change.

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.

~~~
weberc2
I agree that SO has an arrogance problem and the diversity appeal is
pandering, but the "trash fire" characterization is too hyperbolic. The site
is still immensely useful if suboptimal.

~~~
Karunamon
SO is a trash fire that has some really great content down in the basement,
[beware of leopard metaphor elided]. But the problem is the people on the
ground floor that the average new user will run into are, to put not too fine
a point on it, a buncha jerks.

Great place for finding answers to older common questions, really awful place
for asking new ones.

~~~
Someone1234
> Great place for finding answers to older common questions, really awful
> place for asking new ones.

It might just be me, but I've found it substantially harder to find good Q/As
on SO for newer topics and frameworks. You ask about a technology which
existed in 2014 and there are high quality detailed posts all about it, with
different viewpoints, upsides/downsides, etc. But you do the same with a
technology popularized in 2017 (and I'm talking highly popular stuff) and yet
slim pickings from SO.

~~~
politician
I've seen that too, and strongly suspect that's because everyone that tries to
post is beaten down by overzealous mods - so no one tries anymore. I don't.

You have to perfectly craft questions to sneak past the fast-close and you-
should-do-X karma farming traps. It's not worth the time trying to predict how
today's trolls will close your question.

------
corobo
Change closed due to being offtopic

Honestly I just want them to noindex the questions that are closed so that
they stop turning up in Google searches

~~~
ldiracdelta
I still find great results from questions that the Most Holy Keepers Of
Stackoverflow Purity deem "off topic".

~~~
corobo
Oh yeah I more mean the ones where someone doesn't manage to sneak in an
answer before the question police get there

~~~
Ajedi32
Those get automatically deleted after a few months.
[https://stackoverflow.com/help/roomba](https://stackoverflow.com/help/roomba)

~~~
corobo
That works for site maintenance and garbage collection but it doesn't stop
them appearing in search results which is where my problem lies

If I see a StackOverflow result in my search I'd wager there's a more than 50%
chance it's a closed question without an answer. Sometimes I'll grant if it
was marked dupe I may end up finding the answer, but honestly the only visits
I really remember are those that are marked dupe and link to something
sounding similar but completely unrelated

------
WA
I hate if I help people, provide the correct answer but they never accept it.
SO should encourage people to accept the correct answer somehow. Maybe force
them to review answers to their questions before posting new questions.

~~~
Ajedi32
It's already incentivised: accepting an answer gives you +2 reputation.

------
talltimtom
Interesting that they are not doing the extremely simple technical change that
would help out with a lot of the unwelcome signaling: removing negative
scores. There is absolutely no value in a post being -10, it just tells the
poster that 10 unkind people disliked the individual for not knowing the
answer to his own question. Just let new questions sit at 0 if no one upvotes.
New inexperienced users should not feel like they are being put on display for
stupidity when they ask questions for fear of it being a duplicate something
trivial or what else.

------
citilife
> Too many people experience Stack Overflow¹ as a hostile or elitist place,
> especially newer coders, women, people of color, and others in marginalized
> groups.

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.

------
Kagerjay
I have 400ish reputation on stackoverflow

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.

------
bambax
> _only to be told that on Stack Overflow, “please” and “thank you” are
> considered noise_

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).

------
stankypickle
This is just all sorts of ass backward rhetoric that misses the point of Stack
Overflow. People don't go to SO expecting emotional support. They expect
answers to their questions.

------
wiseleo
I answered more than 7000 questions on Quora with a heavily enforced Be Nice
Be Respectful policy. My monthly pageview count is hovering around 200,000 and
I have a lot of followers in addition to the Top Writer title. These questions
often started vague and incoherent because the asker did not know the
vernacular for that problem domain. It is very frustrating to be unable to
express the question in a way an expert can understand. As an expert, I wrote
an initial answer and asked the poster to clarify the question. Once we
clarified the question, I would re-write the question and incorporate some of
the comments into my answer. Other experts can then answer the improved
question without spending mental energy on parsing its meaning.

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. :)

------
asdsa5325
I've never seen minorities being mistreated on stack overflow. Does anyone
have any examples?

