Tavern on the Meta

πάντα ῥεῖ

16:09

@ShadowWizard YSC has been warned many times before he got suspended (as was I). But also what's received as rude has been exaggerated recently (introducing the new CoC aso.). That's why I am completely refraining to write any comments at all beyond clear technical and factual statements.

@Shog9 Nice to see you again here o/

Tim Post

That sounds like a fantastic idea, almost like what we intended comments to contain.

πάντα ῥεῖ

Yeah, I know :)

Magisch

Tim is always lurking, quietly, waiting for the perfect moment to ~~strike~~ post.

Never let an opportunity for a pun go unused

Tim Post

I wasn't named after a HTTP verb, but my kids were!

Magisch

Have you ever had problems with webforms?

There's a guy in the UK whose last name was null and he could not register anywhere so he had to legally change it

Tim Post

16:11

Yes, but only in the very early days of PHP eating the entire internet

πάντα ῥεῖ

Little Bobby tables comes to mind :D

Tim Post

LAST_NAME CAN NOT EQUAL METHOD or some garbage as the error. It was a popular framework, one of the first versions of PHP Nuke I think.

Magisch

I'm not old enough to recall those days

SmokeDetector

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Potentially bad ns for domain in answer (1): What is the sum of the series $\frac{1}{(2^p)} + \frac{1}{(2^p-1)} +\ldots+ 1 + 2^2 + 2^3 +\ldots+ 2^{(p-1)} + 2^p$? by Annamalai Chinnaraji on math.SE

Tim Post

The 2000s was the decade of bad programming assumptions. I'm certain it will eventually go down in history that way.

Every language has spaces. Everyone has at least two names. ASCII is good enough for everyone, people can just use phonetics for accented characters. 2001 is never going to come so just don't waste time on it at all. 1970 is a perfectly great beginning for everything.

Mark Amery

16:15

Oooh, Shog wasn't eaten by sharks after all. Some of us were worried! (chat.meta.stackexchange.com/transcript/89?m=7322827#7322827)

Magisch

The y2k thing was remarkably stupid though

Tim Post

I even counted on modems throttling and creating a race condition to prevent buffer overflows on the i286 platform.

Magisch

like, whoever coded that was like less then 10 years away from y2k. Did they just think everything would be re-done before 2000?

Tim Post

People smart enough to see that as a problem rightfully assumed we'd blow ourselves up by then. I'm pretty sure they were right and this is just the afterlife.

Magisch

i know that's easy to say from my high throne of standardized date handling with inbuilt handling of timezones and leap years and stuff that goes so far as to reduce it to a minor annoyance, but still

πάντα ῥεῖ

16:17

@Magisch Remember Microsoft's "Windows Millenium Edition"? :D

Magisch

pretty sure I never had to manually implement date handling

every language I use has prebuilt types and functions for it

if this is afterlife then I landed in heck

πάντα ῥεῖ

Embedded airplane controllers with limited memory? At that time we all were worried about airplanes going to ground exactly at our New Years eve parties :P

doppelgreener

@TimPost you say that, but 2010 was when NPM arrived and people started writing about how the task runner pipeline was getting too crazy for anyone to comprehend.

so it might be “and then 2010s were even worse” :P

Tim Post

Even the standard C library had decent handling for dates from the early 90s on. Error prone because locality hadn't been standardized yet, but you could work with it. What most languages lacked was relative dates which were always a pain to implement because just making a timestamp display as "11 days and 13 hours ago" meant variadic expansion hell on the back end to maintain for years to come.

Magisch

o_O

apaul

16:20

@Magisch Pretty sure we're in something similar to the storyline of The Good Place.

Magisch

@apaul looks like the bad place has been encroaching with what's been happening recently in the world and whatnot

Tim Post

I mean you could dirty-hack it into a printf statement if you only had to display it in one place, but if you needed it for reports, you were writing your own relative date library.

apaul

@Magisch Heh. Gotta watch that show to get what I'm saying.

Magisch

I reckon even the display framework we use for our self-made ERP system has pre-built datehandling with date differentials already implemented

Somewhat

Looks like I almost missed this and found it accidentally while leaving that page open

3

A: SE needs a better social media policy (and could us experienced users get a little love too?)

Okay, super-official almost response that's going to be edited as we go: We're soon to be circulating an internal social media policy. Initially, this is going to lay out what not to do for the most part, because that helps cover the biggest mistakes that can be made. The policy is going to cl...

John Dvorak

16:25

I feel like that answer didn't actually say much

Tim Post

That's what happens when people are demanding words and I don't have very many to give yet.

