@Tinkeringbell Oh, sure, I don't think they're against it; I think they're largely orthogonal to it, since the Welcoming drive is all about tone, and both my suggestions linked in this conversation are mostly about allowing users to get more detailed, thoughtful feedback
Not all about tone... Tone is just easier to do... Well, talk about... than systemic changes. Even when the system has a major influence on tone, it's easier to classify people as jerks than to look at factors that lead them to be perceived that way.
@Tinkeringbell I think I consistently disagree with the Welcoming side's sense of what makes the tone of a comment polite. What I find to be candidly getting to the meat of the technical matter at hand, they find curt or even hostile. What they find to be kind, I find to be patronising.
Other side of the coin here is probably low-quality questions: yes, there are people who ask hundreds of bad questions and clearly have no interest in improving... But they're massively outnumbered by folks who just don't know any better, and get very little guidance from the system in precisely the place where they'd need it.
@MarkAmery so, this is a good example of something that's... Harder than it should be (AFAIK it requires a schema change), but not so hard that it couldn't be done
@Shog9 I don't disagree with this, although I've been skeptical about the only attempt at solving the problem so far - question templates - since they've all seemed to channel users into only asking debugging questions, which are frequently bad, and I think kneecapping users who want to ask good questions is the opposite of welcoming
@MarkAmery that's a wee bit myopic. Don't think of the "wizard" as an end unto itself, but as a framework to build on.
For example: we've been trying to add (in a very piecemeal way) little bits of advice to the ask page for years now... Consider the little pop-up you get when you try to ask a regex question, or use an SQL tag.
The problem is, we've got a little bit of text that says "slow down & read & think" in a whisper, while the UI itself is shouting "HURRY! HURRY! FILL IN ALL THE BOXES!"
The core value of a wizard isn't the guidance it provides, but what is implicit in the style of UI: it's slower. You're asked at each step to provide one piece of information, and there's no pressure to move on until you get that right.
Hmm. I'm not sure I agree with that analysis; I think there is the potential for the guidance itself to have great value, and I'd intuitively expect the opposite effect on speed - a free text field to compose my thoughts in makes me go slowly and deliberately, while a multipart form makes me want to bash through and get to the end
As SO ages, the notion that folks who are new to the system are gonna just know this stuff is... Increasingly detached from reality: the folks who, newly-minted, "get" this system have always been few in number, and we've long ago exhausted the pent-up demand from folks who cut their teeth on other, similar systems. So what we mostly get are folks who aren't just new to SO, but new to programming, new to forum-style communication, new to classic online etiquette...
Figure that some small % of these folks will take the time to read the site first and naturally absorb our standards that way. It literally doesn't matter what guidance we give them, because they've already figured it out for themselves.
They probably do well on standardized tests too, and maybe play poker at a competitive level for fun on the side.
But meanwhile, everyone else is just lost. They haven't learned anything because they don't realize there's anything to learn. They're asking questions on SO precisely because they aren't used to analyzing systems, and so they can't debug their own code and also can't derive the proper use of SO from just observing SO.
Online communities, real-life communities, languages (real and programming), games of chance and strategy, software systems, markup languages... They're all systems of varying complexities with tons of seemingly-arbitrary rules, some of which have to be memorized and others that have to be derived, most of which aren't documented and some of what is documented is at least partially inaccurate.
Some folks are just naturally good at learning this stuff.
Others aren't, but they've been doing it so long they've kinda picked up enough common bits of behavior to get by ok in most scenarios.
but most folks are not only bad at learning this stuff, they're too young to have gained the experience that would let them get by anyway.
And 10 years in... That description applies to a ton of our current users, even fairly accomplished users, just as much as it does new users.
On a theme that I think you've touched on previously on Meta (though I can't find it) - something that falls into the "make the user slow down" category of ideas (or, more accurately, "give the user the space to fall down") is yanking downvoted / closevoted questions out of visibility temporarily for the asker to review them
I don't think the current ask question page induces haste
But I think the way that things unfold when a question is badly received does
Uh-huh. I think we desperately need something like that if we want this welcoming thing to become more than lip service. Folks need space to breath, space to ask for help asking for help, space to retreat and regroup.
You end up racing against a timer to convince the world that your critics are wrong before your question is (in practice) irredeemably made unanswerable
Otherwise, we're sorta encouraging the types of fight or flight responses that inevitably devolve into "just fight". Which is a lot of what makes participation on the 'Net so unpleasant these days.
Most folks end up here because they're taking a class or doing a job that requires a solution to a problem they don't know how to solve
And they're in that class or doing that job because they need money to live, or they're being pressured by their family or friends, or both / all of the above.
Ultimately, there's a piston at the end of a column of incompressible factors that are forcing folks to ask here or be shunned by society
Even that doesn't help. Someone sufficiently desperate will spam innumerable forums until they get the help they need; they have no alternative.
