You completely missed this point. To quote the article:

> Many people, especially those in marginalized groups do feel less welcome. We know because they tell us.

Hanlon doesn't claim to know why the marginalized groups feel unwelcome. He doesn't even claim that the root cause is a bias of action -- conscious or subconscious -- on the part of SO's users or staff. What he said was these groups report at a higher than average rate the feeling of being unwelcome. That is a simple fact, and can only be dismissed at the cost of saying those people's opinions are not worth addressing. Acknowledging it, saying "maybe if we get creative we can improve it", is not virtue signaling, it's the most fundamental requirement to:

> shift from “don’t be an asshole” to “be welcoming.”

As a non-white I call shenanigans. My non-whiteness is very obvious in my SO profile pic and not once in 8 years of active use of the site has it ever come up, nor have I perceived being treated any differently. Also, no one ever asked me if I felt “unwelcome” nor is there a button to click for that, so I don’t know where this really comes from...

Finding material that is off topic but preserved for some reason is often cited as a negative experience. The "I searched for XYZ and it was closed as not constructive" (note: not constructive hasn't been a valid close reason for several years).

This brings up the question of "should that material be findable on Stack Overflow if people are having such poor experiences when finding it?" and "are people finding the closed questions of yesteryear a disincentive to participate today?"

The finding things closed as a duplicate sign post isn't working as intended with redirecting them to the proper question - because when there is an answer to the question (that may or may not properly answer it) it prevents the logged out user from getting redirected to the duplicate.

The negative experience is that the interesting/useful questions/answers aren't rewarded.

It's bad that they are closed with harsh and false ("not constructive" on some of the most useful question there was...). It would be even worse if they were entirely removed so we couldn't find the answer.

This particular argument is really bad IMHO. OP has a point - nobody knows who you are. That means if some people feel they are treated worse it is due to their own perception. After all, objectively they are not treated worse then everybody else. Which to me sounds more like a bias in their perception. They may have that perception for a reason, but that does not seem to me to be something attributable to SO.

Is it a fact? I'd like to see the evidence behind that claim, so I asked for that: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/366692/41071.

But not marginalized groups also tell them. Now the question is who tells more? I think marginalized, because they read all these blogs and tweets about being opressed, shift their selective focus to minor injustices, and feel empowered to complain. The SJWs are the complainers, they are the warriors, that's why you hear from them more than from anybody else. They have the momentum of complaining, so they are more likely to continue to complain. I'm certain most of them are addicted to complaining and will never stop, no matter what. Also, minorities have higher social status within those ranks, and therefore more likely to be SJW.

So it's not necessarily Stack Overflow's fault at all.

From that single datum, you've concluded that this is because marginalized groups must over-complain, and in fact, you claim to have achieved perfect certainly that most members of marginalized groups have an addiction to complaining and will never stop, and therefore the only sensible course is to completely disregard any survey results saying that marginalized groups feel particularly bad about anything.

That's a pretty strong conclusion from hearing about a brief allusion to the results of a survey you didn't see. Your argument says a lot about you and very little otherwise.

That's an anstoundingly lack of emapthy and self-awareness. Also extra points for the unironic use of SJW.

That's a legit question: If people don't even know what gender you are/what color your skin is, can they actually be intentionally racist/sexist towards you?

Which makes me wonder if the actual wrong turn we took was making social media as prevalent as it is today. 20 years ago people on the www were really careful about sharing personal details. People liked their anonymity, there was equality in anonymity! Personal details were only exchanged with those deemed trustworthy enough after enough positive interaction.

But these days anonymity is nearly criminalized, while in some circles open self-display on social media is borderline worshipped as it has become the modern equivalent of "making it big on TV".

Somewhere in there is a relation between crappy TV casting shows, which most people only watch to see jurors be mean to the applicants, and social media. Nowadays social media are our modern TV casting shows and everybody can participate in being the nasty juror putting applicants down.

Note: I know that Stack Overflow ain't considered social media, but these days it feels like these dynamics are pretty much prevalent everywhere.

We sold that out when our Github account, SO profile, email address proved to be useful for finding jobs or improving our social status.

