Tavern on the Meta

Shog9

19:00

Note the lack of a concrete response to that question I just linked... The internal notes for the change contain the phrase "I think the handicap is a fine short-term solution."

Nothing has the staying power of a "short-term solution"

Somewhat

I guess I failed to find the remark about Programmers being penalized on their meta site (if it's stated there)

Shog9

No idea when that was added. Progse launched in 2010, so quite possibly lost to time.

HNQ - like tag synonyms, comment moderation and navigation - tend to be projects that lots of folks think they want to handle... and then burn out trying, or give up after being faced with the complexity of the challenge.

LOTS of folks have joined the company with "fix HNQ!" on their short list of projects they want to undertake. Still not fixed...

...which is why I said earlier: look at this as an opportunity. Sometimes, things gotta get real ugly before they can get any prettier.

John Dvorak

SO doesn't need a handicap. The lack of quality content is a handicap enough Kappa

Shog9

SO has quality content. Just not easy to find. And... HNQ doesn't exactly do a great job of reliably exposing it either.

Andras Deak

it's been days since I've seen a NPE post in HNQ ;)

John Dvorak

19:08

true

Somewhat

@Shog9 could you review this updated answer about "sites excluded on HNQ"?

Shog9

Ironically, the focus on questions is what dooms SO's Hot questions (some other sites as well). Wanna see something fun? Pick your favorite tag and look at its hot answers...

4

John Dvorak

The mere fact that a "fix my null pointer exception plz" gets into HNQ is a symptom of the quality of HNQ.

Andras Deak

I didn't know that was even a thing

Shog9

no one does

I use that page as my go-to example for why navigation is busted

...no one likes that example either.

Andras Deak

19:10

uuuh there's no button to get there, right?

Shog9

@Somewhat "(excluded, closed site)" is a bit confusing.

maybe, (site is now closed) (was excluded when active)

or some such

@AndrasDeak go to the "top users" link for any tag. Then there'll be a "hot" tab across the top

totally intuitive, right???

Somewhat

@Shog9 thanks, I chose "was excluded when active"

Andras Deak

@Shog9 like most things ;)

thanks

Shog9

This is one of a handful of things that Quora does really, really well and... we kinda aped them but lost the bit that makes it work in the process.

If you get your Quora newsletter, what you're actually getting is hot answers

not questions, because questions are boring

Andras Deak

sand and pearls etc

Shog9

19:14

what good is a really interesting question with a pile of sad answers?

you wanna learn something, go look for an interesting answer.

Mark Amery

gah

oops, sorry, didn't mean to post that without typing more

Shog9

I hate reading Quora. Search results almost always suck, browsing manages to be even worse... They have no game-plan for getting rid of spam / self-promotion; heck, they want self-promotion. It's a mess. But... That newsletter is gold. I've been reading it for years; it's like picking up a variety mag at a newsstand to read on a bus.

Mark Amery

I may be too drunk to avoid accidentally hitting the enter key part-way through typing

however

Shog9

that's a good sign to drink more before trying to write something important

Tinkeringbell

STOP! Sobriety test before you go any further...

Tinkeringbell

19:17

walk across that straight line please.

John Dvorak

@MarkAmery up - ctrl+a - ctrl+c - delete

Shog9

I have .25 liters of Jim Beam left over from the flight yesterday; you're free to stop by & share it with me...

Mark Amery

@Shog9 What I was going to say was that this point was largely missing The Point, at least the The Point is perceived by me and some other

s

Somewhat

@Tinkeringbell reply: I can't count how many dashes there are

Shog9

Also: everything about flying Int'l sucks. EXCEPT the duty-free liquor shops. Those are nice.

Somewhat

19:18

maybe I'm drunk...

Tinkeringbell

@Somewhat 3 seconds worth of dashes.

John Dvorak

Flying still beats sailing, doesn't it?

Shog9

I wouldn't know

Mark Amery

Namely: the issue is not just that the staff decided to follow the whims of STRANGERS ON TWITTER over HONOURABLE MEMBERS OF THE COMMUNITY WHO OBVIOUSLY ARE RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING BECAUSE THEY POST HERE

Shog9

I mean... Presumably if I'd sailed, I'd still be on a boat without Internet. That might've been a good thing...

John Dvorak

19:20

How long does it take to sail from England to USA now compared to 100 years ago? Might be even longer because now we know about that goshdarn iceberg.

Shog9

yeah. 100% sure more liquor is needed here. Big chunks of that message weren't capitalized.

Mark Amery

It's also that the entire basis for purging IPS from HNQ was some profoundly sexist feminist bullshit about how a man being uncomfortable with sexual attention from a woman is inherently sexist, and the staff just decided the uncritically roll with that

Jon Ericson

@Shog9 I've got a cruise planned a the end of November and it's easily the thing I'm most looking forward to.

Tinkeringbell

@MarkAmery Okay... that's too much alcohol.

Shog9

@MarkAmery as I said to Magisch earlier: the twitter complaint wasn't really at odds with the complaints we've gotten on-site from Honorable Members.

John Dvorak

19:21

Pro-tip: bold text is far more readable than ALL-CAPS, and easier to type

Mark Amery

_I APOLOGISE AND WILL EMPHASISE THINGS IN THE PROPER MANNER IN FUTURE_

πάντα ῥεῖ

@Shog9 Jim beam is minor stuff (whisky made of corn, what should that be please?? You might spoil Coca Cola with such crap stuff). At least consider Irish triple distilled whiskey, if you don't like that smoky taste of single malt scotch!

