Are we trying to make a more friendly/welcoming site?

Codidact Platform Ideas
109

I was afraid your personal opinion would be different on this, I’m incredibly greatful it isn’t.

A lot of people on SO, when faced with the criticism that they were rude retorted that they “we’re just being blunt” and that’s just how they talk. Yet I doubt that’s how they talk to their managers, coworkers friends, or family. And the thing with SO, is that it isn’t just one person stating this. It’s like 5 per question at least. So now you have half a dozen “blunt” people telling you

  • “This is wrong”
  • “no research appears to have been done”
  • “You need to show the content of the data, we can’t answer”
  • “look at rules before posting, this question doesn’t belong here”
  • “What does x y z mean? and what does a b c have to do with it?”
  • " Your code is poorly formatted, also please post the full error traceback".
  • “Why do you keep trying to do X?.”

Which is disconcerting enough. Except it often isn’t even just blunt, it’s often sarcastic or snarky so it turns into:

  • “This is wrong, why did you even think this was going to work?”
  • “Did you even search before posting this? There’s like 5 results on google that show how to do this”
  • “Without knowing the content of the data, how are we supposed to know how it is going wrong? Are we supposed to read your mind?”
  • “Seriously? What made you think this was appropriate scope/quality or even just effort for a question?”
  • “What does x y z even mean? and why do you even have a b c here?”
  • "Your code is illegible, why do you expect people to put effort into answers when you can’t even put effort to properly format your code? And you need to post the FULL error traceback "
  • “Why do you insist on doing X, clearly it doesn’t work.”

Are you really going to blame people feeling personally insulted when comments like these come up in masse? And to people who would claim that they only do this to new people, this happens often when established curators with higher level expertise encounter other established users, especially when they ask questions on an unfamiliar tag. These specific curators have expectations often far beyond that required to post a question.

If you can spend the effort to be snarky, you can probably spend the effort to be constructive and professional with your language to say the same exact thing.

I understand that people get tired of the same mistakes over and over again, but hopefully codidact’s efforts will help reduce the number of actual curator interactions necessary, and being less abrasive means more people might become contributors which could also help release some pressure.

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110

Nope, not at all. I don’t consider that kind of behavior acceptable. I assume that sometimes it’s the result of people being sloppy or not realizing how their words come across, and those are people I hope we can reach – can teach to do better here on Codidact. (And if they take those improved interaction styles out into the world, even better!) On the way there, we’ll be deleting rude comments, just like I did on SE sites I moderated.

Codidact needs to set a higher standard of behavior without also setting the expectation that our users have to accept bad posts because moderating them would hurt people’s feelings. We can guide and correct people, and moderate content, without being mean. That’s our baseline: if you can’t do it without being mean the this isn’t the place for you, and if you can’t tolerate any guidance or correction this also isn’t the place for you. Communities are made out of people who have different contexts, and people need to be able to interact constructively with each other.

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111

This discussion worries me. Stackoverflow went way too far with demanding we mollycoddle and basically encourage help vampires and enable lots of bad questioners. This wasn’t nearly as much a problem on most other stackexchange sites. it remains a huge problem on stackoverflow.

While I agree that we should not tolerate truly mean behavior or speech, telling people not to be “rude” could easily go too far. What constitutes rudeness varies too widely. For example, I think it’s rude to post a homework assignment and ask people to do the assignment for you. I don’t think it’s rude to respond to that with something like, “What have you tried?”; in fact I think that’s a gentle way to explain to someone that they should be asking for an answer to a specific question rather than demanding unpaid consulting.

Stackoverflow disagreed and banned that reply. Instead they expect us to be fake/saccharine or even just to downvote and close questions without explanation.

It’s fine to have a policy asking people not to be mean, but let’s not go so far as to make this new site have the same problems that stackoverflow does. Those are why I mostly stopped contributing to stackoverflow even before what they did to Monica.

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112

This is the root of SO’s design flaw: public shaming as a moderator tool. The main problems of SO’s model:

  • Humans often simply don’t take kindly even to constructive criticism, especially not when given in public for the world to see.

