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The Stack Exchange community places a rather high value on "being nice." It's an important part of our values and we think it makes the Internet a better place.

by spolsky 15y ago

The Stack Exchange community places a rather high value on "being nice." It's an important part of our values and we think it makes the Internet a better place. A lot of the Math Stack Exchange users came from Usenet's sci.math where epic flame wars were the norm. That community has a few members who do not consider "being nice" a requirement of public discussion, so naturally, conflict ensued when Jeff removed non-nice things (as is the norm in the larger Stack Exchange community), thus violating the "all public debate is sacred and must never be censored" norm of a small subset of that community. Personally, I like the "be nice" norm and I think it contributes to the awesomeness of Stack Exchange. I think that in the long run it will make for healthier communities. I think that the high norm for civilized discourse on Stack Exchange is one reason that it has such a high signal to noise ratio and it's why the mathematicians are on our site to begin with. There was never any question of "censorship" -- the entire brouhaha took place in the META site, the site ABOUT the site... nobody deleted any comments about math on the Math site itself.

microarchitect 15y ago
The "be nice" norm is obviously good and important, but I also think different norms need to come into play here: (1) Due to asymmetric balance of power, moderators need to hold themselves to higher standards of behaviour than the community and (2) Criticism of the moderator has to be treated differently from criticism of regular users. There's a fine line between deleting comments which are critical of the moderator(s) because they are deemed "unconstructive" and simply being high-handed. I don't know if Atwood actually crossed the line here, but I believe the perception that he _may have_ has hurt this community more than the (relatively minor) initial transgression of the "be nice" rule.
mpyne 15y ago
> The Stack Exchange community places a rather high value on "being nice." It's an important part of our values and we think it makes the Internet a better place. OK. That's a fair viewpoint, also espoused by many open source communities for instance. > A lot of the Math Stack Exchange users came from Usenet's sci.math where epic flame wars were the norm. This, on the other hand, is kind of misleading. Is there some other threads elsewhere with material from Prof. Clark that is of the "epic flame war" variety? I ask this because I read Akhil Mathew's post in its entirety and even if you claim that Prof. Clark was not nice in his mentions regarding Jeff Atwood (a claim I highly disagree with by the way), his comments were in no way flame war material. So unless he's actually done this elsewhere, why even mention epic flame wars in association as it does nothing but confuse the issue. > That community has a few members who do not consider "being nice" a requirement of public discussion, so naturally, conflict ensued when Jeff removed non-nice things (as is the norm in the larger Stack Exchange community), I have to ask: Is referencing a person's own quotes in support of a valid position suddenly "not nice". This quite honestly reeks of removing comments that only Jeff Atwood (and perhaps yourself ;) finds personally offending. I understand from the thread that there is apparently some history between Jeff Atwood and Prof. Clark -- I still don't think that justifies the response given in this case. > thus violating the "all public debate is sacred and must never be censored" norm of a small subset of that community. I doubt that this is literally an actual community tenet even with professional mathematicians. The fact that they apparently permit citing relevant facts to support a point of their does not imply that they feel all public debate is sacred and non-censorable. Akhil Mathew quite clearly elucidated his position in my opinion, and I do not see where he claimed that Prof. Clark's comments should stand merely because they were debate. It seemed to me that he felt the comments should stand because they were constructive in nature. > I think that the high norm for civilized discourse on Stack Exchange is one reason that it has such a high signal to noise ratio Civilized discourse is certainly good for S/N -- but this is not uncivilized discourse from Prof. Clark by any reasonable definition! > and it's why the mathematicians are on our site to begin with. I'm sure the network effect of having other very high-quality associated sites with stable working backend software had nothing to do with that. ;) > There was never any question of "censorship" -- the entire brouhaha took place in the META site, the site ABOUT the site... nobody deleted any comments about math on the Math site itself. I hate to say this, but this is disingenuous. If you prevent someone from talking constructively about the site then you are censoring him. Sure you may not be censoring him from the main site, but let's not split hairs here. As an aside I operate in a few communities that enforce a conduct policy... Prof. Clark's comments that were deleted would have been well within the bounds of decorum on any of those communities. You may want to ensure that your Stack Exchange values are being consistently enforced to avoid the appearance of impropriety, as the policies seem to be quite severe to me given the actions here.
- spolsky 15y ago
  Ha! I see what you did there! A classic, Usenet-quoted, point-by-point nitpick, complete with UseNet style > quotes. I salute your ingenuity!
  - bandushrew 15y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem Joel, news.ycombinator has somewhat higher standards for civilized discussion than you are exhibiting here. Please either participate in a constructive fashion or confine your postings to the roughnecks in the stack overflow forums.
  - zck 15y ago
    Joel, this response is disappointing. If you don't want to respond to the actual content of mpyne's response, just say so, or don't respond. Solely attacking the style of eir response is ridiculous. You're better than that.
  - raz0r 15y ago
    Wow, that's all you have to say? I hate to disappoint you but this is not StackOverblow. And while we're at it tell your fat friend to do some research before writing posts on that funny blog of his. He writes about a lot of stuff he heard about just the day before in a style which suggests that he's an expert on those topics, which may turn very unproductive for kids who read the funny blog and take his word for granted without further investigations.
  - mpyne 15y ago
    Usenet is not the only community that uses '>' for quotes. I wasn't aware that Reddit or open-source mailing lists were so unusual, but I can certainly claim no lineage with Usenet. I will, however, take that assumption as a compliment of the highest order, even if it involved no ingenuity on my part. As an aside, I'm just going to assume that this is a counterexample to the "be nice" policy that is in effect for Stack Exchange-affiliated sites? Or is this rather another "founder exception" to the rules?
- codinghorror 15y ago
prodigal_erik 15y ago
Atwood and the math.se community seem to disagree vehemently about what "nice" consists of and how important it is relative to other values like "transparent" and "unbiased". I urge you to handle remarks criticizing management very cautiously (especially via actions invisible to even the moderators), it's a short slide from there to a community of sycophants that's unworthy of defending.
omaranto 15y ago
All of your spiel about wanting the StackExchange community to be nice is fine and I agree with it, but it is irrelevant here since the comments Atwood deleted were not "non-nice". If he is so sensitive that he construed them as such he probably should not be a moderator.