Somewhat

@MarkAmery we know how bad the last time you're drunk...

Mark Amery

@Tinkeringbell Go on?

Shog9

@πάνταῥεῖ oh, man... Got to drink a few glasses of this in the shop while I was waiting: slaneirishwhiskey.com - fine stuff.

Tinkeringbell

19:22

@MarkAmery I can't see the original any more... but the retweet that got a reaction said:

> When people seem confused about why Stack Overflow might not be the most welcoming/comfortable place for people to find answers to programming questions, show them this

Mark Amery

@Shog9 Hmm, link? I don't understand this comment as it stands; maybe I would with the prior context

Tinkeringbell

that didn't even mention sexism or feminism

Shog9

Also picked up a bottle of Bullet, which is cheap and still ok

Mark Amery

@Tinkeringbell that was branched off a thread that described IPS as a "sexist subreddit" for allowing those questions to be posted

Tinkeringbell

@MarkAmery Nope... the sexist subreddit came after.

Mark Amery

19:24

huh, maybe

I didn't check the dates

Tinkeringbell

I did.

Mark Amery

though I'm not sure it matters, since the motive is the same either way

Shog9

2 hours ago, by Shog9

@Magisch hard to know, given what actually happened here was that someone with a bunch of followers got something that folks on meta had also been asking for. IOW, it acted as a multiplier, not a counter.

Tinkeringbell

@MarkAmery Timeline!

Shog9

@MarkAmery I'm nowhere near getting through all this stuff, but... What I've seen as the instigation looks an awful lot like the many, many "Look, I just want to see programming stuff" complaints that've cropped up over the years.

Jon Ericson

19:25

@MarkAmery I didn't see it that way at all. But even if it were, I'm not sure that it's materially different than people uncomfortable with a question in Spanish or about Christianity ~~offending their eyes~~ distracting them from real work.

Shog9

Leveled at IPS, but also Gaming, Worldbuilding, Christianity, Islam, etc.

Tinkeringbell

2:04 PM, 16/10/18... first tweet by someone, asking for a way to block HNQ on SO. Screenshot was tweeted in that thread at 2:37. That got a retweet at 2:39... and that retweet got a response from Adam at 3:18.

πάντα ῥεῖ

@Shog9 Try the "Green Spot" stuff. You'll be surprised about single malt Irish whiskeba!The "Yellow Spot" is stronger, and beyond all beliefs, taking ice with it seems to be a good advice from the bar tender ;)

Mark Amery

so, I mean, is there any motive for purging IPS from HNQ that anyone has articulated other than a sense that it's inherently immoral and misogynistic for a man to ask how to deal with uncomfortable sexual interactions with women?

Tinkeringbell

@MarkAmery That's not why we're excluded at all

Mark Amery

19:27

because as far as I can tell that's what motivated the original complaint, and until now I've interpreted the staff validation of the complaint as a validation of the ideology behind it

@Tinkeringbell go on?

Tinkeringbell

Titles were wrong, we deal with it. Our fault, we should've paid more attention. We're still not doing great at that, Catija had to correct one yesterday.

Shog9

@πάνταῥεῖ clearly I've unfairly dismissed Irish whiskey due to too much exposure to jameson. I'll keep an eye open

> The unfortunate truth is that what is perfectly reasonable for IPS and makes for a great question isn't going to necessarily be something that everyone finds to be workplace appropriate, which is a big consideration for the network as a huge percentage of users are using the network during working hours

That should probably be considered the canonical reason

Mark Amery

So, what does "workplace appropriate" mean, @Shog9?

Shog9

Given it was posted as a response to a direct question on the matter

@MarkAmery "relevant to your work" would be my default assumption

Magisch

@Shog9 In that case, there are about 20 other sites who need kicking off the same train

Shog9

19:29

@Magisch yes

3 mins ago, by Shog9

Leveled at IPS, but also Gaming, Worldbuilding, Christianity, Islam, etc.

Magisch

only IPS got hit though didn't it

Somewhat

deja vu, but I deleted my comment about controversial/clickbait-y sites

Magisch

so that's not the real reason

Shog9

Gaming has gotten a LOT of flak for this over the years, probably because they went out of their way to make click-baity titles at one point

Mark Amery

I raised the point here yesterday that I actually went to a school where any keywords relevant to homosexuality were picked up by the internet filter, and if you viewed a page containing them you were instantly and automatically banned from the school network and sent to a disciplinary meeting with the IT admins

πάντα ῥεῖ

19:30

@Shog9 Jameson isn't that bad at all (I am currently consuming that stuff). I really was surprised (as being a scotch lover) about the quality Irish whiskey can be. Well, I've asked the competent bar tenders to serve me some appropriate stuff.

Mark Amery

Yet I don't think anybody is seriously advocating suppressing all titles that reference homosexuality in some way

Shog9

@πάνταῥεῖ I don't hate Jameson, but it's never been something I'd go out of my way to drink. More like, "oh, it's St. Patricks' day, I guess we should drink Jameson"

(which doesn't make a terrible lot of sense either, but roll with it)

πάντα ῥεῖ

@MarkAmery Homo what plz??