    Solve this by removing the question from the public eye and then give private feedback to the poster.

  • Deleting posts “as slowly as possible”. Bad questions get slowly grinded down into the dust by down votes, comments, close votes, all in public, really rubbing it in. And even when it sits there with 5 close votes and -10 score, it is still published for everyone to see.

    Solve this by giving trusted users privileges to instantaneously remove a bad question from the public eye.

  • “Bandwagon moderation”. The first veteran user who encounters a bad question and are willing to help out often constructive criticisms with links to help pages etc. So far, so good - that initial polite comment is often all that’s actually needed. Yet we have subsequent users arriving later, piling on further comments as in the examples given. It stops being constructive and derails into what the poster might interpret as “you are bad”. And it creates a negative atmosphere for everyone stumbling over that post too.

    Lots of such comments come from veteran users who are simply fed up by viewing the same endless flood of bad questions day after day. They actually don’t have much interest in helping the OP at all, they just want the crap question gone.

    Solve this by not forcing regular users to view bad content, again by quickly removing such questions away from the public eye to a “quarantine” area.

    SO’s “crap hugging” policy of “we must preserve and publish all the crap ever posted and polish it until the end of time” is harmful. Similarly, when a question is closed since it can’t be answered and needs to be corrected by the OP alone, it is senseless to keep on displaying that question to the public.

    In addition, do not force users who just want to use the site to become moderators, by having a messy rep system that assumes that people with good domain knowledge automatically make good moderators as well. This simply isn’t true. A better reputation & moderator privilege system than the one at SO is needed.

I really think the above issues is what the whole “unwelcome”/“elitist” thing originates from. Simply don’t let new confused users clash with power user veterans who have no interest in helping new users. Let the veteran users and elected moderators who actually enjoy helping newbies handle it.

And if no enough such users are around, well tough luck, the question is removed from the public site and stuck in limbo. Provide help pages & meta forums so that newbies can help themselves when that happens. But at least the question isn’t stuck in a destructive public down-vote/close-vote/comment barrage.

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113

That sounds sensible to me. I think I tried to suggest something like that here but Olin was against it…

Olin might be of the view that so-called-crappy questions should get little or no help – that helpers are wrong and that help would be a disincentive to the author’s improving their own post, perhaps that the author should pay for (put the effort into) fixing their own mistakes.

114

All well and good, but we shouldn’t even let there be a reason to become rude in the first place. Like it or not, people turning rude is a symptom of a dysfunctional underlying Q&A infrastructure. Naturally, nobody visits the site with the intention of being rude - they end up rude when emotions run high.

Programming communities in particular have been incredibly rude since the dawn of time (just Google Linus Torvalds quotes about C++ for example :slight_smile: ). And while there is no excuse to behave like that, these kind of people will visit the sites. If we can keep their rudeness “dormant” by a good core design, everyone wins.

Some examples of how this can be done in my post above, Are we trying to make a more friendly/welcoming site? - #112 by Lundin.

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115

As long as the question is removed (temporarily) from the main site. How to save it from there on will be a matter for the OP and veteran users who genuinely want to help. If you give a trusted veteran user the privilege to simply remove a bad question from the site (similar to SO’s “dupe hammer” but expanded), then they just need to click once to make it go away, minimum friction.

As for who to give such privileges and how to “moderate the moderators” or means for the OP to question why their question was removed - that does of course need to be fleshed out in detail too, but that’s another story.

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116

Another question I guess is, “Having edited, how and by whom is it reopened?”

SE too say (on their blog) that they “are making fundamental changes to how our close question system works” at the moment which might be something along these lines.

117

This is EXACTLY what I’m trying to say. Only focusing on “not tolerating rudeness” is treating the symptom and not the cause.

It seems like many here think I’m advocating rudeness, which is not the case. But very often rudeness is an emotional response to something.

Well, I guess the success of that will depend a lot on how it’s handled. Would you delete a comment like “that’s wrong because of (problem)”? I think many people would be extremely annoyed with such moderation.

In general, I see a risk that many people would feel that the environment is hostile if they feel that they constantly have to focus more on how they say things rather than what they want to say. And I think this will be especially alienating to people who are not very good at English.

