snap

MSE busy on a weekend?

who'd have thunk?

@Stormblessed sounds like the perfect opportunity to discuss using the new and improved tag synonym page

@Aibobot I can't, I don't have enough reputation so I can only scream my thoughts into chat :P

@KevinB I'm guessing that by the time OP asks a question on Stack Overflow, given the reception they're likely to recieve, they've exhausted their mental energy and patience, and any attempts to get them to think will be interpreted as provocations.

@Stormblessed and that's why you don't have enough reputation XD

More seriously - its something the mods need to discuss

@Stormblessed proably different tests

Well what exactly is different, I wonder

keywords...

I think google had a thing that actually used some AI stuff for detection of how toxic it is

@Aibobot half of SE users gone

anyway,

@MetaAndrewT. there's a running joke at work that I have that copyrighted

since I use that instead of that other S word

> Listen to the community. We are the ones running the site. -- an SO user

I dunno, while I generally agree, I feel the tone is a bit passive-aggresive (to the respond of the blog post)

sauce?

@MetaAndrewT. practically we do

that's kinda part of the problem ;p

@Aibobot oh well, you asked, and you shall receive

hm.

I disagree with the fundamental premise of the question ;p

Q&A isn't fundamentally broken as a mechanic

Actually....

I've been thinking about duplicate posts

and how people see them differently

(Meta aside. I KNOW I KNOW)

how would a new user, unfamiliar with how we do things, understand the concept of it being a signpost to a question we feel already has answers.

Less "You're bad for asking the same question" more "Hey! Look there!"

@Aibobot truest.

Also, if something is useful it probably should scale both ways

Its probably my small site bias, but... if you're going to adjust mechanics, what works on SO should work on say.... underwater basket weaving say SR or HR.se

But well, since I met metas and Meta, everything around me is about moderation than Q&A-ing

@MetaAndrewT. funny

I'd say its about community first

since I've got my paws in a few off site spinoffs

Yet another blog post about being "welcoming" instead of fixing actual problems with SO...

@forest You're a little late.

Well I just got on SE now.

> The attitude is not beginner friendly. Askers are expected to have done a lot of research before asking a question (re: both question format and content), even if they are completely new to the community or topic. Not everyone can understand or even know to look for documentation when they’re completely new to programming.

[screams internally]

Is there going to be a change where proper research is not required to ask questions?

I fear this will just reduce the number of people willing to answer.

Help zombies should be slain, not commended.

@forest well - getting used to community norms isn't easy

@Aibobot "Slain" doesn't necessarily mean kicked out. It can mean taught.

That's what the ask a question wizard is supposed to help with.

And fundamentally, SE has always been designed to be minimal friction

technically, slain means... dead.

maybe cast turn undead...

And technically zombies are fictional blood-sucking monsters that don't program.

It's layin'.

.... that's vampires. And they count

er

vampires

Help vampies I meant. Goddamn what is with my English today.

@forest so, practically...

SO was designed to be the anti hyphen site

There's a reason you could post questions with no registration, no barriers to entry....

Well yeah but that site is useless anyway. Not like it's competition.

@forest well, it was useful once

so inherently - you can't put up barriers without actually losing what got us this far

No one should put up barriers.

We just shouldn't allow new users to break the rules and post useless questions.

All I can hope for is that the existing community won't stand for it.

And will refuse to answer crappy questions despite staff allowing them.

@forest that's literally barriers

Well a total lack of barriers would be far worse.

And those are existing barriers, not new ones being put up.

Otherwise, this place is gonna turn into Yahoo! Answers.

After all, it is the quintessential "absolutely no barriers" Q&A site.

well yahoo answers is basically a platform with no.... anything

And that's what SO strives to become.

eh.

So, there's two extremes

one is basically utter chaos

Total shadowville

the other is so much order people don't come here any more

and there's every point in between

I don't think anyone wants either

Or... the people who don't come are the ones who think vote to close as dupe is "unwelcoming".