Mark Amery

So it seems to me that when people talk about "workplace appropriateness" in this context, they're really applying their own ideology and not just trying to protect people from filters

Tinkeringbell

@MarkAmery We've actually had the same arguments with people over at IPS before ... When we had questions about sex (and I believe one about furries too... didn't the furries one get filtered out of HNQ after a tweet too?)

Shog9

19:32

@MarkAmery and? If I worked there, I'd probably be REALLY annoyed if the answers to my programming questions had lots of homosexual stuff on the sidebar.

Tinkeringbell

One guy over at IPS kept arguing the same point, that the sex questions set of their internet filters at work and that that wasn't okay.

and perhaps that's something that needs looking into.

Mark Amery

Me too, @Shog9 - and I'd therefore demand from my IT admins that they get rid off the bullshit filter that was stopping me from doing my job

Shog9

Like it or not, we have a big-ass site dedicated to helping folks with their programming jobs, and a bunch of little sites for everything else. And we can't control random people's IT departments

Mark Amery

But it shouldn't be on us to censor everything that any third party would like us to censor

Shog9

No, it shouldn't. But, we can probably do better about helping folks avoid problems.

Mark Amery

19:34

That's not the approach we've ever taken in the past. Ciro still gets to have his username about the Tiannemen Square massacre

John Dvorak

Tianmen Square something something something?

πάντα ῥεῖ

I don't really follow those gay argues here, can someone set me in place please?

Shog9

We haven't even gotten into one of the ugliest parts of HNQ here: Google indexes those titles along with the Q&A.

Tinkeringbell

@πάνταῥεῖ It's used as an example of another kind of stuff that can end up in HNQ, be detected by a workplace filter and then make SO inaccessible/workplace inappropriate...

John Dvorak

Surely there's an HTML hint that says "this content is irrelevant" that ads regularly use?

Mark Amery

19:35

but just this one time, where some feminists get angry about titles that portray female sexuality in a negative way, suddenly this otherwise-ignored doctrine of being "workplace-appropriate" demands censorship?

πάντα ῥεῖ

"Queer and Ass" or what?

Shog9

So you can post some innocuous question about, I donno, operator overloading... And it comes up in searches for How can I kill the president?

Mark Amery

I really don't get how that adds up except through the staff agreeing with the ideological basis for the complaint

Shog9

(as will this room for a while now. You're all on a list folks, sorry - tell the SS I said "hi!")

Somewhat

noooooooooooooooooooo.............!

John Dvorak

19:36

I think I'm on the FBI watchlist now. And I don't even live in the USA.

Mark Amery

I am the least likely to be a terrorist. Kill the others first.

Tinkeringbell

@Shog9 The SS has already labelled me too dumb to take serious. I'm okay :)

πάντα ῥεῖ

@Shog9 The president will kill themselves by swallowing the wrong stuff.

John Dvorak

Accidental suicide by poisoning seems plausible. But then again you have a case of a journalist slipping onto a bonesaw, into a 6ft hole and trigerring an avalanche of dirt that covered him entirely. On an embassy.

πάντα ῥεῖ

@MarkAmery I am an anarchist, make them kill each other in 1st place and have a party on their graveyards :P

Mark Amery

19:39

@Tinkeringbell I'd like to see this fleshed out. If it wasn't inherently that they involved men dealing with problematic sexual attention from women, what was "wrong" with the two titles that triggered the ban?

Given that meta.stackexchange.com/questions/316934/… is the most-upvoted comment of Magisch's answer, I think most of the community shares my interpretation of events; if that's not accurate, explaining WTF the actual staff motive was would have value

πάντα ῥεῖ

@Shog9 That's quite of a cynical statement, and I don't like it. I can accept you're watching like kinda p'lice. But mentioning the SS is just inappropriate (I am still considering to flag that, not sure finally).

Tinkeringbell

@MarkAmery The fact that titles about questions involving men dealing with problematic sexual attention were shown to someone that has no clue of what IPS is, and probably already has had a lot of bad experiences or a catastrophic something happening to them so they view the world in a very negative light (it's called a self-stigma, look it up once you're sober)... In a context of 'programming questions and answers' which you'd clearly expect to be free of any sexual tension.

Shog9

@MarkAmery here's my thing: I don't care who is dealing with problematic sexual attention from whom, I don't particularly want to see that question when I'm looking for answers to programming questions. Same reason I don't want to see Evony ads, or Vogue covers or anything about Kardashians. It trivializes what I'm doing and feels like clickbait.

Mark Amery

@Shog9 HNQ is and has always been primarily clickbait

Shog9

@πάνταῥεῖ sorry, I had to hold in all my bomb jokes yesterday so gotta get 'em out now

@MarkAmery yep, it is. And if that's what you're up for, great! I'll be the first to admit, sometimes I want clickbait... But not when I'm trying to work.

Mark Amery

19:43

If "your questions that show up here are clickbait" was sufficient reason to ban a site from HNQ, every site should be banned

2

Shog9

There's a difference between "give me something to read over lunch" and "I really just need the syntax for git again"

@MarkAmery yep

Somewhat

I read MSO for lunch and MSE for dinner though...

Mark Amery

@Shog9 So that leaves the question of why IPS in particular

Shog9

I'm not disagreeing. This was, at best, a temporary solution and a woefully inadequate one...

43 mins ago, by Shog9

Nothing has the staying power of a "short-term solution"

Somewhat

@MarkAmery Sexuality.SE was also, but that's in the past

Mark Amery

19:44

A justification of "it's irrelevant to programming" and "it's clickbait" doesn't do, because that's just an argument for eliminating HNQ entirely. The fact that that's not actually what happened tells me that neither of those is the real motive.

