This is a classic example of a publicity stunt based on the awful premise that people should be happy that Stack Overflow isn't more toxic. After all, on some places on the internet people openly talk about raping or killing people, so what's a little mean spirit and oppression on a tech help site?
What's more, the author has defined "toxic" in a way that guarantees a negotiation process after results are offered. They can simply sink the discussion by demanding that, "diversity of thought means I need a new Nazi and a hyper conservative anti-lgbt religious person on my panel. Surprise surprise, no one can agree on anything."
I seldom reach for this categorization off the bat, but given that this is a classic anti-debate tactic that I see all the time, I'm going to call it. This entire effort is disingenuous bullshit, and I flagged it hoping to avoid having to see more of this kind of bad logic and bad posting on the Hacker News main page.
Having a panel whose members are open and that you could judge before comitting hours of work: that would be fair.
Instead you have to come with evidence and then negotiate the panel allowing a potentially disingenuous actor to counter pick your evidence. The way the author worded this challenge demands we consider them an antagonist. Their definition of unacceptable is rape and death threats. Given this fact, we must assume they'd demand judges with similar views.
To engage in this challenge genuinely, we are forced to accept the author's absurdly high threshold (10%?! That's a wildfire!) and their absurdly permissive definition of harmless toxicity. I will do neither.
I think SO has gotten what I would call more rules bound. When I started participating in 09 and there were fun code golf challenges some open discussions etc. Now its very strict questions must be directly answerable no discussion no challenges.
I don't understand what people find toxic about it. It just seems to be vague. Maybe I'm not getting something. Its fundamentally a site where people help you for internet points that seems on its basis to be the definition of non toxic.
I did not claim that people should feel happy on Stack Overflow. My claim is that it is not a toxic wasteland. That is it. I understand people have bad experiences on the site and I hope I can offer some good suggestions to SO on how to improve.
Building a straw man around "raping or killing" isn't going to work. Toxicity has a lower threshold and nowhere did I insinuate this was where the threshold was.
> I am offering a free $10,000 of my own money. If you really believe that you can win, then obviously $500 won’t deter you at all.
Since we're talking about statistical modeling, the rational argument would be that a person would only participate if expected value of winning the competition is greater than the input pot. A ~5% chance of winning, given the time investment and opportunity cost involved, isn't compelling enough to risk it. That's why Kaggle competitions are free.
(Edit: When I wrote this comment, the parent comment only contained what is now the first paragraph. I didn't know about the entrance fee.)
And yet I agree with the author. I also hear about toxic posts and the terrible community, but I do not experience it myself. Having people try to put a finger on it would be good. When the $10k is to be paid is indeed unfortunately unclear, but I do like the competition, and I do hope that people that have experienced it will try to quantify it, even if they can't meet the 10% requirement.
That's a non-answer though. That process point alone means no prize need ever be rewarded. If you actually wanted to get results from this, you'd have this panel selected in advance so that people could just the fairness of the panel before engaging. Not allowing for post-engagement "Ha ha I demand Milo Y. is on my panel and he thinks this is fine to say to a woman."
Sorry, chance of winning assuming if winning was a independently random event, which in this case may not be accurate (although you could make an argument if the odds of winning are better or worse than 5%)
> "The following demonstrates the fallacy in the context of a prosecutor questioning an expert witness: “the odds of finding this evidence on an innocent man are so small that the jury can safely disregard the possibility that this defendant is innocent”.[1] The fallacy obscures that the odds of a defendant being innocent given said evidence in fact depends on the likely higher prior odds of the defendant being innocent, the explicitly lesser odds of the evidence in the case that he was innocent as mentioned, as well as the underlying cumulative odds of the evidence being on the defendant."
Care to explain how this fallacy is related to the above competition?
I don't know how one would define toxicity for the purpose of this challenge, but I am certainly baffled as to how people accuse StackOverflow of being a 'toxic wasteland'.
Some people can be a bit curt or even rude with poorly worded or low-effort questions but I can't say that's something I see there in even 1 out of 25-50 questions I see.