Good riddance to those people.

I mean yeah, telling someone "your question sucks u r stoopid" is unwelcoming.

But a downvote? Or a requirement to do at least basic research before asking? Not at all.

@forest on the other hand, part of it is getting people to see a dupe close or a downvote for what it is

But that's not what all the blog posts and the whole welcoming debacle is doing.

I mean hell, even the names of badges were changed. O_o

no

its trying to communicate with us

?

new folks are not going to read the blog

hell, some of us arn't going to read the blog cause it was mostly marketing

I don't think many people care about it. It's pretty transparent.

But it does show what the company is trying to do.

And what it's trying to do is at odds with the ability to curate high-quality information.

@forest it isn't necessarily

The whole pandering to new users thing and excusing their crappy questions is, though.

Programmers aren't fragile little flowers who have a panic attack if they see a -1.

@forest well...

I'm fragile ...

In order to survive in this industry (or even with programming as a hobby), it's fundamentally necessary to learn the skill of RTFM, leaving places like SO for the better questions.

Some could be

@rene Well you're a flower!

@Aibobot They'll be the people who drop out within two weeks. I've met many.

lots of people are suprisingly fragile when corrected

It's even worse with infosec/hacking.

@Aibobot True, but there's a difference between helping them grow a thicker skin and realizing that the world doesn't want to spoonfeed them, and, well, spoonfeeding them.

@forest especially people who think other people need thicker skins

@Aibobot Sometimes I have basic programming questions. I don't ask them on SO because I know I can find it out myself (or look for an existing duplicate). That is as thick a skin as you need.

If I asked how to hook __libc_start_main with dlsym, I should be told that I haven't done my research and that no one is going to answer my duplicate question for me.

@forest well, I literally am old enough that someone taught me to use a search engine

its served me well

I guess that lesson is lost on the younger generation.

but not everyone has the same advantages I did

Honestly, even lmgtfy is a good thing in my opinion. At the very least, it shows people what kinds of terms to use to find what they want. Though I personally dislike Google, but still...

@forest lmgfty is... lazy

It's far less lazy than a quick VTC and moving on.

I used to (and still to do a lesser extent) try to tell folks why a post is closed

And it's downright helpful. Not only does it often answer the question, but it teaches people the kinds of things they should search. There have been several times when I was writing a basic question, then I realized "hey, what if I just plug the question title into a search engine?". It works!

and you can do that in a friendly manner

@Aibobot Sure, I often try to do that as well. But I also give lmgtfy.

I mean not that specific domain. I just say to search "keywords blah blah".

that's different though

actually occationally - I do that with less obvious googlage

But that's what SO is fighting so hard against.

I don't know if it's just empty threats, or if they're genuinely trying to make that against the rules.

well no

But whatever their real intentions, it's pointing in a bad direction.

its fighting against people thinking its their right to be mean to others

and that is totally a thing

That's... not what the blog post or all the other ones have been about.

Their examples of things that were "mean" were far more understanding than they should be.

In fact, some of the comments they gave as examples I'd rate as positively helpful.

None of the comments they provided were people being mean.

@forest from your own frame of reference, maybe

From the frame of reverence of the people who are noticing what is happening to SO.

It's certainly not only mine.

I wonder what will happen when staff finally realize that they are making the place unwelcoming to core users. Maybe the issue is that core users don't click adverts? I dunno, but at least it's making many people, me included, not willing to answer questions on SO. I remember one starred comment on a smaller SE site in chat that said something like "coming back from SO feels like returning from the battle zone", with others agreeing at how horrible the questions are.

The very questions that are now being considered Good Questions(tm).

@forest winning over core users is a different issue

Winning them over != not making the place a hellhole for them.

On Sec.SE for example, if they ever started allowing "halp how 2 hack my ex's facebook", I'd quit.

But luckily as it is now, users who post those are promptly smacked down.

And the result? We get a lot of pretty high-quality, well thought-out questions.

