OK, so everybody’s really getting into the discussion here, and in a way everybody’s really wrong. The thread question is
“Are we trying to make a more friendly/welcoming site?”
To which the answer is a clear no. Because we are not making a site. We’re making a platform to host several sites for distinct communities, each of which will have to work out these questions among themselves.
Once that stands and communities populate the system, people aren’t really in a position to go to another community and tell them “you have to be more/less harsh” (inside the “no abuse” framework of course).
The divide in opinions here between “harsh quality” vs “enabling friendliness”, do you guys see what that is? It’s 2 different communities. Just make an “SO Friendliness” and an “SO Quality”.
They’ll probably complement each other tremendously. If an SO Quality guy can tell a new user “That’s not up to our standard here, you should go over to SO Friendliness first to learn”, is that not a win-win?
SOQ keeps their quality, SOF won’t lose that person they’re concerned about.
Either way, that’s all stuff about creating a community. If that’s what you want to do right now, it’ll probably be fine if you start a post here “Hey I want to start a community for XYZ”, and then that can take shape, and people an also decide to take part in that or not.
Please take those discussions to Codidact Meta, which is for questions about our instance rather than the software platform. I realize there’s been a lot of instance discussion here on the forum, much of which was started before we stood up the meta site recently. Now that we have meta, please use it. Thanks.
SO friendliness and quality are not mutually exclusive, they are only aspects of what goes to make a good site. Hopefully we would not have such odd divisions on the network.
You won’t get any friendliness if you have no quality. In fact you are likely just to not get much of an answer at all or you might get a wrong one (reddit model). If you have no friendliness you won’t have any content, because people won’t want to post there, and such a “quality” site would probably violate guidelines of Codidact anyway. SO suffers because it’s not optimized to avoid hurting pride in its curation process. This creates a perception of rudeness, thus stopping good users from contributing early on. The first part to address this is avoiding instances where the possibility of such conflict could arise (hiding “bad” information from new/users, more prepackaged feedback, removing the need for direct curator to user conversation in the first place etc…). The second is making sure that when actual human interactions do happen they are amicable. Discouraging people from using blunt or snarky language is only part of the equation, not the solution. Individual curator friendliness is the last line in defense of creating the perception of a “less rude” QA platform. None of this involves ruining curation or degrading quality (in fact just the opposite).
And contrary to what contributors might want to believe, this feeling that SO is “rude” is the number one reason people don’t contribute or don’t use it. If you go on any other platform and start asking about SO, people have a very different perspective compared to meta curators, even the experts. You don’t need StackExchange polling to see that. This “rudeness” has a very real effect on the quality of curation and the stress put on curators, contributors and newcomers. This network can do better than SO.
Friendliness and quality are simply not a dichotomy, the resolution here is not some hostile two state solution between communities on the same network, it’s better tooling and empathy network wide. There’s no point of trying to start software QA on codidact if you just end up with the worst of two worlds situation.
You imply that I said that. Wrong.
You imply I suggested a quality community where the slightest show of friendliness will be punished - and vice versa. Wrong.
You imply I described a “hostile” situation. Wrong.
On the contrary, I described a harmonious win-win situation where the 2 communities would complete each other like Yin and Yang. The negative extremist viewpoint where people hate each other, that came from you, not me.
However, if you followed this hole thread here and others, you can see that there are very clearly 2 camps: One favouring quality over the appearance of friendliness, and the other one… well, in short, not that.
You can easily see that your idea is not practical if you think about actually putting it into practice:
Would you really let go of your friendliness if the community decided that way?
I presume not.
Then who are you to tell a quality-over-friendliness guy they can’t start a community with those ideals? Do you seriously want to force people to go with your ideals?
You may not have explicitly said that, but you most definitely did imply that. You might not have meant to imply that, but you definitely did.
I can’t see where Cazadorro has implied that.
Whether Cazadorro considers the solution you suggest as hostile is Cazadorro’s value judgement. You can say that you disagree with that judgement, but you can’t call that judgement wrong, exactly because it is a judgement, not a matter of fact.
I for one cannot see that. Rather, the two types of people I see are: Those who think quality can only be achieved by allowing a certain amount of unfriendliness, and those who think quality can be achieved while staying friendly.
In particular I don’t remember having seen a single post that advocated for lowering the importance of quality.
I did not. Burden of proof lies with you if you want to make that statement.
I interpreted “hostile two state solution” as “two communities that are hostile to each other”, and then it’s a description of the relationship between those 2 communities. That can - to a reasonable degree - clearly be described as hostile or not. For example, The Outdoors and Mi Yodeya are not hostile to each other.
If you both really mean “having 2 communities is hostile”, then Cazadorro may take this as an apology for my misinterpretation. In the same breath, I don’t agree, at all, that having 2 communities is hostile.
So… what you’re saying is you see 2 camps?
One that cares more about quality than friendliness?
And one that has the goal of increasing friendliness (obviously while trying not to lose too much in other areas)?
