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> 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 syst

by CM30 9y ago

> 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.

icc97 9y ago
> > 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, They don't say it out in the open, they contact the SO admins directly or through surveys.
- rossdavidh 9y ago
  I think the point was that the people being mean don't know the gender, color, etc. of who they're being mean to.
  - saint_fiasco 9y ago
    Look at it from the other side. The person who is getting mean comments tells someone at SO about it (maybe via a survey). Then the SO admins notice that in the surveys women are overrepresented in the population of "people who complain about hostility". Perhaps minorities already get enough abuse and hostility every day on meatspace, so they are less tolerant of even minor hostility over the Internet. Since they have a limited amount of fucks to give, so to speak, they are more likely to leave the site for good after an unpleasant interaction. Think of minorities as the canary in the coal mine. They are more sensitive, so they start leaving the moment the environment starts to become toxic. Left unchecked, the toxicity will grow and push away everyone else too, so you can't just ignore them for being "snowflakes" or whatever.
    - leereeves 9y ago
      Or: Our culture encourages women and minorities to speak up. White men are expected to endure abuse in silence. Consider how much attention complaints from women and minorities receive, and how little attention (and how much hostility) complaints from white men receive (unless those men are individually powerful, of course). People tend to repeat actions that are effective, so women and minorities learn to speak up, white men learn to keep their complaints to themselves. Edit: I'd like to thank those who downvoted this comment for providing a live demonstration of the phenomenon.
      - saint_fiasco 9y ago
        Right. So let's not do that. Instead of waiting for minorities to speak up, you should complain right away when an online environment turns toxic. Since we were not aware until today that minorities received more hostility on SO, that means users really don't know other users' gender and ethnicity, so it's not like anyone will call you a sissy girl for speaking up.
        leereeves 9y ago
        We have been complaining about hostility on SO for years. It's debatable whether women and minorities actually do receive more hostility on SO, they're more likely to speak up, or SO's management is simply more responsive to their complaints.
        saint_fiasco 9y ago
        It's also debatable whether we are living in a simulation or we are actually brains in a jar, or maybe only you are real and I'm a conversational AI. But it's pointless to debate things that don't and can't change what we choose to do. Notice that all three of your proposed hypothesis can't change the fact that SO isn't very welcoming and they want to change that.
        leereeves 9y ago
- makapuf 9y ago
  But how would you know about reactions to genre, skin color or other group if they weren't mentioned in the first place? And in that case why mention them at all on SO of all sites ? Or maybe it was about Perl coders? Be kind with them please.
  - icc97 9y ago
    My guess is that although you don't know the race/gender of the person there's a chance that they'll use a different questioning style. More senior/regular users then frown upon this different style not necessarily because they're being racist/sexist just because they don't like the way the question was asked.
    - makapuf 9y ago
      Well, in that case you might as well include non-native english speakers.
  - pellucidar 9y ago
    I'm guessing the point here is that the named groups feel particularly unwelcome at SO; this can be the case without any opportunity for or evidence of discrimination. The blog post wasn't all that clear about how they got the data, but they seem to have data to that effect. It might mean that the expectations of the named groups are different from those of the average white male programmer, or it may only mean that everyone is put off by SO equally but SO is no longer willing to alienate everyone if it also means alienating the named groups.
jakear 9y ago
Totally agree. While I do think “newer coders” may very likely feel unwelcome, as an extension of the elitism issue, there’s no mechanism by which “people of color”, “women”, or “minorities” can even be identified... I fear people are subconsciously correlating these groups with “less able coders”. Obviously this correlation serves only to damage.
- Fomite 9y ago
  I should note that on several sites this isn't particularly true - for example, on Academia.SE it's pretty easy to know/guess and the questions are often about these marginalized groups. ...and when they make Hot Network Questions, the influx of people from Stack Overflow is highly correlated with an immediate drop in the quality of answers and essentially the ruination of the question, to the point that several high rep users, myself included, have asked if we could opt out of HNQ as a concept.
- freeflight 9y ago