@forest there's no way in hell SE can actually manage most of their sites without the core community

Yep, and that's what I think staff don't realize.

actually I think a lot of folks do

Well, then the people in charge of the PR don't realize it, at least.

Well, its a bit more complicated than that

Its also a matter of which products get more attention and how

So it's more an issue of marketing than just PR?

eh, its a matter of focus

Honestly - most of the attempts at the welcome wagon resulted in very little

but they were also focused on careers/docs and the rest

Very little positive outcome, at least. It certainly angered a lot of major contributors.

well the policy of benign neglect didn't help either

That sounds like a SO-specific policy. Is it?

actually no

SO's kinda always gotten attention because the other products have always been related to it

ah

but Q&A didn't really get attention as much as other stuff

That also meant though, the resources for actually connecting with the community were a bit... lacking

Well maybe with animated and intrusive ads and all that, the CEO will be rich enough that he doesn't need to keep pushing for his little pet money-making projects like Teams or whatever it was.

And then SO can get back to answering good questions and the welcoming thing can be left.

see, that's kinda the attitude that makes it hard to work with folks

@Aibobot It's the kind of attitude that only appears when feedback is ignored for too long.

If you keep accusing the senator of beating his wife, no wonder he wants you thrown out of rome

You should be asking what he'll do for the people

If staff really cared, they'd look at one of the (many) comments which explain this.

And which explain exactly why people are getting short on them.

you're basically assuming no one actually cares

If staff are ignoring meta and the like because it's too negative, maybe they should step back and reflect on exactly why it's getting so negative in the first place.

I'm assuming no one with influence over the company cares.

I'm sure there are individual staff members who do care, but who can't do much about it.

in which case we're all doomed

and we can just pack up and leave

Or we can hope that resisting the changes is enough to keep the site high-quality.

I don't think it's the end of the world, of course.

@forest or getting change to happen the right way

E.g. the intrusive ads or malvertising can be fixed with adblock for those who use it.

@Aibobot "The right way" was ignored for so long that people are getting short.

@forest and SE's actually been making changes to reduce the impact of those ads

and I'm under the impression they do feed back when stuff's terrible

Well, maybe that impression comes from ignoring the feedback for too long.

@Aibobot Really? I thought they only promised to try to avoid malvertising.

Not intrusive or animated ads. I recall staff saying that those are here to stay.

so... amusingly

not all stuff's on MSE

Actually I think I saw that on MSO. But I get your point.

i tend to follow a few employees on twitter to get an idea of stuff that happens before it gets announced

@forest fundamentally

its important to have voices folks can't ignore, saying things in ways that can't get dismissed

Like by using Twitter?

Not sure what you mean.

No... like, using Discourse... to post bug report about SE...

@forest by not being so hostile

@MetaAndrewT. Can't tell if serious.

oh discourse

@Aibobot It's a shame that constructive feedback was ignored until it did get hostile.

@MetaAndrewT. I read that as discord

It said discord originally. It was edited.

ah mobile mode sucks

I hate to say it but... 4chan of all places listens to its community better. :P

That's why I keep thinking of SO as the programmer's version of /b/.

It's just the wild west where all the weird or sad people go.

A quarantine site to keep the rest of the network from being infected.

Which is probably why sites like CodeReview.SE are so great!

The mods there listen to feedback before it gets hostile.

@forest its a lot less work though

and you can't throw mods at the problem till its solved.

Mods can only do so much, I know.

They don't have the power that staff do.

its a different sort of power though

you have a much smaller constituency

Stuff like... finally fixing Twitter oneboxing. :P

but you can't mod the way I do on SU, on say MSE, and certainly not on MSE

oh, that

would be devs and PMs

and honestly? SE's not really sure what to do about chat I suspect

Oh, are they thinking about destroying it or something?

Or just leaving without updates it as legacy code?

literally not sure

hm

Chat is fundamentally useful but its also technical debt

and killing it would be a mistake and it works very well

but investing in it might be a hard sell

@Aibobot There's an easy solution that I could code up in a few hours.

pity, slack sucks ;)

The nice thing is that you can use 3rd party services.