~~~
throwawayrt
It was few years ago, I asked a question and posted the code that I had
written on a dynamic programming question. I used to keep a public profile had
around 2k or so.

Dude(with a higher score than I had), left a comment. "You should consider
another profession, you don't have aptitude for programming".

~~~
mikewhy
That just sounds like somebody being a jerk, but I don't see anything about
minorities or calling out PoC in there.

------
mike00632
There seems to be a clear solution: sandbox all questions. Allow 'dumb' users
to ask 'redundant' questions and be answered by helpful people who 'encourage
such behavior'. Then let the zealous content curators search for sufficiently
original or 'valuable' content to add to the archive. Also, if they're going
to blame bad questions on bad searches then perhaps they should rework their
search algorithm.

------
nottorp
I stopped even attempting to answer questions on SO (most of the time i wasn't
succeeding because it seems to be full of full time reputation builders that
copy/paste examples as soon as a question is asked) when I noticed that "teach
the man how to fish" answers are discouraged, called "too generic" and other
crap. Only ready to copy/paste answers that just give the man a fish seem to
be encouraged.

------
dig247
IMO I don't think SO can bounce back in any real way. Years ago I even
attempted to engage on Stack Exchange and it was the same uppity BS in a
garden/home improvement setting.

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.

------
jinushaun
Can’t answer the question of gender and color since I’ve never experienced
those kinds of problems on SO, but the site policies are definitely
unwelcoming. The barrier to entry to ask and answer questions is really high.
You have to earn it by voting on existing answers. I see good questions and
good answers shut down all the time. I kind of wonder what the quality bar is
for these moderators.

------
q12we34rt5
Allow me to translate the article: All you assholes that have been blessing
our site with your free content and gotten us at number 1, 2, and 3 position
on the first page of Google in every country and made us untold millions of
dollars, guess what? We don't you no more. You aren't cool and trendy and you
won't get us any likes on TwitFace so shove off. We have a new demographic.

------
VikingCoder
From an old Reddit post of mine:

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_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2c59xe/what_i_learned_from_answering_questions_for_30/cjc8pr9/)

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.

------
Gene5ive
The support department for the software company I work for basically gave up
having a dedicated team to answer SO questions because the endless bad
attitudes we encountered made it not worth it anymore. Support means
encouragement and we didn't want to encourage people to interact with us on SO
if it meant bringing potential customers into a hostile environment.

------
simonblack
The only time I use Stack Overflow these days is when Google takes me directly
to a single question and answer.

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.

------
swyx
I like the idea of a Beginner box. Github is doing the same with issue
templates. I would suggest going one step further - give a “question quality”
score made up by some algorithm that SO controls. could be machine learned,
could just be a bunch of rules like a Linkedin Profile score. Gamify asking
great questions, not just answering.

~~~
wool_gather
> give a “question quality” score made up by some algorithm that SO controls

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.

~~~
swyx
ok well double down on it. put a big honking number and an incomplete pie
chart that yells at you for not achieving a 100% score on your question.
subtlety is wasted on this stuff.

~~~
wool_gather
Works for me!

------
saltyoutburst
This is a very long-standing problem that Stack Overflow has had so it's good
to see them taking it seriously (regardless of whatever the underlying
motivations may be).

How long-standing you may ask? Here's my answer from _2010_ to
[https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/481/whats-the-
singl...](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/481/whats-the-single-
biggest-barrier-to-entry-on-stack-overflow/50282#50282)

 _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._

------
tradedash
>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.

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.

------
FuNe
So -basically- SO says that a lot of its contributors behave like bullies but,
being unable to actually yell at them (because SO needs them) tries to fuzzy
out/alleviate the issue by taking the blame for them. I don't see any way that
can work out. For what is worth I can testify my own little experience from
that pit. * Contributors who downvote other answers without any
excuse/explanation/commend (I guess it makes their own answer seem better). *
A tiny minority of users ever upvoting (that's a largely thankless community).
* Moderators that are being extra harsh with language usage (I'd say most of
SO users are not native English speakers but this does not stop some native
ones considering themselves somehow superior). *Extended usage of points,
badges and several other facebooky notifications to tap into your dopamine
receptors.