To this day it just feels weird writing people, I only know from the meatspace (friends&family), there. It's such an utterly different MO compared to my usual Internet-interactions that I sometimes struggle how to express myself just because I actually know these people.

That's why I kinda liked having the Internet and meatspace firmly separated, since they started bleeding into each other it feels like everything has just gotten needlessly more complicated and hostile.

Hmm, why do you think intentionally is important in that sentence?

It wouldn't surprise me at all if making the site unfriendly towards newcomers affected minorities more. That seems... bad? And if so, anonymity wouldn't fix it.

It's funny how being results-oriented seems to be counterintuitive to many people whenever a discussion touches on morality. Somehow the issue of good intentions (or lack thereof) overrides everything else.

Not directly, but often indirectly since in such a situation it is common to assume you are a white male. That's a bit off-putting if you are not one, but you might put up with it rather than clarifying your gender/race if doing so opens you up to a risk of direct sexism/racism

Other people assuming you are like them and treating you the SAME as they would treat all the other SO members is literally the outcome we want isn’t it? We’re being treated equally.

But now people are being offended because they aren’t being treated differently based on information the other parties don’t have?

What?

I don’t think SO wants people to treat people the same by starting with the assumption that I am like you. I think they want the opposite. I think they want you to stop assuming things about the person you’re talking to altogether, and start baking that caution into your interactions.

On SO its likely not as bad as the rest of the net, but it'd be naive to assume its perfect: harassment aside, I imagine obviously female commentators get a hefty dose of mansplaining thrown their way

Fair enough if you call people out when they know something about the person they're interacting with. But you're suggesting people are prejudiced because they thought the wrong thing.

This identity politics bullshit is an anti-intellectual cancer. Truth is universal, race, gender, etc have nothing at all to do with it.

It bothers me that I basically have to pretend to be a dude on most of the internet because of assholes.

At least on the Internet, you can pretend, in the meatspace, you simply can't.

I also wouldn't call these people assholes, it might be convenient but imho it's needlessly vilifying people for simply behaving like they are expected to and how they've behaved for the longest time.

Because for the longest time, and in most places to this day, males are expected to initiate contact, if they are interested in a relationship with a female.

Now, one could argue that's outdated and "sexist", but that doesn't change the fact that large parts of our societies (and our behavior) are still shaped by these expectations. It's not that people want to be assholes, people simply don't want to be alone and for the longest time, the most common and accepted solution for that was for males to initiate contact and woo the females.

Sadly this is an angle on all this that too often gets ignored in favor of some simplified narrative where all these guys are just a bunch of misogynists who consider women their property or something like that. While these types do exist too, it just feels dishonest to frame this whole issue like that.

Because as a male the reality of the situation pretty much boils down to this: You are either proactive and approach people or... you stay alone. I'm not trying to dramatize here, I'm just trying to point something out that seems to be largely ignored in these kinds of discussions.

Not everybody is a socialite who constantly meets new people without any effort, heck for the longest time we've been told that female brains are explicitly better at socializing that than male brains (or is that considered sexist now too?). So what are males supposed to do in this situation? Just sit tight until a female approaches them? That's pretty much a "forever alone" sentence for the vast majority of males.

That's why at some point for many males this becomes a simple issue of game theory: You can't meet new females without approaching new females, the more new females you approach the higher the likelihood that you will end up with one of them.

As sad and sterile as it might sound, in the end, it often just boils down to "trying often enough" and it's been that way for the longest time and I'm pretty certain this is engrained in our nature to a certain degree. Millions of years of behavioral evolution don't just vanish in a matter of years.

"They" is a good compromise.

...and when they make Hot Network Questions, the influx of people from Stack Overflow is highly correlated with an immediate drop in the quality of answers and essentially the ruination of the question, to the point that several high rep users, myself included, have asked if we could opt out of HNQ as a concept.

Yes, people can hide these characteristics, but they shouldn't need to.

_No_ mechanism? Seriously? How about when the user is named "Jane Smith"? Or, heaven forbid, they actually use a PROFILE PICTURE with their ACTUAL FACE. Oh god the horror!

I, as a white male with a caucasian sounding name have the privilege of being able to use my actual name on the internet. Women that want to be taken seriously don't even have that choice.

