@Catija Then again, I've noticed a pattern of that user doing that sort of thing in other comment threads... I'm judging that comment in a larger context...
@Tinkeringbell I like the question. I'm pretty disappointed in the answers though.
Most of 'em are "you didn't do anything wrong, mod is crazy" - which is probably true in a broad sense, but does nothing to help you understand the group's culture, where/how you violated it, or what you can/could have done differently.
The closest thing to an answer is peufeu's post, which starts out well by trying to explain the different sorts of goals that various groups might have and how that effects their moderation...
...but then devolves into peufeu's signature "let's draw caricatures and apply them to people" style.
I think it's difficult because many groups do have specific rules about that stuff... but I find it absurd that, if someone wants honest advice about a project, that a user who's giving it and doing it in a kind way gets shut down is... sad.
This is at best tangential, but it might provide a jumping off point for anyone looking to answer - or maybe just discussion fodder for the room if anyone is so inclined.
Several sections in there are clearly, uh, playing to a specific audience. But I found the observations interesting.
Some choice quotes:
> In general, Herring found, the women cared about politeness far more than men did. “What men really value, according to the study, is [not being] censored,” says Herring. “They perceive even politeness norms as a kind of censorship.”
> Ultimately, no rules or regulation will fix gender, or any other bias hindering psychological safety on Slack, or in-person. “Education about bias can be a step to raise awareness, but education by itself will not work without those norms being created, agreed upon, and actively modeled by leaders,” says Simard.
> Women tend to use conversation to maintain and build relationships, while men use it to exchange and display knowledge, says Deborah Tannen, a linguist, and the author of Talking from 9 to 5: Women and Men at Work.
> As Quartz At Work’s Lila MacLellan has noted, the mere presence of private backchannels has been demonstrated in team environments to actively reshape the power dynamic between majority opinion holders and those with other ideas.
As hinted by my caveat and the third quote, the author of that article skirts the same caricature-based explanation that I criticized peufeu for above. Try & overlook that; the references to others' work make the article worth reading in spite of it, I think.
> “It was the early ‘90s, and many were claiming that online, gender, and other social differences that might involve hierarchies—like ability, race, education—all of that would be invisible; you wouldn’t be able to tell who was who, or judge anyone based on their identity,” says Herring. “The internet, and discussion groups, were very young.”
> In subsequent email and listserv studies, Herring also identified gender differences in message structure: Men would commonly link to a previous message, declare that it’s wrong or disagree, tell the group “how it really is,” and then say (or imply) that the conversation should end. Women, inversely, would thank the previous contributor for her insights, suggest something like, “perhaps we could also think of it this way,” then inclusively appeal to others, asking, “What do the rest of you think?”
> What’s more, Herring found, men posted messages that were sometimes 20 screens long, never apologizing for consuming others’ time—while women always apologized for long messages. After tracking response times, she also found that when a question was posed that many people knew the answer to, men were more likely to respond right away, whereas women were slower to jump in.
I simply don't like video/voice calls. I feel I am not comfortable with them, except for emergencies. Most of my co-workers and friends try to convince me in a voice call, because text messaging is simply "too slow" for them (maybe because they're slow at typing and I'm not.).
A few days ago, a ...
I've been known to suspend people for the exact amount of time necessary to get them off the network for the weekend... so that I can enjoy my weekend.
i've gotten kinda protective of my time in my old age
@Shog9 I find that I tend to behave differently depending on which room I'm in. Very subservient in places like Charcoal or rooms I'm intruding on for something specific... but more direct in places I'm a long-time user or expected to be keeping things in line.
Seeing familiar faces helps balance things out, somewhat.
@Catija I think that's something that comes with experience - being able to "read" a group and adjust to... Not just the norms, but also the group's collective expectations of you as an individual.
@Catija I think it stops people from jumping to "this person has no idea wtf they're doing" that so often comes when people don't immediately assert themselves
Most stack users have a tremendous amount of respect for the mods - the blue name comes with a baseline of assumed competency
@Shog9 RE:Tinkeringbell's question. Sometimes the mods are crazy (pun) . I could understand some ire if there's been a complaint, or a repeat offender, et cetera. If, however, someone tries to apologize and is slapped down further, it's time to accept the "their sandbox, their rules" and not bother. Saves grief for all concerned.