John Dvorak

The real motive is that someone on Twitter made a stink

πάντα ῥεῖ

@Shog9 We're digging out WIIWar bombs in cities in our countries still and frequently. Well, all the people have to be evacuated all the time. That#s not really fun :P

Tinkeringbell

@JohnDvorak There's a difference between motive and motivation/catalyst.

Shog9

@MarkAmery sure it is. We can make Gaming less clickbaity. A site where sexual interactions are legit on-topic is much harder to fix.

(I should say, Gaming already has made Gaming less clickbaity, with perhaps just a bit of encouragement)

Mark Amery

awwww, but I loved the clickbait gaming titles :(

Shog9

19:46

@πάνταῥεῖ I apologize for my insensitivity

Mark Amery

Any site that has these amongst its top 30 questions is gloriously based upon clickbait:

How can I tell if a corpse is safe to eat?
How can I kill adorable animals?
My head keeps falling off. What can I do?
Is it dangerous to go extreme pig riding in a thunderstorm?
How do I lick a plane?
Is a horse actually faster than running?
How can I keep monsters out of my nether regions?
What is the terminal velocity of a sheep?
Can I give the naked stalking courier his clothes back?
Uhh… I got drunk and trashed a temple. How do I pick up the mess?

Shog9

@MarkAmery and you should be able to enjoy them. Along with all the sexy IPS questions you can handle. But... That should be your choice.

Tinkeringbell

@MarkAmery @Bart is likely to love the sheep one... he's been planning putting parrots in particle accelerators lately.

Shog9

Hence Tim's meta question. This is in no way an effective solution, and we should stop pretending otherwise. Today it's IPS; tomorrow Worldbuilding. The next day ... I donno, Network Engineering? It doesn't work.

Somewhat

trying hard thinking how to ban Network Engineering from HNQ

Shog9

19:51

Maybe we do the reddit thing: ~~make a bunch of vapid trollish posts the only thing anyone new ever sees~~ er, pick a reasonable default list of sites, allow you to customize it (or hide it entirely).

πάντα ῥεῖ

@Shog9 No worries!

Shog9

@Somewhat master/slave?

Mark Amery

@Tinkeringbell As we discuss this I note that academia.stackexchange.com/q/118993/86725 is currently in HNQ

And, like, I'm inclined to defend it as an unobjectionable title with every right to be in HNQ

John Dvorak

I like HNQ because it lets me discover interesting sites

Mark Amery

But it's basically a genderflipped version of what the staff just freaked the fuck out about

Shog9

19:52

Yes, but it could do a MUCH better job of that

John Dvorak

Although, a digest of my selection of sites would also be nice

Tinkeringbell

@MarkAmery Honestly... Can we just accept that IPS is out of HNQ, that HNQ is going to be reworked, that we are all a bit sad about how everything happened... and go do something fun?

I'm not sure what you're expecting me to say there.

Explode in a ball of feathers and frenzy and shout at Shog that this isn't fair?

Don't you think I've not already shouted at people about how ridiculous I find all of this?

How confusing this is for me?

Shog9

for example... New sites invariably have a terrible time both even getting into the HNQ, and with handling moderation on questions when they do. We could probably moderate that a bit: give newer sites a bit of a bump, but have the questions fall off more quickly.

Or, y'know... Do something useful with answers, as I hinted at above.

John Dvorak

How about a personal blacklist of sites in HNQ?

doppelgreener

the feedback has drawn out some really keen observations i haven't had to think about much before, that HNQ frequently presents the worst any site has to offer

Shog9

19:54

There are TONS of ways of accomplishing the goals of HNQ in a more effective way. No easy ways, but... Ways. With the caveat that we might have to rebuild lots of expensive infrastructure to do it.

doppelgreener

by focusing on controvertial edge cases that made everyone go "wait WHAT!?" over the normal representative stuff, even the interesting representative stuff that just isn't quite so alarming or controvertial

Mark Amery

@Tinkeringbell The thing is, from my perspective - meaning no offence, and not wanting to dismiss the site that you are personally invested in and care about - I don't really care about IPS, which I only interact with by occasionally visiting it when a good bit of clickbait appears in HNQ. I do care about the content I've contributed over years to SO, much of which violates the ideals decreed in the Welcoming drive.

Magisch

@Shog9 Does the team have the resources to do that on a reasonable timeline?

John Dvorak

I don't speak Japanese (but some people might), I will never do Islam (but some people might), I don't want to be told how to exercise (but some people might)...

Shog9

@Magisch sure. We just have to not do something else important. Which is why I said, y'all should be looking at this controversy as a hell of a good fortune: there's probably zero chance anything with HNQ would've gotten fixed any time soon without it.

doppelgreener

19:55

and on the good, but controversial, questions it does harm by undermining the community's ability to expertly handle content and amplifying the fastest gun and bringing in tons of crap votes and posts from nonexperts

Magisch

looks to me like this will be another temp solution become permanent and we'll be moaning until 2022 until something happens

Mark Amery

A position of "we will censor content that is counter to feminist ideology" is a direct threat to the survival of the work I've contributed over years criticising incorrect posts

doppelgreener

@Shog9 i definitely do.

