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LOOK I AM A TURTLE posted:I remember that thread. It was back when Atwood was making the Discourse forum software, and for some reason he was very interested in input from SA forum users. IIRC it turned into a very unproductive debate about the merits of gamification. It was bizarre because nearly everybody was disagreeing with all his ideas and he kept posting "ah, but have you considered that my ideas actually are correct because..." sorts of posts. It didn't appear like it was really a fruitful exchange of ideas or whatever, but from what he said about it, it seemed like he saw it that way. Or that's the spin he put on it at least. It just seemed like he wanted to validate the ideas he already had about what was a good idea for Discourse, and SA was more or less an unusually argumentative rubber duck.
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Oct 12, 2019 23:32
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Maybe if he had listened to the wise (or even the stupid) people of Something Awful Discourse wouldn't be the flaming hot pile of garbage it is.
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Oct 13, 2019 00:28
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Some people were just shitposting at him but there were a lot of thoughtful posts that genuinely taught me a lot about why SA works the way it does. Here’s one thread https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3470954 He also showed up in YOSPOS but I can’t find a link.
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Oct 13, 2019 01:52
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Hammerite posted:SA was more or less an unusually argumentative rubber duck. Let's call that a rubber goose. Also, dang, I was an Experts Exchange employee at the time; I should've been in there shitposting!
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Oct 13, 2019 02:14
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I learned about forums from Experts Hit Posting
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Oct 13, 2019 02:25
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NtotheTC posted:Maybe if he had listened to the wise (or even the stupid) people of Something Awful Discourse wouldn't be the flaming hot pile of garbage it is. I agree with you about Discourse, but of course producing good software is not the goal of most businesses. The measure of success is usually how much money it makes, or maybe how widespread it is. Discourse seems to be pretty successful. At least, I run across forums using it all the time.
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Oct 13, 2019 03:06
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Other than the awful infinite scroll Discourse is now a perfectly fine bit of forums software, but afaict it's entirely abandoned all of Atwood's hot ideas on gamification and stuff and is now just a modern implementation of tradition forums concepts.
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Oct 13, 2019 05:09
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The best feature a forum can have is a button that says "click here to ban yourself" that does exactly what it says.
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Oct 13, 2019 05:11
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Jabor posted:The best feature a forum can have is a button that says "click here to ban yourself" that does exactly what it says.
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Oct 13, 2019 05:34
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man all of that gamification stuff really improved stack overflow, eh?
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Oct 13, 2019 07:09
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I'd answer that but my answer is more of a comment, and I do not have enough reputation for comments, nor do I know how to raise that, or care enough about it to ever find out or make it any farther as a user
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Oct 13, 2019 07:16
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Dumb Lowtax posted:I'd answer that but my answer is more of a comment, and I do not have enough reputation for comments, nor do I know how to raise that, or care enough about it to ever find out or make it any farther as a user Same here. They appear to encourage only people who really want to establish a SO identity to participate, not a casual passer-by who might actually have the perfect solution for the exact problem that’s being queried.
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Oct 13, 2019 07:21
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Instead of helping you with your problem, I will insult and belittle you by implying that you're an idiot and your problem is incredibly easy to solve, as well as copy-pasting something from a google search that doesn't actually answer your question, but seems like an answer to all the other idiots that will glance over it and upvote me for my wit.
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Oct 13, 2019 07:22
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Suspicious Dish posted:man all of that gamification stuff really improved stack overflow, eh? SO clearly did something right and I'd guess that the gamification stuff helped it get off the ground, but I'd also guess that they could have phased out everything but "upvotes make your score go up" long ago without it making any difference.
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Oct 13, 2019 07:27
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the thing it did right was "not charge money" but that might be catching up with them now oops
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Oct 13, 2019 10:53
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As someone who’s been using and moderating a Discourse forum for a couple years now, I have to say that it’s pretty good. My main complaint is that there’s a lot of implicit behavior that I didn’t realize was there, like the user ranks and the automatic promotion, and it’s already caused some amount of annoyance and drama. For example, somebody got demoted because they didn’t read a sufficient number of threads in the last quarter, and they whined to me about it; and somebody else keeps hiding threads which belong on a different forum (which apparently you can do just as a normal user if you’re senior enough) but not telling the poster to actually take it to that forum even after I asked him just to include some boilerplate response. In my experience, using usernames instead of third-person pronouns is just good practice on forums because otherwise people will get confused about who you’re talking about. I can confirm that Monica is a skilled enough writer to make this feel natural. I can also confirm that Monica has strong feelings about singular “they”, and I fondly remember arguing with her about it with all the standard arguments and getting nowhere. The idea that she was trying to be exclusionary is ridiculous. She is is a professional technical writer, which is to say that a large part of her job is starting with a vague, nice-sounding pronouncement and trying to pin down exactly what the expectations are, and it sounds like that’s all she was trying to do here.