------
bsder
For me, the bigger problem with Stack Overflow is simply that it is not aging
well.

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.

------
flas9sd
I'm sure if the aggregation of all gathered points in user-profiles will be
abandoned or "toned down", some of the powerplay will cede, because it will be
about good answers only and helping each other out, not personalities. I
benefit from that community alot, thank you to everybody who is contributing.

------
Lazare
I think they've identified a major problem with the site, and I wish them luck
changing it.

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.)

------
beevai142
The problem with stackoverflow is that answering questions sucks in the long
term, for most people. It's basically an user support job, and if you are not
suited for that sort of job eventually you start to lose patience with fools,
of which there is no shortage on the internet.

------
kichuku
I really appreciate the SO team in bringing this up and considering this as a
priority issue. Many people have been the "third group" as mentioned by
"sigstoat" above, just because of the hostility.

>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.

------
duxup
As a noob learning programming one of the issues I see isn't as much hostility
as it is the people who seem to vote the most already know the answers.

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.

------
ftarlao
Giving more constructive comments/directions to newbies is important but I
think that an high threshold for questions is still mandatory in SO.

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.

------
monksy
I actually wrote about this in 2012. It's still one of the most popular
articles that I've written today:
[http://theexceptioncatcher.com/blog/2012/09/stackoverflow-
is...](http://theexceptioncatcher.com/blog/2012/09/stackoverflow-is-a-
difficult-community-to-participate-in/#.UEu2l1DNwcU.hackernews)

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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4494016)

------
voidr
SO is a website where people ask technical questions and get technical
answers, by default nothing about a users identity is exposed.

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.

------
PeterStuer
Isn't this the natural evolution of long running public discussion sites? In
the end, the 'Netiquette Nazi's' [1] take over. Because some might be willing
to push back on them, but eventually, the proverbial 'never wrestle a pig, you
both get dirty but the pig loves it' will assign victory by attrition.

[1]
[http://web.archive.org/web/20080701090858/http://redwing.hut...](http://web.archive.org/web/20080701090858/http://redwing.hutman.net:80/~mreed/warriorshtm/netiquettenazi.htm)

------
Antonella247
Hey everyone! Ive read a lot about users complaining about the cultural change
in Stack Overflow. Maybe you're even also annoyed by that change? Help me find
the causes for this change as part of my Master Thesis by sharing your opinion
on this matter. Lets work to together on this to keep the unique community
spirit of SO alive!:) I would appreciate your help!
[https://erasmusuniversity.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_9YvdQ...](https://erasmusuniversity.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_9YvdQcryXcdIXkN)

------
thom
It's very difficult to be optimised for people Googling in their hour of
desperation, while also being a community between the rest of the time. I have
to admit that I'm somewhat hypocritical, in that I get angry when I see
Wikipedia-style policing of content, but I also appreciate when I land on a
well-edited, general-case answer to a problem that I'm having.

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.

------
cmcginty
I think it would help if they placed more limits on how much one person can
interact with the site at a time. If you are someone that sits on SO for 8
hours a day every day, then there is a high correlation you become one of the
people that starts driving new/casual users away.

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.

------
Insanity
It's one of the main reasons I stopped answering questions on SO. I got about
4.1k 'rep'/'points' or whatever they call it, mostly just from old answers
getting upvoted.

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.

------
talltimtom
A side note to the article. We really have come full circle back to the mid
90’ies. What’s that LEGO unicorn doing in the middle of the article? I might
as well have been a flame gif. It’s just a random “I thought this was cool so
I put it right smack in the middle of everything”. Naturally it is much more
calculated today and ofcause it is aimed specifically at popular memes... buck
back in the day flame gifs where popular, and one day we too will grow tired
of unicorn-everything and doge memes. Some faster than others.

------
joeax
Stack Overflow needs to be broken up into smaller, baby SO mini-sites (Bell
telecom style) focused on separate lagnuages or stacks, like one for Node, one
for .NET/C#, one for databases, etc. It seems they are headed this way for
some disciplines like game dev and Unix/Linux, but they need to take it
further and shut down the main SO site and migrate questions to these smaller
sites. The site as it exists today is just one big monolithic mess with too
many busybodies making it awkward for everyone else.

