You can’t fix what you can’t measure, so the first thing we did as a part of our Summer of Love campaign was try to measure friendliness in an objective and repeatable way. We gathered 7000 comments from Stack Overflow and submitted them to Mechanical Turk. For each comment, we asked 20 people to rate the comment as Friendly, Unfriendly, or “Neutral/Unclear.”
There are different ways of massaging the data, but I do want to give you a flavor for the kind of comments we’re talking about when we’re talking about unfriendly comments. Here is a snapshot of the com …