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Oct 13, 2019 18:22
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rjmccall posted:For example, somebody got demoted because they didn’t read a sufficient number of threads in the last quarter, I see the yospos derision was justified
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Oct 13, 2019 18:37
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gamification and promoting/demoting posts has real world effect in creating extreme circlejerks. hell, just the other day i saw a subreddit for unironic "climate skeptics" which wouldn't exist if their posts didn't disappear in downvotes in mainstream discussions.
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Oct 13, 2019 20:44
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comedyblissoption posted:lmao I mean they got demoted from one mostly meaningless rank to another, but yeah, there was some quasi-moderator activity they couldn’t do anymore, it was dumb.
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Oct 13, 2019 21:01
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My favorite part of Atwood's visit was when he specifically mentioned how SA's policy of autobanning people who use the wrong thread tags was a terrible UI flaw and he couldn't figure out why it hadn't been "fixed," and absolutely could not wrap his head around the explanation for why it exists.
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Oct 13, 2019 22:11
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rjmccall posted:In my experience, using usernames instead of third-person pronouns is just good practice on forums because otherwise people will get confused about who you’re talking about. The issue is the thing they wanted to moderate can't have a clear, unambiguous dividing like to the degree, say, a technical specification would. When what you want to moderate is essentially "conspicuous overt avoidance of pronouns for a certain class of people to subtly bully them and invalidate their gender identity" it's... not easily definable. It's extremely "I know it when I see it." Now, perhaps, you could argue that what I wrote is more technical and clear than what SO put in their FAQ, and I'd maybe agree. I knew what SO meant but even among seemingly non-bigoted users there seemed to be some confusion about the prohibition on avoiding a person's pronouns after they make their preference clear. I would say that there is legitimate tension between the queer and wider (non-queer) STEM communities to some degree. STEM people, especially engineers and programmers really like precise, technical definitions for things. Queer identity is inherently fluid and only individually meaningful, it deliberately avoids classification and strict definition. It's something that's enough of a thing that you can notice bigotry and bullying, but the nature of it inherently makes it impossible to define explicit indicators of abuse. This is true of all bigotry, of course, if you exactly define racism, then racist rules lawyers will always, without fail, find a way to technically not violate it, but it's especially true for queer identity due to its intentional fluid, temporary, and imprecise nature. I recommend this article for a look at it in the context of why Data Science can, from a certain perspective, be inherently hostile to queer identity. I will say that while I'm not privy to the TL discussions, straight up stripping Monica of mod status seemed overly harsh and swift... but I also understand why it was done. "It's grammatically incorrect!" is a very, very common refrain and shield to hide behind by actual bigots. "Only using a trans person's name" (even if she only did it for NB, they/their using trans people) is also a common bigoted tactic. It was telling that she was willing to use neopronouns that take the singular, which I think should've granted extra leeway, but regardless of her actual reasoning or intent (which, in this case, I think should've been taken into account because she's been such a longtime community member in good standing), it's so bigotry-adjacent I 100% understand why they erred on that side. Not to mention it got mixed up in all the actual concern trolling that was going on. (I can't see this coming up often though. I think I've seen someone use a pronoun on Stack Exchange maybe twice ever outside Meta discussions about a specific user's activity.) Linear Zoetrope fucked around with this message at 22:19 on Oct 13, 2019 |
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Oct 13, 2019 22:14
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raminasi posted:My favorite part of Atwood's visit was when he specifically mentioned how SA's policy of autobanning people who use the wrong thread tags was a terrible UI flaw and he couldn't figure out why it hadn't been "fixed," and absolutely could not wrap his head around the explanation for why it exists. he's obviously right about that though?
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Oct 13, 2019 22:22
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Jeb Bush 2012 posted:he's obviously right about that though? As someone who has been banned for this very reason, it is working as intended.
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Oct 13, 2019 22:31
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Jeb Bush 2012 posted:he's obviously right about that though? No. It's basically the same thing as the classic M&M rider.
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Oct 13, 2019 22:42
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Jeb Bush 2012 posted:he's obviously right about that though? Only if you want to avoid automatically banning people who are inattentive in their posting or have poor reading comprehension, which SA generally doesn't.
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Oct 13, 2019 22:52
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Atwood’s approach is to start by completely disempowering users, and force them to earn every little feature one by one by proving somehow that they deserve it SA gives you what you pay for, and then takes it away again if you demonstrate you don’t understand the rules I think I greatly prefer the latter approach
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Oct 14, 2019 00:58
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Jeb Bush 2012 posted:he's obviously right about that though? No, he isn't.
