Pontifications

  • There’s no culture of being human at Stack Overflow.
  • Instead it’s people who respond off the cuff as tersely and as quickly as possible with as little emotion as possible.
  • Online, terse communication is great for technical stuff but not so great for being human and online community. Over-communicating that you aren’t a jerk is the only way to this and this is de-incentivized by SO.
  • And the duplicate hammer at SO is equally terse and inhumane
  • Unfortunately real life doesn’t work that way; you have to communicate and explain things to people and that takes time.
  • And often when you learning you ask imprecise questions but then people in real life help you make them more precise instead of greeting you with derision and hostility. SO has the potential to educate people on asking better question but instead rewards people for being hostile to “bad” questions.
  • A really good answer takes time in SO or anywhere else in life.
  • Many regular users on SO are jerks towards people trying to learn (and whose first language might not be English).
  • Fortunately there are good answers written by great people on SO but almost every good question with a good answer has many other unacceptably rude and impolite answers from many not so great users on SO.
  • This blog post was inspired by Jon Skeet’s Stack Overflow Culture

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