by spolsky 15y ago

microarchitect 15y ago

The "be nice" norm is obviously good and important, but I also think different norms need to come into play here: (1) Due to asymmetric balance of power, moderators need to hold themselves to higher standards of behaviour than the community and (2) Criticism of the moderator has to be treated differently from criticism of regular users. There's a fine line between deleting comments which are critical of the moderator(s) because they are deemed "unconstructive" and simply being high-handed. I don't know if Atwood actually crossed the line here, but I believe the perception that he _may have_ has hurt this community more than the (relatively minor) initial transgression of the "be nice" rule.

mpyne 15y ago

> The Stack Exchange community places a rather high value on "being nice." It's an important part of our values and we think it makes the Internet a better place. OK. That's a fair viewpoint, also espoused by many open source communities for instance. > A lot of the Math Stack Exchange users came from Usenet's sci.math where epic flame wars were the norm. This, on the other hand, is kind of misleading. Is there some other threads elsewhere with material from Prof. Clark that is of the "epic flame war" variety? I ask this because I read Akhil Mathew's post in its entirety and even if you claim that Prof. Clark was not nice in his mentions regarding Jeff Atwood (a claim I highly disagree with by the way), his comments were in no way flame war material. So unless he's actually done this elsewhere, why even mention epic flame wars in association as it does nothing but confuse the issue. > That community has a few members who do not consider "being nice" a requirement of public discussion, so naturally, conflict ensued when Jeff removed non-nice things (as is the norm in the larger Stack Exchange community), I have to ask: Is referencing a person's own quotes in support of a valid position suddenly "not nice". This quite honestly reeks of removing comments that only Jeff Atwood (and perhaps yourself ;) finds personally offending. I understand from the thread that there is apparently some history between Jeff Atwood and Prof. Clark -- I still don't think that justifies the response given in this case. > thus violating the "all public debate is sacred and must never be censored" norm of a small subset of that community. I doubt that this is literally an actual community tenet even with professional mathematicians. The fact that they apparently permit citing relevant facts to support a point of their does not imply that they feel all public debate is sacred and non-censorable. Akhil Mathew quite clearly elucidated his position in my opinion, and I do not see where he claimed that Prof. Clark's comments should stand merely because they were debate. It seemed to me that he felt the comments should stand because they were constructive in nature. > I think that the high norm for civilized discourse on Stack Exchange is one reason that it has such a high signal to noise ratio Civilized discourse is certainly good for S/N -- but this is not uncivilized discourse from Prof. Clark by any reasonable definition! > and it's why the mathematicians are on our site to begin with. I'm sure the network effect of having other very high-quality associated sites with stable working backend software had nothing to do with that. ;) > There was never any question of "censorship" -- the entire brouhaha took place in the META site, the site ABOUT the site... nobody deleted any comments about math on the Math site itself. I hate to say this, but this is disingenuous. If you prevent someone from talking constructively about the site then you are censoring him. Sure you may not be censoring him from the main site, but let's not split hairs here. As an aside I operate in a few communities that enforce a conduct policy... Prof. Clark's comments that were deleted would have been well within the bounds of decorum on any of those communities. You may want to ensure that your Stack Exchange values are being consistently enforced to avoid the appearance of impropriety, as the policies seem to be quite severe to me given the actions here.

spolsky 15y ago
Ha! I see what you did there! A classic, Usenet-quoted, point-by-point nitpick, complete with UseNet style > quotes. I salute your ingenuity!
- bandushrew 15y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem Joel, news.ycombinator has somewhat higher standards for civilized discussion than you are exhibiting here. Please either participate in a constructive fashion or confine your postings to the roughnecks in the stack overflow forums.
- zck 15y ago
  Joel, this response is disappointing. If you don't want to respond to the actual content of mpyne's response, just say so, or don't respond. Solely attacking the style of eir response is ridiculous. You're better than that.
- raz0r 15y ago
  Wow, that's all you have to say? I hate to disappoint you but this is not StackOverblow. And while we're at it tell your fat friend to do some research before writing posts on that funny blog of his. He writes about a lot of stuff he heard about just the day before in a style which suggests that he's an expert on those topics, which may turn very unproductive for kids who read the funny blog and take his word for granted without further investigations.
- mpyne 15y ago
  Usenet is not the only community that uses '>' for quotes. I wasn't aware that Reddit or open-source mailing lists were so unusual, but I can certainly claim no lineage with Usenet. I will, however, take that assumption as a compliment of the highest order, even if it involved no ingenuity on my part. As an aside, I'm just going to assume that this is a counterexample to the "be nice" policy that is in effect for Stack Exchange-affiliated sites? Or is this rather another "founder exception" to the rules?
codinghorror 15y ago

prodigal_erik 15y ago

Atwood and the math.se community seem to disagree vehemently about what "nice" consists of and how important it is relative to other values like "transparent" and "unbiased". I urge you to handle remarks criticizing management very cautiously (especially via actions invisible to even the moderators), it's a short slide from there to a community of sycophants that's unworthy of defending.

omaranto 15y ago

All of your spiel about wanting the StackExchange community to be nice is fine and I agree with it, but it is irrelevant here since the comments Atwood deleted were not "non-nice". If he is so sensitive that he construed them as such he probably should not be a moderator.