I suspect that some people get frustrated when they first try to ask questions and get rebuffed because they didn't follow the rules of the site. If you hop on there asking open-ended opinion questions or asking something that can easily be found with search, then yeah it might get closed rather quickly. Doesn't make SO a toxic community by any means.
I disagree with the tweet about SO being a toxic wasteland, but OP really undermines his point by being so combative about it. Especially when he turns around and says stuff like:
> If someone really believes that Stack Overflow is toxic then they should back it up with actual data and not hysterical and slanderous remarks.
It's poor form to call a woman's opinion "hysterical". There are other words that can convey a similar meaning without the heaps of sexist baggage that "hysteria" has historically implied. I suggest "inflammatory" here.
It's pretty telling that of the few comments on medium, two are actually people from SO trying to distance themselves from OP's "challenge".
Yes, I recommend reading the comments on this article, they're interesting. When a commenter argued that the fee is unfair toward minorites, OP replied:
> What is it about minorities that makes you believe they have less propensity to make the donation? That’s blatantly racist. If you know you are going to win $10k, then it shouldn’t matter to you. I’ll be happy to lower this to $100 in 6 months if nobody makes a submission.
That attitude is arguably more toxic than the typical Stack Overflow comment.
What is particularly toxic about this comment though?
I would actually agree that there won't be many poor/minority people participating, but that has more to do with the challenge itself, not the fee. Poor people buy a lot of lottery tickets, particularly when the chance of winning is high. The issue here is that the chances of winning are not high, so the only reason someone would try and go after the prize would be to prove a point, and spending a lot of time and effort to prove a point like this one is a luxury many people don't have.
I can imagine an environment in which less than 10% of the posts are toxic, yet it feels toxic to one person.
I’m at a conference between sessions, and there are small groups of people standing around, discussing the latest developments at breakneck speed. Back and forth. Talking a mile a minute. Saying half an idea out loud, and letting others fill in the blanks. Tons of jargon and inside references I don’t understand. I squeeze into one of the larger circles, and I would like to join the conversation, at least to understand what they are talking about, and perhaps add something to the conversation, if I can. I finally see an opening, and ask a question. Each person in the group is suddenly silent and stares at me for a few seconds. Finally one person says, “RTFM noob”. Everyone stifles a laugh, and the conversation picks up where it left off.
Count the number of “posts” in this example. Hundreds, or maybe low thousands. How many were toxic? One.
Doing the math… Yeah. That’s much less than 10%.
Does this feel toxic to me? Oh yeah. Does it feel toxic to everyone else? Some would say yes. Some would agree with you and say, “No. This does not feel like a toxic wasteland to me. I’ll admit, there’s a small amount of toxic discussion, but at least it’s much less toxic than other conferences I have attended.”
My point is that you can have a forum where less than 10% of the comments are toxic, and yet that forum can feel very toxic to some of the people.
So your 10% challenge does not prove anything.
I agree with nearly all of what you said but that wasn't the point of the challenge. I completely agree that many individuals experience negative events on Stack Overflow and would compassionately listen to them. The only thing I am challenging is the notion, that on a whole, SO is a toxic wasteland. That is it.
The reason 10% was set as a threshold is that many people actually believe it to be higher than that. 10% is an absurdly high number of toxic posts and the real number is going to be far lower. I value authentic statements with accurate data to the highest degree.
I hope that we can get some real research on this topic with more accurate data which can only help to improve outcomes.
On reddit, it looks like someone had some data which calculated that the number of toxic comments on SO is about 1%. That sounds about right to me.
But even 1% toxic comments correctly still makes it a toxic wasteland to the people who have been on the receiving end of those toxic comments, and to those who don't enjoy seeing others treated like that.
His comment is dishonest. It claims that "By point-blank denying the experience of women, people of color, and others who are telling us that we have a problem, we diminish them and communicate to them that they are not valued and do not belong"
I am not denying anyone's personal experience or that there isn't a problem. I am rejecting the claim that SO, as a whole, is a toxic wasteland.