  > there’s no mechanism by which “people of color”, “women”, or “minorities” can even be identified That's a legit question: If people don't even know what gender you are/what color your skin is, can they actually be intentionally racist/sexist towards you? Which makes me wonder if the actual wrong turn we took was making social media as prevalent as it is today. 20 years ago people on the www were really careful about sharing personal details. People liked their anonymity, there was equality in anonymity! Personal details were only exchanged with those deemed trustworthy enough after enough positive interaction. But these days anonymity is nearly criminalized, while in some circles open self-display on social media is borderline worshipped as it has become the modern equivalent of "making it big on TV". Somewhere in there is a relation between crappy TV casting shows, which most people only watch to see jurors be mean to the applicants, and social media. Nowadays social media are our modern TV casting shows and everybody can participate in being the nasty juror putting applicants down. Note: I know that Stack Overflow ain't considered social media, but these days it feels like these dynamics are pretty much prevalent everywhere.
  - bcoughlan 9y ago
ben509 9y ago
> 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. I'd rather look at the merits. If I recognize a good idea, I'm going to signal that I'm on board with it, so virtue signaling in itself is, at worst, a bit gauche. The reason I'd avoid making these things about social justice is that it's very hard to show that social justice as a concept actually works to promote comity. When you put things in terms of oppressor and victim, you deepen divisions rather than heal them. When you search for reparations and retribution, you have to harm people.
- Reedx 9y ago
  Yeah, putting groups over the individual and dividing the world into oppressed vs oppressor is problematic to say the least. Jordan Peterson is a good resource on this - he's studied it extensively and talks about it a lot. I'd recommend watching his lectures to anyone interested in learning about it.
- your-nanny 9y ago
  I agree that it can deepen divisions, but ignoring the issue doesn't make it go away. Not sure what to do.
- forapurpose 9y ago
  After most of human history, humanity has achieved are astounding, world-changing successes in human rights (including democracy, liberty, etc.), civil rights, women's rights, etc. I see the above as just an argument to do nothing, usually (I can't speak about the parent's motives) made by the enemies of justice, such as the white supremacists, to suit their agenda.
ben509 9y ago
>> Let’s reject the false dichotomy between quality and kindness > Because at the end of the day, we need to kill the 'brilliant jerk' archetype already. We need to recognize that everyone shifts significantly towards the autistic side of the spectrum when they're online. You're looking at text, and trying to infer emotion from words, and do it quickly. That people are as good as they are reflects a fairly amazing amount of patience from the average person. These "jerks" that we're going to brand intolerable and kick out are probably fairly decent people. Honestly, most moderation systems would benefit hugely from a simple "please rewrite this post" feature.
typomatic 9y ago
> 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. Almost everyone on SO uses a variation of their real name. I suspect you are a smart enough person to know that that is far more than enough to engage in racial and sexual discrimination.
- mehrdadn 9y ago
  > Almost everyone on SO uses a variation of their real name. I suspect you are a smart enough person to know that that is far more than enough to engage in racial and sexual discrimination. Note: A significant chunk of them, yes, but not almost everyone, as far as I know. Looking just at the front page right now, out of the 96 users, I see 7 users whose name begins with "user" (like "user2141351"), at least 13 who have names like "xyz" or "NRA" or "SSB" or "BmyGuest" or "saladi" etc... that's at least 20% of my sample.
mark-r 9y ago
To the extent that marginalized groups have a different style of communication than what is expected at SO, they will be treated differently. You don't have to explicitly know their background.
- zeveb 9y ago
  YES WE SHOULD DEFINITELY STRIVE TO REACH OUT TO THOSE WHO HAVE DIFFERENT COMMUNICATION STYLES THAN WE DO. > To the extent that marginalized groups have a different style of communication than what is expected at SO, they will be treated differently.
chefandy 9y ago
Come on now. This isn't some grand scheme to appeal to all of those social justice coders out there. If you're in charge of a huge for-profit online community and your only source for demographic/marketing/public image information is your existing user profiles, you should probably start looking for a new line of work. There are many ways that they could find out what people in different demographic groups think of their service without even looking at their membership database.
psyc 9y ago
Not the point. It isn't that SO is meaner to marginalized people because SO knows who they are. It's that marginalized people are more sensitive to being excluded, and less likely to voluntarily endure the hazing.
- your-nanny 9y ago
  On point.
valtism 9y ago
> 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. Why would you say this with such conviction when you don't know anything about what the team is doing behind the scenes? They do yearly surveys that do include things like culture / minority status as well as questions about inclusion. I can't help but feel like this is just another white male majority site jumping to shut down this type of discussion before it even starts.
- dgreensp 9y ago
  100% this. To say that the author of the post — whose job includes knowing whether women and minorities feel particularly unwelcome or not, based on actual data and talking to them — must have invented this point is rather outlandish. Based on what? An online community can’t possibly be less welcoming to women, for example... because it has screen names? Because people don’t express open disdain for women like they do for newbies? You don’t have to be an expert on this stuff to know not to rush to hasty conclusions, especially in the face of evidence.
