Note the lack of a concrete response to that question I just linked... The internal notes for the change contain the phrase "I think the handicap is a fine short-term solution."
Nothing has the staying power of a "short-term solution"
No idea when that was added. Progse launched in 2010, so quite possibly lost to time.
HNQ - like tag synonyms, comment moderation and navigation - tend to be projects that lots of folks think they want to handle... and then burn out trying, or give up after being faced with the complexity of the challenge.
LOTS of folks have joined the company with "fix HNQ!" on their short list of projects they want to undertake. Still not fixed...
...which is why I said earlier: look at this as an opportunity. Sometimes, things gotta get real ugly before they can get any prettier.
Ironically, the focus on questions is what dooms SO's Hot questions (some other sites as well). Wanna see something fun? Pick your favorite tag and look at its hot answers...
I hate reading Quora. Search results almost always suck, browsing manages to be even worse... They have no game-plan for getting rid of spam / self-promotion; heck, they want self-promotion. It's a mess. But... That newsletter is gold. I've been reading it for years; it's like picking up a variety mag at a newsstand to read on a bus.
Namely: the issue is not just that the staff decided to follow the whims of STRANGERS ON TWITTER over HONOURABLE MEMBERS OF THE COMMUNITY WHO OBVIOUSLY ARE RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING BECAUSE THEY POST HERE
It's also that the entire basis for purging IPS from HNQ was some profoundly sexist feminist bullshit about how a man being uncomfortable with sexual attention from a woman is inherently sexist, and the staff just decided the uncritically roll with that
@Shog9 Jim beam is minor stuff (whisky made of corn, what should that be please?? You might spoil Coca Cola with such crap stuff). At least consider Irish triple distilled whiskey, if you don't like that smoky taste of single malt scotch!
@MarkAmery I can't see the original any more... but the retweet that got a reaction said:
> When people seem confused about why Stack Overflow might not be the most welcoming/comfortable place for people to find answers to programming questions, show them this
@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.
@MarkAmery I'm nowhere near getting through all this stuff, but... What I've seen as the instigation looks an awful lot like the many, many "Look, I just want to see programming stuff" complaints that've cropped up over the years.
@MarkAmery I didn't see it that way at all. But even if it were, I'm not sure that it's materially different than people uncomfortable with a question in Spanish or about Christianity offending their eyes distracting them from real work.
2:04 PM, 16/10/18... first tweet by someone, asking for a way to block HNQ on SO. Screenshot was tweeted in that thread at 2:37. That got a retweet at 2:39... and that retweet got a response from Adam at 3:18.
@Shog9 Try the "Green Spot" stuff. You'll be surprised about single malt Irish whiskeba!The "Yellow Spot" is stronger, and beyond all beliefs, taking ice with it seems to be a good advice from the bar tender ;)
so, I mean, is there any motive for purging IPS from HNQ that anyone has articulated other than a sense that it's inherently immoral and misogynistic for a man to ask how to deal with uncomfortable sexual interactions with women?
because as far as I can tell that's what motivated the original complaint, and until now I've interpreted the staff validation of the complaint as a validation of the ideology behind it
Titles were wrong, we deal with it. Our fault, we should've paid more attention. We're still not doing great at that, Catija had to correct one yesterday.
I raised the point here yesterday that I actually went to a school where any keywords relevant to homosexuality were picked up by the internet filter, and if you viewed a page containing them you were instantly and automatically banned from the school network and sent to a disciplinary meeting with the IT admins
@Shog9 Jameson isn't that bad at all (I am currently consuming that stuff). I really was surprised (as being a scotch lover) about the quality Irish whiskey can be. Well, I've asked the competent bar tenders to serve me some appropriate stuff.
@πάνταῥεῖ I don't hate Jameson, but it's never been something I'd go out of my way to drink. More like, "oh, it's St. Patricks' day, I guess we should drink Jameson"
(which doesn't make a terrible lot of sense either, but roll with it)
So it seems to me that when people talk about "workplace appropriateness" in this context, they're really applying their own ideology and not just trying to protect people from filters
@MarkAmery We've actually had the same arguments with people over at IPS before ... When we had questions about sex (and I believe one about furries too... didn't the furries one get filtered out of HNQ after a tweet too?)
@MarkAmery and? If I worked there, I'd probably be REALLY annoyed if the answers to my programming questions had lots of homosexual stuff on the sidebar.
Like it or not, we have a big-ass site dedicated to helping folks with their programming jobs, and a bunch of little sites for everything else. And we can't control random people's IT departments
@πάνταῥεῖ It's used as an example of another kind of stuff that can end up in HNQ, be detected by a workplace filter and then make SO inaccessible/workplace inappropriate...
but just this one time, where some feminists get angry about titles that portray female sexuality in a negative way, suddenly this otherwise-ignored doctrine of being "workplace-appropriate" demands censorship?