πάντα ῥεῖ

@Tim What was that weird pic you posted at Twitter yesterday BTW? That wasn't a s selfie of yours, was it?

Shadow Wizard

the storm is coming

Tim Post

what weird pic?

πάντα ῥεῖ

@ShadowWizard It's autumn what else do you expect?

@TimPost That one about buckets and so on

Tim Post

16:31

Yeah, that one was weird. My middle finger looks a lot thicker in person, must be the new iPhone XS camera processing.

πάντα ῥεῖ

:D

Tim Post

Well you know, when I have one group of users shouting "We're on internet time here, and you're not going fast enough!" in one ear, and another shouting "I hope you die from cancer!" in the other, I have only but two middle fingers to give.

Shadow Wizard

It make things bigger? Nice! ;)

@Shog9 true

Tinkeringbell

@TimPost Ignore the ones shouting about not going fast enough. I've tried... I can't get it past their thick skulls that fast is what created a mess in the first place either. Just take your time.

Now you've got two middle fingers for that other stuff, and I'll gladly lend you mine for that too ;)

πάντα ῥεῖ

@TimPost Let them see your tongue additionally :3

apaul

16:36

@TimPost Had to look that up. Brightened my whole day.

Shog9

ok, am I missing something here, or is Nicol essentially asking, "If I have an audience of thousands on social media, should I ignore that power and post on meta instead?"

πάντα ῥεῖ

@ShadowWizard Don't even think about it ... :P

doppelgreener

@Shog9 Nicol Bolas is basically asking “So how are we meant to talk with you about feature changes?”, against a background of years of discussion about changes being needed for HNQ having no action and one tweet spurring this much action

Erik von Asmuth

@Shog9 Huh? Nicol's asking: should I shout at thousands of people that don't have a clue what I'm going on about, but are easily manipulated and can get outraged, or should I keep it to people that actually know and care

doppelgreener

I imagine/hope the thing about “should we just use twitter?” is a bit sarcastic or tongue in cheek, along the lines of jokes lots of people have been making this week

Andras Deak

16:38

the monsters

Tim Post

@πάνταῥεῖ But sticking one's tongue out is rude. I was merely counting with great enthusiasm.

πάντα ῥεῖ

@TimPost OK, thick middle fingers might be better accepted ;)

Magisch

internet time is actually a thing though

thankfully it hasn't reached us here in full yet

Shog9

@doppelgreener one tweet... from someone with tens of thousands of followers, no?

Tim Post

Yep. It's like the nether in Minecraft. Every one block you travel down there is 6 blocks in the overworld, or something.

Tinkeringbell

16:41

@Magisch I had internet time when I was young and we still had dial-up :)

Tim Post

So every hour in real time is a year on the Internet

Human kind seems to collectively struggle with attention spans.

Magisch

It's actually true, lives have been ruined, companies folded and people threatened and forced out of their homes in the times it takes us mortals to complete one work day

doppelgreener

Twitter-driven development, "Sites are excluded only after a twitter demand, from someone with at least 1k followers. That's how it works. Feature requests here regarding those things are 100% ignored." — gnat Oct 18 at 7:39

apparently it's only 1,000, not 10,000

Shadow Wizard

@πάνταῥεῖ it's... Tempting...

Andras Deak

if the followers shout loud enough there's a combo bonus

10x outrage powerup

Tinkeringbell

16:43

@Shog9 There was a tweet and a retweet. The original had a 1 or 2k followers, the retweeter a lot more (28K or so)

πάντα ῥεῖ

@Tinkeringbell Oh boy/girl, I remember burning tons of money dialing in to a OS/2 server at the Netherlands :P

Magisch

this was 5 years ago but it still holds. The owner of the forum website I used to mod for always said that in bad pr the incident response time is measured in seconds, not hours or days

πάντα ῥεῖ

@ShadowWizard I know ;)

Tim Post

That's a very selective way of looking at it. Had Kelly complained about something we couldn't immediately fix, all we'd have been able to do is acknowledge the problem and provide a rough estimate that will turn out to be false in a year like we do everywhere else. That it happened to be on Twitter is incidental.

πάντα ῥεῖ

I like your cooking and barbecue sessions :3

Magisch

16:44

I do think the damage to the company would have been bad in that case too, like some people would say an acknowledgement wouldn't be good enough

it's a no win situation, essentially

Andras Deak

twitter people have nothing to lose :P

Magisch

Hell some people would rag on y'all simply for the fact that your response didn't upset their percieved enemies sufficiently

it's a big circus

doppelgreener

@TimPost It's definitely selective, but jokes or observations like gnat's twitter driven development comment seem to be the backbone of “should we just be using twitter then?” remarks

Tim Post

Well, there's a win, it's just not possible right now. When the people directly engaging with the communities have more resources so there's a lot less guilt when we try to get someone else to juggle priorities, it'll get better. And we're making those hires, but those folks won't be trained up until early 2019 at the soonest.