Note that I agree that “How do you account for (problem)?” in general (but not necessarily always) is preferable to "that’s wrong because of (problem)”. However, I do not believe that the difference is so big that it motivates any action. And I think this especially goes for answers. It’s ok to make mistakes when you answer, but you’re supposed to know what you’re talking about. It’s not ok to basically just guess and then hope that someone else helps you to make the answer good. Pointing out flaws in answers is very important, and as long as there’s no personal attacks like “that’s wrong you idiot” I don’t see any real problem.

I have a very serious question about this. Because as far as I have understood it, one of the main goals with Codidact is to keep it community driven forever, and not allow some company decide a COC that goes against the community’s will. Let’s then assume that a majority of the community actually wants to allow rudeness. How will you handle that?

I think that’s an extremely important question, and it can be formulated a bit wider: Are there any decisions that the community should not have any influence over? If so, which?

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118

We have this really general/baseline Code of Conduct. We’ll require it to be accepted by anything hosted by us. Hence we won’t host communities, who are not interested in following it. We will try, however, to help these sites to migrate to a self-hosted instance, where our CoC does not apply.

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119

Ok, and that baseline CoC is not subject to debate by the community? You @ArtOfCode and @cellio have the final word in this?

Please note that I’m not trying to imply something like “haha, then you are not as democratic as you claim”. I’m just curious and I do understand that compromises may have to be made.

120
121

One possibility is just to do as SE with a re-open review queue. Or if some veteran helped the poster out in person, it would make sense that said veteran could re-open the question. These are details that can be fleshed out in a separate discussion once the core close/re-open mechanics are established.

122

It seems to me there’s leeway in how to interpret the CoC – especially “Rudeness” – leeway for specific communities/moderators.

For example, IMO, “What have you tried already?” and “The problem with this post is X” are not especially rude (though they could possibly also be rephrased to be a little more welcoming, if you were willing and skilful).

Conversely I’d think that a comment like “Stop posting crap!” is probably/decidedly rude (as well as not “constructive”), even if it is ostensibly about the content not the person.

But as I said I think that (kind of decision-making) is a site/community/moderation issue, not a software/governance issue.

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123

Ok, so if the Codidact community theoretically would like to have a basline CoC that explicitly said “Rudeness and personal attacks are allowed”, then it would be implemented?

I want to emphasize that I hope it will never happen.

124

That was my input back when the “welcome wagon” was launched. Often the first rude person is the one asking the question. For example, posting a copy/paste of your homework and accept someone to do it for you free of charge, is incredible rude behavior. People usually don’t post rude comments to questions out of the blue, there’s always a trigger.

And then there’s also the case of the poster of the question acting with good intent and genuinely believe that they asked a good question, then receive backlash in the form of rudeness, by someone who had already answered that very FAQ 3 times earlier that day. In these situations, the question should just be removed, the OP should be given constructive criticism in private and then they are very likely to improve after that. Less so if someone just posts a LMGTFY comment.

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125

IMO the Robustness principle for interop …

In computing, the robustness principle is a design guideline for software:

Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others (often reworded as “Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept”).

The principle is also known as Postel’s law , after Jon Postel, who wrote in an early specification of TCP

TCP implementations should follow a general principle of robustness: be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.

… suggests that it may be unwise to reply with rudeness even to a question which you perceive as rude.

The first time I heard “Be nice” wasn’t from SE, rather it was Patrick Swayze’s instructions to the bouncers in Road House (NSW).

All you have to do is follow three simple rules.

One: Never underestimate your opponent. Expect the unexpected.

Two: Take it outside. Never start anything inside the bar unless it’s absolutely necessary.

And Three: Be nice.

If somebody gets in your face and calls you a _____, I want you to be nice.

Ask him to walk, be nice.

If he won’t walk, walk him. But be nice.

If you can’t walk him, one of the others will help you. And you’ll both be nice.

I want you to remember that it’s a job. It’s nothing personal.