Just link to a copy of a qwebirc instance pointing to Freenode.

lots of missing features

Or a dedicated network made by SE if they really want.

@Aibobot Things like oneboxing or image embedding can be done by JS clients.

basically everyone else does replies wrong

IRC does it right.

IRC does it not at all

Sure it does. Just ping someone's name.

Matrix is slowly getting there

I mean yeah technically it's client side, but it's ubiquitous.

apparently some clients finally do edits

@forest and well

no one uses IRC any more ;p

Programmers by and large do. :P

There's a reason hundreds of thousands of people still use IRC on a daily basis.

#emacs alone has nearly a thousand users in it at any given time, iirc.

And it's way more helpful than SU.

@Aibobot And I defy you to find a real hacker who doesn't at least occasionally use IRC. :P

@forest not everyone is a programmer

I used irc in non technical circles once

Anime communities often use IRC.

I didn't reinstall hexchat on my last build

after litterally basically moving my set up across 4-5 PCs, across 3 forks of xchat

xchat is horrible anyway

irssi master race

eh

I had it as I liked it

Good morning! Worth my time scrolling up, or can someone give me a summary? :P

Well I guess it works. But nothing beats irssi/bitchx/weechat.

@Tinkeringbell no

@Tinkeringbell Me complaining about stuff. Then talking about chat. The usual.

Ah. Chat is nice here :)

Well I was saying that chat sucks here and that we should move to IRC. :P

(How hard is embedding a qwebirc instance, anyway?)

My second favourite platform is matrix

and that might actually eventually work better as a SE chat alternative

I've always hated matrix because it bridges IRC and that's where all the idiots go.

I can tell someone doesn't understand the culture if they have [m] in their name.

@Tinkeringbell summary: Mar was proud to post a comment with 4 characters left...

that said, chat dying is...

kinda a sign I'm gone

@forest we run our own servers

Well this isn't the only chat on the network.

@MetaAndrewT. That's cool! I think SE can use a bit more of those comments, depending on their topic ;)

really good,easy federation

rediculously robust. A little too much

For federated networks, I like XMPP (though I still prefer IRC).

I see a lot of very terse ones, where I go... dude, you have like 300 characters left... put a 'hello' in front!

XMPP is nice because it can give you history when you log in.

@forest matrix does that

also end to end encryption

For IRC you have to use a bouncer to get that.

Though a lot of people do (I personally don't).

@Aibobot Wait, really? Client-side multi-party E2E?

also we once had the server that hosts a chatroom go down

and just keep talking

@forest its kinda "experimental" and verifying each device each person uses is a PITA

I use a bouncer for that, when I really need to.

but yes

neat

OTR doesn't yet support multi-party encryption, only one-on-one.

so typical reaction to a server going down,,,,

@forest honestly - once it has a good client ecosystem...

(I run riot on everything but my potato grade tablet)

IRC behaves in a very fun way if a server goes down. You get a netsplit, which means the network actually splits into multiple networks. Sometimes you're the really, really unlucky one and you're one of like three people stuck on the smallest server until the split resolves itself. :P

and that the API is WIP

@forest the reaction of one of X servers with users going on is...

all the other servers just keep running

Yeah that's the same with virtually all chat networks. IRC, XMPP, whatever.

actually the cute bit is you only notice everyone on that server is offline

and a good chunk of us run our own

I used to run a chat server, but there were too many trolls for various reasons so I quit.