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Oct 14, 2019 01:00
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Having become the maintainer and spelunker of eldritch code from the depths of hell where Cthulhu threads while threading and methods can have 18 parameters, a return, and 8 of the parameters are references which are mutated, I've found myself drifting to at least one way I'd like to see code as a maintainer. I like explicit parameters passed to a function. Class level variables should be limited whenever possible. Then again, the classes I'm working on can be 30,000 lines spread over multiple partials (thanks, C#!) No side effects. See above. Consider learning how to use DI. Don't play with loving Parallel.For if you're badly threading. Actually, just don't thread. If you think you need to, don't, especially when you clearly don't know how IIS works. Don't loving use ref params either. Have a single loving return. I've seen tuple return cuteness with the newer C# features that are okay I guess? Is this 'a thing', FP light? Or is this just non-poo poo-tastic code? I wonder if this is just a proper name for a style or not. I mean, clearly, if you have small classes and small methods class level properties not being params make sense. But not here. I've learned more about code style and architecture trying to fix the mess I inherited than I've ever gotten from reading about it or memorizing for interviews.
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Oct 14, 2019 01:04
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https://twitter.com/noop_noob/status/1183234844534304769
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Oct 14, 2019 01:11
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Oct 14, 2019 01:31
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Plorkyeran posted:Other than the awful infinite scroll Discourse is now a perfectly fine bit of forums software, but afaict it's entirely abandoned all of Atwood's hot ideas on gamification and stuff and is now just a modern implementation of tradition forums concepts. Where "modern implementation" means "slow and inaccessible pile of JavaScript"
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Oct 14, 2019 02:05
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lol this owns and is exactly what you'd expect from Go users
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Oct 14, 2019 02:56
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my go-to post for lollin at golang. it is amazing on every level
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Oct 14, 2019 03:01
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Space Whale posted:Is this 'a thing', FP light? Or is this just non-poo poo-tastic code? I wonder if this is just a proper name for a style or not. I mean, clearly, if you have small classes and small methods class level properties not being params make sense. But not here. No idea, but once upon a time I read something like "every global variable is an implicit parameter of your function" and realized the same conclusion you got to. I think I read that somewhere around here. Anyway, it stuck!
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Oct 14, 2019 03:26
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Linear Zoetrope posted:(I can't see this coming up often though. I think I've seen someone use a pronoun on Stack Exchange maybe twice ever outside Meta discussions about a specific user's activity.) Right, and like I said, usually it's better to use usernames anyway just to remove any ambiguity about who you're talking about, especially in case your post gets reply-quoted. If Monica was refusing to use they/them for NB people because of her aesthetic hang-ups about singular they, then she was wrong and needed to be corrected. I get what you're saying about bigots trying to lawyer the rules in their favor, but dealing with that sort of thing without blowing up your own community is what good moderation is all about. If nothing else, it's not like bigots have never successfully exploited well-intentioned rules enforcement to get their enemies banned. People acting in good faith do sometimes still make mistakes. Also, your goes on for a bit about engineers and programmers falling into the trap of liking precise, technical definitions for things, but it seems to me that this controversy is significantly about an attempt to create precise and technical conditions for ethics. You're saying that Monica's behavior was so "bigotry-adjacent" that it is "100% understand[able]" that she was judged on it without any effort to examine her intent or place her actions in the well-documented context of her history at SE, and it certainly sounds like you view her punishment as acceptable even if it's maybe not the outcome you would have preferred. That is an awfully bright-line rule for a sin as open-ended as "don't do anything that reminds me of something I've seen bigots do in bad faith".
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Oct 14, 2019 05:10
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jit bull transpile posted:That *is* harassment. Explicitly only using someone's username when you'd otherwise normally just use a pronoun is specifically othering them in a way that can be quite dehumanizing. A moderator of a community trying to be inclusive should be mature enough to either ask for people's pronouns or default to the singular "they". It's not hard and anyone acting like it is is not being honest about their motives ... She was saying that she wanted to adopt a personal policy of always referring to people by their chosen usernames. She wasn't suggesting that she would use he/she for cis people and usernames for others...
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Oct 14, 2019 05:55
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English is such a mess of a language that I don't really understand why people care about the finer points of its grammar. If someone says to use singular "they" on their platform, then just do so. Does English even have an organisation somewhere to normatively define it, like most European languages do? Given the sheer number of dialects, I doubt so. I feel fortunate that I haven't really had much use for Stack Overflow.
