well, I mean its not a question but Meta invites discussion (which is forgotten a lot...also argued about) so I don't see a problem with that. And its respectful and presents a problem (and to be fair the linked questions were not the best idea - one shouldn't "ask" people to prove discrimination in such a public setting - IMHO) +1 from me
@Gwideon I find it difficult to see how your post is hurtful to anyone. I think some may find it lacks a clear question, but that isn't the worst thing on Meta, esp. right now.
@Gwideon this has descended into petty bickering. There's no other word for it. Not everyone, of course, and no side has a monopoly on petty bickering, but a lot of what we're seeing is indeed petty bickering.
and without even looking at the comments (remember that right now a lot of good people are angry and angry people watch their language a lot less, are more defensive, and comments are not a great format for discussion - so comments reflect all that). I know someone will ask you to prove where you see this & at least one will say "this does not reflect my views" (hopefully that politely but unlikely): this also happened when it was simply unfriendliness with the welcome wagon.
IMHO, we're usually pretty good across SE in general about deleting that kind of thing very quickly. It's gotten a bit slower recently, with the mass reduction in moderator and power user participation, but we're still doing fairly well.
but you also have to consider that one's own health must be more important than the ongoing discussions on SE
besides, you're not the only representative of your group, there are others stepping in and sharing their perspective when they also feel they're able to
and sometimes they step away too, to replenish their mental health bar
@Mgetz Yeah it definitely shouldn't be that way. The way Meta is set up is particularly bad for minority issues. It makes it both very hard for them to be seen at all and very easy to suppress if even a slightly greater number of people disagree with it.
I think the contrasting opinions you've received on your post are because it's premised on the notion that the "rest of us" don't want to show you basic decency. That is untrue, and not a pleasant accusation. Many of us are concerned only with (a) logistically, how the heck do you apply this thing in its current form, and to a lesser degree (b) feelings regarding forced speech. I said this to you yesterday as well.
@Rubiksmoose so it wasn't pre split, because meta didn't have rep (or at least it wasn't as bad) to me MSE shouldn't have rep consequences. It should just give privileges based on highest network rep. As mentioned above I'd open a feature request if I wasn't already sure it would be sent straight into oblivion
@LightnessRacesinOrbit Yes, my primary issue with the new CoC (or more accurately the FAQ) is that it's possibly the least enforceable rule I've ever read.
> a community that I had felt was a bastion of rational thought has descended into petty bickering over whether they have to extend a certain group of people a basic amount of human respect
@terdon It's implied. "The community", without qualification. That means, the community. Not certain aspects of the community, or some people in the community. It also more directly implies that the arguments are only about giving respect, which is not true also.
@LightnessRacesinOrbit Well, the community has absolutely descended into petty bickering. I don't really see how else to call it. There are some shining counterexamples, but by and large, the tone of the debate hasn't been very constructive.
Personally I don't care at all, and have no personal problem with the post. But if you're getting any negative reactions to it Gwideon, IMO that'll be why.
@terdon Petty bickering about more than one topic, yes. Not just about "I don't want to treat people with decency"
@Magisch But it isn't supposed to be the main support venue for the network either. It's tied to main rep, which is how all local metas work. The friendliness of local metas depends on the spirit of their attached site.
honestly we need some community leaders stat to answer hot topic questions and explain what is going on to fix things daily, best results achieved if they're also going to be doing things that are good, not bad
@user1306322 honestly you could probably use a hidden controversy metric based on total votes on the post and answers. The higher the controversy metric the higher the rep needed to even comment
@Mgetz Congrats, you've come up with another potentially-good idea that will be feature-declined if ever posted. Or just ignored completely by the dev team.
@user1306322 nah just "This question seems to have attracted a lot of controversy, as a way of helping keep the discussion constructive we've restricted some actions. This will gradually age away"
at this point there should be enough information and advice from top members of the community who know how to fix things, to follow it and resolve all this
Honestly? I think it would be hard for the site to find ways to decline much more than it already has. It's not going to disappear, or self-combust; it's not going to find itself with 24 users left overnight. It's just going to be mostly full of crap and frustrated people and, oh wait, it already is.
it's unmanageable at its current scale with its current mod toolset
it's been a problem for years
other sites probably not
smaller communities where review queue reaches 0 many times a day are fine
if it was possible, I'd petition to detach SO and a few other unmanageable technical sites off the rest of the SE network and let the rest be free under the rule of elected mods
let them have their jobs and ads and whatever else brings them money
management doesn't take their time to have a good look into the site's issues, and they say "all of the meta is bad" because just some of the users are bad, ignoring the 90% of good users
people get angry at such a shallow assessment
then other things happen and new people arrive, again not taking time to study the issue and read all the posts and comments, ignoring 90% of good people they say "all people are bad here", again
and again, people are mad, but new people
this is now the third or fourth wave of that same pattern
it's surprising to me because even though they are looking at their profits, they are looking at short term profits first and foremost, their knowledge doesn't allow them to realize their long term are going to tank
it's bad for profits, it's bad for the content, what's it good for?
I think their knowledge allows them to realize that their long terms aren't going to tank, no matter how much we might sit here and project (without any data at all) that they would
by "tank" I mean significant reduction in potential future profits, but I suppose they've calculated that they can take a hit if the price would be to really study the community issues, and I get it, it's hard, maybe it's not worth that bit of extra money
The community is like the structure of a building. You can keep making profits renting out spaces in the building, but if you don't take care of the structure, it will eventually all fall apart.
It will get really rotten and horrible but it won't collapse. It'll always be there in some form, and that form will be sufficient for ad revenue, which is all that the company needs from public Q&A
Look I'm not saying that I want it to be that way; but from a business perspective I just don't see much reason for management to be panicking or even really worrying about any of this drama, which may be one reason why they're not engaging with anyone about it at all: they have nothing to gain from the trauma of it whatsoever.
It's unprofitable already. It has always been unprofitable.
SO public Q&A in the form we love is not profitable. So projections that it would be unprofitable in the form we don't love are kind of vacuous
Hence the increased focus on Teams and Careers (which are both unaffected by any of this drama) because that's where the money is.
Granted, they owe their genesis, and to some degree their continued existence, to public Q&A, but (a) I think that job's been done now, and (b) I don't think public Q&A will ever degrade in terms of participation to the point that it doesn't continue to do that job
Obviously it's all speculation but I don't think it's without reasoning
look they're all very talented business people with respectable portfolios, they'll find another job if this one doesn't work out in a couple years, no reason for panic even then
I'm not sure they're right to, though. We've already seen scummy clones manage to out-SEO Stack Overflow for particular queries in the past, which was always frustrating, but now... is kind of promising
the best we can hope to do for this site is prevent early onset ruination, and I don't have enough neither knowledge nor will for that, especially being fairly certain that a better site will inevitably appear soon enough, and that gives me hope
I observe with some mixture of sadness and amusement that: - since the declaration that we mustn't edit a user's pronouns out of their posts, the only instances we've seen of anyone choosing to put pronouns in their posts in the first place have been right-wing trolls* - everybody besides me seems scared to remove them, to the point of us having had mods editing them back in
* ('trolls' here intended as purely descriptive and not pejorative)
