English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

9:17 AM

@Cerberus I never said you were crazy. I only said that every place is perceived as aggressive for one reason or another by one person or another. I also said that being perceived as aggressive is not bad per se. I also said something about Newton's third law.

Wevs. If I had to put just one thing straight, and this goes out to @terdon as well, it would be this:

We are not "hostile towards newcomers who are learning the language". Heck, we have created a whole spin-off site just for them. We never said, "fuck off", we always said, "here's your new cozy home".

And just for the record: Cerberus is a newcomer learning the language, too. So am I. Yet we are both on here after all these years. And the same standards apply to us as to anyone else. If I had to compose a question these days, I myself would have to be careful in wording it. And that's a good thing.

So again, there will always be people saying that Stack Overflow, or Programmers, or Ask Different, or Arqade, or Cooking, or ELU, is a giant pile of shit. And there'll be no way convincing them otherwise. Whoop dee doo.

We can't please everyone. We are not in the business of pleasing everyone.

Noah

Some of them might be right.

You cannot just have over a million websites that cover the same stuff.

If you really want to split things down, you can come up with a separate website for every single tag.

RegDwighт

That is another aspect of it. There are any number of sites already where you can just throw your spaghetti at the wall. (And get a crappy answer in return, or no answer at all.)

Noah

But that's not what we do, I hope not for now.

I don't know why Quora is getting bigger than us.

I think one of the reasons has to do with the way they are holding the website together.

RegDwighт

If I want to ask a question that does not contain a single question, and fails to so much as spell "English" correctly — well, there are any number of sites that will gladly accept it. Nobody forces me to post it on ELU if I can't be bothered to put the same amount of effort into my question I'd expect people to put into their answers.

@Noah Quora is getting bigger than us precisely because everybody can just dump their worst shit there.

They are in the business of pleasing everyone.

Noah

9:33 AM

But that's where the issue of quality arises. You tell people to be loose and careless. You don't actually help them improve their posting habits. As a result, they go to that less professional website and come up with any kind of shitty content they want.

RegDwighт

The very definition of a win-win.

Noah

Maybe so. But the end result is more mess on the Internet.

RegDwighт

Crap site gets more crap, crap-free site stay crap-free.

@Noah well, I don't know if you got the memo, but: there can't be more mess on the Internet. Impossible. The battle has long been lost.

The Internet is all about a giant mess. It should really be called the Intermess.

Matt Эллен

Intermezzo

In music, an intermezzo (, plural: intermezzi), in the most general sense, is a composition which fits between other musical or dramatic entities, such as acts of a play or movements of a larger musical work. In music history, the term has had several different usages, which fit into two general categories: the opera intermezzo and the instrumental intermezzo. Renaissance intermezzo The Renaissance intermezzo (plural: intermezzi) was also called the intermedio. It was a masque-like dramatic piece with music, which was performed between the acts of a play at Italian court festivities on ...

Noah

But we should stop turning it into a supergiant mess.

RegDwighт

9:37 AM

There are thousands of search engines alone. And someone, somewhere, actually uses them. They all have users.

@Noah Yahoo tried to bring order into the mess. Look at them now, they are a bad copy of CNN.

Hugo

Who remembers when people manually categorised webpages on Yahoo?

RegDwighт

I do.

I had to submit pages back in the day.

Noah

is there a chatroom for our sister Website ELL?

Matt Эллен

yes

RegDwighт

The Internet is the ultimate democracy. Without a five-percent threshold. You don't like all the other parties, you create your own. You don't know all the other parties, you create your own.

English Language Learners

A room to talk about English, linguistics, or anything you wan...

Noah

9:41 AM

And the only true one. Except for its encrypted Websites.

RegDwighт

Yeah. I don't quote XKCD often, but when I do, it's the comic about standards.

No 927.

Oh frigg. It inlines automatically. Frigg frigg frigg. Fixing...

Much better now.

Noah

Why is that? I liked the previous one, the inlined one.

RegDwighт

So yeah. s/standards/websites/.

@Noah because this:

Matt Эллен

even the time cube has a website

RegDwighт

Apr 22 '11 at 21:53, by RegDwight

You post another XKCD, I'll kick you again.

And I really don't want to be kicking myself.

Noah

9:44 AM

I think you already did. At least once.

RegDwighт

@MattЭллен more to the point, all the people who do not agree with the time cube have websites, too.

Matt Эллен

true!

RegDwighт

So do the people who do not agree with the people who do not agree with the time cube.

@Noah yeah, but not inlined.

Sep 19 '12 at 12:24, by ЯegDwight

Okay, this XKCD is a huge time sink, I'll give him that.

Or you mean, I already kicked myself once?

Could be. I'm omnipotent, after all.

Noah

How do you repost a post from a user again?

RegDwighт

I will now use my omnipotence to force myself to have delicious lunch.

Matt Эллен

9:46 AM

enjoy!

RegDwighт

@Noah you need the URL of that post, and you need to post it on its own line with nothing else.

Your post has the URL "http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/11312124#11312124"

Copy and paste that one.

Noah

1 min ago, by Noah

How do you repost a post from a user again?

RegDwighт

See.

Noah

Okay. Great.

Thanks.

RegDwighт

NP.

I'm off to munch soup.

Laters.

Matt Эллен

9:48 AM

CU

Noah

C U.

Hugo

1 min ago, by Noah

How do you repost a post from a user again?

oh yeah

chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/11312146#11312146

Matt Эллен

9 secs ago, by Matt Эллен

damnit. I can't quote myself before I say anything

Noah

Here's a simple way of doing it. Hover over the post, and click on the little drop down arrow, select the link(permlink) and drag it into the text box.

Hugo

12 secs ago, by Noah

Here's a simple way of doing it. Hover over the post, and click on the little drop down arrow, select the link(permlink) and drag it into the text box.

it works!

Matt Эллен

9:50 AM

@Noah there's an even easier way!

Noah

@MattЭллен And that is?

Matt Эллен

hover over the message and drag the down arrow into the text box

Noah

40 secs ago, by Hugo

12 secs ago, by Noah

Here's a simple way of doing it. Hover over the post, and click on the little drop down arrow, select the link(permlink) and drag it into the text box.

Yeah.

Works.

Matt Эллен

Sep 4 '12 at 13:24, by Matt Эллен

you know that little down arrow, on the left of a chat message? you can drag that to the chat box for quick quoting

I knew I'd said it before

Hugo

33 secs ago, by Matt Эллен

Sep 4 '12 at 13:24, by Matt Эллен

you know that little down arrow, on the left of a chat message? you can drag that to the chat box for quick quoting

it works!

Matt Эллен