πάντα ῥεῖ

@AndrasDeak It makes me angry every day that I can't downvote D.J. Trump's silly tweets.

Shadow Wizard

16:47

@TimPost still better than most feature requests on meta which got no answer at all.

Andras Deak

@πάνταῥεῖ you can only blame yourself for reading them

Magisch

not completly sure SE will ever be able to recover fully from this

doppelgreener

@ShadowWizard There was a bounty placed recently on a more reliable pipeline for staff responses to meta feature requests which was declined in 2014ish

πάντα ῥεῖ

@AndrasDeak I still want to be informed from source, not the "Fake News"

Tim Post

2010: Post on meta. Get a response from Jeff, Dalgas, Jarrod in usually a day, see code deployed that week. That is what set the standard and what folks miss. I need to find a way to bring that back to the largest extent that I can, while also setting expectations for folks that our product teams are comfy with. That's .. hard.

Andras Deak

16:47

It still seems to me that any kind of post-mortem correction is out of the question. Which sounds...weird.

all the remarks about the company being understaffed imply that in situ fixes are worse/harder to come by

Magisch

@TimPost I do agree with journeyman on this fully. It just needs someone to acknowledge and lend a sympathethic ear

we need like 5 more shogs

Tim Post

@Magisch If by recover you mean emerge unchanged? No, we won't, but the change is looking like it's for the better.

doppelgreener

OTOH, reliable staff responses to feature requests is probably not numerically remotely sustainable: there's too many of us and the staff would have full time jobs just responding to feature requests (and declining them all because “no time for development, i work 8 hour days responding to feature requests”)

Magisch

stuff can take its time to happen as long as people feel like they're being listened to

Andras Deak

meta is not twitter, we could wait (we have) until there's a thought-out analysis of what happened and what should've been done differently and who is sorry for what

apaul

16:49

@Magisch Shog? Sympathetic?

Erik von Asmuth

@Magisch Where are Shog1 to 8 when you need them!

Tim Post

Sympathetic ears ain't worth crap if nothing ever gets built. I can't look at what would make everyone happy in the short term or my job is just always going to be making you happy in the short term, which is a vicious dishonest cycle.

Shog9

@doppelgreener yeah, but that sorta misses the context doesn't it? I mean... I feel like this is obvious, but... If you had 30K followers on Twitter, would you be using support message boards?

Magisch

@TimPost I don't think all the hurt and lost trust caused in the last few days was in any shape positive. I love this site but I've never felt so betrayed by it before

Shadow Wizard

@TimPost I will be fine with "we plan to do it, keep you updated" with actual updates, even once a year and even "still waiting, but planned". Sounds useless but it is not. It gives a good feeling someone is there on the other side.

Tim Post

16:50

I gotta look ahead to how I wire you folks back into the development cycle in a way that everyone likes.

Shadow Wizard

You can't make everyone happy. :/

Magisch

In a sense it hurt more because I was always of the opinion that secretly this here is a special thing and better then all the other places on the web

Andras Deak

you can not make everyone unhappy

Tinkeringbell

I refuse to be happy or unhappy.

Andras Deak

@Magisch those are not contradictory. This could still be better than anything else and still be poo in some regards

Shog9

16:51

IOW, feels like the lesson here is not, "twitter is more effective than meta" it's that "if you command a huge audience anything you say gets heard more than if you don't" - regardless of what venue you use.

apaul

@Magisch disillusionment sucks, but it's part of playing the game.

Shog9

Which makes all the "twitter driven development" stuff just sour grapes. "I'm not Internet Famous, therefore twitter sucks!"

Tinkeringbell

@Shog9 Goes for both meta and twitter I guess... at least I hope upvotes on meta mean something? :)

Magisch

mob rule is what's going to do us in as a species

Andras Deak

Like, yeah, this is the best thing on the internet, but still we're just drones generating content, but nobody should expect what we want to carry any weight in the grand scheme of SO

Shog9

16:52

@Tinkeringbell probably about as much as likes on Twitter...

doppelgreener

I might not, yeah. :P But Magisch called out the optics here in response to Tim's meta, which look sorta like this to many people:
• lots of people for a long time: "there's problems with HNQ" "why do i have to see this junk on HNQ" "we need to change HNQ" (SE response: n/a)
• several sites, including IPS: "we kinda want to be removed from HNQ" (SE response: n/a)
• one person: "these titles are bad" (SE response: immediate change)

