Math Meta Chat - 2019-06-19

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Martin Sleziak

4:23 AM

Adios to Unfriendly Badges: Ahoy, Lifejacket and Lifeboat

Jon Ericson on June 18, 2019

Analytical

Documentation badges

Tumbleweed and Reversal

Julia Silge’s analysis demonstrated that the Tumbleweed badge wasn’t serving its purpose.

Meg Risdal is our Product Manager who led us to make these changes.

Jane Willborn wrote the code.

Nick Craver made sure the Lifejacket and Lifeboat triggers don’t break the site.

Ben Voigt suggested the trigger we used first for Winter Bash hats and now for two new badges.

A bunch of people tested those triggers on our sites and prodded us to keep considering something like these new badges. We also got a bunch of feedback about Reversal and especially Tumbleweed that helped us understand how they worked in practice. We’ve got an amazing community here! …

> After looking at the data, we decided to retire the Tumbleweed badge on Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange network. That means everyone keeps the badges they have, but we won’t be awarding any new ones.

> As a result, we’re retiring Reversal everywhere. You’ll keep your legacy badges, of course, and if the question has been upvoted enough, earn Lifejacket and Lifeboat too!

And two new badges have been introduced:

> Instead of one badge, we decided to introduce two related badges: Lifejacket and Lifeboat. These badges reward reversing the score of a negative question by answering it in a way that sheds new, positive light on the question, raising its score. It’s an answer so good it makes the question look good by association!

> You can think of it as like someone finding a diamond in the rough and putting a little bit of work into showing the world its hidden value. Conceptually, it’s similar to Reversal, but with a more encouraging twist in that the question itself goes from negative to positive rather than staying negative.

On Mathematics, there are so far 5 lifeboat badges.

3 hours later…

Martin Sleziak

7:11 AM

19 hours ago, by Martin R

Does “I think your solution is very ugly. If you'll see down-voting, it's not mine” already count as unfriendly/unkind? – For me (not a native english speaker) it sounds like “I would understand if someone downvotes your answer” or even a hidden call to downvote. Or am I misinterpreting it?

@MartinR The comment is now deleted, so this is probably moot now.

Anyway, I'd guess that the second part of that comment is mainly to stress that the commenter did not downvote the answer. Many people react badly to downvotes or even retaliate. So that might be the reason why he stressed it.

If you check the profile of the user who posted that comment, they did not cast many downvotes.

14 hours later…

Feeds

9:37 PM

Q: We're testing advertisement across the network

For several years we've had advertising on technology-related sites. But many of our sites aren't about technology at all, so we haven't sold ads for them. That hasn't been a hardship since Stack Exchange sites have traditionally required only a small investment from the company to set up and kee...