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Comment by xibalba | Hacker News Reader

I suspect that the average user of SE will not care one bit about this whole drama.

I do find it frustrating, puzzling, and sad how SE appears to have treated Monica Cellio. She provides an excellent summary (from her perspective) here: https://cellio.dreamwidth.org/2064709.html

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I suspect you're right. I stopped participating in SE years ago not for "political" reasons like this, but because it seemed to be dominated by power-happy mods and people whose main goal was to collect points and not to help others.

This kerfuffle, and I only got a little summary of it, makes my eyes glaze over. I'm certainly not against treating people with respect, but I'm not willing to stick my neck out for some of the unsavory characters here who aren't acting in good faith.

What they did to Monica Cellio was disgusting. And most likely based on pure hate.

I'm in the same place as you are, but in relation to wikipedia rather than stack overflow.

I remember adding a [citation needed] tag to an inaccurate claim, and then discovering that my change has been reverted. The reason the moderator gave was that [citation needed] didn't look good on the page. How do you argue with people like that. I'm not going to spend hours reading on wikipedia's policies just make it better.

SE is bad, but at least I get something out of it. That and the fact that SE's meta game is easier to play than wikipedia's. You just need to make sure you word your question in a way that it can only be answered definitively (no opinion), and preempt duplicate-heads with a list of similar questions and why they don't answer your question.

I've yet to have a question of mine closed as a duplicate, though mods have treated me passive-aggressively for taking away their sticks :^)

Can you give an example on how to word a question?

On Stack Overflow? A good question contains a reproducible problem (or at least an understandable question) and it's worded such that people with the same problem will find the question and answer by googling.

Better than that is better, but that's the threshold between bad and good.

So include error messages instead of just typing "I got a certificate error when …", because people who get the same error will paste their error message into google. Some of then paste it into bing. None type "I got a certificate error when …" into google.

Stack Overflow is about building a knowledge base where people find answers. SEO is essential to that.

What they did to her was wrong from my point of view, but it certainly was not 'based on pure hate'. Don't speak this exaggeration and nonsense. The person who fired her simply had no intention to spend time dealing with Monica's questions and chose the easy route of getting rid of what she perceived as a troublemaker.

Well, it is a pretty hateful way of doing things. I mean, that's how I treat people I hate; shun them, ignore them, not reply to them. So there's an argument there.

I agree though. It seems to me to have more to do with aggrandizing power and influence than with hate. What better way to get rid of competitors than to bait them into behaving "bigoted"? Look at the Monica case. She never refused to use someones chosen pronoun. She was baited into admitting that she already avoids certain ways of addressing people out of kindness and politeness and a desire not to rub people the wrong way. Now she's out. This has nothing to do with bigotry, and everything to do with a group of people that want to kick everybody else off every position of power or influence.

> I mean, that's how I treat people I hate; shun them, ignore them, not reply to them.

That’s also how I treat people I completely don’t care about or am aware of. My default behavior is to ignore, that doesn’t mean I hate everyone I ignore. If I assume this about people who ignore me, I’ll probably be wrong.

Should I assume Comcast is shunning me when they don’t respond? Or that they hate me? Or maybe they are just a stupid org that doesn’t care at all about me.

> "Well, it is a pretty hateful way of doing things. I mean, that's how I treat people I hate; shun them, ignore them, not reply to them."

That is a striking perspective, but perhaps just reflects a generational difference?

In a social media driven culture, where people grow up feeling that "attention == validation"... I suppose they could also feel that "indifference == hate" as a corollary.

I'm 56. I didn't grow up in the "Social Media" culture. But I recognize when a moderator of Mi Yodea is being attacked for seemingly contrived reasons.

Also, I suspect if she weren't a moderator on Mi Yodea the "woke" community would have had much less of a problem with her. (Even on HN, the politically-correct have to attack everything related to that issue.)

They intentionally took action against her on the Shabbos and Rosh Hashanah when they knew she couldn't respond. If you accept the trans community's claim that misgendering is an act of violence, then if follows that this is was act of 'violence' too.

> If you accept the trans community's claim that misgendering is an act of violence...

I've found that members of the cisgender community almost uniformly take offense at being misgendered. And responses from the cisgender male community often include threats of physical violence, especially when one persistently misgenders them or challenges the validity of their maleness.

That said, I'm rather troubled by Monica's treatment in this situation, especially its coincidence with Shabbos/Rosy Hashanah.

I get misgendered all the time! I go by "Ruvi" (short for Reuven) and English readers see that as a female name. So on forums I get called "she".

