@Magisch I removed my accounts for my own mental health, not out of a sense of protest (since a whole lot of protesting didn't have any effect at all). It was altogether too easy to hand in my diamond and get it back. I needed to split, and to heal and to get my head back into the real world. Attempting to help the ungrateful beast that is SE was very damaging to my soul.
@motosubatsu Not here for long, otherwise I might get sucked back in again. Just stopped by to wish the nominees all the best of luck. Good to see some really good guys step up. I saw the trash-talker who was thankfully taken down.
A site-wide moderation team that actively doesn't work together can only be damaging. The CM team used to be good at moderating the moderators, but now there's only one or two left, who are hobbled, I don't see that magically getting fixed by someone senior making a meta post.
There are some staff members who work to bridge the divide, and have been positively received. I agree that it's not looking like a hopeful outlook right now, and I reckon it's fair to cut your losses for the dynamic, but I'm not ready to give up yet, and I like this place and some other sites too much to not at least try
maybe my perspective is different because I haven't seen what you've seen, who knows
There's a saying "don't respond to trolls". It's very tempting and very safe to say "I'll ,just stay on TWP, nothing is affecting me there and I'm away from the toxicity". However, in not getting involved, you allow that toxicity to continue unabated. You contribute to it by not pushing back against it. I tried so hard to push back and to suggest more reasonable approaches, more reasonable points of view. But people who wear the hat of distain refuse to take it off.
I kinda alluded to that in the question I proposed for the questionaire. There's a responsibility beyond the 90% of handling things here for the new mod
I like it that all candidates have answered the question thoughtfully and took it seriously
Yeah was pretty good - managed to get the biggest bruise on the side of my knee whilst messing around and bashing into a wall though currently a very dark shade of purple and about the size of a Cantaloupe. Next one is far too far away...
@Bee yeah it's annoying when it's just something silly that's the cause - last time I did my knee in it was actually a drunken friend falling on it. I was the only sober person there and I'm the one who ended up with a dislocated kneecap! :D
Ouch, that must have been tough to recover from, even worse when it's not even your fault! I was completely sober this time, but I sprained my MCL iceskating whilst drunk (just not a good move) did realise I had done it so worked on it all evening (Chalet Host so acceptable to have been drinking). Woke up the next morning and it had swollen to twice the size
This is something I've wondered for a while, and the question which has prompted me to finally ask it is this one.
The first paragraph is
A couple of years ago I was reporting to J as one of ten developers, then moved under S, who is the manager of J. The reason was that I am looking after ...
@motosubatsu can we discuss your answer or would you prefer not to ? I initially wanted to comment but I'm not sure this will be interesting to anybody else than me
it may be one of the fundamentals of SE I'm questioning here but you are under the assumption that the most upvoted answer is the most helpful answer. Is that correct ?
@ArthurHavlicek well, I don't always personally think it is - but I think the general concept is that it is what the community thinks is the most helpful answer
it is the answer most people in net thought to be helpful
the idea of these sites that outside of obvious abuse or tomfoolery, the voting mechanism by virtue of many people judging will produce something useful at the top
if we're talking about a "soft science" like workplace communications and interactions, where there's no hard-truth like answer that you can test and have a test case for, then we're essentially operating in opinion
I'm not saying the community always get's it right - clearly they aren't infallible, and there are factors that color it such as the "Fastest Gun In The West" problem where early answers garner more upvotes and the fact that people may vote based on their perception of the person writing the answer
The problem is the alternative. Who gets to decide which answer is so objectively bad (or "salty") that they get to override voting consensus to delete it?
We have some clear lines where mods step in like "not an attempt to answer" or "rude or abusive" or "spam" or "obviously unserious (often under the previous categories)" but outside of that, voting is supposed to deal with that.
OK, I think it needs further clarification, I don't think the mod job should change from currently, handling flags and rude/abusive behavior mostly is fine
but from the community having some guidelines could help
@ArthurHavlicek and of course sometimes the answer that might be "best" in the majority of scenarios might not fit the OP's exact circumstances - that happens and askers can't always fully convey the circumstances in an SE question - which fundamentally I think is why the concept of allowing the OP to chose their accepted answer regardless of the voting score works well
like, what exactly do you expect an answer OP to say when you go "this does not fit the criteria we have for answers"?
you couldn't enforce that via any other means then you already can: voting and delete-voting; so what credibility does that give you if the answerer disagrees? Pointing to policy doesn't magically convince people, it is not a substitute for argument
@ArthurHavlicek I don't think we need much more (if any) additional criteria for answers than we have now - it would be very hard to come up with something that worked for all questions/answers but that actually meant anything. If your downvoting for a specific reason there's nothing to stop you just adding a comment explaining what it is about that specific answer you disagree with.
where I disagree with moto is when he says "I could just be making up any old rubbish and posting it as answers. But we have the voting mechanic precisely to ensure that poor quality content like that doesn't rise to the top. " -> I'm not really sure that voting things ensure good quality by itself. I think there is a need for culture to upvote quality things in the first place.
