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StackOverflow: Impact, Ethics, Personal Responsibility?
Vrtra Theory
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
If you don't know what StackOverflow is, it is a very popular - almost ubiquitous - question and answer site for software developers. Almost any programming-related search on Google will turn up one or more results on S.O. (usually in the top three). Members both ask questions and answer them, gaining reputation points for upvotes from other members. It has been around for a long time (a little over 10 years).
In the last few years, the culture of the site has come under fire by diversity advocates (especially those working for female representation in tech). The article https://medium.com/@Aprilw/suffering-on-stack-overflow-c46414a34a52 pretty much lays it all out there. If you want something much shorter, try https://medium.com/@josephmeirrubin/stack-overflow-is-cruel-and-lazy-426be2d5d661.
Personally, I have complicated feelings about S.O. As an almost-daily contributor (+500 rep in January so far), I'm currently struggling with whether I even want to participate anymore. My rep on the site, which a few years ago would have been bragging rights (even if it is all fake internet points), is now something I won't even mention in certain circles.
This is open-ended, but I'm interested in hearing other people's experiences with S.O., or perhaps sites like it. Or, other communities where you eventually became aware (years after everyone else...) that it was not as welcoming as you thought. And finally, what to do about it, if anything, when the site is entrenched in developer culture and the owners and primary decision makers like things the way they are.
In the last few years, the culture of the site has come under fire by diversity advocates (especially those working for female representation in tech). The article https://medium.com/@Aprilw/suffering-on-stack-overflow-c46414a34a52 pretty much lays it all out there. If you want something much shorter, try https://medium.com/@josephmeirrubin/stack-overflow-is-cruel-and-lazy-426be2d5d661.
Personally, I have complicated feelings about S.O. As an almost-daily contributor (+500 rep in January so far), I'm currently struggling with whether I even want to participate anymore. My rep on the site, which a few years ago would have been bragging rights (even if it is all fake internet points), is now something I won't even mention in certain circles.
This is open-ended, but I'm interested in hearing other people's experiences with S.O., or perhaps sites like it. Or, other communities where you eventually became aware (years after everyone else...) that it was not as welcoming as you thought. And finally, what to do about it, if anything, when the site is entrenched in developer culture and the owners and primary decision makers like things the way they are.
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I mean, an excellent example would be here, where there was a dedicated mod and admin attempt to clean it up. Is it perfect? No. But it is better than it was, and will be better tomorrow, hopefully.
Unfortunately making a site with so much content actually genuinely kind probably costs a lot of money. Well over a million dollars for paid moderators to comb through ancient posts editing them to meet the new code of conduct. I don't know that anyone cares quite that much.
My first impression when I tried to both ask questions and contribute answers was that there was a ton of sideline sniping and downvoting for even the slighest deviation from the largely unspoken standards of posting.
No community that eats its young will survive.
There's a litany of things wrong with that statement, but first and foremost is that he's absolutely wrong. It's his house, and he can very much set standards of conduct for people there and show those who don't abide by them the door. But instead, he chooses not to, and then tries to act like his hands are tied.
Considering the changes that this forum has made and the improvement those changes have made to the atmosphere here at PA, fuck that guy.
And while I've consulted answers thousands of times, I can't imagine asking a question directly. It feels like an invitation to be told I'm an idiot. Particularly because the sort of thing I wind up searching for is simple stuff like how do you strip the blanks from a string in this language again or even just how do I print or something.
You probably shouldn't be asking those sorts of questions without searching first. Simple questions have almost certainly already been asked.
It's about a third as useful to me as it would be if better curated. I frequently find old questions with obsolete answers higher ranked in Google than the equivalent newer question, and unanswered duplicate questions higher ranked than the answered original.
If you answer questions frequently, you will notice "flavor of the month" questions - it's clearly people relatively new to programming, all coming off the same tutorial somewhere, all making the exact same mistake.
Stack wants to be an "encyclopedia of questions and answers" - ideally, we want to boil down all those questions to one canonical Q&A. But the only tool to do that is to "vote to close the question as a duplicate". So the experience for the (presumably earnest) asker is (1) a bunch of negative downvotes at best, (2) a closed question and a "hey idiot try searching next time" at worst.