Magisch

@Shog9 I think the real complaint isn't twitter driven development, it's emotionally and fact free driven development

at least it feels like that from the peasant seats down here in meta with no audience and no power to speak of

doppelgreener

conclusion: be that one person complaining on twitter

Shog9

@Magisch that's a valid complaint, but that's not what I'm reading

@doppelgreener ...also, have 30K followers on Twitter...

doppelgreener

someone also joked "maybe we should complain about the new themes on twitter then"

@Shog9 well, that part's not as well known as the "one person on twitter" bit

Magisch

16:54

I like to think I'd be the guy using a forum when I had 30k followers, but also lets be real I'm human like everyone else and completly capable of being co-opted by popularity

Tinkeringbell

I think there's a bit more hurt to the whole twitter driven development thing than just 'she's got more followers than me'... I see it also coming a lot from people that went through what they believed to be proper channels, like MSE or site meta's. Those people are disregarding twitter as a place for those things.

I don't want an audience of 30.000 people. Speaking in front of 10 already makes me wonder if I'm saying everything just right...

Magisch

the problem is just twitter destroys any damn nuance and discussion

Andras Deak

It could've been reddit or facebook or whatever you want. The problem is crapping on the community (read: ignoring the community forever then changing something on an external whim)

Magisch

it's good for agreeing with each other in a pleasant way or to rag on people, but that's it

Andras Deak

though my "crapping on the community" remarks also come from the twitter responses of employees

Magisch

16:56

I'm convinced all of social media is just a perpetual engine for self inflicted human misery

Andras Deak

well as long as it generates a profit

Shog9

@doppelgreener ok. So folks are just missing the context then?

apaul

Just my 2¢ as an IPS regular... It seemed an awful lot like we were ignored when "men's rights activists", homophobes and bigots of all stripes really were causing problems through HNQ. But when one concern troll mentioned the perception of bad things maybe happening, y'all sprang into action, when bad things weren't really happening.

Magisch

@Shog9 Folks are going "This is our site. We built it. We argued about this for years and always put our best foot forward, we obeyed the rules. And then someone comes and posts something that'd almost certainly get r/a destroyed and now they listen?!"

doppelgreener

@Shog9 From what I understand the sentiment is largely based on a comparison of "none of us got listened to but this one person was", which leaves people unsure how they should be requesting change, communicating problems with staff, etc.

There is a general sentiment of people not feeling listened to or not feeling valued because everything they did around the entire HNQ issue amounted to naught compared to one person on twitter in terms of getting any balls rolling.

Shog9

16:59

@Magisch sure. One person with an audience of thousands got heard more than lots of people with individual audiences of... tens/hundreds.

Twitter affords escalation.

Tweeted by shog9 on March 18, 2016 at 10:07 PM

Magisch

@Shog9 That audience of thousands never visited the site

Shog9

@Magisch we know that?

Magisch

I'm convinced of everyone who saw that tweet before it went down the drain maybe 5 of those ever looked at IPS let alone used it

Andras Deak

Also "vocal and obnoxious minority" sealioning, etc. Things that aren't official statements but were made by staff in response to attacks against company property, talking about community members. With no official remarks to the contrary.

doppelgreener

@Shog9 That seems to be the lens. "They're not in even in this community!" -- SE sees that, well, they could be, but if this doesn't get corrected, they won't be -- but the community doesn't have that perspective. We're operating on who got heard vs who didn't.

Magisch

17:01

I could mobilize a couple hundred minecraft players if I felt like it. That doesn't mean I deserve to be heard on a discussion about nuclear physics.

Some of those players might be nuclear physicists, but the groups are different

Catija

@Magisch What does using IPS have to do with it? The complaint is that it's on SO, not that IPS exists at all.

Shog9

@doppelgreener just to be clear, I'm not arguing this point. Deciding who to listen to is... hard. But almost 30K people already decided to listen to this person, so this isn't like throwing up a meta post where... you kinda live or die based on your ability to make an entertaining argument in that post.

Andras Deak

@AndrasDeak oops, the "obnoxious" was a separate thing in the tweet. Minor detail though.

Shog9

It's more like someone who is already pretty famous shows up on meta & brings thousands of their fans with 'em.

Magisch

@Shog9 I'm 99% certain if any of the popular far right personas had a go at SE for some made up reason y'all would well ignore it

even if they brought a couple thousand fans

doppelgreener

17:03

@Shog9 Yeah no worries there. My current reading is you seem to be looking for assistance in catching up on what's happened and why people like Nicol Bolas are saying what they're saying, so I'm just trying to give cliffnote summaries of what & why.