Shog9

(heck, there's still a very real chance that nothing will get done with the controversy, but at least there's a fighting chance now)

Tinkeringbell

@MarkAmery Give me an example question or answer or comment? Cause I'm not following you here... what in the world has feminism to do with questions and answers bout programming?

Shog9

19:57

@MarkAmery ok, what am I missing here? Where's the "feminist ideology" bit coming in here. I do not see it.

doppelgreener

@MarkAmery the only content i can think of that would actually be "counter to feminist ideology" is just content that disrespects the humanity or validity or worth of women. i do not think that is the content you are thinking of, and i do not think we would mind that content being censored where it existed.

John Dvorak

@Shog9 That's whom the tweet came from

Shog9

@JohnDvorak To be honest, given what I've seen so far on Twitter I kinda doubt anyone complaining even clicked through those links.

Mark Amery

@Tinkeringbell The entire "welcoming" drive basically started from the idea that blunt technical criticism given without sufficient fluffy padding alienated women and drove them off the site, due to inherent female emotional frailty

Shog9

IOW, it was the links themselves - the titles - that were objected to. Not the actual content.

John Dvorak

19:58

They didn't read the content, indeed

Jon Ericson

Hard to click links in a screenshot.

Tinkeringbell

@MarkAmery I must've missed that.

Mark Amery

@Tinkeringbell stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/…

doppelgreener

@MarkAmery That is not really the idea at all.

Somewhat

And most of us got panicked and started searching for such comments, then flagging them.. which actually proved that it happened.

doppelgreener

20:00

(... "inherent female emotional frailty"...???)

Andras Deak

@MarkAmery eh, I missed out on the rest of the discussion, but no

Tinkeringbell

@MarkAmery Yeah okay, I know that blog post. And I don't really know what to make about women, minorities etc. either, especially not in the context of SO (I could give it an IPS twist).

Somewhat

(the sexists comments, not the "inherent female emotional failty")

Tinkeringbell

@doppelgreener Now don't repeat that over and over or I'll start crying! :)

Shog9

Big difference between "women are emotionally fragile" and "oh hey, there are folks actively being creeps and we should provide more tools / support when that happens"

7

Andras Deak

20:01

@Tinkeringbell that blog post is about minorities in the context of SO

Tinkeringbell

@AndrasDeak I know, and I don't understand as I use SO as it's meant: you open the tab, go to SO and type in some keywords in the search bar.

Andras Deak

and get oppressed, yes?

Shog9

Now... There's another discussion regarding how the sexes are socialized to interact and how that plays out on SO... Including a couple of light studies on the matter (search MSE). But that's a lot more nuanced than "emotionally fragile"

Jon Ericson

13

A: Are Asians considered "marginalized groups" on the Stack Exchange network?

This is a red herring. The problem isn't whether some group or another feels unwelcome (though we have empirical evidence some groups feel less welcome than others). Rather, the problem is various aspects of the sites make people who already feel marginalized feel even more marginalized. That's w...

Andras Deak

why are you pinging me with that?

Mark Amery

20:03

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I guess I don't see the nuances y'all do.

doppelgreener

@Tinkeringbell Well it's also meant for: you open the tab, then go to ask a question, or you find another one and go to post an answer. But then you run into hostility, dismissiveness, creepiness, and otherwise get alienated in ways white men do not.

Andras Deak

@MarkAmery yup

πάντα ῥεῖ

@Somewhat Men can be emotional, and are. Men doesn't automagically imply sexism. I am really trying to keep that torch burning!

Tinkeringbell

@AndrasDeak I personally haven't met anyone on SE yet that has managed to creep me out or make me feel oppressed. Neither have I seen comments on the answers on SO that I've used doing that....

That doesn't mean no-one else has..

Shog9

Truth is, there's a spectrum of attitudes and behaviors at work here. Folks who already feel like they're starting at a disadvantage might take offense more readily... But that doesn't start or end with "women". Lord knows there are LOTS of new users who react badly to criticism because of their own insecurity, and LOTS of them are men. Including the one who keeps polluting our group inbox today.

Jon Ericson

20:04

@AndrasDeak I believe my answer also addresses your chat message. But I'll disengage.

Tinkeringbell

@doppelgreener I'm... not sure how that works. I've never seen it. Worst I've had was a bunch of people calling Dutch social policing 'entitlement'.

I can dismiss that, they're just ignorant.

Shog9

I think there's some value in being more welcoming to folks who might more readily find themselves in this situation... But that doesn't mean we should put up with more abuse from them.

Andras Deak

@Tinkeringbell anyway, none of us understand it :P The first sign of trouble on SO was when Jay posted that blog post mushing together quality control and niceness, and suggesting (intentionally or not) that we should cut some slack to crap posts written by minorities. And then the lack of an official follow-up saying that no, this is not the case, and the company would never want quality to decline as a sacrifice for political correctness

Shog9

Eh... There was ample "trouble" before 2018

Andras Deak

trouble as in "the company is losing it"

Shog9

20:06

Speaking of which, I'm annoyed this didn't get more criticism while I was away. A short history

@AndrasDeak oh yes, especially that.

doppelgreener

@Tinkeringbell Make some posts on SO with a clearly female name and avatar, and I imagine you'll start getting people creeping on you.

Andras Deak

hehe

Mark Amery

@Shog9 IT IS TERRIBLE AND YOU SHOULD FEEL BAD

Somewhat

@Tinkeringbell because they have been cleaned up... fortunately

Mark Amery

(I haven't actually read it. But you asked for criticism, so I'm trying to be helpful.)