Sounds vaguely familiar…
I’m now thinking that my post was a waste of time. Sorry for being blunt, but this whole discussion is. We could rehash the whole discussion about this and still be no further.
There’s a single yes-or-no question that can conclude this topic for me: Are you gonna forbid me to start a community (that values quality over friendliness)?
I think they’re saying that (to whatever extent there even is a dichotomy of two camps) there seems to one “camp” which argues that quality is paramount, that being nice is secondary, and that a distinct lack of nice is excusable or even necessary when the content in question lacks some quality.
And another camp, which says, “Why not both?” – which argues there is never a good reason (nor ever even a sufficient/acceptable reason) to be rude, and that it’s of paramount importance that all interactions (including or especially with new users?) – including quality control, teaching, filtering, correcting and/or closing questions – should be nice and friendly (welcoming the person even if not the content?), constructive, etc. Also that the design of the software (perhaps too the training and moderation of the community of users) should support this ambition.
I suspect too that people hope that the software might better support the onboarding of new users – e.g. Monica wrote …
That might help moderation too – my first interaction with a user as a moderator tends to my posting, drawing their attention to, some text in the help which they may not have noticed yet.
I thought the first camp was the one that argues that negative feedback is only perceived as being not nice by rule-ignorant noobs (even though we’re helping them improving themselves). Obviously you wouldn’t fall for the gross misinterpretation of conflating that with actual rudeness, would you?
I don’t know how much support for mandatory rudeness there is here, though. Seems a bit contrived TBH.
Yes I think different people have posted a range of comments, and something more or less like that was one of them.
I think people are looking for ways to make that interaction less harsh, partly by making it easier for new users to be better informed (by the software) to begin with, but also anything else they can do to make interactions constructive or prescriptive, and not unfriendly.
You might try to distinguish positive (prescriptive, possibly encouraging and thus welcoming) feedback from “negative” feedback (though I realise “negative feedback” is also used as an engineering term of art).
I thought I saw some people say that rudeness is a natural/understandable/tolerable, and even (at the extreme) that it is necessary, e.g. in response to “a rude question”, even if not mandatory – and some other people took exception to that theory.
The rest of your answer was really nice, but this did not answer my question. What I wondered was really if there is something builtin here that would prevent Codidact from drifting towards things that you three don’t like, EVEN if the community as a whole would want it. Let’s for the discussion assume that there are also people willing to step in and do the work. I’m not trying to put you on the spot. I’m genuinely interested and I would be grateful if you answered it.
Perhaps, but one thing that I especially see in the camp arguing that backing on being nice never can be a good thing is not open for the possibility that this statement can be wrong. Granted, I am very biased when I say that, but on the other hand, so is everybody else in this thread. But when I read the thread, I get the impression that those who does not advocating being extremely nice all the time are more open to the possibility of being wrong.
And this is not so surprising either. After all, stating that “x is NEVER a good way to achieve y” is a far bolder statement than “it MIGHT be the case that x SOMETIMES is a good way to achieve y”.
Also, this is a very tricky thing. Look at this post from @cellio. The whole post advocates being humble, open to being wrong etc, which I in general agree with. But look at the language in the same post. The whole post basically screams that I am wrong and cellio is right. Please note that I am NOT saying this to imply that cellio is a hypocrite. If nothing else, it’s a rather a sign of how difficult this subject is.
Personally as a moderator on SE I will tolerate people’s being neutral, maybe criticising content, but I try to draw a line at being rude (especially anything ad hominem, and probably also criticism which is only “negative” and not informative/prescriptive/constructive).
Being “extremely nice all the time” might be ideal or extremist or, who knows, perhaps even a strawman. The “middle way” in Buddhism means literally, “neither of two opposite extremes”.
Sorry – there’s a lot of Buddhist doctrine about “sectarianism” and “attaching to views” but which I doubt it’s worth trying to summarise here, but I don’t know what else to say about that.
This, so very much. Honestly, my 2-communities solution is nothing more than an AB test for a heavily discussed issue without any clear resolution in sight.
If quality-first doesn’t work out, I’m happy to say “OK, let’s migrate to friendliness-first then”.
However, my hunch is this might rather happen to friendliness-first; that not many mods are wiling to work that way.
And as suddenly people seem afraid to answer the one question that can put a pin in this whole discussion:
It’s not like anybody will stop us from creating a quality-first instance, to get that proof.
I’m closing this thread; it’s producing too much argument and distracting from what we’re actually trying to do here. The TL;DR is this:
Our software will not enforce “friendliness” one way or the other, beyond giving moderators tools to handle user behaviour as they see fit.
Our primary instance (the instance of the software that we host communities on) will enforce the Codidact CoC, and users or communities who refuse to follow it will be sanctioned.
Communities or users who do not wish to follow the Codidact CoC are welcome to take the software (and to copy any content they wish to under the content license) and host their own instance on which they can make their own rules.