------
biocomputation
Super useful community in some ways. Like many others in this thread, I was
more or less scared off by super users. I know quite a lot about GLSL, shader
programming, and GPU tech, but my experience was similar to what others
describe. I answered questions that were 'poorly asked' or 'not constructive'
and found that threads were locked pretty quick.

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.

------
nojvek
To add a comment you need points, to get points you need to answer questions.
Answering questions is a really really challenging thing to do because for all
sorts of things you'd get kicked out. Not only that, but I went into negative
because someone didn't like my answer about Typescript.

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.

~~~
svick
> Answering questions is a really really challenging thing to do because for
> all sorts of things you'd get kicked out.

You're not going to get kicked out if you honestly try to answer questions.

------
sharpercoder
One thing with reputation systems which is not accounted for I feel in many
websites, is that higher reputation must translate to higher responsibility.
It's nothing other then the good ol' "With power comes responsibility"
adagium, also known reversed as "Power always corrupts".

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.

------
interfixus
When I end up on StackOverflow, it's almost always from something I searched
on DDG. I haven't compiled a statistic, but it seems like most of the actually
useful answers I find there belong to questions marked as _not a good fit_ or
whatever took some snarky moderator's fancy that day. So all too often, even
if get my question answered, I leave the place with a net negative impression.
And don't come back except if directed by DDG.

------
IanSanders
Minorities part is nonsense in my opinion; apart from that I can see both
sides of the 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)

------
tomkinson
Most accurate statement ever. 65% MOD problem, 10% newbs, 10% bad programmers
that think they know and their way is the only way, and 15% policy. IMHO

------
Keyframe
One (maybe interesting) approach would be to reset points and power every so
often. Once or twice a year? For past achievements have them as a badge inside
a profile of a user, not visible on the comments/answers section. That way,
users would have to keep working at maintaining their power status. Not like
it's now, grind to the status and act like a roman senator.

------
edpichler
This phenomenon (hostility for newcomers and down voting good and polite
comments) also happens here on Hacker News.

We (the human being) that must be fixed.

------
hd4
Reading an ever-increasing number of similar articles I begin to wonder if we
have a tech-industry-version of the Overton Window...

------
z-tech
I think part of the problem is reputation points. People are so competitive
for no reason about having the best answer that they're fine writing nasty
notes about the next person's comment. I'm almost wary when I see an applicant
with high SO reputation. It's like, you probably had to walk over a lot of
people to get this.

------
justinzollars
I've noticed this for years. As an early member of Stackoverflow with many
internet points I've abused my privilege to reopen "bad questions". As someone
who started his career in technology as a community college chemistry
instructor, I've never been a fan of shutting people down when they ask a
question.

------
coinerone
And He said: "There can only be ONE Question and ONE Answer in this World of
Code!" \- Stackoverflow Answer LVL 5000+

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.

------
merinowool
For me Stackoverflow long time ago has stopped being a place to get answers.
I'd rather explore problem on my own using books, documentations rather than
search on Stackoverflow or ask there. Low content quality and hostility of the
users is what drowned this what used to be useful site.

------
epigramx
The simple reality is that most moderators on the internet are 18-24 year-olds
that are still too much into a teenage ego trip. More mature people are often
more busy with work or they just don't give a fuck.

That's why the only fora that are fun are either vote-based or almost entirely
unmoderated.

------
lanbanger
I recently had one of my questions that "Closed - opinion based" _six years_
after I asked it, and received several useful answers.

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.

------
twblalock
They can start by accepting that a lot of the good answers on the site are
outdated and aren't applicable to current versions of the language or software
they pertain to. Stop flagging questions as duplicates when the question they
are supposedly a duplicate of is 6 years old.

------
sli
A lot of people are not getting the diversity angle, so I want to call
attention to a comment in this thread explaining it:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16935683](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16935683)

------
zxia31
SO's culture is one of the most toxic among all communities. People hesitate
to ask and hesitate to answer. Announcement like this is more like a "will
fix" comment. The key to solve it is to change the mechanism of some SO's
rating and comment.

------
taw-an
I'll believe they changed when I see it. Pretty sure it's not going to any
time soon.

------
KnightOfWords
I see it as a systematic problem: When everyone's a moderator there is a trend
towards the strictest interpretation of the rules. If five moderators take a
look at a post the first four may see nothing wrong with it, but the fifth may
still flag it.

------
hguhghuff
So much could be fixed simply by removing downvoting, which is no different to
a virtual slap in the face or shout of abuse.

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.

