Well, for starters, the site is relatively intolerant of people with poor English skills.

@Richard: I wasn't aware that non-English speakers were "marginalized groups".

@NicolBolas - Those that try to use predominantly English sites most certainly are.

@Richard intolerant? Users are supposed to edit those posts in shape. Any instances?

@Patrick: "I would have assumed that active discrimination should be less of an issue here." My guess (and it's only a guess since they haven't said) is that the issue is not one of personal attacks on individuals, so much as saying things without thinking of/caring about how such statements will be taken outside of one's own areas/cultures/biases. Societal racism/sexism/etc is a lot harder to fight against without conscious effort than the more obvious forms.

@SurajRao - This highly upvoted comment from an SO moderator strikes me as being pretty indicative; "Misspelled posts are an indicator of overall laziness. Generally they lack research effort as well."

I strongly suspect that it's very difficult to pin down a specific thing that makes women/Ethnic minorities feel unwelcome. It strikes me that this is more likely to be a response to the survey revealing that respondents who say that they're female ticking the "i do feel unwelcome" box more often than males, etc.

@Richard: If that's the case, then I'd say it's pretty irresponsible of SE to include that aspect of their post, when the only thing they can suggest that people actually do is take some random survey. Bringing stuff like this up is best done when there's a genuinely useful action that can be taken.

@NicolBolas I do agree that behavior/statements can be problematic in other cultures (among one of the key problems to solve in localization). It would be a impossible balance act to respect every cultures sensitivities - but maybe a subset of them would improve the situation vastly. If only the blog post provided some hard facts...

As that post mentions, you can just ask to figure out whether one feels unwelcome. So I assume they just asked people from mentioned groups and found they feel more unwelcome on average. Though, since active discrimination is hard as you said, I read that as "people from those groups are more likely to ask 'low quality' questions".

I would venture to suggest that only Jay Hanlon or one of his colleagues can answer this question. For myself the only discrimination I've noticed has been directed towards newcomers, not women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups.

I think there is no such thing as discrimination against non english speakers. Working as a programmer, fluent english is mandatory. If you can't speak that then your only recourse is to learn it. SO letting you get away with it won't mean your boss or official ressources will. Letting people accrue bad habits is a cruel disservice to their education which SO is supposed to serve.

I'm glad SO was hostile to me when I first started, and I'm glad people didn't let me get away with stuff. I'm glad I was told to re-examine my approach and use debuggers, it helped me get better in the only way that would work for me: forcing me. I shudder to think that a future newbie could walk away from SO with engrained bad habits and a lack of self reliance as a developer, that'd be such a disservice to our mission here to make people better at their job and help them with their problems. I wasn't helped by someone who wrote 20 lines of code for me, but by someone kickstarting me on

my way to learn to help myself. I wouldn't miss it for the world and I'm concerned that changing the generally unforgiving nature of SO is going to be a sad disservice to new developers that will not get to experience the excellent education of judgement by your peers. By all means, remove barriers and make it more friendly but the demand of excellence is what makes this site rise above the troff like quora or yahoo answers and it absolutely needs to stay imo.

If you ask me, SO has become generally hostile to programmers. The problems have been discusses on HN and elsewhere, you just need to read those discussions.

@user5389107 "fluent english is mandatory" -> that statement is patently wrong. I've personally interacted with experienced and professionally succesful developers that do not fluently speak or write english. They are still devleopers. Language proficiency should not be an exclusionary factor in programming. I agree on debugging and the "teaching to fish"-attitude, but saying that english proficiency is required is just incredibly shortsighted.

We can fix bad English. We can't fix bad content

@user5389107 Your point that you needed help with your approach is well-made, but (though I appreciate the choice of word may be poetic), I don't see why you needed people to be hostile. It may be that your personality responds well to hostility, but I suspect that more people respond well to friendly guidance than unpleasantness.

At first I thought this said SO was hostile to marginalized groups, and I found that strange because I've literally never seen any comment mentioning race and only very few mentioning gender. But when I read it more carefully, it doesn't say that SO is hostile to marginalized groups (at least, not any more than non-marginalized groups) - it says that marginalized groups feel SO is more hostile to them.

One would imagine that marginalized groups are used to being marginalized and therefore more readily accept hostility. That statement should not be controversial. But the way it's mentioned in this blog post evokes thoughts of the gender/race-based hiring schemes some of us may have heard about at other large tech companies - even if that is not what is intended - and paints a picture of SE following that trend as well.

@Richard re "as being pretty indicative; "Misspelled posts are an indicator of overall laziness. Generally they lack research effort as well."" <- Yes, post ending with "Thx" or having slang/sms type all long are those targeted by this comment, that's not about bad English, it's about not even taking care of the red underlined words in your post before clicking "Ask" which seems made in a hurry and likely without any research before asking. I think you're extending it to badly worded posts, which is not what this comment is about.

I get that you don't want to kick off a gender/race discussion, but there is one confusing aspect of the blog post tightly related to the question here, that you haven't spelled out: These aspects only exist for users that advertise it, and it seems to me that most don't.

@izkata repeating my comment again: it doesn't actually say that, it just says those groups are more likely to feel SO is hostile.

I nearly posted this exact question myself.

@Vogel612'sShadow we already have Russian and Spanish Stackoverflow for non-English speakers. But English is absolutely a requirement for Stackoverflow.com.

I must point out: Especially for me, StackExchange at the beginning was not remotely welcoming. One minor beginner's mistake, and you get 10 downvotes and 15 administrators ravenously bashing on you in less than an hour, eventually among a seven-day ban. Finally, the message of new users is being spread.

@Richard Unfortunately isn't possible to +100 your comment regarding the "highly upvoted comment from an SO moderator" . Finally someone points out the root of the problem - the governance. The phrase A fish rots from the head down is very true in this context. Such moderator should be immediatelly banned! Such (and many other (similar) problems) caused that I stopped to contribute to SO. This is an HOSTILE and POISONOUS place and every initiative for cleanup could only help...

On the other side I also must add that many of my answers (in wrong english, but otherwise technically correct) got edits and corrections from thousands of nice peoples. So, here are many-many good contributors, but unfortunately the 80-20 rule works here too. Enough to have 20% morons and the final feeling about the site is: "unwelcoming".