  - svick 9y ago
    > To say that the author of the post — whose job includes knowing whether women and minorities feel particularly unwelcome or not, based on actual data and talking to them — must have invented this point is rather outlandish. Based on what? Based on the fact that he did not share a bit of that data or any other kind of evidence. That's especially jarring on the Stack Overflow Blog, which is full of posts that are nothing but data. It does not necessarily mean that there is no data, but it does make me suspicious.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- cup-of-tea 9y ago
  There was no evidence shown, though. That almost certainly means it doesn't exist. Maybe they do know that most programmers fit a particular stereotype (white/asian man), but that isn't because other people find stackoverflow "unwelcoming".
alexbeloi 9y ago
>> especially newer coders, women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups. >But this isn't true. What do you make of their statement that "Many people, especially those in marginalized groups do feel less welcome. We know because they tell us."?
- bayofpigs 9y ago
  It shows those who perceive themselves as victims see the world through victim tainted glasses where clearly none exist. It's frankly disgusting SO encourages such delusions. WTF is a marginalized group on a site where your affiliation is unknown?
your-nanny 9y ago
Do you think that a minority needs to be identified as such to feel unwelcome in a community? That is the premise of your rebuttal
- 6nf 9y ago
  If someone is being treated badly on SO - but there's no way to know the race or gender of that person, how can you say the bad treatment is because of their race or gender?
  - dbt00 9y ago
    You're arguing against something that nobody said. Neither this post nor the people supporting this change on this thread and elsewhere have claimed that SO users admins or moderators are being explicitly or implicitly biased by race or gender in the way they are treating new users. What they did say is that the general level of hostility leveled at all newcomers is something that users who are women and minorities frequently find unwelcoming and makes them feel uncomfortable about using stackoverflow at all.
  - your-nanny 9y ago
    I don't mean to be rude, but I think you are missing the point. Please read my comment again.
catacombs 9y ago
>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. Thank you for saying this. I'm all for welcoming people from all walks of life to the coding community. But who is SO to say these particular people have been demoralized when most of its users are anonymous. Newbie coders asking stupid questions on SO and getting snarky answers -- mostly because they didn't take the five minutes to see if their question was already asked -- transcends race, sexual orientation, gender and nationality.
- kevintb 9y ago
  Doesn’t seem like OP is particularly welcome to people “from all walks of life”. For example, he seems to have a clear bias in denying the existience of toxic gaming communities [1], never mind Gamergate and it’s ties to white supremacy groups [1] https://gamingreinvented.com/nintendoarticles/no-the-gaming-community-is-not-toxic/ https://gamingreinvented.com/nintendoarticles/no-the-gaming-...
brandonjm 9y ago
> No one knows anything about a user on Stack Overflow unless they explicitly announce it StackOverflow has names and profile pictures. Users can choose not to have their own photo or name but some do and provides some identifiability. Though I agree about your general point that the primary and most obvious issue is with new users feeling less welcome than specific groups of people.
closeparen 9y ago
I think the idea is that someone who feels less secure in their place in the programming community may be more powerfully affected by the same level of hostility than a nerdy middle-class white guy who grew up in gamer/internet culture and feels it’s his birthright. It takes a certain sense of entitlement to continue to participate in a community that rebukes you.
- fapjacks 9y ago
  I take it you've never been an outsider in any community you've been forced to be a part of.
- MikkoFinell 9y ago
  No. Entitlement would be to expect a community not to rebuke you despite the fact that you're breaking their guidelines and posting low quality content.
  - closeparen 9y ago
    That's not the flip side, that's literally what I'm saying. To stick with the internet programming community after i.e. getting your StackOverflow question curtly dismissed requires a level of confidence that not everyone has.
    - MikkoFinell 9y ago
      I'd call it humility rather than confidence.
      - closeparen 9y ago
        Absolutely not. The humble thing to do is to correctly interpret the signal that you are not welcome, and leave.
        MikkoFinell 9y ago
        On StackExchange, it's not "you" that isn't welcome, it's low quality content that is unwelcome. The humble thing to do when having been rebuked for posting low quality content is to accept the criticism and improve yourself. Expecting to be treated like a valued member of the community even though you posted some garbage is entitlement.
kevintb 9y ago
Are you a new coder who is female and in a marginalized group? Given your astonishingly ignorant response, I can bet dollars to donuts that you are not.
donmatito 9y ago