Shog9

20:07

@MarkAmery nothing hurts more than finding out you didn't read it

doppelgreener

Like, Stack Overflow has had to say in its rules at various points "This is NOT a dating service." They've had to say that for a reason!

Shog9

so, uh, thanks for that?

Tinkeringbell

@doppelgreener So, you flag the creeps, stuff gets cleaned up like Somewhat says, creep gets suspended, problem over.

Andras Deak

@JonEricson I've read it and I'm still not sure why you pointed me to that :) If you feel like elaborating you can try to explain. I don't think I expressed any of my views regarding the situation of minorities on SO in the above few messages, I just replied to Tinker's remark about the blog

Shog9

@doppelgreener yeah, for whatever reason trying to use comments / chat as a pick-up service is... disturbingly common

Thankfully we don't allow private messages, 'cause I have to assume that'd be even worse

Tinkeringbell

20:08

The next person isn't going to know that you've already been targeted by a creep magically, so you can take whatever slight offense they make as another example of creepiness or give them the benefit of the doubt. The first is called self-stigmatizing, the second 'assume good intentions'.

Magisch

People with boundary and professionality issues in real life continue to display these behaviors on stack overflow. More news at 11

EKons

it's already 11:09 PM here...

Andras Deak

@Shog9 well we even have edit suggestions with "you are pretty, will you date me?" messages. geez

doppelgreener

@Tinkeringbell Sure. But, let's have this picture: everything you post always attracts creeps or rude behaviour. Always. Specifically because of who you appear to be, or something about you like how you're writing. Wouldn't that get tiring? Like, very? And alienating? And make you feel kinda gross for using this site?

This is your default baseline: rude behaviour follows you. Another user's default baseline is to not run into this at all.

And then we add the less common instances of rudeness everyone sees from day to day.

To me that's just occasional and tolerable. To you it's constant and then some.

Somewhat

@Tinkeringbell but we already know the tools, so we know how to handle it. now, for those new users who just post a question for the first time...

Tinkeringbell

20:10

@doppelgreener Nah. It'd make me stubborn enough to actually try and be constructive and fix it, lead by example etcetera etcetera because that's how I became a mod on IPS. I was too stubborn.

doppelgreener

@Tinkeringbell It would alienate a lot of people off ever trying to use the site again directly through Q&A.

Or force them to have to pretend to be male, or white, or straight, or whatever is the oposite of the part of them that causes issues, in order to pass and not deal with this crap.

Mark Amery

I don't disagree in principle, @doppelgreener - but I also don't think that the scenario you describe is the reality for women on SO

doppelgreener

It's a hypothetical situation conveyed to show how there can be an issue here at all and it isn't just "flag and move on as usual, no big deal".

Tinkeringbell

@doppelgreener And that's the self-stigmatizing. That's what's wrong with the world right now ;)

I can't tell people not to do that, I can only recognize it when I do it to myself.

Andras Deak

@MarkAmery The baseline is that women (etc.) in tech tend to get a lot of pushback, ranging from blatant to subtle. That's how a lot of them have to live each day and any additional slap in the face gives a much worse overall impression

Tinkeringbell

20:12

And then say 'hey, it's unrelated'

@AndrasDeak Those slaps usually being the exact opposite of what you might think they are though.

Andras Deak

a person being spat on each day will tend to think that they are slapped for the same reason, even though everyone gets a slap

@Tinkeringbell I'm not sure what you mean

Somewhat

ugh, it's getting late and I don't know why I'm staying awake at 3am... so...

'night!

doppelgreener

I hope we don't have to go into the idea that women in tech face friction and difficulty.

Tinkeringbell

@doppelgreener Nah, we don't. But for me all of that comes from other women in tech. Never from males.

Andras Deak

can't tell if sarcasm or not

Shog9

20:15

everyone has different experiences. Certainly plausible

Andras Deak

What exactly are our premises here?

Tinkeringbell

Or perhaps sometimes from males, with a misinformed idea of how what equality means, and who then start to manage for equal outcomes instead of opportunities.

Andras Deak

Mine is that there is bias against various minorities, women too

Mark Amery

@AndrasDeak Eh... I don't like this idea that "tech" is somehow uniquely hostile to women in a world where women in lots of other industries are expected to wear makeup and heels as a baseline requirement of the job. We should be able to thoughtfully evaluate proper norms around gender without also pretending that our industry in uniquely terrible on this stuff when it plainly isn't

doppelgreener

@MarkAmery Tech is not uniquely hostile.

Magisch

20:16

FWIW, from all the jobs in my company, the IT department would probably be least hostile to women

considering what they have to go through in order processing and purchasing and marketing

Andras Deak

@MarkAmery Yeah, sure. For the record, I'm a physicist, so tech is not "my industry". But I believe STEM fields all have the same problem. And if I look around, I occasionally see casual sexism among my peers, which sucks because 1. they tend to be highly qualified, intelligent people and 2. I'm as privileged as it gets so I should notice as little as possible of these things, yet I do

Magisch

Also FWIW, if I was out to make a metric ton of money and could choose, I'd be a woman now as a software dev, because all the big companies have extra benefit programs for women in tech

Mark Amery

FWIW, I think that this quote illustrates some degree of absurdity in what "tech" is taken to mean these days:

> I'm a physicist, so tech is not "my industry"

Andras Deak

how so?

