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I suspect that the average user of SE will not care one bit about this whole drama. I do find it frustrating, puzzling, and sad how SE appears to have treated

I suspect that the average user of SE will not care one bit about this whole drama. I do find it frustrating, puzzling, and sad how SE appears to have treated Monica Cellio. She provides an excellent summary (from her perspective) here: https://cellio.dreamwidth.org/2064709.html https://cellio.dreamwidth.org/2064709.html

frittig 7y ago
one thing that I love about SE is that everyone is very professional. almost all answers are either sourced or can easily be seen to be correct. what I am worried is that if a lot of the normal mods quit and our replaced with new mods, who may be more political, SE will turn into Reddit where leftist politics prevail in all of the major subreddits and most responses to factual questions consist of options or unsourced "facts". if that ever becomes the case then I will be sad. although, when seeing how the admins of Reddit act, I'm guessing that acting like they do is good for business.
- shagie 7y ago
  Give https://dev.to/stackoverflow/what-a-very-bad-day-at-work-taught-me-about-building-stack-overflow-s-community-4gmm/comments https://dev.to/stackoverflow/what-a-very-bad-day-at-work-tau... a read - the comment to which Sara replied and the response given. The reddit future is a very real possibility.
  - jxramos 7y ago
    What's the "reddit future" a reference to?
    - krallja 7y ago
      > SE will turn into Reddit where leftist politics prevail in all of the major subreddits and most responses to factual questions consist of options or unsourced "facts"
- scarface74 7y ago
  How much politics do you get in technical Q and A forums?
  - frittig 7y ago
    Currently not much. But maybe in the future if someone mentions a man page they will be banned for not calling it a people page https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/07/justin-trudeau-tells-woman-to-say-peoplekind-not-mankind https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/07/justin-trudeau...
zaroth 7y ago
At least there is this bit at the very bottom; > Breaking news, October 6 21:00 UTC: the CTO stepped in, accepted responsibility, apologized to the community, and promised to contact me directly to apologize and discuss next steps. Finally! I look forward to that contact.
fortran77 7y ago
I suspect you're right. I stopped participating in SE years ago not for "political" reasons like this, but because it seemed to be dominated by power-happy mods and people whose main goal was to collect points and not to help others. This kerfuffle, and I only got a little summary of it, makes my eyes glaze over. I'm certainly not against treating people with respect, but I'm not willing to stick my neck out for some of the unsavory characters here who aren't acting in good faith. What they did to Monica Cellio was disgusting. And most likely based on pure hate.
- vunie 7y ago
  I'm in the same place as you are, but in relation to wikipedia rather than stack overflow. I remember adding a [citation needed] tag to an inaccurate claim, and then discovering that my change has been reverted. The reason the moderator gave was that [citation needed] didn't look good on the page. How do you argue with people like that. I'm not going to spend hours reading on wikipedia's policies just make it better. SE is bad, but at least I get something out of it. That and the fact that SE's meta game is easier to play than wikipedia's. You just need to make sure you word your question in a way that it can only be answered definitively (no opinion), and preempt duplicate-heads with a list of similar questions and why they don't answer your question. I've yet to have a question of mine closed as a duplicate, though mods have treated me passive-aggressively for taking away their sticks :^)
  - steve19 7y ago
    Can you give an example on how to word a question?
    - Arnt 7y ago
      On Stack Overflow? A good question contains a reproducible problem (or at least an understandable question) and it's worded such that people with the same problem will find the question and answer by googling. Better than that is better, but that's the threshold between bad and good. So include error messages instead of just typing "I got a certificate error when …", because people who get the same error will paste their error message into google. Some of then paste it into bing. None type "I got a certificate error when …" into google. Stack Overflow is about building a knowledge base where people find answers. SEO is essential to that.
drusepth 7y ago
As a self-described "average user of SE", I find this drama pretty similar to drama I've seen circling around the Quora "community" for the last 6 months or so: confusing. I use both SE and Quora to get answers, especially to extremely-niche questions. I understand that some people do use them for community and that people do interact and know each other on both platforms, but it's hard to understand complaints about a subpar community when the goal of the site doesn't seem to revolve around a community at all. To me, SE is a Q&A site. It exists to let people ask questions and get those questions answered. If you took away the community entirely, would it be any less useful? This probably comes off a bit flippant to the situation, but it's meant to illustrate that you're right: I'd say I'm a pretty average user of SE (in that I just use it to get answers, and occasionally write my own answers when I can, and so far it's worked perfectly well for me) and I don't care one bit about community-based drama.
- solidasparagus 7y ago
  > If you took away the community entirely, would it be any less useful? My suspicion is that the answer is yes. You'd have to have actual data to be sure, but based on my experience with internet communities, there are probably a small number of people who bring in the vast majority of the value (i.e. answer the most questions, clean up/flag/categorize questions and answers). Those people spend a lot of time on the site and the community aspect (relationships, reputation, etc) is a big part of what motivates them to consistently return and add value.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    I concur. You can see the same thing on HN, if you look closely. For a new or infrequent user, all comment threads are randos talking to other randos. For a frequent commenter who's been here for a while now, it's a community with a lot of transient commenters, but also a lot of regulars, who recognize each other's handles and sometimes carry discussions across time and multiple comment threads - and it's a big part of the value of this place. If HN was to suddenly replace all usernames with their SHA-1 hashes, being here would get much less interesting.
whamlastxmas 7y ago
Average user here, I completely don't give a shit about any of this. As long as I can google to find answers to my bugs I'm fine.