> No one knows anything about a user on Stack Overflow unless they explicitly announce it For example, it's quite easy to tell you are a white male. What gave you away? The "I'm not listening and I know better than you that your concerns are not valid" part
- kevintb 9y ago
  Seems like OP has a bias himself thinking toxic gaming communities don’t exist [1] https://gamingreinvented.com/nintendoarticles/no-the-gaming-community-is-not-toxic/ https://gamingreinvented.com/nintendoarticles/no-the-gaming-...
- Veen 9y ago
  If you think that attitude is limited to white males, I’d suggest widening your social circle. It in fact describes most people of every gender and ethnicity.
javadocmd 9y ago
> 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.”
- paulriddle 9y ago
  > We know because they tell us. But not marginalized groups also tell them. Now the question is who tells more? I think marginalized, because they read all these blogs and tweets about being opressed, shift their selective focus to minor injustices, and feel empowered to complain. The SJWs are the complainers, they are the warriors, that's why you hear from them more than from anybody else. They have the momentum of complaining, so they are more likely to continue to complain. I'm certain most of them are addicted to complaining and will never stop, no matter what. Also, minorities have higher social status within those ranks, and therefore more likely to be SJW. So it's not necessarily Stack Overflow's fault at all.
  - CobrastanJorji 9y ago
    The only information we have from the blog post is that Stack Overflow has survey results telling them that marginalized groups feel particularly unwelcome, unless you have some other source of info I didn't notice. From that single datum, you've concluded that this is because marginalized groups must over-complain, and in fact, you claim to have achieved perfect certainly that most members of marginalized groups have an addiction to complaining and will never stop, and therefore the only sensible course is to completely disregard any survey results saying that marginalized groups feel particularly bad about anything. That's a pretty strong conclusion from hearing about a brief allusion to the results of a survey you didn't see. Your argument says a lot about you and very little otherwise.
lifeformed 9y ago
> No one knows anything about a user on Stack Overflow ???? There are names and profile pictures.
tallanvor 9y ago
> 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. I understand what you're saying, and while you're correct, it doesn't change the fact about how people feel in a community. There are really two groups here: newer coders, and marginalized groups within our profession. Newer coders are less confident, and when you see the types of responses you see on SO, you're less likely to want to participate - nobody likes being told that they're stupid or not working hard enough, as an example. For marginalized groups - primarily women, people who aren't white, and the LGBT communities, they already have to deal with sexism, racism, homophobia, and other forms of discrimination in their daily lives. When you have to worry about hostility in general, trying to participate in a community that does have a reputation to being hostile is even more difficult and frustrating. The fact that you don't know who an SO user is unless they volunteer the information simply doesn't matter. > Trying to make this about minorities feels like a desperate attempt to fit in with the 'social justice' sphere, and to virtue signal to people on sites like Twitter. This isn't about trying to make it only about minorities, and the post doesn't give that impression. It is, however, about making sure that everyone feels welcome, and that has to include thinking about and understanding WHY minorities aren't feeling welcome, even if there isn't explicit discrimination against them on the site.
kevintb 9y ago
It’s hard to take your claims seriously, when you proudly and publically publish meandering rants (linked to your HN account) about how gaming communities are in no way toxic, while completely denying Gamergate, its ties to white supremacists and a wealth of other examples [1]. [1] https://gamingreinvented.com/nintendoarticles/no-the-gaming-community-is-not-toxic/ https://gamingreinvented.com/nintendoarticles/no-the-gaming-...
- kadenshep 9y ago
  There's always a trail or sign with these people.
  - ruirr 9y ago
    There is also a trail to politically correct to the nauseous people like you probably. Fanatics at both extremes are not nice.
    - dang 9y ago
      You can't attack someone like this on HN regardless of how strongly you disagree with them. We ban accounts that do this, so please don't do it again. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - kadenshep 9y ago
      "Both sides" are not equivalent in any objective way.
- dang 9y ago
  Pursuing someone's personal details or history and bringing them into HN threads as ammunition isn't allowed here, regardless of how wrong someone is. Whatever edge you gain in an argument is wiped out by the damage you do to the community by attacking someone this way. Please don't do it, and especially please don't do it in a bunch of different posts, as you did in this case.
DanBC 9y ago
> No one knows anything about a user on Stack Overflow unless they explicitly announce it, Stack Overflow allows people to use photographs in their profile. You're saying that women and POC are not allowed to be themselves. That they cannot use features everyone else is free to use. That they must lie about who they are in order to participate on the Internet

