hi

o/

\o

We're actually stashing things now. Holy moly.

Yes, we are stashing ideas.

Oh hi!

hi!

Diamond stash.

There you go, one chat message ;) random thought, so not necessarily a well-thought out answer :)

this one I think is gonna stick in my head a little

Like, it's sort of driving at a pretty scary question: what even is the point of having a long-term mission?

You're welcome! ;)

One identity crisis, as ordered ;)

But yeah. It's been on my mind. Not just for SE btw, but for life in general. Especially the past few weeks, life has had a habit of messing with my plans so what's the use of plans? ;)

I mean, there's definitely conceptual value

Like, if you set a 10 year plan for your life, you can create a six month plan for what you'd need to do to get there

Then after six months you figure out if the 10 year plan is still correct, and write a new six month plan

Going back and forth in that kind of iterative manner is how a lot of people do it, particularly when rapid and unexpected change is a guarantee

Yeah but .. is it worth being here and trying if the plan changes every six months? Things like that may work for stuff like "working/saving for a car", but change every six months seems far too rapid to built communities on?

Yeah, for sure

I mean the specific timescale is not really the point, but more so the idea of a long plan and a short plan

Ah yeah, then the short term plans would really be all that's needed because the long term one will change anyway.... I guess

note to everyone: I'm happy to chat / be pinged for discussion related to my answer post (but no promises that I'll take those discussions all the way)

I wrote way too much :P

@Spevacus Can't believe this

@Tinkeringbell the library one is the mission I've picked up. I understood it to be the mission. I joined "the parlour" late, so I see it as sort of my job to listen to existing conversation and sort of assimilate into it. Ex. learning the community norms and values.

@Spevacus don't worry, I know someone who can help with that

@Spevacus hi I’m here now

o/

So like I said, could you define what "evil" means here?

I have my own version of it but given you seem to be giving SE that label I figure it's worth knowing what you mean by it.

@Spevacus How isn’t the company destroying the site? They tryed to flood us with AI and take out the data dump last year and now they’re doing it again just more slowly. They don’t listen to and alienate the community. They don’t care about the quality of the diet anymore just making money

Did they really try to flood us with AI? They tested an experiment on a site after asking for permission from that site's mod team. Unless you mean with the AI-deletion-policy debacle.

Further... We still have the data dump. A network-wide one needed to be made using community-sourced tools (which is not good and I'd agree with that), but we still have it. It's been a core part of SO for awhile. If indeed it does die I suspect people will just walk. Even if that removal manifests itself in the form of a slow death.

@Spevacus I was talking about both

@Spevacus also I personally think the whole community should have been given the choice to test ai or not not just mods

@Spevacus SE did remove the data dump but then we made them reinstate it. Now they are slowly removing it, sneakily changing the license and slowly destroying it.

I'd say that the AI-policy debacle was a poorly-executed, hasty reaction to a perceived problem with AI content moderation. It wasn't good. It took formal negotiations to get on the same page again, but we're no longer in a piss-poor spot there.

@Starship The test was only going to surface AI-generated posts to those mods for review. Mods are commonly looked to for first-look feedback because they're typically more reliable than the community at large for feedback purposes. They're commonly experienced, engaged, and well-spoken. This isn't to say the rest of the community isn't, just that it's easier to tap into the engagement that mods typically give than hope you get something worthwhile from the community at large. That experiment could likely scale up to include that whole community's input before being tested. I'd hope that it would.

@Spevacus The perceived problem (which still exists) is “wewantmore$$$$$$$$$” and they didn’t wan to be seen as anti AI,

@Spevacus Okay, but how about at least asking the community “were thinking of doing this are you Okay with the general idea”? Because the community there voted for an AI ban

@Starship They've made a commitment to the survival of the data dumps. Yeah, there's some dubious language there ("for the foreseeable future"), but it's a commitment.

"for the foreseeable future" is there because we don't want to make promises that outlive us lol. We pretty much always put qualifying language like that in

@Spevacus just like there “commitment” to the community, I’m assuming

Makes it look sketchier but it's a good habit and sets correct expectations

> "for the foreseeable future" is ther E because we don't want to make promises that outli V e us lol. We pretty much always put qual I fying L anguage like that in

I see through you, Slate.

