@jkerian *@&# your censorship.

@AndrewGrimm JLSE is for talking about the Japanese Language... "the SAD group" seems more interested in making it a little discussion clique for talking about other users.

(that's fine for chat, btw... just not on the main site)

@jkerian if the serial downvoting stopped, then the talking about the serial downvoting would stop.

@AndrewGrimm sorry, not the way it works. Spam is spam

I've noticed you haven't tried to make an argument that it's on topic in any way.

It's fairly obviously a 'meta' discussion

@jkerian Oh, ok, I'm in favour of that anyway.

ahh... my way of saying it was a bit... hard to understand, I see :)

Well, I can see it in your original post now that you've actually explained what you intended to say =)

it's a conversation that's been proceeding very slowly in here for the last few days

@AndrewGrimm I presume you don't want me to censor users who drop random insults at each other's level of Japanese knowledge as well?

@jkerian I agree different ideas are fine. I'm "whining" about both the non constructive votes and about trying to improve the site. The lack of constructive feedback is giving more people than just me a downer about the site. I'm not here for the rep and you don't have to offer helpful comments along with downvotes but it's considered good manners across all SE sites I use, and here I find negative votes without comments to be much more noticable - or I wouldn't have noticed it.

If you find the people "whining" about the SAD to be cliquish then you can probably understand how we also find the SAD behaviour to be cliquish - especially now that people who can see the voting stats have revealed that it's not just one SAD but a clique of like-minded "I hate all these questions but I'm not gonna tell em what I hate about em" people. Let's just all stop "*@&#ing up" questions, answers and comments and start accepting the different kinds of contributors and promote niceness

censoring out all the negative vibe would be the best kind of censorship here. it's the negative vibe that's been holding the site back for three years, including the clique of SADs, the clique of anti-SAD-commenters is only a month or two old at best and has so far only upset one contributor who is in favour of serial drive-by nonconstructive down votes.

> I'm not here for the rep and you don't have to offer helpful comments along with downvotes but it's considered good manners across all SE sites I use

That is, essentially... the end of the discussion.

You don't have to. And because you don't have to... please stop complaining about it in questions/answers/comments. (Continue complaining here or on meta, if you feel the need)

(That's directed generally... I don't think I have edited/deleted such from you personally)

we don't have to do that either so please stop complaining about people complaining

I'm not really focused on the complaints as long as they stay off the main site

More or less, it's just people ranting against your comment that I bolded above

Sure, it would be nice if people explained downvotes, but "SAD" has basically been used as an excuse by certain people to avoid improving questions or answers

well i'm all for improving everything. basically i didn't move very boldly in that regard because i'm only active when i'm in japan and don't want to step on any toes

Answers in particular... there has been at least one case of someone reflexively upvoting a clearly bad answer because of a misplaced sense of justice.

(I only know this was the reason because I nuked the comments they made at the same time)

but i've boldly created some new tags and done some retagging and minor edits so hopefully making the site better

bah... tags ><

(but I haven't a clue what to do with them... so I'm all for whatever improvements people can figure out)

because of a misplaces sense of justice because of consistent lack of constructive criticism to accompany downvotes - if you want to fully apply cause and effect

Yeah... but the answer was wrong in a way detectable in a way a "3 weeks of Japanese" student could see, and there was an alternative answer that was better.

well there's a few official blog posts and stuff on the tagging system you can read. here's one: blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/tag-folksonomy-and-tag-synonyms

well if people can vote how they want then that is another kind of person voting how they want. i try not to vote up questions i think are bad. but sometimes i vote up questions other people think i bad, if i think they missed something good about them

Yeah, I know how they're supposed to work... at one point I was fairly active on SO (my current employment keeps me mostly in custom APIs), I just don't see them being as useful here. (which means I try to mostly stay out of tagging stuff)

i don't know which question you mean but i wouldn't be surprised if i sometimes ask questions that might be thought of as falling into that category. probably because i'm teaching myself, but off and on over a much longer period of time. so i don't always learn things in the sequence most people do

Questions are often salvageable with enough editing. I do think we're entirely too shy about editing questions here.

but wouldn't travel have a pretty obvious taxonomy? region/country?

i'm a bit shy that way. i boldly edit questions on to salvage them on the sites i feel more at home in.

same with SO and "computer language"/API

i haven't been active on SO for over nine months now. no coding while i've been travelling this time.

Natural languages don't have neat boundaries like that... I might be interested in APL questions (favorite) but not Fortran questions (ignore). But why on earth would I want to follow nouns as opposed to verbs on a Japanese site?