Accidental suicide by poisoning seems plausible. But then again you have a case of a journalist slipping onto a bonesaw, into a 6ft hole and trigerring an avalanche of dirt that covered him entirely. On an embassy.
@Tinkeringbell I'd like to see this fleshed out. If it wasn't inherently that they involved men dealing with problematic sexual attention from women, what was "wrong" with the two titles that triggered the ban?
Given that meta.stackexchange.com/questions/316934/… is the most-upvoted comment of Magisch's answer, I think most of the community shares my interpretation of events; if that's not accurate, explaining WTF the actual staff motive was would have value
@Shog9 That's quite of a cynical statement, and I don't like it. I can accept you're watching like kinda p'lice. But mentioning the SS is just inappropriate (I am still considering to flag that, not sure finally).
@MarkAmery The fact that titles about questions involving men dealing with problematic sexual attention were shown to someone that has no clue of what IPS is, and probably already has had a lot of bad experiences or a catastrophic something happening to them so they view the world in a very negative light (it's called a self-stigma, look it up once you're sober)... In a context of 'programming questions and answers' which you'd clearly expect to be free of any sexual tension.
@MarkAmery here's my thing: I don't care who is dealing with problematic sexual attention from whom, I don't particularly want to see that question when I'm looking for answers to programming questions. Same reason I don't want to see Evony ads, or Vogue covers or anything about Kardashians. It trivializes what I'm doing and feels like clickbait.
@πάνταῥεῖ sorry, I had to hold in all my bomb jokes yesterday so gotta get 'em out now
@MarkAmery yep, it is. And if that's what you're up for, great! I'll be the first to admit, sometimes I want clickbait... But not when I'm trying to work.
A justification of "it's irrelevant to programming" and "it's clickbait" doesn't do, because that's just an argument for eliminating HNQ entirely. The fact that that's not actually what happened tells me that neither of those is the real motive.
@Shog9 We're digging out WIIWar bombs in cities in our countries still and frequently. Well, all the people have to be evacuated all the time. That#s not really fun :P
Any site that has these amongst its top 30 questions is gloriously based upon clickbait:
How can I tell if a corpse is safe to eat? How can I kill adorable animals? My head keeps falling off. What can I do? Is it dangerous to go extreme pig riding in a thunderstorm? How do I lick a plane? Is a horse actually faster than running? How can I keep monsters out of my nether regions? What is the terminal velocity of a sheep? Can I give the naked stalking courier his clothes back? Uhh… I got drunk and trashed a temple. How do I pick up the mess?
Hence Tim's meta question. This is in no way an effective solution, and we should stop pretending otherwise. Today it's IPS; tomorrow Worldbuilding. The next day ... I donno, Network Engineering? It doesn't work.
Maybe we do the reddit thing: make a bunch of vapid trollish posts the only thing anyone new ever sees er, pick a reasonable default list of sites, allow you to customize it (or hide it entirely).
@MarkAmery Honestly... Can we just accept that IPS is out of HNQ, that HNQ is going to be reworked, that we are all a bit sad about how everything happened... and go do something fun?
I'm not sure what you're expecting me to say there.
Explode in a ball of feathers and frenzy and shout at Shog that this isn't fair?
Don't you think I've not already shouted at people about how ridiculous I find all of this?
for example... New sites invariably have a terrible time both even getting into the HNQ, and with handling moderation on questions when they do. We could probably moderate that a bit: give newer sites a bit of a bump, but have the questions fall off more quickly.
Or, y'know... Do something useful with answers, as I hinted at above.
the feedback has drawn out some really keen observations i haven't had to think about much before, that HNQ frequently presents the worst any site has to offer
There are TONS of ways of accomplishing the goals of HNQ in a more effective way. No easy ways, but... Ways. With the caveat that we might have to rebuild lots of expensive infrastructure to do it.
by focusing on controvertial edge cases that made everyone go "wait WHAT!?" over the normal representative stuff, even the interesting representative stuff that just isn't quite so alarming or controvertial
@Tinkeringbell The thing is, from my perspective - meaning no offence, and not wanting to dismiss the site that you are personally invested in and care about - I don't really care about IPS, which I only interact with by occasionally visiting it when a good bit of clickbait appears in HNQ. I do care about the content I've contributed over years to SO, much of which violates the ideals decreed in the Welcoming drive.
I don't speak Japanese (but some people might), I will never do Islam (but some people might), I don't want to be told how to exercise (but some people might)...