@Starship I don't really know how to respond to that one.

Not because I don't think SE cares, but because the statement indicates such negativity that nothing I say would convince you otherwise.

@Spevacus I’m being so negative. SE has gone back in their promises so many times that it’s clear that SE’s words isn’t worth the bits it’s written on

This is kinda what I mean with what I said in my "What worries you?" section. If you truly have written off everything that SE says as being worthless, and that they're evil, how can you justify any participation?

I'm not telling you to leave, just to be clear. I'm just asking why bother when you're so thoroughly convinced that they're liars, cheaters, and evil?

@Spevacus only because I can’t find a better site yet

What makes SE better than the other sites you're looking at?

And because I still think that my being here helps the users of these sites

@Spevacus It’s not a complete trash can…for all its faults, SE is still one of the few sites in the internet where posts are generally high-quality, the site is moderated well, and the site is made in a way which makes finding information easily possible

When you come to SE, what is it you look to get out of your participation? Does it serve those desires well? Do you think, five years from now (for example), that'll still be the case?

Helping other people and sometimes getting help myself. I think it does more or less, but honestly I doubt it will in 5 years or so, with the way the company is going. Do you disagree?

I'm not an oracle but I sure hope it exists in five years

If it really "doesn't exist," i.e. completely gone, evaporated into thin air, man. The loss of knowledge that would represent

I do disagree. I think 5 years from now it'll still be doing what it's currently doing, maybe with one or two extra things (for better or worse, w/e).

It'll still serve the content it's been serving for years.

I don’t think it won’t exist it will just exist so badly I wouldn’t want to be on it

What do you think needs to change for that metaphorical collision-course with the ground to stop?

@Slate Continuing my response to your comment on my answer, I also want to make clear that, snark aside, I don't think the processes of "enshittification" or pilfering a brand reputation happen with evil intents or anything. In the refrigerator example, it probably starts as "we're doing poorly with market share for the budget consumer, how can we reach them with our products?"

Then realizing, well, if we put the engineering costs into a cheaper fridge, we'll never recoup those costs with the profits we make because the margins are smaller there, etc

And I don't necessarily think Jobs-redux was a bad business move or that it's even bad for the broader health of the site; when things are tight it may be worth selling a bit of the brand for a payout even if the results are not great, especially when the engineering costs of a better solution just don't make any fiscal sense

@Starship I don't think there's much value in coming out with such a vague proposal, especially when you already know that there is hesitancy about it. You're going to get a negative reaction, guaranteed, because everyone is going to come up with their worst imagination of what it can look like.

@Starship Instead, if you want to build a case for a feature that you think can work even with community reservations, it makes sense that earlier steps would involve smaller groups: moderators, focus groups, where you can have a 2-way conversation. It might include recruiting those people to help be spokespeople or at least help you figure out how to sell it

Yeah, that makes sense. (I mean, obviously "pilfering" and "enshittification" are charged words, but the latter's in common usage and the former I get what you're going for, so I'm not going to waste time getting caught up on that.)

All of those steps require getting input with those folks which requires sharing things with them, demonstrating to them what you are thinking, all before everyone else hears about it. That's "secrecy" of a form, sure, but it's not malicious secrecy

@Slate Yeah, I maybe regret making an example out of Jobs particularly, I kind of tacked it on trying to have a more concrete example of how these things might play out in a frog-boiling sort of way.

@wizzwizz4, for your answer post I'm curious if you have other ideas about what this distinction between help and reference means or can be leveraged for in terms of mechanics. Ex. roomba conditions, web indexing hints

(sorry all for starting a new, potentially interleaving conversation)

Yeah, that makes sense

Still, I think you're striking at the heart of something that I'm having trouble putting to words

Like, there's two sides to every coin. On "side A," we implement a feature like Jobs because we want money and we will sell our soul to the devil to get it. On "side B," we implement a feature like Jobs because having features like Jobs is beneficial to community members, healthy for the community, and sustainable for the company (provided that it works as expected).

I'm struggling to figure out if the difference is material (i.e. if these two cases are really different), or if the difference is emotional (i.e. they are not actually different, but something causes people to view it one way or another).

