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Stackoverflow shotbot4/15/2023 ![]() Experience was varied but our median employee classified 6.5% comments of the comments they saw as unfriendly. Stack Overflow employees classified comments from random Stack Overflow posts into three categories: Fine, Unfriendly, and Abusive. We started by going to see the problem for ourselves. The only remaining option is to work on the comments themselves. We don’t believe that there are villains to expel here, so suspending or banning users isn’t the answer. You cannot invalidate someone’s lived experiences. Arguments that end up at “What does it matter how you feel, I wasn’t intending to be dismissive” or “You can’t be trying to help, not with that tone” don’t get us anywhere. The solution to these issues isn’t to argue about circumstance or intent. It was the most common coded response to “What do you find most frustrating or unappealing about using Stack Overflow?” in a recent survey at ~10% of respondents. While it is hard to measure how many could-have-been-good-contributors have been turned away by this experienced unfriendliness, we do know it is a common piece of feedback. In aggregate, passersby could be more impacted by an unfriendly comment than a question asker despite having no control over the post or its quality. A comment will be read by it’s “intended” recipient once or twice, but dozens or hundreds of readers will read it over time. These readers are often neglected in discussions, probably because they are relatively invisible, but there are lots of them. More insidious and arguably more important is the impact on future readers of these comments. These people have already made the scary leap of trying to contribute, but these sorts of comments can easily convince them that was a mistake. The recipient of an unfriendly comment bears the brunt of its impact. These are people earnestly trying to help others, even if their tone is off. Most of the time, it doesn’t appear that commenters are actively trying to make their comment condescending, dismissive, or any of the other subtle variations of unwelcoming we see. The problem is the tone the reader experiences. The problem with unwelcoming comments is rarely the commenter or the intent of their comments (remember that bigotry and harassment, while definitely unwelcoming, are a completely different category). There are more comments than almost anything else in the system, and accordingly, there’s a lot of space for these signals. We know (from personal experience, surveys, and interviews) that making the leap to being a contributor is intimidating and scary and it stands to reason that every little “you won’t be welcome here” signal makes it even scarier. Unfriendly comments are an issue in our system because of the effect that their tone has on their recipient’s and future readers’ willingness to contribute to Stack Overflow. When these subsystems have issues, they need-and deserve-fixes. All of these subsystems come together to help the overall system fulfill its purpose. No part of the system is here just for funsies. These subsystems are things like voting, reputation, the ask flow, comments, Meta, closing, badges, flagging, review queues, nurturing new contributors, and so on. Stack Overflow is a big system, made of many subsystems, intended to help people get answers to their programming questions. In this post, we’re going to update you on the work we’ve done in this area over the last two years.Īs developers, we’re inclined to think in terms of systems. We’ve written about some of our work attempting to address these subtly unfriendly comments and recently our community has asked us about it. Some unfriendliness is more subtle though, and these comments don’t always get flagged away. Things like hate speech and bigotry are infrequent, and they don’t last long before they’re flagged by our community and handled by our moderators. Sometimes comments on Stack Overflow are very obviously unwelcoming, and we’re good at removing those. We all want Stack Overflow to be a welcoming and friendly place. ![]() □ Hello! We’re Jason Punyon and Kevin Montrose, long time Stack Overflow developers and the founding members of the Data Science Team.
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