by CM30 9y ago

icc97 9y ago

> > 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, They don't say it out in the open, they contact the SO admins directly or through surveys.

rossdavidh 9y ago
I think the point was that the people being mean don't know the gender, color, etc. of who they're being mean to.
- saint_fiasco 9y ago
  Look at it from the other side. The person who is getting mean comments tells someone at SO about it (maybe via a survey). Then the SO admins notice that in the surveys women are overrepresented in the population of "people who complain about hostility". Perhaps minorities already get enough abuse and hostility every day on meatspace, so they are less tolerant of even minor hostility over the Internet. Since they have a limited amount of fucks to give, so to speak, they are more likely to leave the site for good after an unpleasant interaction. Think of minorities as the canary in the coal mine. They are more sensitive, so they start leaving the moment the environment starts to become toxic. Left unchecked, the toxicity will grow and push away everyone else too, so you can't just ignore them for being "snowflakes" or whatever.
  - leereeves 9y ago
    Or: Our culture encourages women and minorities to speak up. White men are expected to endure abuse in silence. Consider how much attention complaints from women and minorities receive, and how little attention (and how much hostility) complaints from white men receive (unless those men are individually powerful, of course). People tend to repeat actions that are effective, so women and minorities learn to speak up, white men learn to keep their complaints to themselves. Edit: I'd like to thank those who downvoted this comment for providing a live demonstration of the phenomenon.
    - saint_fiasco 9y ago
      Right. So let's not do that. Instead of waiting for minorities to speak up, you should complain right away when an online environment turns toxic. Since we were not aware until today that minorities received more hostility on SO, that means users really don't know other users' gender and ethnicity, so it's not like anyone will call you a sissy girl for speaking up.
      - leereeves 9y ago
        We have been complaining about hostility on SO for years. It's debatable whether women and minorities actually do receive more hostility on SO, they're more likely to speak up, or SO's management is simply more responsive to their complaints.
        saint_fiasco 9y ago
        It's also debatable whether we are living in a simulation or we are actually brains in a jar, or maybe only you are real and I'm a conversational AI. But it's pointless to debate things that don't and can't change what we choose to do. Notice that all three of your proposed hypothesis can't change the fact that SO isn't very welcoming and they want to change that.
        leereeves 9y ago
makapuf 9y ago
But how would you know about reactions to genre, skin color or other group if they weren't mentioned in the first place? And in that case why mention them at all on SO of all sites ? Or maybe it was about Perl coders? Be kind with them please.
- icc97 9y ago
  My guess is that although you don't know the race/gender of the person there's a chance that they'll use a different questioning style. More senior/regular users then frown upon this different style not necessarily because they're being racist/sexist just because they don't like the way the question was asked.
  - makapuf 9y ago
    Well, in that case you might as well include non-native english speakers.
- pellucidar 9y ago
  I'm guessing the point here is that the named groups feel particularly unwelcome at SO; this can be the case without any opportunity for or evidence of discrimination. The blog post wasn't all that clear about how they got the data, but they seem to have data to that effect. It might mean that the expectations of the named groups are different from those of the average white male programmer, or it may only mean that everyone is put off by SO equally but SO is no longer willing to alienate everyone if it also means alienating the named groups.

jakear 9y ago

Totally agree. While I do think “newer coders” may very likely feel unwelcome, as an extension of the elitism issue, there’s no mechanism by which “people of color”, “women”, or “minorities” can even be identified... I fear people are subconsciously correlating these groups with “less able coders”. Obviously this correlation serves only to damage.

Fomite 9y ago
I should note that on several sites this isn't particularly true - for example, on Academia.SE it's pretty easy to know/guess and the questions are often about these marginalized groups. ...and when they make Hot Network Questions, the influx of people from Stack Overflow is highly correlated with an immediate drop in the quality of answers and essentially the ruination of the question, to the point that several high rep users, myself included, have asked if we could opt out of HNQ as a concept.
freeflight 9y ago
> there’s no mechanism by which “people of color”, “women”, or “minorities” can even be identified That's a legit question: If people don't even know what gender you are/what color your skin is, can they actually be intentionally racist/sexist towards you? Which makes me wonder if the actual wrong turn we took was making social media as prevalent as it is today. 20 years ago people on the www were really careful about sharing personal details. People liked their anonymity, there was equality in anonymity! Personal details were only exchanged with those deemed trustworthy enough after enough positive interaction. But these days anonymity is nearly criminalized, while in some circles open self-display on social media is borderline worshipped as it has become the modern equivalent of "making it big on TV". Somewhere in there is a relation between crappy TV casting shows, which most people only watch to see jurors be mean to the applicants, and social media. Nowadays social media are our modern TV casting shows and everybody can participate in being the nasty juror putting applicants down. Note: I know that Stack Overflow ain't considered social media, but these days it feels like these dynamics are pretty much prevalent everywhere.
- bcoughlan 9y ago