Is the only difference users' skepticism, or possibly cynicism, when they view our actions? Setting aside the degree to which that skepticism/cynicism is justified

I don't really know yet. It doesn't strike me as obvious. Maybe that means I have the wrong framing.

@wizzwizz4 would you want it to be easier for low-rep answerers to comment on help questions? (I'm randomly spitballing ideas here)

@Slate I don't know how much work was done on Jobs on the internal side of things, but from an outsider's perspective it looked pretty lazy, at least at launch. I don't feel like it was really differentiated from having an ad for Indeed on the site, whereas it was sold as a return of an old feature. I think that clash of expectations and promises is a problem.

If Jobs pays the bills, hey, I'm not really against it (again, why I regret making this a focus here, even as I keep talking about it)

...just making myself pingable here...

It probably doesn't really belong in the family of things I'm concerned about because it's not really a core feature of the platform in the first place

@BryanKrause or how about stack assumes the community aren’t all panicked unreasonable idiots, and that we don’t need to have people recruited to sell a feature to us for us to consider it

@Starship I mean, have you been on Meta?

We're talking about the same place, right?

@BryanKrause “Doing something in secret to keep it from the larger public to avoid backlash” sounds like secrecy to me

@BryanKrause yeah

and I find people to be usually reasonable humans

@Starship Including Stack Exchange staff?

@starball Help questions are the sort of thing you'd bash out in chat, if chat were any good – but in practice, comment discussions work well for that. The ideal Stack Exchange Model™ is for those comments to all be folded into the questions or answers, and for the resulting Q&A pair to be a canonical resource useful to any other people with That Problem (in the abstract, regardless of manifestation), but in most cases that just… doesn't happen.

@BryanKrause yes (they tend to be more reasonable, unsurprisingly, then the average metaer)

I don't think there should be any difference in terms of exposure to search engines (robots.txt, etc). But "help"-style questions are important LLM-fodder (as much as I'd rather we didn't train LLMs), and "reference"-style questions are the sort of thing you'd compile into a book – that's one way in which they differ.

@BryanKrause That makes sense. I'll say at the same time though, the original Jobs did perform a core function for the platform - it gave people a reason to be here. In doing so it kept the platform present, relevant, useful, and in front of people. It was far from excluisvely responsible for this and its removal didn't like destroy SO or something. But these tertiary tools can definitely have a symbiotic effect.

Something separate might be akin to SO Enterprise: an environment purposefully and wholly closed off from the main site. But even then, it's taking the core "idea" of SO and putting it in front of a bunch of people, professionals working in their fields. Can that really be thought of as independent?

@Starship Then I think it's worth considering that a group of more-reasonable-than-average people with a job description in community management are not entirely clueless about their approach, and also that they are working in a business environment where they know complete transparency is not possible and so the people asking for it do not appear to be among the reasonable humans.

@Slate Yes, to be clear my criticism is entirely about the newer iteration. Which may even be much improved since launch, I don't know; I think I saw something about at least ridding the thing of all the 90+ day old scraped jobs

@Mithical 🏓

I'm not super up to date on what's going on with Jobs these days

@starball That sounds like a good idea, but I'm not sure whether it'd have second-order effects (e.g. making spam easier – especially since comments on a "help" Q&A are more likely to be among the more valuable parts of a page).

@Slate Cutting the Teams integration out of the main site meant that it lost pretty much all appeal for people who regularly use the site (i.e. the people most likely to use something just because it's SO-branded); instead of being something neat that was already built into the system, it became yet another independent place to check. That's one of the reasons I find the Mod Team not as useful as it should be, for instance.

yeah that makes total sense to me

When the recently-active Teams posts on SO main stopped showing I had to start manually checking Teams for activity, which was a bit annoying.

I see another issue with whether we let low-rep users retag "reference" questions as "help". If yes, we let low-rep people subtly info-hole useful resources (assuming there are aggregators that filter out the "help" posts). But "reference" questions are held to a "higher" standard than "help" questions, so if a well-meaning contributor comes along and re-tags a high-quality help question as "reference", the expectations of the OP's use of comments change.

But there's a solid commitment to keep 'em separate now so... Bleh. Oh well. I'll just check manually I guess.