Why have facts when you can just dump the term "toxic inhumane wasteland[…]shaming[…]…excluding women and people of color" without a shred of evidence and running away?
I saw her post, yes. One of her examples was the tragedy of SO automatically removing "hello" from the start of posts.
Oh, the tragedy!
She completely ignores that it's more disrespectful to waste the readers time with small talk before a question. If she wrote an FAQ, would she write an FAQ like this:
Q: Hello HSBC, I hope you're well this Friday afternoon. I was wondering what your phone number is.
A: Hello dear customer. Happy Friday to you too! We would love for you to call us. We always appreciate talking to customers about their banking. It's XXX-XXXXXX.
Q: Hello HSBC, I hope you're well this Friday afternoon. I was wondering what your phone opening hours are.
A: Hello dear customer. Happy Friday to you too! We would love for you to call us. We always appreciate talking to customers about their banking. We'll be ready for your call between XX and YY Mon-Sun.
So that's what a non-"toxic inhumane wasteland[…]shaming[…]…excluding women and people of color" would look like?
Readit News
What's more, the author has defined "toxic" in a way that guarantees a negotiation process after results are offered. They can simply sink the discussion by demanding that, "diversity of thought means I need a new Nazi and a hyper conservative anti-lgbt religious person on my panel. Surprise surprise, no one can agree on anything."
I seldom reach for this categorization off the bat, but given that this is a classic anti-debate tactic that I see all the time, I'm going to call it. This entire effort is disingenuous bullshit, and I flagged it hoping to avoid having to see more of this kind of bad logic and bad posting on the Hacker News main page.
I mean, that's about as fair as you can get when it comes to negotiating an agreement on something as subjective as "toxicity".
Instead you have to come with evidence and then negotiate the panel allowing a potentially disingenuous actor to counter pick your evidence. The way the author worded this challenge demands we consider them an antagonist. Their definition of unacceptable is rape and death threats. Given this fact, we must assume they'd demand judges with similar views.
To engage in this challenge genuinely, we are forced to accept the author's absurdly high threshold (10%?! That's a wildfire!) and their absurdly permissive definition of harmless toxicity. I will do neither.
I don't understand what people find toxic about it. It just seems to be vague. Maybe I'm not getting something. Its fundamentally a site where people help you for internet points that seems on its basis to be the definition of non toxic.
I did not claim that people should feel happy on Stack Overflow. My claim is that it is not a toxic wasteland. That is it. I understand people have bad experiences on the site and I hope I can offer some good suggestions to SO on how to improve.
Building a straw man around "raping or killing" isn't going to work. Toxicity has a lower threshold and nowhere did I insinuate this was where the threshold was.
Also, about the required input fee:
> I am offering a free $10,000 of my own money. If you really believe that you can win, then obviously $500 won’t deter you at all.
Since we're talking about statistical modeling, the rational argument would be that a person would only participate if expected value of winning the competition is greater than the input pot. A ~5% chance of winning, given the time investment and opportunity cost involved, isn't compelling enough to risk it. That's why Kaggle competitions are free.
And yet I agree with the author. I also hear about toxic posts and the terrible community, but I do not experience it myself. Having people try to put a finger on it would be good. When the $10k is to be paid is indeed unfortunately unclear, but I do like the competition, and I do hope that people that have experienced it will try to quantify it, even if they can't meet the 10% requirement.
> An independent panel that both you and I agree upon will define what it means to be “toxic”.
But the author is right so there's zero chance of anyone taking him up on this offer.
Of course that's just one of many red flags.
That is not a 'chance of winning.'
Care to explain how this fallacy is related to the above competition?
Some people can be a bit curt or even rude with poorly worded or low-effort questions but I can't say that's something I see there in even 1 out of 25-50 questions I see.
I suspect that some people get frustrated when they first try to ask questions and get rebuffed because they didn't follow the rules of the site. If you hop on there asking open-ended opinion questions or asking something that can easily be found with search, then yeah it might get closed rather quickly. Doesn't make SO a toxic community by any means.
