@mag Depends on what you're making I guess... for me, that would mean it'd be helpful to talk to some of the people actually using the software and making sure that group is 'diverse'... not really having programmers that score on all sorts of different diversity data points.
To be honest, we recently had someone on the team that doesn't speak either Dutch or English fluently... very nice for diversity, but not much else....
Okay sure... again, the stuff I'm working on isn't the kind that really needs diversity (it deals with automatically registering infrastructure like powerlines and gas pipes)
It can help cover blind spots sure, but then you need to be working on something where there actually are such blind spots.
Depends on why you're diverse. As a checkmark. meh. If you actually deal internationally or there's specific skillsets a member of a team brings in and they arn't local, that's essential
@TheforestofReinstateMonica it's never just the one person, it's the entire management team's fault. And you can't "fire" the entire management team unless you buy out the company, but why waste the money when you can just create another for much less.
you can't get enough training and education to manage a community like this if you don't actively participate in it and talk to its representatives (active users on meta, mods, user evangelists, etc), and it doesn't feel like any of the decision makers have been doing that for years
I don't think there's a school or university where they teach you how to community-manage sites of the scale of SO
we're all in an unfortunate position where the employees just want to keep their jobs, and I don't have anything against that, and yet they are unable to perform well enough for how big the site has become, unless they radically change how they operate (no chance of that, sadly) or they're all replaced by more competent people (also no chance)
the content is not locked up though, it's free for copying with proper attribution, so I say let the poor folks keep their paychecks, let's go do what we want somewhere else
it's a bit like george said. If this goes on for long enough and most just pack up and leave there will be nobody around to train replacements on how everything works, and lord knows the community team is overstretched as is.
How's this going to look like if nothing further happens (as they have said nothing will, the defamation lawsuit is going to take years to shake out), in a month or three from now
@user1306322 I don't feel this is a particularly helpful attitude though. There's been a lot of public facing employees that have basically told us between the lines that they're not responsible for this, and don't have the responsibility/power to solve this. Saying that this means they are 'unable to perform well enough' comes across to me as pretty nasty, given that I see them work with what they got. They are not all incompetent.
the anger doesn't just vanish completly it'll come out every time they do anything until we're either all gone because we can't stand the toxicity anymore or the site folds.
@user1306322 only to go on to say that they all should be replaced by 'more competent people' meaning that the ones now are 'all incompetent'. That's not nice.
@mag I still trust them enough to tell me in advance that I can just as well stop handling flags because the site will be shut down. Haven't heard anything about that, so I'm not worrying about shutting down meta.
And you might want to ask yourself: if meta is shut down, would that be because the company is mean/evil? Or would that be because meta isn't serving it's purpose of being a place where SE can communicate and talk with AND at the community?
on an unrelated notice, any way to have a short private chat with someone like Shog, JNat or another staff member from the Community Management / Dev areas?
@user1306322 To be honest? I've thought of a load of stuff I want to put on MSE, but haven't... because I wouldn't be talking with people, but shouting at people... and those people wouldn't really be listening to what I have to say, but just shouting back at me. That's were communication breaks down...
I suppose that the parrot could be option B) - after all, you should be able to relay the message quite efficiently, without even needing to disclose the source.
@user1306322 I don't think it is. We're at a level where disgruntlement about one issue is posted in comments/answers to different issues, and drowning out other communication. Especially if we forget to purge the comments periodically.
I don't think it's important to discuss "company culture" where the corporate goal is profits first and then maybe Q&A somewhere down the list, while the community goal is quality Q&A first and not much else on the list that overlaps with the company's goals. We can't change the company culture. At least I don't think we can.
But no, its entirely for the company to work on company culture
> I don't think it's important to discuss "company culture" where the corporate goal is profits first and then maybe Q&A somewhere down the list, while the community goal is quality Q&A first and not much else on the list that overlaps with the company's goals. We can't change the company culture. At least I don't think we can.
