TRPG General Chat

12:12 AM

Today in StackWorld:

Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming. It’s Time for That to Change.

Jay Hanlon on April 26, 2018

Let’s start with the painful truth:

Too many people experience Stack Overflow¹ as a hostile or elitist place, especially newer coders, women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups.

Our employees and community have cared about this for a long time, but we’ve struggled to talk about it publicly or to sufficiently prioritize it in recent years. And results matter more than intentions.

Now, that’s not because most Stack Overflow contributors are hostile jerks. The majority of them are generous and kind. Sure, a few are… just generous, I guess? But our active users regularly express thei …

trogdor

Wow they actually did it, the first step

I was not ready to believe

nitsua60

12:39 AM

You mean the minifig photoshoot they did?

trogdor

Yeah sure let's go with that

I totally protest them admitting they have a problem with inclusion though, why do that right?

:P

nitsua60

In all seriousness, I have roughly zero experience with SO so can't say anything about why the site might feel hostile to various demographics, rather than the usual hostility to new users that gets fretted over.

Shalvenay

@nitsua60 yeah -- I think addressing the new user hostility issues in general would go a long way

nitsua60

I do think that framing policies/codes in the positive/active direction (compare Be Nice with WP's Don't Be a Dick) is generally beneficial.

trogdor

I will admit, I went over to overflow exactly once ever

So not much better here at all

nitsua60

12:54 AM

@trogdor Was it for a hat? Because I've just learned I have nonzero rep on SO, and I think it must have been hat-induced =)

trogdor

@nitsua60 nope

I am pretty sure if I go over there I will have exactly 100 rep, but only just will get it there as I do it for the "trusted on other sites " thing

nitsua60

@Shalvenay I... have trouble with this. Because I feel like there's so much conflation between how a new person is treated and how their content is treated.

trogdor

I would do anything for hats, but I won't do that

nitsua60

Meat Loaf I'd Do Anything For Love But I Won't Do That

►

Shalvenay

@nitsua60 I do agree that there is quite a bit of conflation there

trogdor

12:57 AM

@nitsua60 Hehehe

No officer I don't know who "meatloaf" is, should I?

nitsua60

@Shalvenay But it's so easy to stumble into "dammit, you're feeling wrong!" too. =\

@trogdor lolfigsl

(like, it's study hall and the kids are looking at me because I'm laughing)

I mean, how to say "It's not you I don't like, it's the words coming out of your mouth" and sound sincere?

trogdor

@nitsua60 Yeessssss I win again

Shalvenay

@nitsua60 yeah, that's quite a difficult message to communicate, especially to someone who has strong feelings about what they say/write

nitsua60

More concretely, assume that many will have trouble with an early post.
And it'll suck to get spanked like that.
Some will take the lump, learn something, and progress along the spectrum of Stackpertise.
Others will just leave and forever think we're a bunch of [redacted].
Obviously there's nothing beyond that first interaction we can do to change the mind of that second type. So how do we change that first experience, while still rejecting bad *content*?

Shalvenay

@nitsua60 one thing SO is experimenting with is providing more positive guidance to new users on what well-formed content looks like

trogdor

1:04 AM

I will say, if I didn't first join this site because I knew people here already, and take extra care from the start on my first post,.... I might have taken some criticism badly

nitsua60

This seems like classic signal-processing quandary: one cannot drive false negatives (repulsing a good-faith new user) to zero without also losing the ability to discriminate (reject bad contributions). The moment you're correctly averse to bad content you'll also engender false negatives.

trogdor

Depending of course on how careful whoever gave it was

Shalvenay

@nitsua60 especially in a world where you have to deal with people who go out of their way to take umbrage at things (assumptive umbrage, perhaps?)

trogdor

I do think there are definitely some good ways to teach new users what kinds of posts are acceptable without driving them away

We just all need to know those ways and make them official

Telling a new user thier post is $&##&_ isn't the best way to reach them

nitsua60

@Shalvenay Perhaps, but one need not even go that far to see a problem: even in a world with no one doing that, there'd still be the signal-discrimination problem. (And now I've got to wonder if I'm so bound to my metaphor for the situation that I'm missing other useful lenses.)

trogdor

1:08 AM

Which I am pretty sure is one of the things that has happened especially over on SO

This is why I think our little invented boiler plate is useful

nitsua60

@trogdor Well, with the volume they get I'd assume they see at least some of basically everything.

trogdor

@nitsua60 yes

nitsua60

@trogdor "Welcome. The coffee's over there, come here to hang out and chat, and cookies will be out of the oven soon. And delete that crap, please. We'll have none of that here."