@Spevacus And then you're manually checking Teams and all you can see is stuff bumped for content review...

Currently, on Stack Overflow, certain language tags seem to have this effect. Questions tagged C are held to a much higher standard than questions tagged, say, Scratch.

@BryanKrause Oh my godddddddd yes please make it not bump.

@wizzwizz4 yeah, relating to the "library mission" thing, and tying to my answer post's part on "study group / office hours / helpful colleague at scale", the "at scale" part here requires the asker to do some work too so there's "no chit chat".

@starball Yep. This was something I've thought about some too. Despite it being the guidance, I don't think it's very easy for new users to find questions that truly don't need clarification. Of course, comments being filled with spam isn't OK either though.

@starball But in many cases, the asker lacks that skill entirely.

@Spevacus I can only imagine what that's like in a corporate environment. "Dammit, Phil from QA is at it again, can someone PLEASE get him some work to do? How did he have time to content review 296 Q&A items this morning?"

I've certainly asked atrocious questions – questions I tweaked and tweaked and was never happy with –, because I have no way of developing the skills required to write a good question without knowing the answer to that question.

I actively avoid content review so I'm not the one flooding the thing. I feel like doing so is like reply-all.

@Spevacus This is why they invented RSS. (I don't know why Teams has no RSS support.)

@Spevacus Agreed! Kinda off-topic, but I'd also love it if Teams admins could change the rep thresholds too

@Spevacus Good thing you can go to /search?tab=newest&q=is%3aa&searchOn=3.

@wizzwizz4 yeah. some related words I wrote before

@Mithical Stop giving me solutions, I'm trying to complain here.

Oh, that's a veiled complaint, I don't think it should be necessary to know search operators to be able to view recently answered posts... but this is a bit of a departure from the discussion about the main Q&A network.

@wizzwizz4 and I can empathize with that.

@Mithical Why'd they still have searchOn, anyway? It doesn't appear to work properly (e.g. 2 just gives me the search Help page).

@wizzwizz4 what is searchOn for?

It was originally a bitfield, for whether to search on SO proper, your Team, or both. Nowadays it does absolutely nothing, except trigger weird edge-cases in the HTML renderer.

@wizzwizz4 Question-writing is a skill that's pretty much only developed through... question-writing. I've written I think thousands of questions at this point, so I'm fairly comfortable heading to most sites on the network and asking a question. But it's definitely a skill I've had to actively develop; you don't usually arrive on the scene knowing how to scope a question, provide the right background info, and display enough previous research to be received well.

(Okay, maybe not thousands, but hundreds. Lessee... 700+.)

@wizzwizz4 oh great

no wonder when I take it out of the URL for making browser bookmarks it seems to do nothing

writing good* questions is hard

(*depending on your definition of good)

@Mithical I don't mean baby's first question: I mean "I have absolutely no idea what these words mean but I overheard them somewhere".

It is absolutely possible for a complete question-writing beginner's first attempt at a Reference Question to be edited into shape, but any inherently "help" question cannot be. (Maybe some Reference Questions can be extracted from it, but those won't help the next person who needs to ask a "help" question on the topic.)

Some sites already make this distinction somewhat: Mathematics has [fake-proof] and Worldbuilding has [review-my-idea]. (Neither are quite the same as the distinction I'm drawing between "reference" and "help", but they're prior art.)

> Traditionally, RMIQs violate a number of Help Center prohibitions including, but not limited to, being open-ended, opinion-based, and leading to all answers having equal value. Questions using this tag may not be closed for violating those prohibitions, but may be closed for violating others (notably being too broad, AKA violating the Book Rule).

@wizzwizz4 I think that's part of the question-writing skillset. My math skills aren't good enough to evaluate that question, but if you're asking about concepts you're not familiar enough with, then the first step is to ask more basic questions to make sure you can formulate the more advanced question properly. If I don't know what the difference is between "mass media" and "new media", for example, I'm not going to do well asking what role the internet plays in mass media.

Once I know that internet is defined as new media, and that mass media refers to more traditional media (newspapers, radio, TV, film), then I can more successfully formulate questions on those concepts.

@Mithical I did formulate the more advanced question properly. But the comments show that I didn't know what I didn't know.

