Tavern on the Meta

8:00 PM

oh, ok

oh. I've done this rant before. Including the "old man" bit. They say memory is the second thing to go, but I forgot the first.

user315433

Before it was product-managed into the managed product that we see today.

Anonymous

@FTP Well, I'm glad the answer isn't entirely downvoted, at least.

Catija

FB really annoys me and their focus on using users as a source of income makes me sick... Have you seen that "donate your birthday" thing they're doing? They get you to advertise that you're asking for donations to a charity (that's great) but then they get to keep a cut of it... I'd much rather post it myself and tell people to go directly to the charity's site to donate. :(

Anonymous

I read the IOTA white paper blind to its reception, and found it had a lot of interesting ideas, but lacked the rigor I'd need to have any confidence in it as the basis for this kind of system. And then I looked around and saw their interactions with the cryptographic community, and it became clear that they shouldn't be trusted with a dime, let alone the amount of investment they got.

Travis J

8:04 PM

@Catija "Users as a source of income" is kind of the way that every business on the internet works.

Anonymous

IOTA team: "hey check out our innovative decentralized network architecture!"
Security community: "your decentralized security model fails due to weaknesses in this hash you made up."
IOTA team: "shut up you know we're not actually meant to be a decentralized system."
Security community: "?!??!?!"

Travis J

assuming that other providers could perform security tasks has always been a weak assumption

Catija

@TravisJ Sure, but that doesn't mean I have to participate and actively make it easy for them...

Travis J

@Catija True, you don't have to participate, but don't be disillusioned either. Getting worked up over the fact that using a service provides value to that service is rather naive.

That said, don't take this as an endorsement of Facebook on my behalf, they suck. They are the anti-thesis of benevolence.

Catija

I'm not expecting them to be benevolent. They've repeatedly shown that they don't actually care about the people using their site other than as a product... but the lack of transparency... they don't ever tell you that they take a cut of those donations... that's what bothers me.

You have to go and actually search the web for the help page that explains what cut they take.

Travis J

8:13 PM

That makes sense, it would have been clearer to say that up front :P

Anonymous

> The company takes a fairly standard 5% fee from donations. Of that, 3% is to cover payment processing and 2% goes to administrative costs like vetting nonprofits and fraud protection.

Travis J

I would suggest completely halting all activity on Facebook aside from a cursory presence to maintain basic communication availability for certain people who are otherwise difficult to contact. But, that is just me.

Catija

Some of the groups I use only use FB as their primary way of getting information out to members.

Travis J

Yeah, that's true. That falls into the difficult to contact arena. Doesn't mean you need to be active on the site though, aside from maintaining the group response. Unless the group is based on creating Facebook content... in which case there are no words.

Have you or the group tried meetup.com?

Really high quality group focused website for organizers.

Catija

Nope. And nope. And I'm really not in a position to get them to change.

It's a group full of little old people who barely know what FB is... With a chunk of tech-savvy people thrown in to make it really frustrating... and a bigger chunk of "normal" late 20s-40s people.

Travis J

8:33 PM

Sounds like a perfect meetup fit :)

user315433

Not hearing anything about SO meetup.

user315433

Sep 29 '17 at 13:24, by bluefeet

@Michelle early next year

user315433

But that was before November 2017.

Adam Lear

We didn't end up doing a meetup

user315433

Hopefully... early next year (2019).

Travis J

8:37 PM

You could just start unofficial SO meetups...

Catija

OK... are we talking about the site or in person actual meet ups?

Travis J

in person

Only 1 requirement: you must wear at least one piece of Stack Exchange swag to enter. Free beer. Free pizza. At least one presenter.

Mostly joking, but it kind of sounds like a fun idea.

Catija

Well, I have swag now...

Travis J

First meeting, Vegas, Independence Day.

Catija

It'd be cool if they had them in conjunction with tech conferences, actually... Andy's going to one in San Jose in June and it'd be neat to see people there.