That ^^ boilerplate, you mean?

(kidding, kidding....)

trogdor

My point is, we, or at least they, can cut down on some of the more exclusionary responses to new users who don't immediatly know what Stack Exchange values in posts

I have repeatedly heard that SO is the biggest offender, for various reasons

nitsua60

@trogdor Yes, of course. I suspect some of the negative reception/commentary comes from a place of tiredness, but not realizing that it's okay to hand the baton off for a bit. You, fictitious prickly SO anti-welcome-committee, don't actually have to leave a comment if you're annoyed: someone else will probably be along within the minute with the same message, said nicely.

trogdor

1:14 AM

Being tied to coding, and having a huge volume of posts being among those reasons

nitsua60

(I'll admit, since election the proportion of "nice" posts vs. "ugh, let's deal with this..." stuff has dropped quite a bit. But I try to be mindful of that and, consequently, have been doing less of the welcoming--because I don't want to be anti-welcome!)

trogdor

It boils down to not expecting a person who is posting for the first time ever to already know every little rule

That is extremely exclusionary

nitsua60

Yeah, but... there's a spectrum there, too. I think.
If someone bursts into my room right now and shouts a query without even looking around to see (a) who's here, (b) what we're doing, (c) whether shouting that query might be appropriate, it damn-well better be an actual emergency.
Assuming that nearly all Stack questions aren't actual emergencies, I think there's an amount of "look around, see what seem like the norms" that one should be able to expect from a new poster.
I mean, how many questions from 1-rep, no badge users have we seen? You know that person hasn't scrolled to the bottom …

AAAARGHHHH!!! So many shades of gray!!!

=)

Wool is white. Face is black. Sheep are so much simpler.

(cue BESW with pictures of multicolored sheep)

trogdor

I agree that it is not going to be easily done

But that doesn't mean do minimum effort right?

God I am qouting my dad now and didn't realize till I said it

nitsua60

@trogdor I'm saying it's not clear to me how to know which direction is even the right direction to nudge =|

trogdor

1:27 AM

(I got really annoyed when he said that to me way back when)

@nitsua60 that is something a community needs to work out together

nitsua60

(Though if we look back to the originating blog post, I think it's clear that if PoC or women are disproportionately reporting negative experience, then there is a correction necessary.)

trogdor

You don't gotta have all the answers yourself

nitsua60

I've got 397 answers. Given my answer-rate for the last few months, I'm starting to suspect 400 is my number. Like: I was born with 400 answers in me =)

trogdor

@nitsua60 also, we did both admit we don't hold to SO

Like,... How are we specifically supposed to know the fixes to it's issues?

I do think discussion of it is good though

nitsua60

@trogdor (If nothing else: here we are in this room, showing an example of curious and thoughtful engagement to new chatizens.)

[pulls muscle patting self on back]

trogdor

1:31 AM

Lol

I don't even contribute here very much

And by here I mean Rpg SE, not chat because boy do I chat

That's right baby, this is what 4% of posts looks like :P

nitsua60

@trogdor I don't think that's nothing, though. This room gets held up in mod-circles as a network-wide example for how to produce healthy, site-supportive and wide-ranging chat.

trogdor

(sorry, sorry, it won't happen again,.... Probably)

nitsua60

And I think a lot of that's creditable to a few anchor/linchpin presences, including you.

trogdor

No one wants to address the BESW not currently in the room?

XD

Pun day is fuuuun day

@nitsua60 anyway, thanks

The praise will go right to my head, I assure you

nitsua60

@trogdor Thank you, among others. I've learned a lot in this room that I use in daily life.