ben509 9y ago

> 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. I'd rather look at the merits. If I recognize a good idea, I'm going to signal that I'm on board with it, so virtue signaling in itself is, at worst, a bit gauche. The reason I'd avoid making these things about social justice is that it's very hard to show that social justice as a concept actually works to promote comity. When you put things in terms of oppressor and victim, you deepen divisions rather than heal them. When you search for reparations and retribution, you have to harm people.

Reedx 9y ago
Yeah, putting groups over the individual and dividing the world into oppressed vs oppressor is problematic to say the least. Jordan Peterson is a good resource on this - he's studied it extensively and talks about it a lot. I'd recommend watching his lectures to anyone interested in learning about it.
your-nanny 9y ago
I agree that it can deepen divisions, but ignoring the issue doesn't make it go away. Not sure what to do.
forapurpose 9y ago
After most of human history, humanity has achieved are astounding, world-changing successes in human rights (including democracy, liberty, etc.), civil rights, women's rights, etc. I see the above as just an argument to do nothing, usually (I can't speak about the parent's motives) made by the enemies of justice, such as the white supremacists, to suit their agenda.

ben509 9y ago

>> Let’s reject the false dichotomy between quality and kindness > Because at the end of the day, we need to kill the 'brilliant jerk' archetype already. We need to recognize that everyone shifts significantly towards the autistic side of the spectrum when they're online. You're looking at text, and trying to infer emotion from words, and do it quickly. That people are as good as they are reflects a fairly amazing amount of patience from the average person. These "jerks" that we're going to brand intolerable and kick out are probably fairly decent people. Honestly, most moderation systems would benefit hugely from a simple "please rewrite this post" feature.

typomatic 9y ago

> 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. Almost everyone on SO uses a variation of their real name. I suspect you are a smart enough person to know that that is far more than enough to engage in racial and sexual discrimination.

mehrdadn 9y ago
> Almost everyone on SO uses a variation of their real name. I suspect you are a smart enough person to know that that is far more than enough to engage in racial and sexual discrimination. Note: A significant chunk of them, yes, but not almost everyone, as far as I know. Looking just at the front page right now, out of the 96 users, I see 7 users whose name begins with "user" (like "user2141351"), at least 13 who have names like "xyz" or "NRA" or "SSB" or "BmyGuest" or "saladi" etc... that's at least 20% of my sample.

mark-r 9y ago

To the extent that marginalized groups have a different style of communication than what is expected at SO, they will be treated differently. You don't have to explicitly know their background.

zeveb 9y ago
YES WE SHOULD DEFINITELY STRIVE TO REACH OUT TO THOSE WHO HAVE DIFFERENT COMMUNICATION STYLES THAN WE DO. > To the extent that marginalized groups have a different style of communication than what is expected at SO, they will be treated differently.

chefandy 9y ago

Come on now. This isn't some grand scheme to appeal to all of those social justice coders out there. If you're in charge of a huge for-profit online community and your only source for demographic/marketing/public image information is your existing user profiles, you should probably start looking for a new line of work. There are many ways that they could find out what people in different demographic groups think of their service without even looking at their membership database.

psyc 9y ago

Not the point. It isn't that SO is meaner to marginalized people because SO knows who they are. It's that marginalized people are more sensitive to being excluded, and less likely to voluntarily endure the hazing.

your-nanny 9y ago
On point.

valtism 9y ago

> 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. Why would you say this with such conviction when you don't know anything about what the team is doing behind the scenes? They do yearly surveys that do include things like culture / minority status as well as questions about inclusion. I can't help but feel like this is just another white male majority site jumping to shut down this type of discussion before it even starts.