Magisch

@Catija The site that was primarily affected was IPS, not SO

Clickbait titles happen on other sites too, almost nothing was improved by that singular action

πάντα ῥεῖ

@Shog9 At SE/SO "entertaining" is often considered as being rude or bullying. Twitter is way more relaxed, yeah.

Catija

Not really relevant to the complaint, though.

Magisch

just today I saw a couple where I thought "I'd have a hard time explaining that one to my boss"

Shog9

@Magisch yeah, probably. Most of the "far right" folks I've encountered are pretty odious. How 'bout just "right"? Less Steve Bannon, more Will Buckley

Magisch

17:05

@Shog9 my point is popularity alone means squat if you're aggresive and unruly

Shog9

(yes, Buckley is dead, but no one else came to mind...)

Magisch

and characterizing the original complaint & the followup as aggressive and unruly is being more charitable then mother theresa

Shog9

@Magisch means lots. You just have slightly fewer excuses to make if you're not overtly rude.

Magisch

So that's where we at now, whoever yells the loudest gets their way?

Shog9

@πάνταῥεῖ not really. It's a cheap way of being entertaining, hardly the only way.

Magisch

17:08

popularity shouldn't matter in a reasonable development process

Shadow Wizard

@Magisch with most followers

Shog9

@Magisch unless someone takes a hard stand for/against something specific, sure. That's always how it's been. It's why there are votes on meta.

SO wasn't even 6 months old when the entire closing system changed because someone somewhat influential wrote a blog post.

πάντα ῥεῖ

@Shog9 Well, I am an amateur actor, that's another way :3

doppelgreener

The reality of "this complaint was put in front of 30,000 people and that genuinely has some clout and we were in a position to respond quickly" is probably not in the frame of reference of the current discussion, but is probably not going to be received happily put bluntly like that

Magisch

@Shog9 so any single user with a couple thousand followers trumps all of our meta community?

Is that what it is?

πάντα ῥεῖ

17:09

God plz no!

Shog9

Not a uservoice request, not a polite email, a blog post. And five months after launch, the mechanics of the site's moderation were irrevocably altered based on that post.

doppelgreener

@Magisch ... and that's exactly the reason why putting it like that won't be received happily :P

Magisch

that stinks

the entire dynamic stinks

Andras Deak

I've always hated precedent law ;)

πάντα ῥεῖ

@Shog9 We well remember who was the culprit. He should better be aware not meeting me at the streets!

Shog9

17:10

@Magisch hard to know, given what actually happened here was that someone with a bunch of followers got something that folks on meta had also been asking for. IOW, it acted as a multiplier, not a counter.

Magisch

If you act that belligerently and in such bad faith your word should have no weight

and giving it any sets a horrendous precedent

Shog9

@Magisch And if I click my ruby slippers together I should be able to avoid a tedious plane flight. But in reality...

Andras Deak

I hope all those meta posts (which the tweets were multiplying) also explained how users are obnoxious trolls

Magisch

In reality I thought SE was better then that, yeah

apaul

@Magisch You also thought shog was sympathetic.

doppelgreener

17:12

@Magisch so there's kind of a thing there though: disenfranchised people are mad about their disenfranchisement. it's frustrating. it has them not inclined to be all that polite when they call out the causes or problems or draw attention to their disenfranchisement. but then people say "well they're being rude, so we shouldn't have to listen to them, and we don't need to do anything.", and nothing happens.

5

and then the same disenfranchised people behave politely and calmly, and people say "well they seem happy, it mustn't be too serious, we don't need to do anything."

5

(short summary of why so little changes with regards to support for minorities in any community, including societies like the USA)

Shog9

@Magisch There is no better here. What's the principle you'd have folks stand on? That HNQ is so beloved that removing a site is unthinkable? Rubbish, we've removed plenty of sites in the past, nerfed others, etc. What's unusual here is that IPS wasn't removed within the first couple of months of its life.

Magisch

@doppelgreener I've been disenfranchised and shit on all my life

@Shog9 Better in terms of process

Better in terms of actually enforcing the "be nice" not just for its own users, but also for those speaking against its users

Better at having their user's back in the face of unproven and unfounded accusations

Shog9

I'm serious about that, btw: this came up repeatedly - I talked it over with folks on the IPS mod team, with other CMs... In the past, we can and did remove sites from the HNQ for being controversial until such a time as they'd kinda settled down a bit, but we decided to just give more thorough moderation a try on IPS: stuff like policies about how gratuitous titles could be, etc.