Once again, beyond my skillset to evaluate that specific question :) Just going off the depiction you gave in here

> That is just bad teaching, I'm sorry. Trees are plants: that's part of the definition of "plant". It's a woody plant, and there's no such thing as a "half-tree, half-cat". Some cats can climb trees, and therefore can sit in them: whether or not a given cat will is a separate question, neither provable nor disprovable from the existence of plants.

Translated.

@Mithical in my experience, there's a significant threshold of practicality. I can answer the questions I can answer because I spend my time asking many of those foundational questions and finding the answers through exploration, reading source materiel, etc. if everyone did that, many of the questions I answer would not be asked on SO. people could answer them on their own.

people being able to ask those questions without going that deep into research and me answering them saves people time. it's my understanding of what makes a significant chunk of the value of this platform.

@Mithical This pretty much describes what classroom education is for and why it works (even if it's not optimal in many ways; like Churchill and democracy I guess)

I think some of our science-based sites work fairly well when people come around with their classroom-based questions (as long as they're not trying to cheat), but we struggle with what to do when they come from somewhere else

For Biology, Medical Sciences, and Psychology part of that problem is the "somewhere else" is often a personal medical problem of their own or a family member and they're looking for advice rather than understanding

But another part is that they're too lost to ask a specific enough question. They don't really know where to start

honestly I think that's one of the massive challenges the network faces. if you must already have structured your thinking to ask questions here, then either a) you are an SME who, by virtue of structuring their thinking, likely has produced an answer, or b) you are generally not a greenhorn independently looking into a topic

@BryanKrause In such cases, the answer should be "here's this book: read it, find the words to explain your question, and [edit] and/or self-answer it afterwards".

But even if someone says that, there's no way to take the question aside (e.g. bump it into the Staging Ground), so it gets a massive rain of downvotes and close votes and other negative feedback.

Like, there's a dual purpose. We archive knowledge (collection). We serve that knowledge to people who need it (distribution). But we don't collect all kinds of knowledge equally. Just how biased is the kind of knowledge we collect? Are distributees looking for that kind of knowledge at all? Does the requirement for structured thought in asking a question preclude us from accepting the kinds of questions someone would want to search later?

@wizzwizz4 Is that an answer, or a comment? If that makes them upset because they don't want to take the effort of reading the book, is that good riddance or a failure of the platform to address a user's need?

@BryanKrause Comment. And if they don't want to take the effort of learning, then… well, depends whether it's a good book.

@Slate Spitballing: Would it be useful to have pages that split up general, overly-broad questions into more specific questions? i.e., a parent question or topic that's more general than a question but more specific than a tag?

I'm assuming, here, that the book is at an appropriate level. Sometimes (e.g. for General Relativity questions) the answer should be "you are not capable of understanding this yet", but for a simple subject like biology or set theory, there are books available.

@wizzwizz4 Which is correct: the questions are low-quality and should not be on the site in their present form. (Doesn't mean it doesn't suck to be on the receiving end.)

@Mithical I think this is something we've tossed around a bit in different forms. Like, maybe not that idea exactly, but a gesture at "is 'completely organic Q&A pair' the correct way to archive knowledge at all?"

And yeah, absolutely

I asked in the TL a bit ago about canonical questions: which sites have them, how they construct them, how they index them. Same vibe. We might even be gesturing at the same general idea

@wizzwizz4 I'm skeptical that many of the askers are willing to go to that effort, even if it's a good book, even if they only need one. The question is kind of whether those users should or shouldn't be served by these sites, which I don't think is easy to answer

...continuing: A parent question of "What is figurative language?" may be too broad for a good answer, but it could then direct you to child questions such as "What is a metaphor", "What is a conceit", "What is metonymy", and "What is personification", for instance. (No points for guessing what notes I'm reviewing at the moment.)

Also I should add that "not willing" isn't just out of laziness necessarily; sometimes askers are older folks where the idea of learning from a book like school is just so long-ago and foreign to them that they don't have the confidence that they can do it even if they wanted to

@starball "display enough previous research" refers to checking information extant on the site itself, not necessarily external sources.

