@Shog9 I'm curious if you've heard anything from the Teams Team about why closing/flagging aren't possible in a Team. I'm contemplating asking about it on MSO but I'm not sure if I'm missing something stupidly obvious. I've obliquely asked about it but not directly.
Jon tried to do a discussion about close voting, but I answered with some long rambling reply and apparently discouraged anyone else from participating
The rest of them either represent problems that aren't necessarily problems for Teams, or are borderline useless unless you have gobs of users with the privilege
Does anyone know why I can edit the "-> moved xx messages to {room}" chat messages? I can't delete them because "You can't delete audit messages" but every role that can read chat message histories (room owners, moderators) can also read deleted chat messages. Seems like an oversight?
I can't think of a decent reason to allow editing audit messages (like 'n messages moved to room' or topic changes). I have abused it for fun before but it really has no purpose other than joking or obfuscating your actions. For that I think that such messages should be untouchable. Please make t...
eh, either i'd think, but "allowed" is a far different question than whether or not it will be well received. and you'd have to be pretty specific as far as what you mean by "site".
the site's community? the rules it has? the way it is moderated? the kinds of questions allowed (or disallowed?) the moderation for said site? the company behind it? "site" is ambiguous
I think we can't answer those questions because it's not a community building post like asking users. We have " What brought you here" types. This isn't like that. It's asking other's opinions which we can't know.
@SomewhatMemorableName lol. Did you read comments as well?
Mostly technical SE sites are mentioned/shared to external discussion sites (Hacker News, Reddit) and might "influence" others (or just trash talking...). Not sure for other sites (especially, religion SE sites)
So far every political "movement" pushed to SO via blog posts or bars etc have been met with a large amount of both negative backlash and positive reinforcement. The company has its own biases, but they don't speak for the entirety of the community.
I don't think a question along those lines would be very useful.
it's impossible without a site-wide survey to determine the political leanings of the the community, and even then that wouldn't really help determine how the community influences other people's opinions/political leanings.
In a manner of speaking yes. I have a firm believe people are too sensitive, and catering to a crowd of sensitivity only slows down our advancements
That being said, you don't have to be mean to achieve the same results. But I refuse to spend effort changing myself to accommodate somebody else's feelings on the internet, especially when I'm not a mean person.
We're not a scientific organization working towards making major breakthroughs, though... we're a Q&A site where questions from all experience levels are welcome.
@Mgetz exactly my point. it's wasting effort and resources to continuously please everybody
@Catija I believe it applies to every aspect of life
Now, after binge watching 4 seasons of the Flash I do realize this is the same mindset as a sociopathic super villain, but I take that with a grain of salt
@SterlingArcher Trust me... I'm trying very carefully to word my responses, this is a bit of a rabbit hole. I don't necessarily disagree with you, there is a difference between reasonable accommodation and pleasing everybody unfortunately it's a very fuzzy line.
So... here's my question... no one is forcing anyone to pander towards the sensitive people or to please everybody. What we are asking is that people avoid making comments that can be interpreted as rude or unwelcoming... if you don't think you can interact in a welcoming, helpful way with people who are too sensitive... then don't... right? There are thousands of users on SO all the time. No one person has to do it all.
But by forcing everyone to be less sensitive or else leave, we're potentially excluding very valuable contributors by assuming that these first timers who don't necessarily ask the best questions straight out of the gate will never be able to participate usefully... which is detrimental to the ecosystem.
@Catija It's a weighing process. Some people might come down on the side that losing a bunch of contributors is worth it if it also removes more people who don't contribute anything useful
This is where the whole "false dichotomy" thing comes in: if you define anything that makes someone feel bad as rude, then yes - it's impossible to have both quality and a welcoming attitude; no one is going to feel good about being told they're wrong.
@Catija That's where people's fears come in. They think welcoming culture will extend to prohibit downvoting on newbies
Which is not far fetched considering moderators (!) of certain sites have publicly announced that their users should not downvote any new askers, regardless of question quality
We can't spare everyone's feelings. Many people get hurt just by being told that their question isn't allowed for a legitimate reason... that doesn't mean we can smash their face in with "you're an idiot, how could you dare ever do this here" when we let them know that their question is a bad fit for the site.
@Shog9 I am starting to think that I am really your good friend" because I don't know why but we think in some matters likewise and I agree with you most of the times :D Many Sa that it's argument and rude when I point out mistakes.
ELL has done what I think is actually a quite exemplary job of restricting question scope while helping users improve their questions. I'm always impressed with the users willing to reframe off topic questions or guide those users to improve them themselves so that the question can be answered for them.
We've never had an explicit policy around downvoting -- users are free to, if they like, cast all their votes as downvotes. Whether this behavior is desirable or not is another matter.
Now, we do discourage downvoting by making downvotes cost -1 rep to the casting voter. But, there's nothing in...
That's sort of a bit of a stretch to call it "official", though... I mean, the first sentence starts with "Some guidelines I'd love to see follow below."
IMHO, the elephant in the room here is that questions aren't getting answered as readily as they were in years past, at least on Stack Overflow. Which, as we've known pretty much forever, is THE thing most likely to drive new users away.