It's never bothered me.

Btw that cisgender community you speak of doesn't exist, right? You just made that up.

As a self-described "average user of SE", I find this drama pretty similar to drama I've seen circling around the Quora "community" for the last 6 months or so: confusing.

I use both SE and Quora to get answers, especially to extremely-niche questions. I understand that some people do use them for community and that people do interact and know each other on both platforms, but it's hard to understand complaints about a subpar community when the goal of the site doesn't seem to revolve around a community at all.

To me, SE is a Q&A site. It exists to let people ask questions and get those questions answered. If you took away the community entirely, would it be any less useful?

This probably comes off a bit flippant to the situation, but it's meant to illustrate that you're right: I'd say I'm a pretty average user of SE (in that I just use it to get answers, and occasionally write my own answers when I can, and so far it's worked perfectly well for me) and I don't care one bit about community-based drama.

> If you took away the community entirely, would it be any less useful?

My suspicion is that the answer is yes. You'd have to have actual data to be sure, but based on my experience with internet communities, there are probably a small number of people who bring in the vast majority of the value (i.e. answer the most questions, clean up/flag/categorize questions and answers). Those people spend a lot of time on the site and the community aspect (relationships, reputation, etc) is a big part of what motivates them to consistently return and add value.

I concur. You can see the same thing on HN, if you look closely. For a new or infrequent user, all comment threads are randos talking to other randos. For a frequent commenter who's been here for a while now, it's a community with a lot of transient commenters, but also a lot of regulars, who recognize each other's handles and sometimes carry discussions across time and multiple comment threads - and it's a big part of the value of this place. If HN was to suddenly replace all usernames with their SHA-1 hashes, being here would get much less interesting.

I’ve been here for four or five years, and I only recognize two or three people by their username. I don’t pay attention to the people - only the comments.

Compared to other communities, HN is particularly minimalistic when it comes to associating posts with authors.

I pay attention to comments first, too, but I can't help but remember the handles - especially if I had a back-and-forth with someone over the course of a day, and had to verify that I'm still replying to the same commenter. Like, I recognize your handle, I think we've been replying to each other on some thread some weeks ago.

(Then again, maybe I'm projecting, assuming more community in this place than there really is. I'm a HN addict after all.)

I've been here for just under three years, and I'm in the same boat, except I don't really even have but one username that I'm specifically familiar with due to HN (and that'd be dang). I've recognized familiar usernames from other places (such as when byuu occasionally shows up to talk shop about emulation), but that's a bit different.

I honestly think that's one of HN's strengths. Too often, in general discourse, who is talking becomes as important, if not more important, than what is being said. I feel that the lack of prominence of a poster/commenter's name is a plus - it invites the reader to focus on the message being written, rather than the source.

I'd actually argue that that that context-heavy communication (carrying discussions across time and multiple comment threads) often makes the conversation worse from the point of view of those transient commenters (which, I'd guess, is a majority of HN? You probably know better than me on that, though). I'd classify myself as a transient commenter here since I don't recognize names even though I've been on HN since 2011. I admit it probably makes the site more enjoyable for those regulars, though, and can sometimes also generate "good" conversation that wouldn't otherwise exist that is beneficial to transient commenters also.

I actually spent a long time lobbying Quora to make content anonymous by default for exactly this reason. It's really frustrating when I come into a comment thread and don't understand some context outside of what's actually being said. This isn't nearly as much of a problem on HN than it is on Quora (or even SE), but if I ask an intentionally-generic question I don't want people looking at who asked it and needlessly scoping their answers to the kind of answers they think I want. I also understand there are some psychological benefits to the opposite though (people wanting to know more about who asked a question to put a face to who they think they're helping), but IMO what little benefit it offers the OP dwarfs potentially unfortunate specificity for anyone else with that question in the future that might put them in a weird mix of "duplicate question" and "oh, but this one little thing is different for me".

To my experience, "context-heavy communication" is rather subtle on HN, more of an inside joke if anything. I can't think of a case where a comment would seem off-topic if read by a transient commenter; it's just that over time, you start recognizing other regulars and their views on some topics, and sometimes you may remark on it. Like, I recall participating in comment threads that branched off into "I recall you saying X on a related thread some time ago; could you elaborate on that?" somewhere deep in the discussion. Or, I know to not reply about topic Y to a particular commenter, because we've been through a long discussion about it some time ago, and essentially agreed to disagree. Or, someone will joke that it's time to submit and upvote some Erlang stuff to HN, and the joke mysteriously stays upvoted because, well, it's an inside joke.

