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Comment by jaghaj662 | Hacker News Reader

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

Women consider SO an elitist place? People of colour? What colour? Black? White? Marginalised groups? Which groups are those? Are people in SO hostile to Palestinians? Amputees? Such an accusation, where's the data to back it? I'm white and male and completely normal and let me tell you: everybody in SO behaves like a stuck-up twat to me. This has nothing to do with "diversity". Too many people are there sitting in a throne of points and medals and rubbish, closing comments and questions and editing whatever they see fit.

The truth of the matter is that you've had a code on conduct for a long time and everybody ignored it so this post is not going to change that. Why don't you just change the braindead voting system?

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Yeah, I mean seriously. SO is hostile to everyone. Seems like needlessly jumping on the diversity bandwagon.

I used to participate in SO but also stopped because people were answering questions faster with better quality. That's a strength not a weakness.

I don't disagree with the article in general but I was surprised by the women and people of color comments -- how does anyone know someone's gender or race on SO?

Of all the sites on the Internet, SO seems to be particularly well suited to the anonymity of posters -- even more so than HN because HN is more free form and conversational.

Maybe women and people of color just perceived SO as a more hostile place because they imagined the person on the other side of the keyboard as a white male (true or not) and took it as an attack on their gender/race, forgetting that they are anonymous.

> how does anyone know someone's gender or race on SO?

SO allows people to use an avatar image. I think for some time they were using images from Gravatar. So people were putting images of themselves in posts; or they didn't realise their gravatar image would be used.

How about this paper from the IEEE for data:

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6542459/

From the paper: "although the computing field is generally unbalanced towards men, the community around this Q&A site [StackOverflow] seems to create and maintain higher barriers to entry for women."

I too was wondering how this shakes out. The vast majority of <100 rep users I come across that ask pretty dicey questions have a default user profile picture or a picture of something that is not a person, not associated with an ethnic/religious/political group, etc. How can a group be intentionally or unconsciously hostile to POC and women when their photo is a stock photo provided by SO and their handle is user12098739578?

The keyword being experience. The same behavior is experienced differently by different people, and being in a group who is more at risk for self-doubt tends to produce the experience of hostility more easily.

Yep, I posted one question on SO and almost exactly 10 minutes later it got downvoted for being "not enough code to compile" or somesuch. Not really a warm welcome -- I have a pretty thick skin but was seriously considering just deleting the account.

Turns out there was exactly enough code to get a working answer (which I knew from the beginning when I chose what code to include), the problem was simply a matter of (undocumented) lib changes which were pretty obvious. I still don't understand why someone who had no idea what the problem was decided to downvote instead of just leaving it for someone more knowledgeable to deal with.

Now if I were a sensitive individual I can see how this could be construed as "not welcoming to &whatever_group_I_identify_with".

How about that tribe of people who aren't mentally capable of phrasing a consice question and include proper context? They are constantly being discriminated against. I know, I used to be one.

>Why don't you just change the braindead voting system?

I think this is what it's really going to take for SO's culture to change. There's definitely a hostile/elitist bent to it, but the thesis that this has anything to do with oppression is just plain laughable, so let's cut this mass of empty virtue signaling away from the greater point and see what we're left with.

SO's niche has shifted as an effect of their own success. The early rules served to create a really great compendium of google-bait, the common "how do I do X in Y" questions from newbies that now have literal thousands of votes because they're genuinely useful and helpful. Now that the well-traveled roads are all plowed, it leaves only the extremely situational.

And if SO hates one thing, it's the extremely situational. When they're not downvoted, they're ignored, and when they're not ignored, they're closed with curt messages that either leave the asker wondering what the fuck they did wrong, or redirect to other questions that don't actually answer the situation the asker was asking about, or ask them to spend a bunch of time on a low-to-no productive feedback process (either arguing on meta or trying to get reopen votes) that won't actually accomplish the one thing they went to the site for.

Part of being a newbie is not having the mental context necessary to ask more effective questions, because you don't know enough about the thing you're asking about to have the information to put together a decent question in the first place!

From the article:

>Let’s reject the false dichotomy between quality and kindness. Quality matters because it means posts can help more people.

Great! That means referring to the users with derisive (and dare I say: non-welcoming and non-inclusive) terms like "help vampire" will stop, right?

Why is it that so many complaints about SO includes insults about users with high scores?

Very specifically calling out "they have a score higher than mine" as part of the description of the hostile behaviour. Isn't that a bit odd, wouldn't you expect them to only focus on the behaviour and the content, not the number next to the name?

Too many people are there sitting in a throne of points, and medals and rubbish, closing comments and questions and editing whatever they see fit.

Whereas the people without a throne of points who are closing questions and editing whatever they want, and commenting rudely, are .. not hostile? Is there an undercurrent of chip-on-shoulder points-resentment in the complaints in aggregate?

A throne of points implies you're spending a lot of time on SO, which begs the question: are you actually doing any useful work from which to draw the experience you're pretending to have when answering?

People with points have forgotton what the restrictions are like for people without points, which sometimes causes them to say stupid stuff.

"Just participate until you get the points" is hard to do if your lack of points prevents you from participating.

> I'm white and male and completely normal and let me tell you: everybody in SO behaves like a stuck-up twat to me.

So, imagine that level of hostility that you face but with even more additional hostility because you're eg a woman.

How does anyone even know what color or sex someone is on SO? Seems like those people are either imagining it or they're generally intimidated by programmers and their typical arrogant or blunt attitudes everywhere.

I saw an example a while back of an SO question about "how should I store gender (sex) in a database". Conflating the two may alienate or upset a transgender individual, without the participants in the Q&A ever being aware of that person. Maybe they're a new user with no ability to comment to point it out, and they just head elsewhere from then on.

Similarly, if minority groups are more prone to imposter syndrome, it may be that aggressive and blunt answers impact them disproportionately.

In both of these cases, it needn't be intentional or directed at any particular individual to have a disproportionate impact on a group of people. Just as a group can get a reputation of being a "boys club" without explicit "no girls" rules.

Make sure to get all 176 in that dropdown, just to be sure.

> How does anyone even know what color or sex someone is on SO?

SO allows profile images. Are you saying POC and women should never use photos of themselves?

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