It helps your proposal to clearly delineate what you want
do you:
- Want to change the culture on TWP? - Convince members to use their votes differently? - Codify a new policy for answers and enforce it via moderators? - Codify a new policy for answers and convince people to enforce it?
People are going to have different reactions to each of those, and your post doesn't say, so people will tend to default to the one they like the least.
@Arthur there is only so much that can be done about that though - the community needs to vote sensibly for the correct answer to rise to the top. The mods are only there to stop stuff getting out of hand - it's up to the community to use the site as intended
I flagged Kilisi's answer because I find it rude. OP in this post says he has mental problem and schedule issues. Kilisi advocated basically "just sleep earlier or face consequences". How comes we have so diametrically opposed vision on what's helpful there?
I didn't vote on that answer up or down, but I wouldn't say it is rude
it's not a personal attack, and Kilisi's style is brash and brusque, but not really rude. People who upvoted it evidently though the OP needed a wake up call or that the answer to their problem was just discipline.
@Arthur I agree that Kilisi's answers do tend to lean towards being a bit ...blunt, but ultimately it's not really up to any one person to decide when they overstepped the line. If the OP flagged it, it might be a different matter - or if a load of people agreed with you and also flagged it
TBH I think Kilisi gets a lot of up votes because Kilisi says what quite a lot of people were thinking but didn't want to come across as rude by saying outright
Well just expect me to raise more flags in the future then... I'm sorry but this isn't OK to be blunt like this especially bringing so little to the table.
@ArthurHavlicek Well, because he's not wrong - if the OP can't get a handle on this then it's going to lead to negative consequences. And while there may be third party services etc that can help the OP they need to be the ones to drive the change.
You should attempt to discipline yourself so you don't turn off the alarm and get out of bed at the appropriate time. Also, you may want to consider going to sleep a bit earlier.
This is a normal part of every day life. If you cannot do this, then you can expect to lose jobs which will genera...
@ArthurHavlicek While I would absolutely agree that you have the freedom to flag and vote in accordance with your position on this - can you not see the irony in you curtly and bluntly dismissing another member of the community's contribution. You're essentially tone policing another user while using essentially the same tone.
@ArthurHavlicek and while I happen to think you're wrong in that assessment (and I say this as someone with experience in that area) I would passionately defend your right to hold that view and to vote in accordance to that.
@arthur Moto is making the point that you are saying Kilisi shouldn't be able to state their opinion and stance, whilst you are being allowed to state yours. You're basically saying "This person is wrong and I am right and I don't care if no one else agrees". Would you rather one person who took a disliking to your comments to be able to kick you out the chat? - No, there would need to be a consensus about it. It's the same thing with Kikisis answers
By all means you should Flag if you find something unreasonable. You should also consider that people have different backgrounds and come from different cultures. This sometimes is hard: Direct versus Blunt. As the answer sits now, to me its fine. Sometimes the answer is pretty straight forward.
@Arthur, you can always comment on his post - suggesting a way to improve. Or even edit it yourself to soften it a bit and then write a note about why you edited
@DarkCygnus Well now I know what I'm doing on my lunch break...
And the results are in!
I chose to count characters in answer bodies, since literally counting words in a string seemed a little more challenging (I'm open to ideas if any SQL experts know a foolproof way to do this). I found the average character count in all user's answers, ranked them from smallest to largest. The results had a lot of noise, because there are a lot of people who have posted a small number of very short answers
So that said, if you filter out people with less than 100 answers posted, you get the following "top ten least wordy answerers:"
Ed Heal, Solar Mike, Strader, user1666620, PeteCon, JohnHC, Kilisi, solarflare, kevin cline, sf02
Kilisi averages 603 characters per answer
I just looked myself up, I average 2,179
Our most wordy high-count answerer is Steve Jessop at 3,440 characters per answer on average
doing something like "SELECT id, LEN(text) - LEN(REPLACE(text, ' ', '')) + 1 as CountWords" would work - if the only ever used a single ' ' char to separate words, but you can't rely on that since it could be two spaces, or a line break etc
yeah, I mean, I would say it's pretty clear that whomever has been bombing the site with random trash questions lately is not "new" to the community. Even if we don't IP ban people, I wonder if an IP search would at least help figure out who it is
Why does that bother you? If you feel that the asker would be better helped by a different answer, you're free to write it. If you're upset about the points, well - I think we have many examples where points aren't a universal indicator of value, so it's hard to really get upset about it (to me at least)
Did something immature in a moment of anger. Company is now rechecking cameras to see who did it. What can I do to hide my actions?