@Magisch sure. We just have to not do something else important. Which is why I said, y'all should be looking at this controversy as a hell of a good fortune: there's probably zero chance anything with HNQ would've gotten fixed any time soon without it.
and on the good, but controversial, questions it does harm by undermining the community's ability to expertly handle content and amplifying the fastest gun and bringing in tons of crap votes and posts from nonexperts
A position of "we will censor content that is counter to feminist ideology" is a direct threat to the survival of the work I've contributed over years criticising incorrect posts
@MarkAmery Give me an example question or answer or comment? Cause I'm not following you here... what in the world has feminism to do with questions and answers bout programming?
@MarkAmery the only content i can think of that would actually be "counter to feminist ideology" is just content that disrespects the humanity or validity or worth of women. i do not think that is the content you are thinking of, and i do not think we would mind that content being censored where it existed.
@Tinkeringbell The entire "welcoming" drive basically started from the idea that blunt technical criticism given without sufficient fluffy padding alienated women and drove them off the site, due to inherent female emotional frailty
@MarkAmery Yeah okay, I know that blog post. And I don't really know what to make about women, minorities etc. either, especially not in the context of SO (I could give it an IPS twist).
Big difference between "women are emotionally fragile" and "oh hey, there are folks actively being creeps and we should provide more tools / support when that happens"
Now... There's another discussion regarding how the sexes are socialized to interact and how that plays out on SO... Including a couple of light studies on the matter (search MSE). But that's a lot more nuanced than "emotionally fragile"
This is a red herring. The problem isn't whether some group or another feels unwelcome (though we have empirical evidence some groups feel less welcome than others). Rather, the problem is various aspects of the sites make people who already feel marginalized feel even more marginalized. That's w...
@Tinkeringbell Well it's also meant for: you open the tab, then go to ask a question, or you find another one and go to post an answer. But then you run into hostility, dismissiveness, creepiness, and otherwise get alienated in ways white men do not.
@AndrasDeak I personally haven't met anyone on SE yet that has managed to creep me out or make me feel oppressed. Neither have I seen comments on the answers on SO that I've used doing that....
Truth is, there's a spectrum of attitudes and behaviors at work here. Folks who already feel like they're starting at a disadvantage might take offense more readily... But that doesn't start or end with "women". Lord knows there are LOTS of new users who react badly to criticism because of their own insecurity, and LOTS of them are men. Including the one who keeps polluting our group inbox today.
I think there's some value in being more welcoming to folks who might more readily find themselves in this situation... But that doesn't mean we should put up with more abuse from them.
@Tinkeringbell anyway, none of us understand it :P The first sign of trouble on SO was when Jay posted that blog post mushing together quality control and niceness, and suggesting (intentionally or not) that we should cut some slack to crap posts written by minorities. And then the lack of an official follow-up saying that no, this is not the case, and the company would never want quality to decline as a sacrifice for political correctness
@JonEricson I've read it and I'm still not sure why you pointed me to that :) If you feel like elaborating you can try to explain. I don't think I expressed any of my views regarding the situation of minorities on SO in the above few messages, I just replied to Tinker's remark about the blog
The next person isn't going to know that you've already been targeted by a creep magically, so you can take whatever slight offense they make as another example of creepiness or give them the benefit of the doubt. The first is called self-stigmatizing, the second 'assume good intentions'.
@Tinkeringbell Sure. But, let's have this picture: everything you post always attracts creeps or rude behaviour. Always. Specifically because of who you appear to be, or something about you like how you're writing. Wouldn't that get tiring? Like, very? And alienating? And make you feel kinda gross for using this site?
This is your default baseline: rude behaviour follows you. Another user's default baseline is to not run into this at all.
And then we add the less common instances of rudeness everyone sees from day to day.
To me that's just occasional and tolerable. To you it's constant and then some.
@doppelgreener Nah. It'd make me stubborn enough to actually try and be constructive and fix it, lead by example etcetera etcetera because that's how I became a mod on IPS. I was too stubborn.
@Tinkeringbell It would alienate a lot of people off ever trying to use the site again directly through Q&A.
Or force them to have to pretend to be male, or white, or straight, or whatever is the oposite of the part of them that causes issues, in order to pass and not deal with this crap.
@MarkAmery The baseline is that women (etc.) in tech tend to get a lot of pushback, ranging from blatant to subtle. That's how a lot of them have to live each day and any additional slap in the face gives a much worse overall impression
Or perhaps sometimes from males, with a misinformed idea of how what equality means, and who then start to manage for equal outcomes instead of opportunities.