> If you took away the community entirely, would it be any less useful?

The whole platform is based around the users creating questions and answers. The site puts much of the effort for curation and moderation on to the community, if you visit the chat rooms on there you'll find that there's groups of people who congregate there who do a disproportionate amount of that work of keeping things running smoothly.

So I think there is a risk of the site quality sliding substantially if the currently highly engage segment of the community there disengages.

One of the fascinating aspects of any user-generated-and-shared experience is that community forms. From original forums hoping to foster community to blog posts where folks live in comments to the rise of wikis and the the communities there, to the current optimization of "social networks", what makes the content good is the community who is willing to contribute to it. Just a pure "look for questions and answer them" will fail, and has over and over again, even with payment/bounties for answers, unless a community can form that takes pride in sharing knowledge, keeping things accurate, and trying to help. And once it declines, as these things can, into arguments from the louder voices, then the community suffers... and so does the quality of content moving forward.

So, without community, you wouldn't have the answers, and without the answers, folks stop asking the questions.

> If you took away the community entirely, would it be any less useful?

so for a while, due to strange quirk of circumstance, i had the inside track of a profitable adult website. it was your standard “streaming adult videos, no ads, charge hefty subscription” model. one morning the ceo says let’s do community. everyone’s going social. lets have blogs, message board, the whole shebang. Announcement made with much fanfare. The idiot audience thought community means they could talk to their favorite pornstar :) once the ceo clarifies that no, community doesn’t mean that, they turn on him like a pack of wolves. what do you mean, you want us to talk to each other ?! like random perv from oklahoma should message arbitrary perv from cleveland about which vid gets him off ? wtf ?!! the poor ceo’s got his back to a wall. he says, we’ll be the world’s largest adult community. the peeps are like, dude, largest community of pervs ? fbi will have a ball. half of us are scared our employer or our spouse or worse, teenage son hacks into our account. now you want us to have wacky avatars & actually talk to each other on a messageboard so whatever we say persists for posterity ? it quickly went downhill from there. they brought in a moderator, sort of like dang. he was supposed to police the crowds & tamp down on contentious disagreement. but hardly anybody participated, so they had to broaden dang’s role. so now everytime a video was posted, poor dang would have to watch the whole video and make insightful comments like “lady featured in this clip at 7:15 is the same lady in that other clip at 9:20” and so on. soon he became an encyclopedia of porn trivia. people actually started showing up on the community board just to poke fun of his wide acumen. Around that time i quit. But it was quite the experience. Community can be a major hassle.

Dang, dang.

This was an interesting read. If you wrote more of these stories out into a longer blog format I'd totally read it!

So you're telling me there's a dude named Dang out there with an incredible wealth of porn knowledge? That's really cool in the weirdest way and I bet you he can't even tell anyone about it for the rest of his life

I have a feeling this is like asking if you could take the community out of Little Italy in NYC.

For the tourist coming in, looking through the windows, having a canoli, does the community really matter? Are they even visible in the throngs of the crowd?

But for the people who live there day in and day out, the expulsion of a popular shop owner from their midst might be quite perturbing and a big stir.

At the end of the day, without those shop owners who come back every day, Little Italy probably would not be the same pleasant experience for the tourists. I imagine it’s similar for the largely invisible to the end user stack exchange community.

At least there is this bit at the very bottom;

> Breaking news, October 6 21:00 UTC: the CTO stepped in, accepted responsibility, apologized to the community, and promised to contact me directly to apologize and discuss next steps. Finally! I look forward to that contact.

one thing that I love about SE is that everyone is very professional. almost all answers are either sourced or can easily be seen to be correct. what I am worried is that if a lot of the normal mods quit and our replaced with new mods, who may be more political, SE will turn into Reddit where leftist politics prevail in all of the major subreddits and most responses to factual questions consist of options or unsourced "facts". if that ever becomes the case then I will be sad. although, when seeing how the admins of Reddit act, I'm guessing that acting like they do is good for business.

Give https://dev.to/stackoverflow/what-a-very-bad-day-at-work-tau... a read - the comment to which Sara replied and the response given.

The reddit future is a very real possibility.

What's the "reddit future" a reference to?

> SE will turn into Reddit where leftist politics prevail in all of the major subreddits and most responses to factual questions consist of options or unsourced "facts"

How much politics do you get in technical Q and A forums?

Currently not much. But maybe in the future if someone mentions a man page they will be banned for not calling it a people page

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/07/justin-trudeau...

Average user here, I completely don't give a shit about any of this. As long as I can google to find answers to my bugs I'm fine.

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