StackOverflow to becoming more welcoming. 👏
For me (cis het dude with monster-sized Asian tech privilege), learning to StackOverflow properly was certainly a learning experience, and I have the closed questions to prove it. I've also gotten enough useful feedback through it (and other StackExchanges, like GIS and statistics) that I try to give back by "mentoring" & showing how to improve the question.
Downvoting unhelpful comments is a great start. I see that too much.
@22 i wish them luck doing something about this; as astonishingly useful a _resource_ as it is, i've always experienced SO as so overtly hostile and swarming with aggressive procedure jockeys that i'm in no way interested in contributing.
(but it's also been my feeling that that tends to be a natural outcome of heavily gamified systems, and SO has always been all-in on the notion that point scoring is the right engine for what they want to do.)
@brennen But I'm not sure the points/metric/gamified aspect of it is the problem. Compare StackOverflow to Wikipedia, in terms of how contributors are treated. SO actually has a feedback mechanism that lets (some) people learn how to do it and get value out of asking & answering. On Wikipedia—no points, no trophies, no feedback, no way to learn, just reverted edits and frustrated ex-editors.
Would you agree with this assessment, and the general idea that points might not be the problem here?
@22 i'd certainly agree that there are social problems in wikipedia editing, and that they manifest somewhat differently. to be fair, i'm really not sure about points as the center of the thing, though at this point i think i have at least a mild bias against designs that're focused on up/down vote mechanics.
wikipedia doesn't have _points_ as such, but it does have a great deal of procedure and rules-lawyering is not uncommon.
@22 in the end it may be just be that there is a system to manipulate and power/territory of some sort to be accumulated that leads to these behaviors. which is a hard problem to solve for anybody in the business of making systems. :)
as to asking questions, i doubt i'll ever become involved in SO, though i use it in read-only mode almost daily. it mostly feels healthier to me to talk technical things over with colleagues and write documentation in places i control for myself.
@22 (but i do thank you for the offer, re: question submitting.)
@brennen Thanks for these thoughtful and cogent responses. Slightly unrelated—one thing that kind of forces me to answer questions on StackOverflow is questions from students whose professors are obviously awful and who just need one or four ideas presented to them (or two or six wrong ideas removed) for them to make rapid strides. There are people without colleagues to bounce ideas off of, and when they show up on SO, I'm moved by their plight to try and help—sympathy miseducation's victims 🙃
@brennen Like Tetlock says, questions and answers are both very hard to get right :) power/territory seem inevitable when you have a real system to make/run, but mayyybe we can apply some p2p decentralized magic (à la Beaker Browser et al.) to it: think about how search engines work: we type in questions (sometimes generic like 'jay-z' meaning 'what this jay-z thing', sometimes exact: 'why should you not be buried with feet facing north') and they suggest pages with answers. Can we invert this?
@brennen I mean, when we write blog posts/articles/code/etc., we have in mind someone who arrives there through a web search, with a question. We should be able to formalize that—have a system that publishes people's questions (think Quora) and let people publish blog posts etc. specifically answering that; with version control and permalinking and backups (combining Wikipedia and Archive.org).
@brennen Then, as you encounter questions/answers, you can up/downvote them, publishing your vote on ActivityPub, thus helping people in your network improve their ability to find questions and answers.
I'm hugely sorry for posting all this to you, I'm sure it makes negative-1000% sense, but your comments were magic and contemplating them made this crazy hare-brained scheme materialize :P I will clean it up and write up a proper something about it.
@22 i look forward to reading it. :)
@brennen thanks for reaching out, I appreciate it!
I agree that there's a ton of rule wankers. It drives me crazy—I would love to mark comments as not helpful/nice.
I also, in the p2p spirit, offer to peer-review any question you might think about asking on StackOverflow. I realize most my suggestions would be like "Make sure you preempt the snark by saying 'X/Y/Z aren't related, here's why'", which is symptomatic of culture problems, but I hope I could improve the question at least a bit.