Andras Deak

My main beef with what has happened is the blatant contempt with which some employees approached the users involved

Magisch

@doppelgreener And this is where debate dies. You know what the result from all this is? The next elections are up, and the far right party set to win it is about to make a couple hundred people in my area homeless for no other reason then hate

doppelgreener

17:15

@Shog9 that history seems lost in the current discourse, i actually haven't seen a single soul bring up that this has happened multiple times before

Shog9

@AndrasDeak Well... That's not ok, at all. I think that's where Tim's aiming with the work he's doing now on enforceable policy + "beeper duty".

πάντα ῥεῖ

As every experienced software developer should know: Product managers and marketing people sometimes tend to have weird ideas. It's our responsibility to tell them kindly that those won't fly well given the code base. And even if they don't believe you give them the numbers of tremendous efforts to refactor the whole system. :3

Shog9

@doppelgreener that's a shame. Someone should have.

Feel free...

Magisch

@Shog9 All of these tweets are still up

Andras Deak

@Shog9 apology > maybe make it harder to be a jerk next time

doppelgreener

17:16

I'd bring it up but this is genuinely the first time I've ever heard of this

Andras Deak

nobody has acknowledged that the employee(s?) were out of line

Shog9

...huh

Magisch

also I've never heard of any other sites being kicked off hnq temporarily

Andras Deak

but Tim has suggested that yeah, action had to be taken

so...sort of endorsed the events that took place as they did

Magisch

nor is there any documentation on meta. I looked before I asked my "list of communities excluded from HNQ"

Andras Deak

17:17

Monica's medium post explains what I'm talking about pretty well

Shog9

@AndrasDeak I can't speak to that aspect; got a lot to catch up on here, and the first phase of this will probably occupy the rest of my reading today & tomorrow. But if you got some links handy, I'd love to read 'em when I get time. I'm sure I'll find out a lot more Monday too.

πάντα ῥεῖ

There never was any of the SO employees out of line. It's more a Meta problem (and I don't mean anything to be discussed at Meta SE)

Andras Deak

@Shog9 see pinned twitter.com/MonicaCellio/status/1053850846570651648, that's what I'd suggest heeding first

also, I know you're the least responsible for anything, being still on vacation and everything...

doppelgreener

@AndrasDeak oh, yeah. Monica's blog post — that calls out another compounding factor in the current situation where a stack staff member waded into the situation with some blame & threats, but it looks like there was a lot of miscommunication. @Shog9 Tim will have more to say about what happened there if you ask him.

Magisch

side rant of the day: my town is going down the drain

Erik von Asmuth

17:21

For me, the troubling thing wasn't the tweet, the responses on it, the removal of IPS from HNQ, the slow response on the meta post, that's all suboptimal but understandable. But this moment in chat, telling us it's all okay what happened with the rant on twitter and be plain rude instead of trying to engage constructively... At least that's how it feels to me

πάντα ῥεῖ

Let's continue this discussion at Twitter ... :3

Shog9

@AndrasDeak just to be clear, I'm absolutely not trying to take blame or responsibility here... ;-)

Andras Deak

hehe, and you shouldn't

Magisch

at least you're back

Shog9

But, I would like to catch up on what I missed

Andras Deak

17:22

I was trying to say that I'm not bugging you because I blame you, but because I want to help catch up. And that I'm aware that you're still supposed to be on vacation

Magisch

you have a lot of clout with users that will calm this down

πάντα ῥεῖ

@Shog9 I have to agree that chat transcripts are easier to catch than a Twitter timeline

Magisch

I don't recommend reading all the chat transcript from the tavern of the last couple of days

Andras Deak

I've heard of people playing practical jokes on coworkers on leave (like, growing grass in their keyboards, stuff like that). Dropping a doodoo this big in a fan so you can clean up later is something else ;D

Magisch

It's a true trash fire :)

Tinkeringbell

17:24

@Magisch With strawberries and chocolate sprinkles though.

Magisch

now you made me hungry for strawberries

Andras Deak

flambé

Tinkeringbell

I should've added marsmellows.

Ah well... there'll be a next time when I'll need comfort breakfast :P

Magisch

@doppelgreener about that disenfranchisement thing again

πάντα ῥεῖ

@AndrasDeak "growing grass in their keyboards" That sounds interesting, can you tell me more about the concept?

Magisch

17:26

the breakdown of civilized debate is what makes the bigots look like reasonable people

Andras Deak

@πάνταῥεῖ instructables.com/id/Make-grass-grow-from-a-keyboard

Magisch

the only thing I found to be working consistently is to be nice enough that they feel bad for hating eventually

Shadow Wizard

@Magisch ?

doppelgreener

@Magisch that makes sense

Magisch

@ShadowWizard far right party is set to win 45%

every mainstream party is busy pandering to the right and they get beaten at this game by the far right

Andras Deak

17:28

is that AfD?