Sure over time women figure out that anonymizing their gender online is a wise strategy, but how many brand new programming-enthusiasts are going to learn this when they have negative first experiences on the most popular Q&A platform for programmers? How many never return to contribute because of those negative experiences?

It's no wonder you can't go to SO and find women, they either aren't contributing or they have effectively hidden themselves among the ranks of the men.

Why would you say this with such conviction when you don't know anything about what the team is doing behind the scenes? They do yearly surveys that do include things like culture / minority status as well as questions about inclusion.

I can't help but feel like this is just another white male majority site jumping to shut down this type of discussion before it even starts.

An online community can’t possibly be less welcoming to women, for example... because it has screen names? Because people don’t express open disdain for women like they do for newbies? You don’t have to be an expert on this stuff to know not to rush to hasty conclusions, especially in the face of evidence.

Based on the fact that he did not share a bit of that data or any other kind of evidence. That's especially jarring on the Stack Overflow Blog, which is full of posts that are nothing but data.

It does not necessarily mean that there is no data, but it does make me suspicious.

OK, using that reasoning, what evidence do you have to support your statements? What evidence do you have that supports the reasoning quoted above?

I'd rather look at the merits. If I recognize a good idea, I'm going to signal that I'm on board with it, so virtue signaling in itself is, at worst, a bit gauche.

The reason I'd avoid making these things about social justice is that it's very hard to show that social justice as a concept actually works to promote comity. When you put things in terms of oppressor and victim, you deepen divisions rather than heal them. When you search for reparations and retribution, you have to harm people.

I see the above as just an argument to do nothing, usually (I can't speak about the parent's motives) made by the enemies of justice, such as the white supremacists, to suit their agenda.

Jordan Peterson is a good resource on this - he's studied it extensively and talks about it a lot. I'd recommend watching his lectures to anyone interested in learning about it.

> Because at the end of the day, we need to kill the 'brilliant jerk' archetype already.

We need to recognize that everyone shifts significantly towards the autistic side of the spectrum when they're online. You're looking at text, and trying to infer emotion from words, and do it quickly. That people are as good as they are reflects a fairly amazing amount of patience from the average person.

These "jerks" that we're going to brand intolerable and kick out are probably fairly decent people.

Honestly, most moderation systems would benefit hugely from a simple "please rewrite this post" feature.

Almost everyone on SO uses a variation of their real name. I suspect you are a smart enough person to know that that is far more than enough to engage in racial and sexual discrimination.

Note: A significant chunk of them, yes, but not almost everyone, as far as I know. Looking just at the front page right now, out of the 96 users, I see 7 users whose name begins with "user" (like "user2141351"), at least 13 who have names like "xyz" or "NRA" or "SSB" or "BmyGuest" or "saladi" etc... that's at least 20% of my sample.

I understand what you're saying, and while you're correct, it doesn't change the fact about how people feel in a community.

There are really two groups here: newer coders, and marginalized groups within our profession.

Newer coders are less confident, and when you see the types of responses you see on SO, you're less likely to want to participate - nobody likes being told that they're stupid or not working hard enough, as an example.

For marginalized groups - primarily women, people who aren't white, and the LGBT communities, they already have to deal with sexism, racism, homophobia, and other forms of discrimination in their daily lives. When you have to worry about hostility in general, trying to participate in a community that does have a reputation to being hostile is even more difficult and frustrating. The fact that you don't know who an SO user is unless they volunteer the information simply doesn't matter.

> Trying to make this about minorities feels like a desperate attempt to fit in with the 'social justice' sphere, and to virtue signal to people on sites like Twitter.

This isn't about trying to make it only about minorities, and the post doesn't give that impression. It is, however, about making sure that everyone feels welcome, and that has to include thinking about and understanding WHY minorities aren't feeling welcome, even if there isn't explicit discrimination against them on the site.

>But this isn't true.

What do you make of their statement that "Many people, especially those in marginalized groups do feel less welcome. We know because they tell us."?

Given your astonishingly ignorant response, I can bet dollars to donuts that you are not.

Stack Overflow allows people to use photographs in their profile.