dgreensp 9y ago
100% this. To say that the author of the post — whose job includes knowing whether women and minorities feel particularly unwelcome or not, based on actual data and talking to them — must have invented this point is rather outlandish. Based on what? An online community can’t possibly be less welcoming to women, for example... because it has screen names? Because people don’t express open disdain for women like they do for newbies? You don’t have to be an expert on this stuff to know not to rush to hasty conclusions, especially in the face of evidence.
- svick 9y ago
  > To say that the author of the post — whose job includes knowing whether women and minorities feel particularly unwelcome or not, based on actual data and talking to them — must have invented this point is rather outlandish. Based on what? Based on the fact that he did not share a bit of that data or any other kind of evidence. That's especially jarring on the Stack Overflow Blog, which is full of posts that are nothing but data. It does not necessarily mean that there is no data, but it does make me suspicious.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
cup-of-tea 9y ago
There was no evidence shown, though. That almost certainly means it doesn't exist. Maybe they do know that most programmers fit a particular stereotype (white/asian man), but that isn't because other people find stackoverflow "unwelcoming".

alexbeloi 9y ago

>> especially newer coders, women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups. >But this isn't true. What do you make of their statement that "Many people, especially those in marginalized groups do feel less welcome. We know because they tell us."?

bayofpigs 9y ago
It shows those who perceive themselves as victims see the world through victim tainted glasses where clearly none exist. It's frankly disgusting SO encourages such delusions. WTF is a marginalized group on a site where your affiliation is unknown?

your-nanny 9y ago

Do you think that a minority needs to be identified as such to feel unwelcome in a community? That is the premise of your rebuttal

6nf 9y ago
If someone is being treated badly on SO - but there's no way to know the race or gender of that person, how can you say the bad treatment is because of their race or gender?
- dbt00 9y ago
  You're arguing against something that nobody said. Neither this post nor the people supporting this change on this thread and elsewhere have claimed that SO users admins or moderators are being explicitly or implicitly biased by race or gender in the way they are treating new users. What they did say is that the general level of hostility leveled at all newcomers is something that users who are women and minorities frequently find unwelcoming and makes them feel uncomfortable about using stackoverflow at all.
- your-nanny 9y ago
  I don't mean to be rude, but I think you are missing the point. Please read my comment again.

catacombs 9y ago

>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. Thank you for saying this. I'm all for welcoming people from all walks of life to the coding community. But who is SO to say these particular people have been demoralized when most of its users are anonymous. Newbie coders asking stupid questions on SO and getting snarky answers -- mostly because they didn't take the five minutes to see if their question was already asked -- transcends race, sexual orientation, gender and nationality.

kevintb 9y ago
Doesn’t seem like OP is particularly welcome to people “from all walks of life”. For example, he seems to have a clear bias in denying the existience of toxic gaming communities [1], never mind Gamergate and it’s ties to white supremacy groups [1] https://gamingreinvented.com/nintendoarticles/no-the-gaming-community-is-not-toxic/ https://gamingreinvented.com/nintendoarticles/no-the-gaming-...

brandonjm 9y ago

> No one knows anything about a user on Stack Overflow unless they explicitly announce it StackOverflow has names and profile pictures. Users can choose not to have their own photo or name but some do and provides some identifiability. Though I agree about your general point that the primary and most obvious issue is with new users feeling less welcome than specific groups of people.

closeparen 9y ago

I think the idea is that someone who feels less secure in their place in the programming community may be more powerfully affected by the same level of hostility than a nerdy middle-class white guy who grew up in gamer/internet culture and feels it’s his birthright. It takes a certain sense of entitlement to continue to participate in a community that rebukes you.

fapjacks 9y ago
I take it you've never been an outsider in any community you've been forced to be a part of.
MikkoFinell 9y ago
No. Entitlement would be to expect a community not to rebuke you despite the fact that you're breaking their guidelines and posting low quality content.
- closeparen 9y ago
  That's not the flip side, that's literally what I'm saying. To stick with the internet programming community after i.e. getting your StackOverflow question curtly dismissed requires a level of confidence that not everyone has.
  - MikkoFinell 9y ago
    I'd call it humility rather than confidence.
    - closeparen 9y ago
      Absolutely not. The humble thing to do is to correctly interpret the signal that you are not welcome, and leave.
      - MikkoFinell 9y ago
        On StackExchange, it's not "you" that isn't welcome, it's low quality content that is unwelcome. The humble thing to do when having been rebuked for posting low quality content is to accept the criticism and improve yourself. Expecting to be treated like a valued member of the community even though you posted some garbage is entitlement.

kevintb 9y ago

Are you a new coder who is female and in a marginalized group? Given your astonishingly ignorant response, I can bet dollars to donuts that you are not.