> If someone really believes that Stack Overflow is toxic then they should back it up with actual data and not hysterical and slanderous remarks.
It's poor form to call a woman's opinion "hysterical". There are other words that can convey a similar meaning without the heaps of sexist baggage that "hysteria" has historically implied. I suggest "inflammatory" here.
It's pretty telling that of the few comments on medium, two are actually people from SO trying to distance themselves from OP's "challenge".
> What is it about minorities that makes you believe they have less propensity to make the donation? That’s blatantly racist. If you know you are going to win $10k, then it shouldn’t matter to you. I’ll be happy to lower this to $100 in 6 months if nobody makes a submission.
That attitude is arguably more toxic than the typical Stack Overflow comment.
I would actually agree that there won't be many poor/minority people participating, but that has more to do with the challenge itself, not the fee. Poor people buy a lot of lottery tickets, particularly when the chance of winning is high. The issue here is that the chances of winning are not high, so the only reason someone would try and go after the prize would be to prove a point, and spending a lot of time and effort to prove a point like this one is a luxury many people don't have.
The comments from SO were, unfortunately, strawmen arguments. They apparently indulge in self-flagellation to appeal to the loudest.
I think it would be better if the SO team said something assertive along the lines of "No, we are not a toxic wasteland, but we have problems ..."
I’m at a conference between sessions, and there are small groups of people standing around, discussing the latest developments at breakneck speed. Back and forth. Talking a mile a minute. Saying half an idea out loud, and letting others fill in the blanks. Tons of jargon and inside references I don’t understand. I squeeze into one of the larger circles, and I would like to join the conversation, at least to understand what they are talking about, and perhaps add something to the conversation, if I can. I finally see an opening, and ask a question. Each person in the group is suddenly silent and stares at me for a few seconds. Finally one person says, “RTFM noob”. Everyone stifles a laugh, and the conversation picks up where it left off.
Count the number of “posts” in this example. Hundreds, or maybe low thousands. How many were toxic? One. Doing the math… Yeah. That’s much less than 10%.
Does this feel toxic to me? Oh yeah. Does it feel toxic to everyone else? Some would say yes. Some would agree with you and say, “No. This does not feel like a toxic wasteland to me. I’ll admit, there’s a small amount of toxic discussion, but at least it’s much less toxic than other conferences I have attended.”
My point is that you can have a forum where less than 10% of the comments are toxic, and yet that forum can feel very toxic to some of the people. So your 10% challenge does not prove anything.
The reason 10% was set as a threshold is that many people actually believe it to be higher than that. 10% is an absurdly high number of toxic posts and the real number is going to be far lower. I value authentic statements with accurate data to the highest degree.
I hope that we can get some real research on this topic with more accurate data which can only help to improve outcomes.
But even 1% toxic comments correctly still makes it a toxic wasteland to the people who have been on the receiving end of those toxic comments, and to those who don't enjoy seeing others treated like that.
I am not denying anyone's personal experience or that there isn't a problem. I am rejecting the claim that SO, as a whole, is a toxic wasteland.
Dead Comment
Oh, the tragedy!
She completely ignores that it's more disrespectful to waste the readers time with small talk before a question. If she wrote an FAQ, would she write an FAQ like this:
Q: Hello HSBC, I hope you're well this Friday afternoon. I was wondering what your phone number is.
A: Hello dear customer. Happy Friday to you too! We would love for you to call us. We always appreciate talking to customers about their banking. It's XXX-XXXXXX.
Q: Hello HSBC, I hope you're well this Friday afternoon. I was wondering what your phone opening hours are.
A: Hello dear customer. Happy Friday to you too! We would love for you to call us. We always appreciate talking to customers about their banking. We'll be ready for your call between XX and YY Mon-Sun.
So that's what a non-"toxic inhumane wasteland[…]shaming[…]…excluding women and people of color" would look like?