I spent... Something like 7 years programming before I ever got paid for it. There was no pressure. It was literally my "plan B", the thing I resigned myself to doing after all my other options failed to pan out. The notion of having to ask a question in order to do my job / get my degree was and remains entirely foreign.
That's what makes being "nice" being "welcoming" hard for me in these situations; I implicitly assume a shared background that does not and cannot exist.
Sure, that's where 'I'm sorry, no' comes in. You can't fix society. You can still say no.
It's really sad if people are so pressured into asking bad questions on SO by society. But in the end, SO people can't fix society and may just have to say 'no bad questions please'. How people do that is up to them.
I mean, we can block / discourage a few people, but... The crux of the hydraulic pressure analogy is that you can't just tell water "stop!"
Fixing society is reducing pressure all the way back to the source. That's... Challenging
The other option is redirecting the pressure
Essentially, a lower-resistance path that takes folks off course and puts them somewhere they'll either get better help or at very least do less damage
I'm still in favor of some big red kill switch button if we're talking hydraulic pressure. Haven't been running around long enough to ever see Documentation. A different site might be an option, I guess..
On second thought..
> Someone sufficiently desperate will spam innumerable forums until they get the help they need; they have no alternative.
@Shog9 Or what we had in the Mentor/Mentee program where the post appeared in chat and a mentor could guide the OP before posting? (scaling that is probably an issue)
aaaargh so many about reviewing suggested edits is frustrating
I try to use reject-and-edit with an explanatory comment a lot of the time to provide meaningful feedback and preserve any useful changes within a bad suggestion
@rene Meh. Wild accusations of racism are obnoxious, but downvotes are adequate to deal with it. I think DVing and moving on is the right response. I've thrown mine into the mix.
FWIW, I have long disliked that pluralising "code" is used as a way of conveying leetspeak/illiteracy in programmer culture (as in "can i haz teh codez?") when it's totally valid Indian English; I think it's tasteless to use a construct that's actually correct in the dialect of an already frequently-mocked demographic of programmers as a standard dialogue trope to convey that the speaker is stupid. This view of mine... is not the dominant one, but perhaps that answerer would support me!
Maybe I'm just dense... but as far as I'm aware, I've always correlated that with lolcat speech... which regularly uses the wrong tense and misspells stuff...
Well, so far, I've found some Indians to be the most difficult to deal with in real life and on SE. But I've never associated the sentence with Indian English.
I also really hope people don't actually downvote stuff just because of language.
I've heard it a few times, our company has their helpdesk in India. I always talk British English back and we seem to get along just fine, until they ask me to recite my employee number :P
and that using it as a standard English mistake in lolcat/leetspeak makes people read it, internalise it as a stereotypical dumb error made by people with bad English, and then read "codes" when used by Indians as an error and try to correct it
@MarkAmery I'm guessing because American/British is more about spelling, and Indian seems to have a whole system of grammar/sentence construction attached to it that makes it harder to follow?
British English is one of the few things that you'll get your average middle-class Brit to voice some patriotic sentiments about, whereas Indians quite often view the deviations their dialect has from British English as systemic errors in the ways that Indians speak English rather than as a legitimate dialect in its own right
whereas, given that it seems to be a stable dialect with a huge number of speakers, I'm more inclined to view it as a legit dialect, even if its own speakers largely don't
@Tinkeringbell I'm not sure they have many grammar differences?
I guess sometimes the distinction between the present continuous and present simple seems to be... different... from British or American English in ways that confuse me
@MarkAmery May be just worst-kaas scenarios then. I've definitely seen a few posters of Indian descent that had horrible grammar and spelling, but then again some of the French people I met regularly mess up their grammar too.
So, the other point here is that obviously India has a lot of people who just genuinely do have bad English; are you sure those forms are ones that your average Indian who has English as one of their childhood languages would recognise as correct, and aren't just outright errors?
I enjoyed the anti-graffiti sign that said "DO NOT DEFECATE THIS WALL" when I was out there :)
@MarkAmery I'm talking about Indian text books for learning English... Now, admittedly, some of these are just errors... but there are many forms that are acceptable in InE that aren't in other forms. I don't have any specific examples off the top of my head, though. :(
@Catija it's sorta both. The original was "plz send the codes" - both an actual phrase commonly found lurking in posts from new Indian programmers and a mockery of the same's tendency to use txtspeak and phrasing that comes off as demanding to westerners.
...the similarity to lolcat spk wasn't lost, and so it got corrupted into "plz send teh codez" -> etc
It's worth remembering the please send the codes types are the worst programmers, and there's a few quirks in Indian culture and teaching styles so they very much are in the wrong profession without a safety net
So these folks might have learnt..... Idk Borland C or Java and are currently in a very reputable job in what is essentially a sweatshop trying to meet deadlines in a language they don't get
And the social stigma of losing your job is terrible and the stress of these places is great
To make things more fun, traditionally India has had a tradition of rote learning
And that's at odds imo with troubleshooting skills