@AndrasDeak Eh... I don't like this idea that "tech" is somehow uniquely hostile to women in a world where women in lots of other industries are expected to wear makeup and heels as a baseline requirement of the job. We should be able to thoughtfully evaluate proper norms around gender without also pretending that our industry in uniquely terrible on this stuff when it plainly isn't
@MarkAmery Yeah, sure. For the record, I'm a physicist, so tech is not "my industry". But I believe STEM fields all have the same problem. And if I look around, I occasionally see casual sexism among my peers, which sucks because 1. they tend to be highly qualified, intelligent people and 2. I'm as privileged as it gets so I should notice as little as possible of these things, yet I do
Also FWIW, if I was out to make a metric ton of money and could choose, I'd be a woman now as a software dev, because all the big companies have extra benefit programs for women in tech
As someone who works with molecular biologists, an electrical engineer, a bioinformatician, chemists, and a mechanical engineer, I find it amusing that as a programmer I am magically the only one of us who works in "tech" as typically defined by a modern newspaper :P
Anyway, I fear I need to leap out of this conversation and bash out some code I've been putting off before my girlfriend gets to the office and drags me home
I am ABSOLUTELY SOBER ENOUGH to write business-critical software right now, so it'll be fine.
The point is to make that little effort not to be a jerk, that's all. And this isn't specific to minorities of course (hence all the rage about the blog post and the New Contributor indicator and blargh whatever)
@AndrasDeak And deal with those that are by flagging, deleting, suspensions. That doesn't even have to be the new user, it can be the experienced part of the community. So I don't realy see how we got into an argument about workplaces in the first place.
A position of "we will censor content that is counter to feminist ideology" is a direct threat to the survival of the work I've contributed over years criticising incorrect posts
and from discussing that the welcome wagon is not about how merely discussing tech is injurous to "inherent emotional frailty" or whatevs, because that is not what was going on that was the source of any problem
@Shog9 Workplace is not penalised at all. I keep a close eye at HNQ and this has never been the case, I've seen up to 7-8 Workplace questions in HNQ. For a concrete example right now I see 6 (six) Workplace questions in HNQ right now: #121410, #121411, #121512, #121499, #121395, #121407. I made a snapshot at Wayback machine if you're interested in more details: web.archive.org/web/20181025205546/https://stackexchange.com/…
@AdamLear well you can easily see what that means in practice by simply going to webarchive link in my previous message and counting all the Workplace questions captured in HNQ over there (spoiler: in practice that means nothing). If you want to see the site where penalization really works, check Stack Overflow - that's the only site where whatever magic digits are there they make real impact. For the sake of completeness there is also Math.SE, but it hides from HNQ by editing the titles
> What’s more, the idealized state of users and developers working hand-in-hand to build the sites was more smoke-and-mirrors than reality. When I was first hired most of the development team was assigned to “core”, which is to say, there was a bag of developers for managers to draw from. It wasn’t quite the same situation as Valve’s no-management structure but it was a lot closer to that than a typical organization. As a semi-outsider, I observed two ways that changes got made:
As a result of major initiatives originated by management.
> Fortunately, there’s a solution to this problem: hire a project manager. I don’t think I’m alone in feeling a sense of relief when our development process became more predictable and understandable. I can now say with confidence what we are working on and usually explain our goals too. There are still vestiges of the old ways4 that surprise us, but generally PMs have taken responsibility to drive the development process.
The downside of top-down development is there’s a lot less room for independent projects and ad hoc feature development. As more developers have been assigned to larger …
The solution you provided is simplistic. It doesn't take a lot of the factors that led to the current situation into account and assumes that a technical solution to a people problem will resolve the issue.
CMs have been spread to thin already back when I was a CM and that was 5 years ago. But, you responded to Tim's message that in the past a meta post could get a dev response and code shipped within a week. Merging metas wouldn't get us back to that in the slightest
I mean, it might not be a bad idea for other reasons, but it wouldn't fix the fact that Q&A as a product has far more moving parts now and those parts are being worked on by different teams with different scheduled and different priorities
@AdamLear It really depends on the feature. For example, I see bugs get fixed by Nick in hours sometimes from MSO posts. So, context is really important in the classification there. However, the real issue lately hasn't really been so much that there is a lack of response so much as also there is a lack of clarity. Discussions seem to be needed in multiple places before anything can coalesce nowadays, and that leads to a lot of lag.
@AdamLear sure let's use "insufficiently" if it's important to you, no problem. Want to know what's important to me? Shog referred to my meta post about 5 TWP questions in hot list to tell us his story of penalization but when I check it now I see even more than I complained about - 6. Yeah. Insufficiently. Let's call it that way
@Mithrandir Okay, I read it, and the medium post. To be honest, I follow the exchange rather closely. Anyway, none of that is really that new, aside from the "hire a PM" as a fix.
Problem: Lost trust of community, Solution: Hire a PM. RE: Hiring a PM to make features more streamlined in both their development and publication will not solve the problem of community trust. SE as a company has had community trust because the community felt like they were involved with something for a long time, and a large portion of that feeling came from interacting with the team on meta. It is virtually impossible for a response to be made on metas because many exchanges face the same problem simultaneously, and CM's are now made to prioritize which community to assuage, and which to…
Merging metas may seem like a trivial solution, but there is a lot of depth to it, and it also has a historical precedence of working very well.