I'm not in any industry, I'm in academia :P

doppelgreener

I'm not super interested in debating the notion of women experiencing difficulty in tech or other industries

I am hoping we can just take that it is a baseline that this is a thing that happens

and move on to something else

Mark Amery

20:19

As someone who works with molecular biologists, an electrical engineer, a bioinformatician, chemists, and a mechanical engineer, I find it amusing that as a programmer I am magically the only one of us who works in "tech" as typically defined by a modern newspaper :P

Andras Deak

there's not much constructive to be said, hence my earlier request to clarify what exactly are we trying to be working with

doppelgreener

@MarkAmery maybe it's because of the STEM acronym? physics goes under the S, programming goes into the T

Andras Deak

but then E is also tech

Mark Amery

Anyway, I fear I need to leap out of this conversation and bash out some code I've been putting off before my girlfriend gets to the office and drags me home

I am ABSOLUTELY SOBER ENOUGH to write business-critical software right now, so it'll be fine.

Andras Deak

don't let yourself be oppressed, have fun

EKons

20:22

good luck :-P

Mark Amery

:)

Tinkeringbell

@doppelgreener Sure. But then I still agree with this

Andras Deak

oh definitely

doppelgreener

@Tinkeringbell Of course

Andras Deak

The point is to make that little effort not to be a jerk, that's all. And this isn't specific to minorities of course (hence all the rage about the blog post and the New Contributor indicator and blargh whatever)

Tinkeringbell

20:26

@AndrasDeak And deal with those that are by flagging, deleting, suspensions. That doesn't even have to be the new user, it can be the experienced part of the community. So I don't realy see how we got into an argument about workplaces in the first place.

doppelgreener

We got there from here:

32 mins ago, by Mark Amery

A position of "we will censor content that is counter to feminist ideology" is a direct threat to the survival of the work I've contributed over years criticising incorrect posts

and from discussing that the welcome wagon is not about how merely discussing tech is injurous to "inherent emotional frailty" or whatevs, because that is not what was going on that was the source of any problem

Tinkeringbell

I'm still lost. I guess I've used up my thoughts for the day. I'm going to take a shower.

doppelgreener

Good idea

Tinkeringbell

I'll figure this out tomorrow and get back to anyone that deserves a reply :)

doppelgreener

:D

Andras Deak

20:34

@Tinkeringbell blog post -> situation of minorities -> are women actually biased against?

(non-males/non-straights/non-whites/etc.)

canon

20:55

Wonder whether that tweet would have been dripping with such venom had the IPS post been about male treachery. ;)

gnat

@Shog9 Workplace is not penalised at all. I keep a close eye at HNQ and this has never been the case, I've seen up to 7-8 Workplace questions in HNQ. For a concrete example right now I see 6 (six) Workplace questions in HNQ right now: #121410, #121411, #121512, #121499, #121395, #121407. I made a snapshot at Wayback machine if you're interested in more details: web.archive.org/web/20181025205546/https://stackexchange.com/…

@Andy see above ^^^

Oded

@ShadowWizard blockchain, what else?

Adam Lear

21:13

@gnat If I'm reading this monster of a query right, the "hotness factor" is reduced for Workplace to 45% of what it would normally be.

Couldn't possibly tell you what that means in practice, though. There's a remarkable number of magic constants in there.

rene

Shouldn't it be 42% ? Or 6 times 8 ... 45 is just a made up number ...

Adam Lear

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Oded

Yo @AdamLear - wishing speedy recovery to ya.

Adam Lear

@Oded Thanks! It's going pretty well so far.

Oded

Glad to hear it

Adam Lear

21:24

Good to see you here, too. How's things?

Oded

Doing OK. Going to Prague with my team next week, for a conference.

Interesting being in a startup that is in midst change to "we now have an actual product out there" mindset.

Adam Lear

Right on, sounds like fun

Travis J

@TimPost Merging the metas solves this problem.

Oded

Feels a bit like SO when I first joined up, minus the remote work.

@TravisJ really doesn't. Company is all grown up - got multiple teams and stakeholders to consider - in addition to the community.

Naive to think that merging metas would solve those issues.

Travis J

You are going to need more than hand waving to call me naive, sir.

Oded

21:34

Dunno, looks like all I need is a textbox to do that ;)

Travis J

Meh, then I don't take you seriously, and assume you are trolling.

Oded

Company structure and team structure are vastly different to what they were in 2010.

Travis J

You think I am not aware of that?

Oded

Size of team is different and the responsibilities that few people took on themselves have been spread out to many more people.

Merging metas will not help with that.

Travis J

Merging metas will help with the issue of being too spread out. While there may be "many teams", there is not some abundance of CM's to go around.

Oded

21:38

Communication and agreement to changes take a lot longer, never mind that the ability to unilaterally make a change is gone.

Travis J

Communication is harder with the metas spread apart, as it requires the same thing to be said in multiple places now.

Moreover, it requires the same thing to be read in muliple places now.

Oded

I disagree. CMs are spread more thinly than you think.

Mithrandir

@TravisJ staff monitors the feature-request and bug tags network-wide

Travis J

If you want to follow a situation, you need to visit like 5 metas and 6 months worth of posts to piece something together.

Oded

You are assuming that the problem is multiple metas. It really isn't.