Travis J

8:40 PM

As long as no one runs into an invisible wall #AppleSpaceship

Catija

Actually, I went to Google last year... maybe I'll try to go to the new Apple complex this time... though, I don't even know if they allow visitors.

Travis J

Just tell them you are a paramedic.

Catija

And I'm there with a 22 month old kid?

And no ambulance?

Travis J

Emotional support child.
You are part of the preemptive response team.

The PRT.

Which tech conference? DevOPs? Women in tech? Those were the only two I found listed.

Anonymous

@TravisJ I like this plan. I have a box of XXL stack t-shirts from the marketing guy that was laid off before me. Just gotta set myself up down the blocking selling those for $5 a pop ("great deal for pizza and beer!") and I'm set for an evening.

Travis J

8:46 PM

LOL

Catija

@TravisJ Fluent and Velocity

Travis J

Hm, that looks interesting

Catija

Really, really good parties.

You know... if you're into that part of it...

Last year, Andy got a (LEGO similar) Android kit... and about a dozen t-shirts.

I'm sure that swag and parties isn't what Conferences are all about but, since I didn't actually go to the conference, that's all I can say. :P

Shog9

@TravisJ we did do this a couple of times... SOMeetup #1 SOMeetup #2

Travis J

Yeah, I remember those. I almost flew out.

Or at least, to the Germany one.

No, I take that back, that was before my time here really.

I was thinking of the ones where you earned the not a robot badge recently.

@Catija It is, in general, what I am interested in. The attendees tend to be just as informed if not more informed than the presenters, so mingling there is often more productive than sitting through the presentations.

Shog9

8:58 PM

The story was, in 2009 Jeff & Joel did a world-wide tour of Stack Overflow Dev Days conferences

In 2011, they tried to do it again - and ran into Second System Syndrome

Travis J

hah

Shog9

so scrapping that plan, they went with community-organized and site-promoted meetups instead

which worked pretty well, so we did it again the next year

at which point, everyone was thoroughly exhausted

Travis J

Well it has been 6-8 years now, so the cool-off procedure should be complete.

Petter Friberg

9:12 PM

I have continued to comment some on that stuff, I just don't dare to ping you anymore Shog :D

Maybe a dedicated meta would be best, if I get some time I will write down a question with the alternatives (pro-con) and see what the rest of the community thinks.

gnat

@TravisJ the systemic problem is hot questions are a big entertainment business that brings Stack Exchange about 100K clicks a day. This is why these flood sidebar with entertaining garbage having low or zero value for knowledge repository. And loosely interpreted site scope has nothing to do with this, it's only a smoke screen invented by Shog few years ago to cover this business. Stack Overflow, a site with canonically strict scope, suffers just the same...

7

Q: Why are so many useless questions ranked highly, and vice versa?

I find that more and more new questions consist of useless ponderings of obscure details of languages. Maybe I am not seeing the questions that involve actual issues. That could be because the obscure useless questions tend to gather the most traction. A few recent examples (from weekly newslet...

...the only difference is that system is tweaked to push SO questions from hot list after 7-8 hours, unlike other sites. Without this dirty trick that whole HNQ business would probably be killed long ago by complaints at SO meta (the only meta that is loud enough to be heard)

Travis J

9:34 PM

Meh, I disagree.

law.stackexchange.com/q/17392 , 400 views, closed within 12 hours of posting, example of systemic problem. HNQ handwaving reeks of whataboutism.

Shog9

What pushes SO questions off the list is... more SO questions. The tweaks for SO (and a pile of other sites) are mostly so that the list isn't dominated by any one site. Which is, I'll freely admit, not done particularly well; we should probably just explicitly cap the number of questions per site in a given time period. But, that'd require keeping history, which we don't and - I've been told - can't.

For the past little while, I've been working on my own system for identifying "trending" questions and tags, which I use internally for keeping an eye on meta sites. I look at vote velocity directly, rather than approximating it via score + age. And I keep a history. It works a lot better. But, it also only runs on meta sites, so I can afford to do that.

Catija

No... but you could adjust the weighting so that anything after 5 is really, really hard. Is changing the equation also impossible?