@BryanKrause I'm not saying "learn from the book": I'm saying "read it so you have a basic vocabulary with which to contextualise the question and any answers you receive". There are a lot of questions where the person asking doesn't even have that, and has nowhere to start.

(e.g. using the words "virus", "bacteria" and "parasite" interchangeably in a question, such that there's no way to tell what's actually being asked)

@wizzwizz4 That sounds like "learning" to me; I don't mean necessarily learning the answer to their one specific question from the book

Though, sometimes it would involve learning why the question as they've asked it makes no actual sense

In my experience, people with such questions do know enough about what they're asking that the questions in their heads do actually have answers, but they're getting mixed up with other things because they're ignorant of the other things and don't know the difference.

You don't need to know very much about a bacterium or a virus to know that a tick isn't either.

(That specific example could be clarified easily in the comments, but hopefully you get the idea.)

sorry for the inbox spam @Spevacus; here's another one

@BryanKrause fwiw, I'm fairly aware of the term enshittification, what it means, and likely share a lot of your concerns of what it means to the internet we grew up on and the things we loved about it. All of that to say, with that context, I don't think your answer/comments were particularly too snarky/rude or anything. I had the same question Slate had, but when you answered with the comment it made total sense.

@Slate Unforgivable

[sigh] I'll put it on the pile of grudges

of unforgivable grudges. At least put it in the right pile!

@Slate not the stash?

Fine. It's in the stash of unforgivable grudges.

What are you, some kind of Q&A knowledge archival enthusiasts, insisting everything gets put in the right place and called the right thing?

Feature request: Remove all tags on Meta. Replace with one [stuff] tag.

@Slate Nope. Just Dutch. It's almost the same, but without the enthusiasm.

LOL

@Slate didn't you give a presentation to the Trust and Safety team on an idea to achieve exactly that this very week?

No, and you can't prove it because it's in internal docs

Fine. But I can call you a lying bird then

(no, I can't prove it. Nor that you're lying, nor that you're a bird)

You can call me whatever you'd like. Beware: I get the same privilege.

@Slate Clearly not.

Well, people insist, but that doesn't mean it happens. Or that it amounts to preservation per se.

Preservation and archival are also somewhat distinct, I think; archival implies more order and organization than preservation, which simply implies continued existence.

Yeah, depends on the definition. I think colloquially the definitions have flipped

But I could be wrong

I think if I tried to claim we weren't archiving Q&A posts, while probably technically true, would confuse a lot of people

@Spevacus as someone who 1) dosen't always get tags 2) has multiple folders called 'stuff' - I approve

@Slate is this a general infohoarding room or just for the question you linked ? :D

general purpose

if you've got burning questions or searing engimas go for it

naw, more about catching up so I didn't repeat (too much) what other folks said WRT that post

:D

coherence will need to wait for coffee

@starball I'm so sorry I don't think I'm going to get around to thinking in depth about your post today

same w you @wizzwizz4

I'm trying to take the time to think carefully about this stuff and what the implications are. Goes slow. Lots of notes, rereading, cross-referencing. They're both good answers but I'm out of time

Also

nioteas.com/blogs/oolong/duck-shit-oolong

this was mentioned by the neighbours

dancong is really good

wait until you learn about chongshicha

Oh, I can't share (privacy) but they went to this restaurant across the border and they were pairing teas (served in different sorts of containers, even bottles) depending on the type

Interesting

What kinds of teas?

lLots

ooh

tiktok.com/@joatmon.sg/video/…

Mostly chinese?

hmm

and they got little cards saying what the tea is apparently

Yeah. All the true teas are Chinese or Taiwanese in style. Dancong is from Chaozhou, Dahongpao from Wuyi, what I'd guess is some kind of jinjunmei which would be Yunnan, couple ball oolongs from God knows where.

lol

The white teas are probably Fuding unless they're very unusual. The 15 year is probably not actually 15 year

as a vaguely ceylonese person "all true teas are chinese/taiwanese" should offend :D

I still prefer my coffee

no sorry "true teas" in this case means camellia sinensis leaf and nothing else

not like, location based

Yeah, and black vs "everything else"

tea types are complicated :D

Many things worth caring about are :D

Else they'd be boring

Even this chart is an oversimplification in several areas...