Magisch

@doppelgreener if you get angry you validate all their stereotypes

πάντα ῥεῖ

@AndrasDeak Ah, such. I was confused about the wording. Probably thought more about "growing weed in your keyboard" :3

Andras Deak

weed is weed :P

πάντα ῥεῖ

;)

Magisch

@AndrasDeak 'tis

doppelgreener

17:30

@Magisch I haven't seen Get Out yet, but I'm told a bit about how the protagonist feels he can absolutely never become The Angry Black Man for fear of that, and not without good reason. And I understand why Peele says it's a documentary.

Andras Deak

you should probably watch it

doppelgreener

I'd love to, I just haven't gotten to that yet.

Magisch

I'm probably more irritable then normal because of that anyways

Andras Deak

extra prickly :P

Magisch

It's a obnoxious combination of traditionalist pearl clutching and "new woke conservatism"

Andras Deak

17:34

well our prime minister has explained on multiple occasions that liberal democracy is on the decline :P

Magisch

I don't want it to, I'm scared what might replace it

Andras Deak

well our PM knows things, his name is Viktor Orbán :D Whether those things have anything to do with reality is a different matter

but anyway I feel your problem

Shog9

17:55

@Magisch SE isn't better at that. WE are better at that. You, me, that new user who flags a rude comment instead of responding in kind. The software, the company... They facilitate that, but WE make it happen. Twitter software doesn't facilitate and Twitter users wouldn't use it if it did (see: Mastodon).

We can just as easily not be better though. It is a constant battle... Against our own nature.

Twitter plays to our base instincts,just like those politicians. And they get what fickle support they have because of it. But we should not envy them for it.

πάντα ῥεῖ

@Magisch Chaos, bloodshed, Zombie Apocalypse??

Shadow Wizard

18:10

@Magisch you mean anti Muslim/Jews/etc? Makes sense, much easier to spread hatred and use it to control people than with love and caring. It is universal.

@Shog9 did you read Blade Runner?

Shog9

@ShadowWizard what?

@ShadowWizard hate is cheap. Love is expensive. Follow the money...

πάντα ῥεῖ

@ShadowWizard Don't forget to keep your baseball-bat beyond your counter bar!

Shadow Wizard

@Shog9 never mind... Book which take those things to the extreme. :)

πάντα ῥεῖ

@Shog9 "(see: Mastodon)" Just to clarify. These became extinct, didn't they?

Shog9

naw, they're still alive:

Mastodon (band)

Mastodon is an American heavy metal band from Atlanta, Georgia, formed in 2000. The group is composed of Troy Sanders (bass/vocals), Brent Hinds (guitar/vocals), Bill Kelliher (guitar), and Brann Dailor (drums/vocals). Mastodon has released seven studio albums, as well as a number of other releases. The band's 2002 debut album, Remission, garnered significant critical acclaim for its unique sound. Mastodon's second full-length release, Leviathan, is a concept album based on the novel Moby-Dick by Herman Melville. Three magazines awarded the record Album of the Year in 2004: Revolver, Kerrang!...

Shadow Wizard

18:16

@Shog9 as in cheaper to destroy than to build?

Shog9

oh, but wait, I was talking about this:

Mastodon (software)

Mastodon is a distributed, federated social network that forms part of the Fediverse, an interconnected and decentralized network of independently operated servers. Mastodon has microblogging features similar to Twitter. Each user is a member of a specific Mastodon server, known as an "instance" of the software, but can connect and communicate with users on other instances as well. Users post short messages called "toots" for others to see, subject to the adjustable privacy settings of the user and their particular instance. The Mastodon mascot is a brown or grey Proboscidean sometimes depicted...

@ShadowWizard as in cheaper to enact

love as an action

Kevin B

fediverse

Shadow Wizard

Oh

Shog9

if I see you suffering and want to help you, that costs me time or money or both

if I see you suffering and tell you it's Magisch's fault, that costs me nothing

Shadow Wizard

@πάνταῥεῖ pfft. You mean Uzzi? ;-)

@Shog9 brilliant.

And true.

πάντα ῥεῖ

18:18

@Shog9 Oh cool Heavy Metal, that's my weather. And eve a software. I love you shanked headed guy!

doppelgreener

Magisch, how could you.

Shadow Wizard

?

πάντα ῥεῖ

@ShadowWizard Well, I know that almost all Israeli farmers and bar hosts would keep one, but I am still at the trail for starting escalations at lower levels. An Uzzi makes that too deadly. :3

@Shog9 Or just some bullets :P

Shog9

@doppelgreener we're usually pretty quiet about HNQ adjustments (as in, we only mention them if asked). I'm not sure why we publicized this one, but apparently there was some internal discussion about it so I'll try & read up on that.