Shog9

@Catija anything after 5 what?

Catija

Questions from a site. The math already penalizes additional questions from a site, right?

Shog9

5 simultaneous posts? That's already hard. But it doesn't stop 3 simultaneous posts + a different 3 an hour later.

Catija

9:46 PM

As long as they're turning over, that'd be fine with me.

Shog9

That's where this all falls apart right now: the entire list is regenerated every n minutes, so without history there's nothing stopping a "hot site" from exposing a large set of questions over the course of a day or two.

If I ever get time, I'll put together a script to track this and ... animate it or something.

Catija

I'm guessing my mental image of "animate" is probably not what you meant. :D

Shog9

imbue with the breath of life and cause to walk the earth as an undead monster preying on the flesh of the living?

wait, I mean... like a gif

Catija

Disappointing. I think the undead is more often what people think of when it comes to the HNQ.

Shog9

Naw, undead is more like that [featured] meta post bug.

Catija

10:01 PM

Speaking of, I haven't seen it recur... so I guess it's really dead. I guess you'll have to find someone else to try out deleting it.

Shog9

that sounds like you're trying to jinx it

Catija

It's been almost a week...

Now I have to remember who I was talking to about it...

gnat

7

A: Make hot questions with multiple answers age away faster on smaller / subjective-ish sites

It's worth noting that matters of aging factor have very little impact on Stack Overflow questions. If you take time to monitor questions in the hot network list, you may notice that SO ones seem to leave it much faster compared to questions from smaller sites. To understand why this is so, take...

> If SE team wanted just to avoid SO domination, they would implement the adjustment differently. There is a parameter in hotness formula that controls just how to limit amount of questions from single site... Tweaking this parameter would guarantee desired limit for questions that can enter the list. But instead of simply changing it they picked an indirect way that makes SO questions leave hot list faster which apparently was the main purpose of this adjustment...

Catija

Ah, fedorqui on ES.SE spanish.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2787/…

It's slightly odd that the tags (including the red tags) on that meta are in Spanish... but the main site interface and the lock banner are not.

rene

Only the SO language sites are localizable via Transifex, I assume.

Catija

10:14 PM

It's just odd because, in general, Tags should be in English, so I was surprised.

rene

Although most texts should be available for es.so so with a bit of re-use

Shog9

@gnat yeah... That's based on an admittedly inaccurate answer. Which is my own fault.

rene

@Catija Tags are just records in a database, so I guess it is easy to enter there whatever is needed.

Shog9

IIRC, every parameter is scaled down for SO

I wasn't around for the implementation of this, but from the looks of it the idea was to try and normalize inputs rather than directly adjust outputs

So you'd look at, say, median answer score on SO vs. the rest of the network and scale SO accordingly

(no idea if that's how it was done, but something like that)

user315433

@Catija Typically, the language sites where the language is based on Latin alphabet use tags in that language. Where it's not, the tags are in English.

Shog9

10:18 PM

Which was probably sensible back in '10 or '11 or whatever

user315433

Magento voters rather convincingly went with "who has most rep" strategy.

user315433

Electing a candidate who edited 174 posts and reviewed < 500, despite being on the site since the beginning.

user315433

10:32 PM

4 featured items on SO: Elections, OpenId, Teams, and spam.

Shog9

there's another one waiting in the wings...

feast or famine

Taryn

all the announcements

Travis J

The elections at SO seem to always revolve around review counts, and then the moderators get elected and have to deal with custom problems completely unrelated to trivial suggested edits, close votes, or non answers.

Journeyman Geek

@rene no. SE openid will continue to be supported. Only third party openid will not. And that's practically mostly more obscure providers

user315433

@JourneymanGeek That's not what I read.

user315433

10:47 PM

@JF SE OpenID accounts are really email/pw accounts handled through complicated OpenID code path. They will be migrated to a more simple email/pw only code path as a part of this change. No extra work required on your part. — Joe Friend ♦ 5 hours ago

Catija

0

A: 2018 Community Moderator Election Results

-1 ... 16% voted voted and i guess 90% of them did not read Who should nominate him self as a candidate in elections?