donmatito 9y ago

> No one knows anything about a user on Stack Overflow unless they explicitly announce it For example, it's quite easy to tell you are a white male. What gave you away? The "I'm not listening and I know better than you that your concerns are not valid" part

kevintb 9y ago
Seems like OP has a bias himself thinking toxic gaming communities don’t exist [1] https://gamingreinvented.com/nintendoarticles/no-the-gaming-community-is-not-toxic/ https://gamingreinvented.com/nintendoarticles/no-the-gaming-...
Veen 9y ago
If you think that attitude is limited to white males, I’d suggest widening your social circle. It in fact describes most people of every gender and ethnicity.

javadocmd 9y ago

> 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.”

paulriddle 9y ago
> We know because they tell us. But not marginalized groups also tell them. Now the question is who tells more? I think marginalized, because they read all these blogs and tweets about being opressed, shift their selective focus to minor injustices, and feel empowered to complain. The SJWs are the complainers, they are the warriors, that's why you hear from them more than from anybody else. They have the momentum of complaining, so they are more likely to continue to complain. I'm certain most of them are addicted to complaining and will never stop, no matter what. Also, minorities have higher social status within those ranks, and therefore more likely to be SJW. So it's not necessarily Stack Overflow's fault at all.
- CobrastanJorji 9y ago
  The only information we have from the blog post is that Stack Overflow has survey results telling them that marginalized groups feel particularly unwelcome, unless you have some other source of info I didn't notice. From that single datum, you've concluded that this is because marginalized groups must over-complain, and in fact, you claim to have achieved perfect certainly that most members of marginalized groups have an addiction to complaining and will never stop, and therefore the only sensible course is to completely disregard any survey results saying that marginalized groups feel particularly bad about anything. That's a pretty strong conclusion from hearing about a brief allusion to the results of a survey you didn't see. Your argument says a lot about you and very little otherwise.

lifeformed 9y ago

> No one knows anything about a user on Stack Overflow ???? There are names and profile pictures.

tallanvor 9y ago

> 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. I understand what you're saying, and while you're correct, it doesn't change the fact about how people feel in a community. There are really two groups here: newer coders, and marginalized groups within our profession. Newer coders are less confident, and when you see the types of responses you see on SO, you're less likely to want to participate - nobody likes being told that they're stupid or not working hard enough, as an example. For marginalized groups - primarily women, people who aren't white, and the LGBT communities, they already have to deal with sexism, racism, homophobia, and other forms of discrimination in their daily lives. When you have to worry about hostility in general, trying to participate in a community that does have a reputation to being hostile is even more difficult and frustrating. The fact that you don't know who an SO user is unless they volunteer the information simply doesn't matter. > Trying to make this about minorities feels like a desperate attempt to fit in with the 'social justice' sphere, and to virtue signal to people on sites like Twitter. This isn't about trying to make it only about minorities, and the post doesn't give that impression. It is, however, about making sure that everyone feels welcome, and that has to include thinking about and understanding WHY minorities aren't feeling welcome, even if there isn't explicit discrimination against them on the site.

kevintb 9y ago

It’s hard to take your claims seriously, when you proudly and publically publish meandering rants (linked to your HN account) about how gaming communities are in no way toxic, while completely denying Gamergate, its ties to white supremacists and a wealth of other examples [1]. [1] https://gamingreinvented.com/nintendoarticles/no-the-gaming-community-is-not-toxic/ https://gamingreinvented.com/nintendoarticles/no-the-gaming-...

kadenshep 9y ago
There's always a trail or sign with these people.
- ruirr 9y ago
  There is also a trail to politically correct to the nauseous people like you probably. Fanatics at both extremes are not nice.
  - dang 9y ago
    You can't attack someone like this on HN regardless of how strongly you disagree with them. We ban accounts that do this, so please don't do it again. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - kadenshep 9y ago
    "Both sides" are not equivalent in any objective way.
dang 9y ago
Pursuing someone's personal details or history and bringing them into HN threads as ammunition isn't allowed here, regardless of how wrong someone is. Whatever edge you gain in an argument is wiped out by the damage you do to the community by attacking someone this way. Please don't do it, and especially please don't do it in a bunch of different posts, as you did in this case.

DanBC 9y ago

> No one knows anything about a user on Stack Overflow unless they explicitly announce it, Stack Overflow allows people to use photographs in their profile. You're saying that women and POC are not allowed to be themselves. That they cannot use features everyone else is free to use. That they must lie about who they are in order to participate on the Internet