You're saying that women and POC are not allowed to be themselves. That they cannot use features everyone else is free to use. That they must lie about who they are in order to participate on the Internet

> But this isn't true. No one knows anything about a user on Stack Overflow unless they explicitly announce it,

They don't say it out in the open, they contact the SO admins directly or through surveys.

Perhaps minorities already get enough abuse and hostility every day on meatspace, so they are less tolerant of even minor hostility over the Internet. Since they have a limited amount of fucks to give, so to speak, they are more likely to leave the site for good after an unpleasant interaction.

Think of minorities as the canary in the coal mine. They are more sensitive, so they start leaving the moment the environment starts to become toxic. Left unchecked, the toxicity will grow and push away everyone else too, so you can't just ignore them for being "snowflakes" or whatever.

Our culture encourages women and minorities to speak up. White men are expected to endure abuse in silence.

Consider how much attention complaints from women and minorities receive, and how little attention (and how much hostility) complaints from white men receive (unless those men are individually powerful, of course). People tend to repeat actions that are effective, so women and minorities learn to speak up, white men learn to keep their complaints to themselves.

Edit: I'd like to thank those who downvoted this comment for providing a live demonstration of the phenomenon.

Since we were not aware until today that minorities received more hostility on SO, that means users really don't know other users' gender and ethnicity, so it's not like anyone will call you a sissy girl for speaking up.

It's debatable whether women and minorities actually do receive more hostility on SO, they're more likely to speak up, or SO's management is simply more responsive to their complaints.

But it's pointless to debate things that don't and can't change what we choose to do. Notice that all three of your proposed hypothesis can't change the fact that SO isn't very welcoming and they want to change that.

Rather than ignoring or mocking complaints from white men, we could choose to listen.

I personally don't mind though. In my city many positive quality of life changes were made only after some disabled people complained. I benefit from those changes too, so I don't mind the delay as long as it eventually gets done.

And if, as is often the case, past complaints had little effect until a particularly favored interest group spoke up, it's also an opportunity to listen more effectively to people who may have been ignored.

> To the extent that marginalized groups have a different style of communication than what is expected at SO, they will be treated differently.

If you're in charge of a huge for-profit online community and your only source for demographic/marketing/public image information is your existing user profiles, you should probably start looking for a new line of work. There are many ways that they could find out what people in different demographic groups think of their service without even looking at their membership database.

StackOverflow has names and profile pictures. Users can choose not to have their own photo or name but some do and provides some identifiability. Though I agree about your general point that the primary and most obvious issue is with new users feeling less welcome than specific groups of people.

What they did say is that the general level of hostility leveled at all newcomers is something that users who are women and minorities frequently find unwelcoming and makes them feel uncomfortable about using stackoverflow at all.

Thank you for saying this. I'm all for welcoming people from all walks of life to the coding community. But who is SO to say these particular people have been demoralized when most of its users are anonymous.

Newbie coders asking stupid questions on SO and getting snarky answers -- mostly because they didn't take the five minutes to see if their question was already asked -- transcends race, sexual orientation, gender and nationality.

[1] https://gamingreinvented.com/nintendoarticles/no-the-gaming-...

???? There are names and profile pictures.

[1] https://gamingreinvented.com/nintendoarticles/no-the-gaming-...

He posted a HN comment that referenced an explicit link. That is not "personal." It's a publicly stated position, and one that sheds light on his true motivations on this subject.

I think this statement is disingenuous.

There's a spectrum of these behaviors; some are outright doxxing but most aren't, and there's widespread disagreement about what to call them. When I said "pursuing personal details" I was referring to this spectrum. "Extraneous details" or "history" (edit: added above) might have been more accurate, but this is not the important distinction.

On HN, we've learned that when one user follows another's trail and comes back with ammunition to discredit them with, it lowers the discussion quality in a way that bodes ill for the community. You can see that clearly in this case; when someone finds four different places to post like that, they've crossed into something we don't want to become a norm here.

Whether the details were public or not doesn't change much. The real issue is that this genre of online shaming/war does more harm than good to a community like HN, which is trying for a different value system, so it's better to just keep it out of here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html