Ouch.

Shog9

NO OpenIDs will be supported for authenticating with SE.

whether or not SE OpenID will continue to be available for use with 3rd-party services is a bit up in the air at present, but... I wouldn't make big plans involving it.

user315433

Since Joe is saying sorry about that to Boltclock, it looks like such support is unlikely.

Shog9

The line Joe is trying to draw there is between your current email+password login on SO/SE (which relies on SE OpenID) and the way this'll work after July (where you'll still be able to use your same email+password, but behind the scenes it won't involve OpenID anymore)

Kinda bad if we somehow convince a lot of people to abandon their current logins and, I donno, sign up for Facebook or something.

Catija

... and if there's I don't know... a bug that deletes all logins that happen to use the same email address when you only delete one of them.

Shog9

10:58 PM

@Catija So... There's a long story there, but I'll let Kevin tell it once he's done sorting this out.

Catija

@Shog9 Should I ask a question on Meta about it?

To give him somewhere to tell said story?

Shog9

up to you

user315433

Every sufficiently large internet company is indistinguishable from embodiment of evil.

Shog9

Pretty sure there's already a meta post about this

The short version is: back in, uh, late 2011 I think? ...we redesigned the whole login and account system to be a bit less confusing. Prior to that, it worked more or less like the one you can see now on SEDE.

Catija

The one that logs you out when you take five minutes to refill your coffee mug?

Shog9

11:01 PM

yeah. Ok, it wasn't like SEDE in that regard.

Catija

That's something to be thankful for, at least.

Shog9

Anyway, then in ... 2014? ... We redesigned it again. To be a bit less confusing. Except we didn't really redesign it, we just put up sort of a less-confusing facade over the old less-confusing-but-still-confusing system.

So for the past ~4 years, we've had this leaky abstraction. Which mostly does what it says it's going to do, except behind the scenes it's doing something entirely different.

Catija

Seems reasonable to want to fix it, then. :) (Which I'm guessing is part of getting rid of OpenID)

user315433

Remembering "you are logged in, reload the page" banner and feeling nostalgic.

Shog9

@Catija Right. One of the big advantages of getting rid of OpenID is that we can tear out a ton of legacy support for ... everything. Multiple providers per email, multiple emails per provider, providers with no emails, emails with no providers... All these crazy scenarios that were either explicitly supported at one time or implicitly supported without any UI.

Tim Stone

11:23 PM

@Catija Damn D:

Catija

@TimStone What? :P

Tim Stone

Harsh but fair :P

Catija

:D Sorry.

I'm getting an inkling that you're the person to poke about SEDE concerns... is that accurate?

user315433

Yes, SEDE is Tim's baby.

Tim Stone

I mean I'm certainly not not that person at least

user315433

11:25 PM

Possibly adopted from waffles.

Catija

I just posted an MSE bug report for SEDE.

Taryn

@Catija and I closed it as a dup of another discussion on how to fix it

Catija

Also, the site name for "Software Recommendations Meta Stack Exchange" is too long and breaks the list of all sites... but I didn't want to post two bug reports at the same time.

Tim Stone

Oddly enough I believe that too is a duplicate

Catija

@Taryn I was thinking it was a bit odd because Writers, which changed after CogSci, seems to be fine.

Whee!

Ano

11:28 PM

@Taryn It's not a duplicate of that. That one asks about the data dump; this one asks about SEDE. If anything, this is a dupe of this: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/306338/… — Ano 13 secs ago

Taryn

@Ano if you read the question, it also discusses SEDE

Ano

@Taryn So the one linked above is a dupe too? Why wasn't it closed?

Catija

I feel like I'm suffering from echoing ears... or eyes? Or something.

Ano

@Taryn The one I linked is an exact duplicate of Catija's post...can you please add it to the duplicate list?

user315433

New job ad: VP of Marketing. How does this mesh with the existence of Chief Marketing Officer (who is not mentioned in the job ad)?

user315433

11:40 PM