But for the sake of an informed discussion, the following sites have in the past been either penalized heavily or removed entirely from the HNQ:

- Sexuality
- The Workplace*
- Christianity
- Programmers / Software Engineering*
- Interpersonal Skills*

* == currently penalized / removed

There may've been others too; finding a complete list is beyond what I have time for today

Also,

12

A: What is the reason for the lack of "hot network questions"?

Update As of October 5, 2015, the penalty for Christianity on the Network Hot Questions has been removed. Well, there's a reason for this. The hot network questions algorithm includes adjustments based on feedback such as: I shouldn't have to see a bible study on Stack Overflow. Therefore, Ch...

Magisch

@doppelgreener ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Shog9

18:32

(as noted there, Stack Overflow is also penalized, but only to the degree needed to compensate for the overwhelming amount of activity there vs the rest of the network)

Tinkeringbell

What's "I'm not sure why we publicized this one" mean? You can't really keep it quiet that IPS is out of HNQ if IPS regulars follow Adam on Twitter :/

Somewhat

@Shog9 I just found this when you said that there are other sites... I'm tempted to add this info and your previous message on Magisch's "sites that are exempted on HNQ" for fuller history

or... you want to answer it yourself, since you know more history?

Shog9

@Tinkeringbell pretty sure this was not Adam going rogue and changing stuff for the heck of it, then chatting about it on Twitter as one might about a particularly tasty IPA. Cat's announcement on meta IPS doesn't give that impression at all... But, like I said, I have a lot of reading left to do.

@Somewhat got my hands full. If you think it adds to the discussion, go for it.

Tinkeringbell

@Shog9 Oh no, not like that... I took that statement to mean something like 'people should never have been told IPS is out of HNQ'. Which... kinda matches what I woke up to on Wednesday. A message in the mod-room and then someone posting the tweet in The Awkward Silence around the time I came back from a driving class.

Shog9

@Tinkeringbell oh... If you search your mod room, you'll probably find previous discussions of this (predating your appointment)

Tinkeringbell

18:45

I kinda was trying to find out what 'publicized' stood for in that sentence.

Somewhat

@Shog9 need clarification though, was Sexuality completed banned or only penalized?

Shog9

@Somewhat completely banned.

Somewhat

thanks

Shog9

It was in many ways the template for IPS, but only in the sense of "well, that's how to NOT do an interpersonal skills site"

So... Like a negative exposure

πάντα ῥεῖ

Hmm:

0

A: Make Stack Overflow More Welcoming?

And your particular and concise feature request actually is please? I believe the SO company already did some tremendous efforts to enhance new users experiences, because they just need to get new users to fulfill their business needs regarding their business model. Though that doesn't validate...

doppelgreener

18:52

@Shog9 huh, wow. 2015? Tim's writing about the HNQ in his meta feedback request sorta suggested moving to entire sites being removed was recent, as though IPS was the first.

> Now that we have gotten to the point where we've gone from saying "Let's ignore titles with these words.." to "Let's ignore sites with these titles..", we're seeing a pattern of scale that starts to suck if you think about it protractedly.

in all the discussion of background there's no mention of ever penalising another site, so all the background read like IPS was the very first and this was a new precedent or something

Shog9

@doppelgreener no, not even close

Tangential Trivia: a couple years ago, Kasra whipped up a feature that'd let folks hide the HNQ sidebar. Never rolled out because we didn't have a way of storing account-level preferences, so it was cookie-based (or per-site, or maybe both; I forget).

Andy

@Shog9 Workplace is penalized? I thought I saw their questions frequently. goes to look

Jon Ericson

44

Q: Can you filter out certain SE sites from the hot questions list?

Is it possible to filter out Stack Exchange sites from the hot questions list?

Shog9

We actually could do that now - the necessary infrastructure exists. But it took a long time to get there.

Jon Ericson

"May 11 '11"

Shog9

18:59

@Andy they're penalized primarily because they have / had such insanely "hot" questions that they were getting overwhelmed

4

Q: How come there are 5 Workplace questions in the hot list?

Over the last two days I've observed that there are 5 Workplace questions in the Hot Network Questions list. Given that list contains 100 questions and there are more than 100 sites in SE network, equal distribution would mean less than one question per site in that list. How come Workplace pres...

support hot-questions

Andy

Oh, the same penalty SO has. Got it. I misunderstood what penalized meant

Shog9

@Andy well, the same sort of penalty. Rather more severe than what's applied to SO though.

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