I mean granted, I let them in willingly, but I regretted it because I didn't have time on my hands lol

@forest one of the wierd bits about matrix is in theory...

everyone runs their own server

?

but you can have multi users on a server

Is it P2P?

so my homeserver has... me

well no

its client server

and how its built now, you do actually need a domain name and properish server to run

hm

Does it support r͕̣͇̻̕e̼͉͖̕a̭͓͇̺l̷̟̮͖̦l̗̲̕y̞̭ ͓̻͎̭̀ͅa̞̰̲̠͠n̮̮̳̘̼̦̲͢n̡̖̮̣͙̺̳o͈ͅy̤͙͚̹͝ḭn̟̞̜̻̜̫͡g̛͕̣͖̪ ̴̥̹ͅun͖̺͉i͏̲̰̲͚͇̥̳c̞͚̤̗o̤̯͔͟d̻̼̩̜̼̕e?̥̜̱̘̗̝͟ :P

(or unicode at all, for that matter)

Or is it entirely client-dependent?

That's the one good thing about a monoculture client ecosystem is that you never need to worry about feature support breaking on some clients. Though the downside is that you can never find a client that's just right for you (all the plugins you want, or really stable, or whatever).

No one tried

brb someone's calling for me

So apparently one of the directors for some of my favorite anime died in an arson fire. :(

(totally unrelated to my afk, just read that in the news now)

Oh ..

Kyoto animation?

Yeah.

Someone linked the news to me like an hour after the fire broke out, but at that time noone died.

Yeah. :/

Now it's at 33, including one of my favorite directors...

I mean of all studios to attack, why KyoAni? They never hurt anyone...

They made Lucky Star ffs.

@forest sounds like the attacker was .. well, mentally ill

Anyone who would attack KyoAni is mentally ill.

Unless they were just angry about having to sit through the Endless Eight.

In which case I half sympathize. But still.

eh, even that, whatever it was...

If they just hated the company they should have burned it at night when staff were away.

life's important

@Aibobot Eight 30 minute episodes that were basically identical copies. The theme was time resetting over and over, but instead of putting it in 2, maybe 3 episodes, they made it 8.

ah

And it was a horrible beach episode, no less.

even that

That was in Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu (The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya).

(and eh, pity mental illness has such a stigma in asia, and folks like that need help before things like this happen)

Yeah, it's a problem in Japan particularly.

anywhere

indian culture has that too

as does chinese culture

It's really bad in Vietnam.

Why do you keep switching between your two accounts btw?

@forest aibobot's my office PC

so I can have chat on a vivaldi sidebar while I work

ah

I've had dodgy work pcs and once lost my job at short notice so this feels safer ;p

heh

Yeah it's safer for sure.

I have my main account on my phone

@forest well, this place isn't too bad

I'm lucky enough to be a contractor, so I never have to stay in an office.

Not that I've never had shitty clients, but at least a client leaving isn't as bad as getting fired. :P

@forest oh

they fired everyone

then moved operations to india

oh

oh jesus

ya, stuff like that makes you a little paranoid ;p

People will do anything for money, even outsourcing jobs for cheap.

At least one mod is not a Minecraft fan ... I was about to make fun of it ...

Never played it, actually.

@forest well, also, it was closer to their growing markets

and cheap

and a few other things

It's a game for little kids, right?

it wasn't particularly ethical ...

@Tinkeringbell eh. Its kinda like digital lego

@Tinkeringbell Yes but, like shows like My Little Pony, very odd people like it into adulthood.

its good mindless fun

It's like someone decided to make what they thought looked like a retro 8-bit game.

well, also a massssssive open world

and fairly simple game play

Perfect for kids who want to feel like they're doing kool retro gamez.

All I know is that it's made with blocks, and that my brothers used to play it when they were young, and complain they needed better PC's

0_0

That's because it's written in Java. :D

minecraft isn't exactly demanding

@Aibobot Yes it is. It's actually extremely demanding.

Even if conceptually it requires very little computation.

@Aibobot Depends on the kind of PC you have, I guess :P

But... Java.

They had old ones ;)

A PC from the late 90s should be able to run it, if it wasn't Java.

@forest based on the last couple of responses I feel you don't seem to like Java ...

Too many bean factories.

(I like C)

For all I know that bean stuff was crazy indeed.

What is an SSD? Solid Stand Drive ... I kid you not

haha what

lmfao