~~~
ldiracdelta
Sneering comments from neckbeards are worse than downvotes to me. Some days
are just Monday and you're not on your game, but that doesn't stop the
neckbeards from trying to light you on fire, despite the fact that you spent
30 minutes massaging the question or half a day agonizing about asking the
question. You know the neckbeards are lurking in their basements.

~~~
grzm
> _" Sneering comments from neckbeards"_

Condescension, like any other dismissal, can be rough and is definitely
detrimental to communication. That said, I encourage you to be the change you
want to see. Name calling as you've done here, and snark, as you've done
elsewhere in this thread, similarly degrade conversation and communication.

~~~
ldiracdelta
I'm not directing this at anyone in particular and so I will use "bad", yet
colorful, words for people behaving bad. No one is going to read these
comments and think they are the neckbeards, but most people who have
participated in Stack Overflow have interacted with a preening, sneering
neckbeard and neckbeards are indeed a problem on Stack Overflow.

~~~
_kst_
Speaking as someone who happens to have a full beard, I find your use of the
slur "neckbeard" insulting. Find another way to say whatever you meant.

------
k__
They have the Wikipedia delete-nazi problem.

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.

------
jpalomaki
Should they limit the amount of ”moderation” like activities one person can
perform? It’s probably not good for the community if there are users who are
mainly contributing by performing housekeeping tasks.

~~~
legostormtroopr
They do. You only get a certain number of review or close actions per day.

------
lza
I enjoy reading the problems and solutions but every time I am trying to
answer a question I get the "You don't have enough karma" lol. I just smile
and move on :)

------
Zamicol
I've had very negative experiences on Stack Overflow, especially when the
"answers" are blatantly wrong. There's little one can do to correct it.

------
tziki
This is definitely not exclusive to stackoverflow. Math.stackexchange has the
same problem, and from what I've heard, so do many other sites of the same
format.

------
Lapsa
oh. hoped for something substantial, worthwhile. Jon Skeet attending pride
parades unfortunately isn't that. early StackOverflow model was way better
(the one w/ code golfing, silly joke questions and whatnot). it was like one
ring to rule them all - THE resource for programmers, flooded with brilliant
minds. now it's just a boring directory of some answers full with zealots.
continuously degrading in quality.

------
cpeterso
GitHub solved their "thank you"/"me too" comment problem elegantly with the
heart and thumbs-up emoji reactions for comments.

------
kizer
As long as they get rid of “marked as not a real question”. Completely
meaningless and the first instance of “hostility” that comes to my mind.

------
janitor61
Even if it's a hostile environment, I do have to give credit to Stack Overflow
for killing expertsexchange... that site was a plague

------
chx
And this doesn't talk about how smaller StackExchange communities become a
toxic fiefdom of their moderators.

------
ryanpcmcquen
Stack Overflow is a reflection of most internet communities, which show that
many people are assholes.

------
singularity2001
If SO is listening, do one thing: Stop closing questions! It is incredibly
frustrating.

------
hyperpallium
Unfortunately, you can't legislate kindness.

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.

------
amelius
Perhaps they can learn from Wikipedia?

~~~
singularity2001
As someone said Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, Stack Overflow is that AND a
forum, so needs other tools.

------
mesozoic
"especially newer coders, women, people of color, and others in marginalized
groups."

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...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-false-science-of-implicit-
bias-1507590908)

------
ggg9990
Websites that build knowledge-based status hierarchies naturally end up being
dominated by insecure know-it-alls.

------
sureaboutthis
I thoroughly disagree that SO is hostile to "everyone". I've been there for
nearly nine years and find that the only people who complain about such
things, as listed here, are those who never took "The Tour" and aren't aware
of the rules for asking and answering questions as out lined in the Help
Center.

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.