@JourneymanGeek Only in the short term. The idea is to lose money to gain, for example, market share and eventually start making money. Not to lose money for ever.
> A question that carries additional emotional weight or significance—whether positive or negative—beyond its literal or basic meaning. A: "Tell me, how would you describe your relationship with your mother?" B: "Wow, what a loaded question!"
the long term goal seems to be significantly diverging from what the established community (who by and large built the network's success) wants. The answer to that seems to be to get rid of the community then rather then to change goals.
it is no surprise then if open conflict breaks out that attempts to mend relations aren't made, as the current community isn't included in long term plans for the site anyways
what I wanted to pose is: what if the company's actual goal was to create the best Q&A site, profits not on the list of goals at all? Would we be having these problems? I think not
And btw, Wikipedia's constant begging for money is so they can fund their pet projects, not so they can run, so the argument that Wikipedia is constantly on the brink of financial collapse does not hold water. In fact, if they didn't get any more money at all, they could still keep the lights on in the DC for a decade.
@user1306322 You really don't need to donate to Wikipedia. Their begging is honestly a bit scammy. It only goes to their pet Wikimedia projects, not to server costs.
> On the heels of backing the likes of BuzzFeed and Genius, Andreessen Horowitz is putting more money into digital content, this time with a technical and B2B angle. The VC is leading a $40 million round of investment in Stack Exchange, a New York-based startup that operates the Q&A site Stack Overflow as well as a host of other programmer-focused forums, with 80 million users monthly in total.
Elon keeps saying his personal goal is to achieve the multiplanetary species status for humanity and improve life on earth with the electric stuff and the internet satellites, which kinda includes profits as a by-the-way goal but not the main goal of his endeavours
people also kept laughing at his cars and whatnot, all the while they keep appearing on store shelves :p
@user1306322 I don't know anything about those. I just know that his cars are selling well and that SpaceX is going strong. Whether or not he'll get us to Mars... Who knows.? Probably not.
Who's the 'right' person to ask? I... was raised by pretty strict Christian parents. In a pretty strict Christian town/community. These people would argue that referring to me as 'she', and to my dad as 'he', but to avoid pronouns when talking to the transgender person, would be right... as it would be 'polite', and they wouldn't be misgendering. I've seen people apply a more equal principle, where no one is referred to using pronouns to avoid this.
But none of them to this day feel it's wrong to kick out a lesbian daughter from your home once she starts 'practising'... or that it's wrong …
@terdon-stopharmingMonica To keep the site running. There are lots of successful open source projects with community-led development. I regularly contribute to several.
And if you think a site of this magnitude and one targeted by as many malicious players as SE can be run without full time sysadmins, you got another think coming.
@terdon-stopharmingMonica Of course it would need sysadmins, but the point is that the cost is reduced. Now sure, you could pay a few developers, but still keep it primarily community-driven.
@TheforestofReinstateMonica Lol, yes, I've heard of the idea of open source (you might want to check my profile ;) ). I'm saying what incentive is there for an existing, for-profit company to let go of its flagship product.
If we had thought of this 10 years ago, it might have worked as a community project. If we want to set one up now, it might eventually work as a community project. But talking about taking the existing SE network and converting into a community project is just pointless since the company would never let that happen.
there are a couple major issues like browsing pages efficiently, for which I had to create my own helper app, and aside from the fact that there are like 200 users in the world
and one mega pro tip from me: disable onedrive sync and just put the notebook into a cloud sync folder if you need that functionality, as the builtin syncing makes the notes load from the cloud and the app feels sluggish as hell
in offline mode it's instant as it should be
if you need collab, better just use google docs or similar
Copy-on-Write (CoW) is a technique that provides atomicity by duplicating any modified block and changing metadata to refer to the modified block rather than the original. It provides integrity for a filesystem without needing the overhead of a journal, at the expense of making in-place modifications slower and increasing fragmentation over time. It's not just for filesystems though, but that's the context I used it in here (ZFS is a CoW filesystem, like btrfs).