There's not really a way around it other than to actually answer the question, perhaps by reposting part of the answer and linking to the canonical one. This allows you to control their experience and have it be a gentler, kinder one, but it dilutes the question pool with many answered clones (and doesn't stop a flood of other high rep mods from closing the question anyway).
I don't see how having your question closed with a link to the same question already answered is some horrible experience.
wait why isn't there a way around it
why not merge the new question with the old one, so that a link to the new one takes you to the old one, maybe directly to a bot comment at the bottom of the comments with your question and a note that it was merged and that the answers to this one should help that one
this as many other things seems like a thing SO staff could fix if they wanted to
Because half the time the linked post is a similar, but different enough that it doesn't actually solve the problem, question. Assuming they even bother to link it, instead of just bitching and closing the thread straight off.
That is probably not the tone they're aiming for.
Or actually, maybe it is.
It strikes me that the problem is machoism. Which might seem ironic at first if you don't know a lot about tech/nerd/whatever culture but at this point none of us should be surprised. You can take the jock out of the man but you can't take the toxic masculinity.
I really wish I had more to add to this. I desperately want to see more diversity in my personal workspace, and I'm not sure how to do it.
In my personal experience, most people I've worked with who were rude programmers really did think they were God's gift to a workplace
Edit- having said that I don't want to rule out the incredibly pervasive sexism that does come out of the wider developer community because I have heard some straight up bonkers shit come out of the mouths of programmers Etc.
I think it's just general jockeying for social status via displays of dominance. Usual stuff.
Ugh, I hate those answers.
"Instead of answering your question, let me answer a completely different question."
Sometimes there's a reason for doing it a specific way, or using a specific language.
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
Those aren't exactly without overlap.
Of the very few female programmers I have known, none of them have been the kind that sneer at those who know less than them.
It depends on whether the goal is to answer questions to to help with writing better code. Questioning the method is important for the latter
What's more likely? That an expert user of a language has chosen to do something in a way they don't understand for a good reason, or an inexperienced user posts about their exact current problem with the code they have written or found that may or may not even be a good way of doing things?
"I am having trouble with string pointer manipulation in C++" can usually rightly be answered by "Don't do that, use std::string" 99% of the time
Part of the issue is illustrated in a tweet by co-creator Jeff Atwood in his retrospective on Stack Overflow:
I will give Jeff some credit here - he's framing this as "we're failing to educate users as to how this works," rather than "users are too stupid to understand how this works." But, he's missing the bigger point - if you say "this system is meant to be X," and your users keep saying "we really want it to be Y," at some point you're failing your users by insisting that it should be X.
There are plenty of times when I see "you would never want to that, do this instead," but "this" doesn't work in my circumstances, and I really would like to know how to do "that".
If they want to do that, they can answer the question, and then suggest an alternative.
Because I encounter a lot of "how do I do this in language A?" with "Don't use language A, use language B" or "Install this 3rd party plugin/library to do it for you" as an answer.
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
Take that for what you will.
Don't assume bad intentions over neglect and misunderstanding.
You kind of have to engage in it if you want something like its services because it's too much effort to make your own database when they've got such a head start
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
I don't know that I'd agree with that. It certainly says there's a demand for Y but I don't think that is inherently a reason to have to change.
If anything, they're leaving money and influence on the table by just mailing in the culture component as "not my problem" rather than enforcing some simple "glorious edict" style stufff to move the discourse in a better direction.
The problem is that if they made StackOverflow into an answers service that did not reject duplicates aggressively, then it would be of dramatically lesser value and swarmed by kids looking for the internet to do their homework for them. It’s already halfway there.
Sometimes it’s overzealous in rejections. One time a guy tried to get my asked and answered question thrown out as a duplicate to his asked and not answered question when mine was months earlier. And better. I’ve seen people say “asked and answered” with a link to something that appears to me unrelated. But these are failures that, like the cliquiness and gender issues, can and should be addressed without changing the site’s format.