@TheSnarkKnight Years ago, I loved to read a site named Everything2; it was sort of wikipedia before wikipedia existed, but that description doesn't really do it justice. Folks would write competing definitions for words, phrases, concepts (sorta like answers on these sites) some of which would be very thorough and some of which would be... Straight-up opinions, they'd keep dream logs, there was even a weird chat-like thing built in...
So after a few years of this, I figured I had a pretty good handle on what made the site tick. And decided to dip my toe in the water and write my own definition for... something; don't really remember what.
And... I did my best to copy the snarky tone of definitions for similar topics.
It got slapped down and deleted within a couple of hours, complete with a dismissive note from a moderator.
I'd internalized the tone of the group, but not their expectations for new writers.
E2 at the time had a colorful name for this exact thing: "Earn your bullshit"
It meant in essence that you could only get away with the snarky, opinion-based definitions if you'd already put in the time and work to build an impressive catalog of useful, informative write-ups.
@Shog9 I come from the wild days of the USENET and a few hacker sites. Nobody got booted or moderated unless they were WAAAAY out of line (made 4chan look tame) BUT.... if you were a n00b.... expect to get messed with, and that was the "earn your BS" back then.
I'm the best man at my best friend's Floridian destination wedding. We've been friends since middle school, and in general, we can confide in each other just about anything.
Over the course of the week (many of us came down early to make it a vacation), we've spent lots of time as a group, doing...
Arguably, the entire rep system is a way to "earn your bs" in a formalized manner: you don't even get to comment on other folks' posts until you've earned 50
and boy howdy do some people spend their comment bullshit with abandon once they've earned it.
the amount of times I had to lawyer with people who were absolutely and clearly only making trouble openly because some sentences in the rules wasn't 100% unambiguous
@Magisch back in my more mischievous days, I would troll a site until I got put on moderation, then post a barrage of well thought out, reasoned, very on topic posts, and create a backlog. Then when I was taken OFF moderation, I'd slowly slip back to trolling them again.
I had WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY too much time in my youth.
What are your ways of handling stress?
What are some things that stress you out? (unrelated)
Does stress ever come back even after the situation is over, and if so, how do you handle it?
@TheSnarkKnight I think you might better raise custom flags then? I don't think it's that though, I had all the comments on my last question purged multiple times now... no problems there I think.
I recently got married a few months ago and received a nice gift from an aunt and uncle. We sent them a thank you card. Unfortunately, we had the address wrong, and the card was returned to us in a mailbox my wife and I seldom check.
We would like to send them a new thank you card and apologize...
@TheSnarkKnight I spent the last weeks flagging everything with standard flags, works just fine. I have 1 custom flag still open, they tend to take more time
@ExtrovertedMainMan Is this just about copy editing that message?
@HDE226868 the nastiness in the comments is starting to calm down, thanks to aggressive flagging, I imagine. It takes away all the fun of those who wish to cause trouble.
@HDE226868 at TWP, one of our questions made it to "hackernews" and we were inundated by nastiness for about six weeks. that's how we tamped it down over there
Recently we've had a large number of questions deleted because they were clearly trolling. Some examples (sorry, this is going to be all 10k+ links): New coworker demanding $10k, Autistic teenager, Tickling boss, How to get fired
These questions were closed by enderland, and he said that there w...
@HDE226868 the old adage "don't feed the trolls" applies. flagging and deleting is the best way to go, because they have nothing to show for their trolling.
That, and encouraging people to flag, rather than engage.
they eventually went away, but we had to just flag and flag and flag. Fortunately, we have enough people with enough rep to delete bad Questions and answers quickly. We've shut trolling posts down in under 2 minutes.
Is down voting based on tag/subject considered abuse of the system? Just noticed a short string of downvotes on a few of my lgbt+ questions and answers, I'm not really worried about the rep, but it seems crappy on principal.
@Shog9 I'm guessing you'd be the resident expert on this.
@Shog9 Eh, I could see that for upvoting, but it seems kinda messed up to go around downvoting based on a dislike for an on-topic subject matter... Probably near impossible to enforce any policy on it though.