Sure you can say they should be used for SEO... except that mostly we should improve titles to remove that improvement.

following is just one thing tags do

nouns is not a very interesting field for japanese, but there are other things i find fascinating. the verbs, though i'm very bad at them. but i've taken a keen interest in the jobs the 連用形 form can do. i also watch the "food" tag because that's one of my favourite fields of vocabulary and etymology

you can also do the opposite of following, ignoring they might call it. i've seen some people say they are annoyed by the word choice questions here. they could just ignore the word-choice and/or synonym tags.

another think you can do is use tags in combination. when you want to ask a question and don't know if it's been asked before you can look what previous questions have tags you would use on your new question.

you can also try to find questions about two features of the language you're studying at the moment to see if and how they interact

i definitely do things like go through all the old questions tagged "causitive" or some other difficult feature of verbs when i'm learning that feature - that can help a lot

Yeah... as I said, I'm pretty much useless when it comes to tagging discussions. So I mostly try to stay out of them. (Obviously failed here)

I think my issue is that if you were to look at all the JLSE questions, I see many good tags, but I see a lot of tags that we could do just fine without... except that we'd be left with a lot of untagged questions.

i made a tool that shows the most relevant tags on all kinds of stack exchange actions, including text searches. it's helpful when you want to know if there's some tag related to some concept but you can't think of it, and other stuff too

it uses some basic stats concepts to order the tags rather than just vanilla number of uses

tags himself with "fooding"

@hippietrail: I share some of the curiosity in the comments: here, what are you looking for that the current answer doesn't provide?

いま、なんじですか？

みんな、おやすみの時間ですかね

静かだし

何時でも

@snailboat What do you think? I think it's fine to give pointers for homework, but the asker should do the actual work by him/herself...

Well, I think giving full solutions to homework questions is bad policy.

You have to admit it's a little strange. It tends to be a meta tag that says "Don't give me the solution to my problem"

I'm not talking about tags...

well... whichever.... most sites seem to let that 'meta-tag' slip by :)

I find it a bit annoying when people come by a question on stack overflow and ADD the homework tag to it.

I alternate between abdicating, and hating all things taggy

(although you'll note I was talking about SO)

What would be the best way to write, "If you are reading this, I will already be dead"? Currently I'm thinking of 「これを読んでいるなら、私もう死んでいました。」, but that seems to translate more to "If you are reading this, I already have died", that is, it's not "will already be dead".

Is that the best way to write it, or is there a better way?

あなたがこれを読んでいるということは、私はもう死んでいるということです。

I don't really understand what does “I will already be dead” mean.

@YangMuye It's a common trope in fiction, a letter to an old buddy that starts that way :)

I gooled it, found a lot of “If You're Reading This, I'm Already Dead ”

tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DeadManWriting

Is there any difference between I'm and I will be

grammatically... yes... functionally? not really

Depends on if the speaker/writer decides to speak from the point of view of the present as he writes the letter, or the future where it's a current status.

I see. Thanks.

@小太郎 あなたが これを読んでいるなら、私はもう死んで い る でしょう might work. You can turn it into a question.

Thanks @YangMuye

@snailboat I never expected participation in this website - ie working with people with shared interests - to lead to questions about whether we were helping students cheat as school (I think that is what it comes down to?). I would hope that any serious academic course in the modern world recognises the additional support / resources available today and builds this into their assessment system.

The people on this site cannot do it for course managers who should be taking modern study aids into account, indeed, they should be encouraging students to take advantage of them.

When it comes to learning Japanese scores in the classroom are of little value if you can not say or read anything outside the class room any way.

@小太郎 Had done is usually していた, will have done is usually しているだろう. If you see た after conditional forms such as たら, なら and れば, it's usually a counterfactual condition.

@小太郎 Strictly speaking, だろう is not needed to express “the future tense”, but if you don't add it, words like いる, ある are normally understood as in “the present tense”

@小太郎 Sometimes I think there is no “past” or “future” in Japanese. Only 回想 and 推量. (I don't know how to translate them.)

As a result, no matter you are talking about the past, present or the future, you can always use だろう.

I still haven't fully understood the grammar of the English sentence "If You're Reading This, I'm Already Dead." In Chinese, if I speak from the point of view of current, I will not use “if”. I speak from the point of view of future, “if” can be used and it roughly means the same as “because”.

@snailboat Agreed.

@Chocolate, how about これをあなたが読んだ の なら、その時、(もう)私は死んでいるでしょう。 Will adding の makes it sound a little better?

@snailboat I think sometimes it's better to put 私は or あなたが. I don't know how Chocolate-san feels.

I suggested using our nifty pitch accent feature

I can't read it like that...

My, thank you =)

There's even a grave accent on the "n"

I think a macron (or maybe a circumflex) for high pitch would be the diacritic of choice. Unfortunately, they're both taken (even for the same purpose of marking a long vowel...)

Why oo? I'm sure Vietnamese can provide diacritics, like acute on top of macron (or on top of circumflex).

Oh, I'll have to ask you later about that. I have to go now.

See you

@snailboat In that case we agree. That is a relief. I was wondering where we were going at one point. If a question does not sound genuine, or well thought out then I am less inclined to contribute too. How people contribute (eg giving long, short answers or just "hints" in comments) is up to them but yes a website like this is intended to have value for future users with similar questions.