When I read about Stack Overflow or the Stack Exchange network in various other places on the internet, a lot of it are complaints about the moderation. There is one specific complaint I see a lot, and that is that questions are wrongly closed as duplicates.
Getting their question closed as a d...
Let’s start with the painful truth:
Too many people experience Stack Overflow¹ as a hostile or elitist place, especially newer coders, women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups.
Our employees and community have cared about this for a long time, but we’ve struggled to talk about it publicly or to sufficiently prioritize it in recent years. And results matter more than intentions.
Now, that’s not because most Stack Overflow contributors are hostile jerks. The majority of them are generous and kind. Sure, a few are… just generous, I guess? But our active users regularly express thei …
This kind of already exists in the current UI, though it currently suffers from a bug. When looking at many duplicate questions, you see this notice:
This question has been asked before and already has an answer. If those answers do not fully address your question, please ask a new question.
...
Going forward, “rep-whore” (and its derivatives) will be treated like any other term that’s inconsistent with the community’s “be nice” policy: it will be removed.
It’s totally okay if you’ve used it in the past.
Nobody’s judging the many users who’ve used it. And users will NOT start being s...
The recent blog post brings up some important observations about the Stack Overflow community.
In particular, the paragraph about bias suggests to me that it is often possible to know another user's gender or race. For example,
We don’t tolerate our female users being called “sweetie” or get...