~~~
nottorp
The fact that SO isn't a forum any more is a problem because it has stopped
encouraging learning. If you can't discuss the problem, all you'll get is
canned answers for copy/paste monkeys. And then you'll wonder why you can't
hire a competent programmer any more...

~~~
sureaboutthis
SO has NEVER been a forum. That's where most people are confused. It has NEVER
been a platform for open discussion.

~~~
nottorp
Perhaps, but it was more useful when they didn't enforce that.

My recent experience with SO is: i reach it via googling a problem or feature,
I find a question describing my problem that is closed because of being a
duplicate of...

... except the other question isn't a duplicate in subtle ways and has nothing
to do with my problem.

I've also seen moderators encouraging people to post answers as code ready to
copy paste instead of answers helping the recipient to learn something.

How is that useful?

~~~
wool_gather
> moderators encouraging people to post answers as code ready to copy paste
> instead of answers helping the recipient to learn something.

Yeah, this is a slow-motion disaster that's been going on for a while now. I
don't know why so many people have gotten it into their heads that a bespoke
code snippet is unconditionally the right way to answer a Stack question.
Explanations are so much more valuable in the long term.

------
poster123
"Too many people experience Stack Overflow as a hostile or elitist place,
especially newer coders, women, people of color, and others in marginalized
groups."

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.

------
rhapsodic

      > It was hard to accept some of the (valid) criticism,
      > especially the idea that women and people of color felt 
      > particularly unwelcome. 
    

The article fails to offer any examples women or POC were treated more
shabbily because of their gender or color. Does anyone know where this is
coming from?

~~~
vkou
It's not that they are getting worse treatment, it's that that the impact of
the same treatment on them is worse.

~~~
rhapsodic
_> It's not that they are getting worse treatment, it's that that the impact
of the same treatment on them is worse. _

How so? Does the article say?

------
s2g
I had hopes based on the title, but...

> 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.

~~~
abakus
I second that. They are avoiding the real problem by pretending to fight for
social justices.

~~~
s2g
I think they see the problem, they are just dressing it up.

It's a tough problem, since community moderation of this sort seems to almost
inevitably lead to some individuals who take it on themselves to obsessively
shape the site to their own warped vision. Wikipedia has the same issue.
Reddit avoids it by fracturing into small communities, and poor modding leads
to death (or alt-right infiltration, ugh).

If they want to say it is worse for women and minorities, which could be
entirely true, then my worry is they just try to bring those groups up to the
often shitty baseline where perfectly reasonable seeming questions get closed
meanwhile others have people rushing to provide a lousy answer so they can
later expand it into overwrought 1000 word answers.

------
cup-of-tea
Looks like another community is about to get ruined in the name of social
justice.

------
jaghaj662
>Too many people experience Stack Overflow¹ as a hostile or elitist place,
especially newer coders, women, people of color, and others in marginalized
groups.

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?

~~~
wvenable
I don't disagree with the article in general but I was surprised by the women
and people of color comments -- how does anyone know someone's gender or race
on SO?

Of all the sites on the Internet, SO seems to be particularly well suited to
the anonymity of posters -- even more so than HN because HN is more free form
and conversational.

~~~
DanBC
> how does anyone know someone's gender or race on SO?

SO allows people to use an avatar image. I think for some time they were using
images from Gravatar. So people were putting images of themselves in posts; or
they didn't realise their gravatar image would be used.

------
homero
I didn't feel welcome the few times I tried answering questions

~~~
ceejayoz
I'm kinda baffled by this complaint. [edit: OP has _completely_ changed their
post.]

I'd think most new SO users are looking for help or a solution to a problem.
Why was not being able to vote yet so upsetting you abandoned the resource?

~~~
homero
I tried being part of the community

~~~
ceejayoz
A user with zero rep can both ask and answer questions.

Letting them vote seems like it'd quickly result in voting rings via a bunch
of zero rep bot accounts.

------
viggity
Stack Overflow is naturally full of nerds. Nerds are pedants by nature. Are
some answers bereft of friendliness? Of course. Are some answers rude and/or
insulting? Sure, there are millions of them, its bound to happen. But how in
the hell that specifically impacts women or poc more than a random white male
is frankly beyond me.

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.