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Oct 14, 2019 06:54
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Athas posted:English is such a mess of a language that I don't really understand why people care about the finer points of its grammar. If someone says to use singular "they" on their platform, then just do so. Does English even have an organisation somewhere to normatively define it, like most European languages do? Given the sheer number of dialects, I doubt so. She was literally just asking whether she could use everyone's usernames as an alternative to "they". That's all she did, she asked. She didn't actually take any action one way or the other. Not really sure how anyone here can defend SE on this. putin is a cunt fucked around with this message at 08:11 on Oct 14, 2019 |
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Oct 14, 2019 08:09
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a hot gujju bhabhi posted:... Alright, so my interest has been piqued enough to go actually find the fired mod's account of what happened. From here: https://judaism.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5193/stack-overflow-inc-sinat-chinam-and-the-goat-for-azazel quote:On Friday, half an hour before Shabbat and two days before Rosh Hashana, Stack Overflow Inc. suddenly revoked my moderator status on all sites where I had it. I found this out while handling flags, when I suddenly got notifications for Marshal and Deputy badges (which moderators are ineligible to earn). They did this not because I've done anything to violate SE policies (which I have not done), but because they think I will in the future violate a thoughtcrime-style provision of a Code of Conduct change that hasn't been made yet. quote:I was the victim. Someone with a "director" job title had dropped into the room to announce an upcoming change to the Code of Conduct; unlike the rest of the CoC, this rule mandates specific, positive actions.1 I raised some issues with the formation of the policy and asked some questions, the vast majority of which were never answered. I was polite and was trying to work with others to solve a problem I have with the change as presented. quote:Now that this has been made public elsewhere, I feel safe in saying more. The policy is an update to the Code of Conduct that requires us to use people's preferred pronouns (when known). What was posted in the TL wasn't polished language; I assume they're working on that. I completely agree that it is rude to call people what they don't want to be called; knowingly misgendering someone is not ok. But the policy was about positive, not negative, use of pronouns. I pointed out that as a professional writer I, by training, write in a gender-neutral way specifically to avoid gender landmines, and sought clarification that this would continue to be ok. To my surprise, other moderators in the room said that not using (third-person singular) pronouns at all is misgendering. The employee never clarified, and this is one of the questions I asked in email. In my email I said clearly that I'm on board with "use preferred pronouns when using pronouns", but from the fact that they fired me without warning (or answering the question), I conclude that that's not the policy. I haven't seen an actual policy, though I am being accused of violating it. Now, in the past I've been told by transgender people the same thing that other people told this former mod: that if someone asks you to use a specific pronoun, then it's misgendering for you to use some other singular pronoun. That includes singular "they"; if someone asks to be called "she", then calling them "they" is misgendering. That's a Stackoverflow CoC violation, full stop. It's rude in the same way that nobody wants to be called "it" StackOverflow's official stance is that they "removed a moderator for repeatedly violating our existing Code of Conduct and being unwilling to accept our CM’s repeated requests to change their behavior". The specifics of that interaction are not publicly available, having occurred mostly over e-mail, so it could be all bullshit, or it could be a legitimate series of issues pertaining to a user refusing to use preferred pronouns, or it could be something else entirely. The mod in question claims to not know what they did; "I was just asking questions", essentially. I'm inclined to believe that we may have some unreliable narration here; after all, this person has accused stackoverflow of not providing any evidence of their wrongdoing, but she isn't posting those interactions publicly, either. No one gets to claim to be the sole arbiter of truth while withholding evidence that could confirm their version of events. Meanwhile, many of the resigning mods are actually just shitheads. For instance, a resigning mod who was in charge of christianity.meta.stackexchange.com wrote: quote:In light of all the things we went through just to open this site much less make it work, the touch-stone issue is almost comical. Pronouns. No seriously, pronouns. A resigning moderator from Skeptics: quote:I am resigning today. Others are more clear on agreeing with the CoC changes but disagreeing with the mod firing. Others only mention the mod firing. a hot gujju bhabhi posted:... There's actually nothing in the mod's post about always using usernames; rather, it sounds like they wanted to always use singular they, which they allude to as a thing that is commonly done in technical writing (it is and it isn't). And we don't even know if this "just asking questions" narrative is accurate; they could have been talking to a transgender person and refusing to use that person's preferred pronoun after being asked repeatedly to do so (which is the StackOverflow version of events; again, that could be bullshit).
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Oct 14, 2019 08:17
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From what I understand, Monica cannot release any transcripts. Not like, because it's against some NDA or something but like... physically cannot. The discussion purportedly happened in the Teacher's Lounge, basically a coaching/discussion chatroom for mods which she well... couldn't access after she was terminated. I've heard the transcripts leaked, and that they had shown that Monica was willing to use singular she and he when asked, but not singular they for, essentially, grammatical reasons. If that information was wrong, then I apologize Linear Zoetrope fucked around with this message at 09:56 on Jan 9, 2020 |
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Oct 14, 2019 10:24
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