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126

At the risk of repeating something which has now been said several times: there is never “a reason to become rude”. People don’t just unavoidably “end up rude” when they are provoked by annoying behaviour. Choosing to be rude is an entirely voluntary response, and trying to shift any blame for it onto the other party (no matter how irritating or wrong they are) is a failure to take responsibility for one’s own actions. It’s the exact same reasoning used by domestic violence perpetrators who say “I’m not a violent person, I only hit her when she keeps driving me up the wall”.

This is not to say that addressing the annoying behaviour that you claim causes rudeness isn’t a good and important thing to do. But the primary aim of doing so is to maintain site quality, not to keep people’s rudeness “dormant”. It is the rude people’s own responsibility to do that.

Anyway, the discussion here is mostly going in circles now, so I’ve said enough. I’m glad that the leaders and organisers of Codidact have made it clear what their stance is, and I hope this prevails in the new communities they are going to build.

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127

It doesn’t matter! Nobody is arguing that it is ok to be rude, but making such a rule won’t change the fact that people will end up rude when triggered. Just like people will keep posting homework dumps even if you wave a link telling them that’s not ok. It’s like saying “war is bad and unacceptable” and thinking that just saying so will fix all wars in the world.

If you put up a sign saying “no smoking allowed” and still someone stops by next to the sign for a smoke, it does no good saying “Aha, see here, we told you that smoking isn’t allowed here!”. It does no good to ban the smoker from the premises either, because you are still only treating symptoms. The next day someone else will show up and start smoking in that same spot instead. The permanent solution is to deal with the root cause: stop selling cigarettes.

Or in case of Q&A, stop designing systems that cause maximum friction between users.

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128

The first step is gentle guidance. Most people want to be civil and some people will trip over cultural or language norms – that’s to be expected! We don’t smack people for it but we also don’t ignore it. We teach. We guide.

Nobody participating in good faith should have to worry about being smacked for stumbling over language. And yes, we do need people to raise issues with answers. A functioning community has (in my experience) enough people of good will, and emergent leaders, to make this happen pretty organically. Before you counter with SO: SO isn’t a community; it’s a bunch of content, a bunch of casual users, and a bunch of sub-communities that don’t necessarily interact much. I think its size and volume works against community-building. (I don’t really want to add an analysis of SO to this already-long-and-meandering thread, but I anticipate the argument so I’m trying to counter it up front.)

If the majority of a community on our platform wants to allow patterns of behavior that the people overseeing the instance object to, and discussions with the community aren’t productive (“but being 4chan-ish is core to us!”), then we should help that community emigrate to a more suitable host. It’s fine for a community to say “hey, codidact.com isn’t really working for us any more; we’re going to take the software and do our own thing”. It’s an open-source platform for a reason; you can take not just the content (like on SE) but the software too.

That said, we’re going to work closely with our communities to try to make sure everyone’s as happy as possible and we’re meeting people’s needs as well as we can. One of the benefits of a Codidact instance over everyone setting up their own sites with a variety of software platforms is that we all get to benefit from the common elements, the network.

And these two threads – you can go elsewhere, and the network is beneficial – act as checks on each other. The whole network suffers if we allow, say, a neo-Nazi community to thrive here. The whole network also suffers if there isn’t a whole network because communities scattered. So the network will have core expectations about behavior, and if those core expectations aren’t reasonable then the community won’t support the network. Those core expectations are pretty minimal, but they do exist. They have to.

The baseline CoC that we have is the result of extensive community discussion. More broadly, we do have to establish governance and that is going to have a bootstrapping problem; we’ll end up with an elected board of trustees that’s responsible for upholding our core principles, but on the way to that we need our project leaders to be able to make decisions that move us along the path to that outcome. So, yes, Marc, Art, and I, backed by community consensus, established this CoC. There will probably be tweaks along the way, but its core is pretty much set. It’s aligned with Codidact’s core principles, and ultimately Codidact’s board will be guided by and apply it.

Won’t happen, because the people here doing the work don’t agree with that. A group of people (from here or elsewhere) could, of course, fork the code and set up their own instance (with their own name) with whatever policies they want. It would be powered by the Codidact code but not backed by the Codidact organization.

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