Travis J

21:39

CM's are spread very thin. That was my point.

gnat

@AdamLear well you can easily see what that means in practice by simply going to webarchive link in my previous message and counting all the Workplace questions captured in HNQ over there (spoiler: in practice that means nothing). If you want to see the site where penalization really works, check Stack Overflow - that's the only site where whatever magic digits are there they make real impact. For the sake of completeness there is also Math.SE, but it hides from HNQ by editing the titles

Travis J

Having them duplicate responses all over the exchange amplifies that.

Oded

But multiple metas is not the issue, as much as it is a larger company and many more stakeholders.

Travis J

You said that, but you honestly have no reasoning behind it.

You may as well tell me that peanut butter is a solution.

Oded

Only my inside experience of it, but you can take it or leave it.

Travis J

21:41

Your experience has a gaping absence in it recently.

Mithrandir

@TravisJ so this is a totally unofficial blog post written by Jon Ericson that touches on it: jericson.github.io/2018/10/24/lost_trust.html

Adam Lear

@gnat You're saying Workplace isn't penalized at all, but that's not true. Sure, might be insufficiently penalized, but that's a different problem. :)

Oded

Recently, yes.

Travis J

Yes, as I said.

Mithrandir

@TravisJ This reads as rather toxic, to be frank

NotThatGuy

21:42

Got asked to implement binary search in an interview. That doesn't fill me with excitement over the role.

Travis J

@Mithrandir Just a response to being called naive.

Oded

I don't see how that invalidates my point. I spent nearly 5 years of the 8 between 2010 and now at the company.

Travis J

To be honest, if you call someone naive without reason, don't expect them to be courteous to you.

Mithrandir

> What’s more, the idealized state of users and developers working hand-in-hand to build the sites was more smoke-and-mirrors than reality. When I was first hired most of the development team was assigned to “core”, which is to say, there was a bag of developers for managers to draw from. It wasn’t quite the same situation as Valve’s no-management structure but it was a lot closer to that than a typical organization. As a semi-outsider, I observed two ways that changes got made:

As a result of major initiatives originated by management.

Andras Deak

A-ha! exactly what someone naive might say.

Mithrandir

21:42

...

> Fortunately, there’s a solution to this problem: hire a project manager. I don’t think I’m alone in feeling a sense of relief when our development process became more predictable and understandable. I can now say with confidence what we are working on and usually explain our goals too. There are still vestiges of the old ways4 that surprise us, but generally PMs have taken responsibility to drive the development process.

The downside of top-down development is there’s a lot less room for independent projects and ad hoc feature development. As more developers have been assigned to larger …

Travis J

@Oded This is a recent development. That is how it invalidates your point.

Adam Lear

@TravisJ Nah, it's not

Oded

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Adam Lear

Would be nice if it were recent and brand new, but it's not

Travis J

@Adam - CM responses are the same as they have always been?

Oded

21:44

Didn't realize that naive is a 4 lettered word.

Adam Lear

@Oded yeah, the E is silent

Oded

:P

Adam Lear

@TravisJ Not sure I follow what you're trying to say there

Travis J

@Adam - What exactly did you think you were responding to when I said "this is a recent development"? I was referring to CM's being spread too thin.

Oded

The solution you provided is simplistic. It doesn't take a lot of the factors that led to the current situation into account and assumes that a technical solution to a people problem will resolve the issue.

Travis J

21:47

@Oded - The community is polyfurcated.

It is a solution which allows us to all get on common ground.

Adam Lear

CMs have been spread to thin already back when I was a CM and that was 5 years ago. But, you responded to Tim's message that in the past a meta post could get a dev response and code shipped within a week. Merging metas wouldn't get us back to that in the slightest

I mean, it might not be a bad idea for other reasons, but it wouldn't fix the fact that Q&A as a product has far more moving parts now and those parts are being worked on by different teams with different scheduled and different priorities

Mithrandir

I'd really advise reading Jon's blog post if you haven't already.

10

Adam Lear

@Mithrandir I second that suggestion

Travis J

@Mithrandir Working on it.

Oded

Anyhow, getting late here. Take are y'all - see you around

Travis J

21:50

@AdamLear It really depends on the feature. For example, I see bugs get fixed by Nick in hours sometimes from MSO posts. So, context is really important in the classification there. However, the real issue lately hasn't really been so much that there is a lack of response so much as also there is a lack of clarity. Discussions seem to be needed in multiple places before anything can coalesce nowadays, and that leads to a lot of lag.

gnat

@AdamLear sure let's use "insufficiently" if it's important to you, no problem. Want to know what's important to me? Shog referred to my meta post about 5 TWP questions in hot list to tell us his story of penalization but when I check it now I see even more than I complained about - 6. Yeah. Insufficiently. Let's call it that way

Travis J

@Mithrandir Okay, I read it, and the medium post. To be honest, I follow the exchange rather closely. Anyway, none of that is really that new, aside from the "hire a PM" as a fix.

Problem: Lost trust of community,
Solution: Hire a PM.
RE: Hiring a PM to make features more streamlined in both their development and publication will not solve the problem of community trust. SE as a company has had community trust because the community felt like they were involved with something for a long time, and a large portion of that feeling came from interacting with the team on meta. It is virtually impossible for a response to be made on metas because many exchanges face the same problem simultaneously, and CM's are now made to prioritize which community to assuage, and which to…

Merging metas may seem like a trivial solution, but there is a lot of depth to it, and it also has a historical precedence of working very well.

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