Throwaway because my real stackoverflow account is my real name.
My boss refused me a raise and I spent my next little while planning revenge. I stayed late afte...
Did something immature in a moment of anger. Company is now rechecking cameras to see who did it. What can I do to hide my actions?
Throwaway because my real stackoverflow account is my real name.
My boss refused me a raise and I spent my next little while planning revenge. I stayed late afte...
@dwizum I happen to be in a similar situation than OP and just found that answer really rude. It gave me a really bad feeling about the quality of answers found in TWP. I also happen to participate on so-called advice boards where people get really shit input (along with mediocre and good ones). I found out there that people could get advised to treat depression with cold showers. This is just a tiny sample of how dangerous a "this should work" board can become.
Sure, we have the votes there, but you know that's not perfect. People can upvote things for many other reason than helpfulness (good laughter and stuff).
Yeah - I guess my point is, we can't inherently expect to limit or control content, given the format of the site. But if we feel the appropriate response has not yet been given, we can always provide that response ourselves. While I fully respect the fact that you found that answer abrasive, I think it's pretty much a given that we will never have full alignment on that sort of thing
@DarkCygnus I'm at the point where I don't think it makes sense to comment or answer on the spam questions, since that just seems to give the spammer something to feed on. I've got a tab open sorted to new questions so these can be flagged immediately.
@DarkCygnus I think that would have made sense the first or second time around, but this is a pretty clear pattern at this point so I’d say just flag it for the mods.
I agree 100% with "assume good intentions" as a basic rule for the site but I feel like there's a point at which something is so obviously not well intentioned that we can just flag it. Especially in this case, since the person posting these questions seems to specifically make a play at trying to appear good intentioned (they engage in comments and answers)
@dwizum Well you asked why I care, but honestly as I previously told I'm not really sure the problem isn't on my part (for having too high expectations).
as of right now I'm reflecting and not asking anything in particular.
But I may come up with a constructive proposal in the future.
@ArthurHavlicek Looking forward to it. This is something I've struggled with myself as well. It's hard when you see an answer you feel strongly about get upvoted/downvoted/whatever in a way you disagree with. I'm just sharing with you what I have personally found helpful, which is: instead of focusing on others' content, or what other people think about content (i.e., how they vote), I look for the opportunity to be helpful, myself (i.e. by providing another answer, or taking some other action).
Announcement: Spoke to the Guys at Charcoal HQ and Smoke Detector. They asked me to provide them with a gist of the text these past spams included, so they can see into finding patterns of such spam and help us avoid to have to manually prune these posts.
Perhaps what this person wants is precisely that... to get us a bit upset and having us casting votes and saying this is spam.
Posting an objective and constructive answer to their... questions... breaks this pattern... just like some school bullies will continue bullying you if you continue to fuel their desires
Anyways... this whole poop situation and this mysterious user smells fishy (pun intended)
Gotta go back to work. Ping me if something interesting happens
@DarkCygnus I've updated one of our regexes which is intended to catch some types of offensive content to include various permutations of "poop" with manager/boss/CEO/CTO as targets/associated words.
I find interviewing and applying for jobs more interesting than doing anything.
This is something I've wondered for a while, and the question which has prompted me to finally ask it is this one.
The first paragraph is
A couple of years ago I was reporting to J as one of ten developers, then moved under S, who is the manager of J. The reason was that I am looking after ...
You should attempt to discipline yourself so you don't turn off the alarm and get out of bed at the appropriate time. Also, you may want to consider going to sleep a bit earlier.
This is a normal part of every day life. If you cannot do this, then you can expect to lose jobs which will genera...
Which user on The Workplace has the best hair?
Did something immature in a moment of anger. Company is now rechecking cameras to see who did it. What can I do to hide my actions?
Throwaway because my real stackoverflow account is my real name.
My boss refused me a raise and I spent my next little while planning revenge. I stayed late afte...
The Water Cooler
The Water Cooler