@Shog9 Answering has lost some of its charms too because unless the question you're looking at is incredibly specific or complicated chances are it's a dupe and now you have the nagging feeling in the back of your head that you should be searching for the dupe rather then answering it
ironically early on when I was very new I was much more likely to answer stuff I came across that I found interesting or a worthy challenge
These days I almost know they're dupes so I rarely bother anymore
Many new answerers aren't aware of what is or isn't a dupe in the same way many veterans are. So they'll answer a question, the question gets closed, they get downvoted, etc, and it's just a terrible outcome. They were just trying to help, and who knows, maybe they did look for a duplicate, but SO search isn't google, so it isn't always going to find what you're looking for.
Then a couple months down the line you're just searching for that dupe and think "eh, searching for that dupe is not as interesting as coming up with the solution myself, why bother"
@Magisch When a diamond posts, some people vote without reading at all. If a user posts, you are just a user like like me.. You're not a mod to know these things. Mod's comment or answer is taken as official thing in many places. At least the site I post frequently.
they're having fun ... enjoying helping people. If we ever want to solve dupes being answered that's more of a tooling problem then a behavioral problem
I don't like when people downvote dupe questions... but I at least can understand that vote as a "no research" vote to some extent, regardless of how bad SE search is and that people don't think about using an external search engine... but answers, particularly from newer users, on dupe questions ... that's ... ugh. If someone votes to close as a dupe and then answers, that's one thing... but with millions of questions on SO, knowing there's a dupe is asking a lot.
from a human behavior perspective downvoting someone's answers when they're new doesn't make them introspect and change their behavior into a model stack citizen, it makes them leave
Also we end up with a bunch of actually correct answers with bad scores
Which is unhelpful for the purposes of what downvotes actually serve
If you give rep for successful dupe closure, more will occur... which is what we want. you'll of course increase the incorrect closures if you increase the closures at all.
like, there's certainly a few different ways a question can be asked, but past that... you end up with a bunch of titles asking for A when the real problem was B and it was closed as a dupe of B
@KevinB ..and the other half of the time, the OP's are good at crafting obfuscated titles for their questions so as to reduce the chances of ident as a dupe and increase the chances of a unique answer that no other student has copypasted into their submission.
new askers want an answer to their question. If they get it, generally they're happy. If they don't, generally they're not. Downvotes have some small effect, but... It's probably about the same as the color of the bikeshed on the attentiveness of the safety monitoring team at the power plant.
if you got alarms going off and your team is looking all bored and distracted... Maybe don't make re-painting the bikeshed your first priority.
So they walk me to a manager's office, nice place with potted plants & heavy wooden door and a big picture window looking out onto downtown
And offer me a cup of coffee, which I accept, and tell me the manager'll be right there
So I sip my coffee, enjoy the view and ambiance, and the manager comes in & thanks me for my patronage or something...
...look, long story short: I waste about an hour and a half there, during which everyone was SUPER welcoming, but no one would actually cash the check. Which, was issued by the city government and drawn on that bank.
So finally I threw my coffee into one of the potted plants, walked across the street to a different, much less fancy bank, talked to a gal sitting in a crappy little cube in the basement, and within 15 minutes had a new account and a fist full of cash.
(These days I bank with a local credit union, which doesn't have coffee but is otherwise very welcoming and always, always gives me money when I need them to)
One time somebody managed to deposit a check into a savings account I was preparing to close out, and the check bounced, so it overdrafted. tl;dr the bank froze all my assets for 9 days (I had literally no money to access for 9 days) because it was fraud based
Even better: day 8 of being in the bank, the bank gets robbed while I'm in there. All of a sudden I'm being interviewed by the FBI because I was involved in fraud and they wanted to make sure I wasn't invovled
Heh... Now that I think about it... They did that to a friend last year too. His paycheck was printed slightly mis-aligned, so their machine couldn't read the account number. And, I guess, none of them can type.
Is that a reason for _not being nice_? IMO no, but just telling straightforward what would work, and what won''t. But people feel bad and obstructed by such behavior as well.
The point of doing all of this is to have answered questions. We cannot lose sight of that; we can get better about doing it nicely, but we have to keep that core mission firmly in mind.
This is where we've gotten into the weeds in the past, with banners and warnings and increasingly-verbose messaging all aimed at sorta obscuring the fact that we're not going to be able to answer some things.
This is why I just delete programming questions posted on meta. There's no avenue for redemption there; there's no way to soften the blow. You just prolong the pain.
Does it help anyone to see a programming question go from 0-score 0-answers to -5 closed 3 comments no answers? No. Not the asker, certainly not passers-by
I'm not criticizing the DVs and CVs here. Or even the comments. I'm just saying that that they're irrelevant. The asker isn't going to get an answer. Ever. That's known from the start, and the fact that we have a long bureaucratic process for getting to the inevitable conclusion isn't benefiting anyone.
I was gonna leave unhappy from the minute I walked into that bank. The teller knew it, the manager knew it... Only I didn't know it. So instead of walking out unhappy in 90 seconds, I walked out unhappy in 90 minutes.