frittig 7y ago

one thing that I love about SE is that everyone is very professional. almost all answers are either sourced or can easily be seen to be correct. what I am worried is that if a lot of the normal mods quit and our replaced with new mods, who may be more political, SE will turn into Reddit where leftist politics prevail in all of the major subreddits and most responses to factual questions consist of options or unsourced "facts". if that ever becomes the case then I will be sad. although, when seeing how the admins of Reddit act, I'm guessing that acting like they do is good for business.

shagie 7y ago
Give https://dev.to/stackoverflow/what-a-very-bad-day-at-work-taught-me-about-building-stack-overflow-s-community-4gmm/comments https://dev.to/stackoverflow/what-a-very-bad-day-at-work-tau... a read - the comment to which Sara replied and the response given. The reddit future is a very real possibility.
- jxramos 7y ago
  What's the "reddit future" a reference to?
  - krallja 7y ago
    > SE will turn into Reddit where leftist politics prevail in all of the major subreddits and most responses to factual questions consist of options or unsourced "facts"
scarface74 7y ago
How much politics do you get in technical Q and A forums?
- frittig 7y ago
  Currently not much. But maybe in the future if someone mentions a man page they will be banned for not calling it a people page https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/07/justin-trudeau-tells-woman-to-say-peoplekind-not-mankind https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/07/justin-trudeau...

zaroth 7y ago

At least there is this bit at the very bottom; > Breaking news, October 6 21:00 UTC: the CTO stepped in, accepted responsibility, apologized to the community, and promised to contact me directly to apologize and discuss next steps. Finally! I look forward to that contact.

fortran77 7y ago

I suspect you're right. I stopped participating in SE years ago not for "political" reasons like this, but because it seemed to be dominated by power-happy mods and people whose main goal was to collect points and not to help others. This kerfuffle, and I only got a little summary of it, makes my eyes glaze over. I'm certainly not against treating people with respect, but I'm not willing to stick my neck out for some of the unsavory characters here who aren't acting in good faith. What they did to Monica Cellio was disgusting. And most likely based on pure hate.

vunie 7y ago
I'm in the same place as you are, but in relation to wikipedia rather than stack overflow. I remember adding a [citation needed] tag to an inaccurate claim, and then discovering that my change has been reverted. The reason the moderator gave was that [citation needed] didn't look good on the page. How do you argue with people like that. I'm not going to spend hours reading on wikipedia's policies just make it better. SE is bad, but at least I get something out of it. That and the fact that SE's meta game is easier to play than wikipedia's. You just need to make sure you word your question in a way that it can only be answered definitively (no opinion), and preempt duplicate-heads with a list of similar questions and why they don't answer your question. I've yet to have a question of mine closed as a duplicate, though mods have treated me passive-aggressively for taking away their sticks :^)
- steve19 7y ago
  Can you give an example on how to word a question?
  - Arnt 7y ago
    On Stack Overflow? A good question contains a reproducible problem (or at least an understandable question) and it's worded such that people with the same problem will find the question and answer by googling. Better than that is better, but that's the threshold between bad and good. So include error messages instead of just typing "I got a certificate error when …", because people who get the same error will paste their error message into google. Some of then paste it into bing. None type "I got a certificate error when …" into google. Stack Overflow is about building a knowledge base where people find answers. SEO is essential to that.

drusepth 7y ago

As a self-described "average user of SE", I find this drama pretty similar to drama I've seen circling around the Quora "community" for the last 6 months or so: confusing. I use both SE and Quora to get answers, especially to extremely-niche questions. I understand that some people do use them for community and that people do interact and know each other on both platforms, but it's hard to understand complaints about a subpar community when the goal of the site doesn't seem to revolve around a community at all. To me, SE is a Q&A site. It exists to let people ask questions and get those questions answered. If you took away the community entirely, would it be any less useful? This probably comes off a bit flippant to the situation, but it's meant to illustrate that you're right: I'd say I'm a pretty average user of SE (in that I just use it to get answers, and occasionally write my own answers when I can, and so far it's worked perfectly well for me) and I don't care one bit about community-based drama.

solidasparagus 7y ago
> If you took away the community entirely, would it be any less useful? My suspicion is that the answer is yes. You'd have to have actual data to be sure, but based on my experience with internet communities, there are probably a small number of people who bring in the vast majority of the value (i.e. answer the most questions, clean up/flag/categorize questions and answers). Those people spend a lot of time on the site and the community aspect (relationships, reputation, etc) is a big part of what motivates them to consistently return and add value.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  I concur. You can see the same thing on HN, if you look closely. For a new or infrequent user, all comment threads are randos talking to other randos. For a frequent commenter who's been here for a while now, it's a community with a lot of transient commenters, but also a lot of regulars, who recognize each other's handles and sometimes carry discussions across time and multiple comment threads - and it's a big part of the value of this place. If HN was to suddenly replace all usernames with their SHA-1 hashes, being here would get much less interesting.

whamlastxmas 7y ago

Average user here, I completely don't give a shit about any of this. As long as I can google to find answers to my bugs I'm fine.