...technically Friday poke

I assume Spolsky must have been on the verge of death for years now to have so appallingly neglected this company.

I sometimes avoid bad-mouthing him because illness seems the only plausible explanation

Why do you think the company is neglected?

This... doesn't seem especially headed in a productive direction. Perhaps it'd be best to avoid the discussion altogether?

Okay. I will leave it "I disagree" :D

← 6 messages moved from Tavern on the Meta

Probably unproductive, but better to rant here than in an MSE post:

I am still 100% pissed about the ISE HNQ ban

Seriously, what the actual fuck motivated? Some angry feminist objects to men wanting to discuss how to avoid uncomfortable sexual encounters, and SE just

Dude...

obediently says "yeah, we agree it's appallingly offensive for men to not pliantly submit to any female sexual attention, we'll immediately ban any community that permits discussion of this topic"

So, what's going on with that anyway? I only have a very vague idea, but...IPS.SE got removed from the Hot Network Questions because of some comment on Twitter?

like, i already have an extremely dim view of feminism, but it's depressing to me that it's seen as sufficiently outrageous and offensive for a man to want to diplomatically avoid unwanted sexual attention from his students that even allowing such a man to ask about how to do so apparently warrants a network-wide ban of the site that permitted the question

@SilverWolf Sonic asked a question on ISE about how to deter his female pupils from flirting with him

From what I've heard about it, to me, it sounds like the question isn't the problem, it's that the titles of many questions there can be taken wrong out of context.

@SilverWolf the title was 100% clear out of context as being about avoiding students hitting on you

OK, what.

So...what happened to get IPS off HNQ?

the issue is that feminists just can't fucking stand the idea that a male teacher might be uncomfortable being hit on by his students

because apparently, fuck that, any man being uncomfortable with female sexual attention is inherently a misogynist

Where did feminism come into this? (I haven't read the Twitter comment that supposedly kicked it all off, since I'm not on Twitter.)

the woman who got ISE banned from HNQ is a twitter feminst

it's just straight-up, unapologetic sexism

that SE has bought into without nuance

Context required. Otherwise I only have your word, which isn't okay.

How is a twitter feminist different from a regular feminist? (: Do you mean she's one of the "men are all bad" people?

@SilverWolf that's pretty much what I mean :P. As for whether a "regular feminist" is meaningfully different... I'll leave that for you to judge. Mostly, I think no. But I've but some I find principled and worthy of respect

@JohnDvorak 1 sec, I'll find links

Thanks, links are always good. (:

twitter.com/aalear/status/1052322898252304384 is a good starting point

You can explore the thread from there

oh also meta.stackexchange.com/q/316934/200582 if you haven't already seen it

I think I saw that before I saw the whole IPS blowup. (:

what a depressing clusterfuck

SBTYA

still better than Yahoo Answers

a low bar :)

but yeah, I'll grant you that

But a bar nevertheless :P

it's the bigotry that bothers me

and the fact that, because it's leftist bigotry, it will go unremarked upon

if anyone had said "ban this site! it lets the gays talk about gay-related things!" and the staff had complied, it'd be a media-outrage-attracting controversy

What we really need is a Thanos snap

but when the ideological thesis behind the ban is "men should not be allowed to talk about unwanted female sexual attention that makes them uncomfortable", apparently that's... just fine?

Not sure where to start, but it probably doesn't matter. Take out everything at once.

@MarkAmery That's just a theory

You might want to just, take a second, and sort of get some perspective. All they did was remove one site from the HNQ section because it didn't fit with Stack Overflow's topicality. Really, almost none of the HNQ fits there. It should be split on entertainment versus not entertainment.

> because it didn't fit with Stack Overflow's topicality

no

yes.

see, I can do it to.

@MarkAmery words have been had

we're about as angry as you are

but but...

Uh...isn't HNQ specifically for seeing random interesting stuff on other sites -- i.e. entertainment?

because feminists explicitly objected to allowing men, specifically, to discuss discomfort with sexual attention from the opposite sex

they were not unclear about their motive

Who is "they"?

at the end of the day, sad to say someone's going to go "LOOK! SOMEONE COMPLAINED ON CHAT" and turn that into more ammo

@JourneymanGeek maybe it's time to stop taking every word Twitter says as the word of god?

the feminist critics on twitter who motivated the ban

Meh, you can read it like that, but HNQ has had a long history of problems with linking to other sites. IPS just sort of pushed the bounds until this final straw.

I'm not a principled defender of IPS or HNQ

both have problems

but this was not a problem

@MarkAmery tbh there's other problems

Maybe just slapping an H1 above the HNQ would help disseminate some of the feminists' confusion?

and while I don't agree with this either, we're talking to the folks who run this

@JohnDvorak a H1?

H1...as in <h1>, a header?

Yes

saying what?

HNQ has issues, and has had them for some time. That the final straw came from a woman on twitter shouldn't trigger you.

Do you think IPS would have been removed were it not for the tweet? I don't know...

@TravisJ it's not like the company is going to try to fix HNQ's issues now

@MarkAmery That seemed to be the point of the meta. What can be done?

I am far more interested in making progress on changing the HNQ to work better than I am at the source of their inspiration to make such changes.

maybe I'm too cynical, but I think that's ass-covering and don't expect them to even read the responses

I'm just kind of resigned to SE-the-company being uncritically on board with the feminists at this point

I totally agree that HNQ has been problematic for a long time

But I don't see this changing anything for the better

And I absolutely think it's right to take issue when the inspiration for even looking at the problem is rooted in unashamed bigotry

"without consultation"?

@TravisJ yes - there were only minutes between tweet and removal

"Unashamed bigotry"?

And you have access to their internal chat?

@JohnDvorak Would you characterise the belief that it is uniquely unacceptable for men to be uncomfortable with sexual attention in any other way?

Because as far as I can tell that's still the entirety of what this is about

Perhaps you meant, without asking the community for permission?

Oh, you mean bigotry by SE staff

By them and by the feminist tweeters who inspired the ban

And, perhaps, you think the majority of users would disagree with such a choice at SE? Hmm.... really?

@TravisJ well, there's broader issues of concern

Removing an entire site from HNQ? I believe that site would disagree.

I disagree.

but we've/we'll probably have better places to bring it up than here

You mean ... meta?

They never indicate that it was permanent, only that it was problematic and was removed. Then they posted on meta for feedback.

Or, ostensibly for feedback, depending on account

Seems like standard behavior when something goes wrong. It isn't like they closed the exchange.

@TravisJ the site regulars weren't really aware when it happened

If the HNQ is really such an influence there, and the site regulars are that aware of its activity, I would strongly posit that the system is being gamed.

Losing a place on the HNQ shouldn't be cause for concern. The other exchanges stood on their own prior to its existence.

By "gaming", do you mean "utilizing the only means they have of gaining users in a way that lets them gain users"?

anyway, I've gotta sleep

No, I don't.

sorry to arrive briefly just to rant about my anger at the staff/feminists :P

I'll leave y'all to it

@PaulWhite that.

The only way to get users is to radically upvote posts into the hot network list is "the only means of gaining users"? That site shouldn't exist at that point.