@apaul I'm not suggesting that folks should or are downvoting based on a particular subject matter here, and I'd be careful about assuming that; your posts have attracted a total of 6 downvotes over the past day, from multiple voters, and in some cases upvotes from the same voters; I'm not seeing a clear pattern as of this point in time and would caution you to consider your own bias.
That said... It's certainly not unheard of, even for less controversial topics than those often found here.
For example, folks complain all the time about downvotes on "ID questions" being part of a concerted effort to discourage such questions on certain other sites. There's... probably truth to some of those complaints.
There are also voters who are... Well, inherently more critical than others. On Stack Overflow, there are a few well-known voters whose votes are nearly entirely downvotes; you don't particularly need private info to guess that those votes are heavily concentrated on answers they found lacking in the areas where they themselves expend a great deal of energy answering.
(Heck, I've been known to downvote every answer to a question when I believe them all to be inaccurate or misleading, and I don't consider that a problem - sometimes the obvious answers aren't particularly useful)
I work in a cubicle farm. Recently, someone who I believe may be a new employee moved into a cube a row away from mine. I've not been introduced to him and we are antisocial engineers so I really don't know who he is. All I know is that every day whenever he eats something he slurps and smacks...
@apaul One of the rules of "be nice" is "assume good intentions". When you tell someone not to answer, you've stopped assuming that they have good intentions.
@apaul meh... there's a difference between telling and asking... please implies more of a request so it also implies a little more trust in good intentions I think...
@apaul which is probably why it was edited, not removed :-)
Robert doesn't edit much... so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt that it was needed. I think the phrasing is better and support the change. I'll likely keep it in mind for future posts, too... It sounds more positive "remember to stay on topic" than the negative "Don't go off topic".
@apaul sorta, but the positive version, the half dozen, s nicer... glass half full vs half empty.... boils down to the same though : glass bigger than needed... It's just about perceptions of other people. It's subtle but works, like the feedback sandwich...
@Catija Whoops sorry, didn't see the change of topic
It went really well. Chinese food, single malt scotch. It was nice. Looks like we're getting together again next week and going to a Burn together in January.
... I have this bitter gene thing... it makes it so that I don't like the tastes of bitter foods... makes alcohol in general complicated... most spirits are bad because the alcohol itself has the flavor and then hops are bittering, as are tannins, so beer and wine are difficult... at least, red wine... so I mostly stick to... Sweet white wine (moscatos), sweet ciders, mead, ... uh... and amaretto.
Phenylthiocarbamide (PTC), also known as phenylthiourea (PTU), is an organosulfur thiourea containing a phenyl ring.
It has the unusual property that it either tastes very bitter or is virtually tasteless, depending on the genetic makeup of the taster. The ability to taste PTC is often treated as a dominant genetic trait, although inheritance and expression of this trait are somewhat more complex.
PTC also inhibits melanogenesis and is used to grow transparent fish.
About 70% of people can taste PTC, varying from a low of 58% for indigenous peoples of Australia and New Guinea to 98% for indigenous...
The title may sound really strange, but the story is that my grandmother was diagnosed with liver cancer in China(Super early stage). Now, in China, it is up to the family member to tell the patient such info, so she does not know that she had cancer now. Instead, we said that she had polyp. She ...
I think I have the opposite problem. I like everything a bit smokey/bitter. Stout, scotch, 85% chocolate, coffee I can stand a spoon in. Oh and char is one of my favorite flavors... Like just slightly singed.
What are your ways of handling stress?
What are some things that stress you out? (unrelated)
Does stress ever come back even after the situation is over, and if so, how do you handle it?
I recently got married a few months ago and received a nice gift from an aunt and uncle. We sent them a thank you card. Unfortunately, we had the address wrong, and the card was returned to us in a mailbox my wife and I seldom check.
We would like to send them a new thank you card and apologize...
I work in a cubicle farm. Recently, someone who I believe may be a new employee moved into a cube a row away from mine. I've not been introduced to him and we are antisocial engineers so I really don't know who he is. All I know is that every day whenever he eats something he slurps and smacks...
