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Comment by p-e-w | Hacker News Reader

> “They are creating this culture on Stack Overflow where it’s become a really safe place to ask a question, a safe place to provide an answer, and try to get people closer to their solution, and I think that’s part of what’s made it really successful and where we found a lot of value.”

Is this satire? Stack Overflow is infamous for how hostile its culture is towards people asking questions. And I'm sure that the CEO is well aware of that. The fact that they're dropping a quote like this one into the post without a single word even attempting to address SO's well-known culture problems is a slap in the face to anyone familiar with the platform.

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Anyone care to explain to me what is mean by "safe place"? Was it not safe before? Are Q&A platforms generally known to be unsafe to post on? Genuinely curious. It's such a peculiar choice of words it certainly has intrigued my senses.

The "safe place" stuff is a reference to the recently implemented new Code of Conduct, which bends over backwards to accommodate gender pronouns etc.

https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/10/10/iterating-on-inclusion...

Why SO thinks this is the biggest problem they should be solving, or why it took four years to roll out, is beyond me; for one, I can't ever recall discussing or caring about anybody's genitals or lack thereof when posting coding Q&As.

Hell, I don't even recall ever seeing a pronoun on SO. Most of the discourse is about the answers themselves.

I believe it's called 'virtue signalling', it's a hot phrase (though perhaps past its peak by a few years) and associating yourself with it is only really a positive thing.

What does it actually mean? Yeah, probably nothing. In fact as others say it might ironically actually not be true (an 'unsafe place', 'hostile to newcomers') in SO's case.

I dislike the proliferation of this word. "Safe" has started to mean "free from critical commentary" in a lot of contexts. It's hampering objective discourse all over the place.

It used to mean physically safe - ie. A gay bar - at least safe from outsiders. Once you move to “emotionally safe” then it basically becomes so vague as to be meaningless

StackOverflow is notoriously unpleasant for non-power users. A selection of miserable anecdata over the years:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16934942

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20859332

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2166021

The answers from SO users on that last thread show how much they lack self-awareness. Nowadays the only way I end up on SO is through a google link, I 100% consider it a read-only site.

> Is this satire? Stack Overflow is infamous for how hostile its culture is towards people asking questions.

I don't think any CEO or PR department would willingly admit such things...

That may be true, but there is usually a limit to how much hypocrisy such posts contain. I'm pretty sure that after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, BP didn't put out press releases containing quotes that praised the company's stellar environmental record. The above is pretty much the equivalent of that for Stack Overflow.

They’re saying that it’s a safe space because you and your gender/pronouns/etc will be highly respected as your question is closed as redundant to an unrelated question from fifteen years ago.

They have no idea how to solve the real underlying problems so they’re rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic.

I though you were making a joke, but this is actually serious (also posted in another thread):

https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/10/10/iterating-on-inclusion...

I thought it was funny as satire, now it's sad.

You can’t fix a problem management won’t acknowledge and management will never acknowledge a problem they don’t know how to fix. It’s a vicious cycle.

I can just imagine their internal mod training materials:

    Problematic: "user64738's answer is an obvious duplicate of [URL], his answer is stupid, and he is stupid."

    Consider changing to: "user64738's answer is an obvious duplicate of [URL], *their* answer is stupid, and *they* are stupid."

Real life is becoming satire. I can't wait to read business books 40 years from now. "In the beginning of the 21st century, corporations erased trillions of dollars of shareholder value. But don't forget: While they were incinerating money and laying off workers, they all changed their internal technical processes to rename 'master' to 'main' and changed their codes of conduct to stop misgendering people."

it's true. half of my time on stack overflow is convincing mods who don't understand my question that it's not a duplicate.

Look, someone asked the same question 12 years ago, just install jQuery and copy-paste the answer, ok?

I'm mostly active in a corner of SO where any questions are rarely closed. They are just mostly left without answers. Looking at most of them, they describe extremely convoluted setups, involving so many parts that likely nobody (except the author) has.

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