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Nice post, guys. Would you mind saying what you mean by 'lurking'? In all my life on the Internet, it's a positive thing when joining a community. You're invis

Nice post, guys. Would you mind saying what you mean by 'lurking'? In all my life on the Internet, it's a positive thing when joining a community. You're invisible to everyone and just read. Why should people not do this? It seems harmless to be in read-only mode.

jmcomets 8y ago
I understood the use of "lurking" as "commenting unproductively in a channel". Although I may be mistaken, it makes a lot of sense to avoid such toxic behavior.
- ownagefool 8y ago
  Weird, it's always meant reading and not posting to me, such as the parent suggested.
- QuercusMax 8y ago
  Isn't that more along the lines of trolling or shitposting?
mediocrejoker 8y ago
I was confused by this too. I noticed that in both places they use the term, they say "lurk in", almost as if it's a term with an accepted meaning within Stripe. The fact that they say "read to your heart's content" also suggests that they aren't using "lurk" in it's usual meaning (which to me is reading but not commenting).
elgenie 8y ago
The "lurking into" in the blog post should probably be read as "jumping into". That is, reading is fine, but transitioning from lurker to active participant should be minimized. Stripe has a very specific culture of email transparency that they've posted about before, and they've likely developed company-specific jargon around it: https://stripe.com/blog/scaling-email-transparency https://stripe.com/blog/scaling-email-transparency
patio11 8y ago
Stripe's usage of "lurking" is a bit idiosyncratic. (There are a couple of other words like this, distributed in a glossary, the majority of which is less idiosyncratic word usage and more industry- or company-specific jargon.) In the sense used here, "Lurking into someone's thread" means sending an unsolicited comment to a thread you were not an expected participant on. This is something we're broadly supportive of but which, if done poorly, can be socially contentious. You could imagine pathologically bad examples like "Hey thanks for working on this project for the last 8 months, but before you ship it, just wondered if we had considered adding a teal bikeshed? Taking the liberty of CCing seven people for their thoughts on the bikeshed you'll be building."
darkarmani 8y ago
I think they made up/redefined that term. The rest of the world calls lurking someone that mostly reads a forum/thread but doesn't say anything. I've seen the opposite by senior management called the "swoop and poop". They haven't followed the thread at all, but they will swoop into a meeting without any context and poop all over the ideas because they are missing the context around the complexity of the problems. I'd sooner have a lurker that read all of the conversation speak up than the opposite.

jmcomets 8y ago

I understood the use of "lurking" as "commenting unproductively in a channel". Although I may be mistaken, it makes a lot of sense to avoid such toxic behavior.

ownagefool 8y ago
Weird, it's always meant reading and not posting to me, such as the parent suggested.
QuercusMax 8y ago
Isn't that more along the lines of trolling or shitposting?

mediocrejoker 8y ago

I was confused by this too. I noticed that in both places they use the term, they say "lurk in", almost as if it's a term with an accepted meaning within Stripe. The fact that they say "read to your heart's content" also suggests that they aren't using "lurk" in it's usual meaning (which to me is reading but not commenting).

elgenie 8y ago

The "lurking into" in the blog post should probably be read as "jumping into". That is, reading is fine, but transitioning from lurker to active participant should be minimized. Stripe has a very specific culture of email transparency that they've posted about before, and they've likely developed company-specific jargon around it: https://stripe.com/blog/scaling-email-transparency https://stripe.com/blog/scaling-email-transparency

patio11 8y ago

Stripe's usage of "lurking" is a bit idiosyncratic. (There are a couple of other words like this, distributed in a glossary, the majority of which is less idiosyncratic word usage and more industry- or company-specific jargon.) In the sense used here, "Lurking into someone's thread" means sending an unsolicited comment to a thread you were not an expected participant on. This is something we're broadly supportive of but which, if done poorly, can be socially contentious. You could imagine pathologically bad examples like "Hey thanks for working on this project for the last 8 months, but before you ship it, just wondered if we had considered adding a teal bikeshed? Taking the liberty of CCing seven people for their thoughts on the bikeshed you'll be building."

darkarmani 8y ago

I think they made up/redefined that term. The rest of the world calls lurking someone that mostly reads a forum/thread but doesn't say anything. I've seen the opposite by senior management called the "swoop and poop". They haven't followed the thread at all, but they will swoop into a meeting without any context and poop all over the ideas because they are missing the context around the complexity of the problems. I'd sooner have a lurker that read all of the conversation speak up than the opposite.