Please support Stack Overflow moderators strike against AI content policy

[Anders Melander 1783]

It's like watching a slow-motion car crash. Pretty fascinating, really.

[Brandon Staggs 278]

4 hours ago, Dalija Prasnikar said:

Additionally, the results of "formatting" go beyond mere formatting because AI completely rewrites the post including text and code adding its hallucinations on top. It is beyond horrible and harmful.  

Wow.

 

I can't wait to see how productive people are using all these AI tools built on infinite AI training feedback loops. 

[Sherlock 663]

There goes another enshittification. And we all get to watch it live and in color.

 

[Attila Kovacs 629]

3 hours ago, Brandon Staggs said:

I can't wait to see how productive people are using all these AI tools built on infinite AI training feedback loops. 

Why are you so obsessively interested in what others are doing? Why don't you go where you feel good? 😄

[Anders Melander 1783]

6 hours ago, Sherlock said:

There goes another enshittification. And we all get to watch it live and in color.

Wow. Excellent article (but a bit long). Thanks.

 

I particularly liked this one at the end:

Quote

Enshittification truly is how platforms die. That's fine, actually. We don't need eternal rulers of the internet.

 

[Fr0sT.Brutal 900]

On 6/16/2023 at 5:44 PM, Sherlock said:

There goes another enshittification. And we all get to watch it live and in color.

IMHO Tiktok has been a pile of shit from the very beginning so nothing is changing. It just rots.

However, I agree that most of services degrade. Google's dark patterns of marking ads, Facebook's spamming with endless useless crap. Local taxi app has integrated food delivery (with the price of 50% slowdown) - who the hell needs pizza popups when he wants to move from point A to point B??

Anyway I'm glad to learn the right term. It should be a RHCP song : " It's understood that Hollywood sells Enshittification "

Edited June 19, 2023 by Fr0sT.Brutal

[Lars Fosdal 1792]

I just did some deshittification and perma-deleted my Reddit account.

It followed my Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat accounts. I never was on TikTok.

 

Enough with the corporate anti-social media.

I'd rather be an anti-social among other anti-socials on a truly social platform like Mastodon.

[Lars Fosdal 1792]

https://www.wired.com/story/stack-overflow-gender-problem/ and there is this... 
Can the moderation be a factor when women, minorities and non-native english speakers are put off by SO?

Quote

FOR 15 YEARS, Stack Overflow has been the main hub for discussions of computer programming and development. It’s where users who are facing a tricky conundrum or are hitting a wall in their code can come to ask questions of fellow users. And historically, it has been a male-dominated space. In the organization’s annual survey of its users conducted in 2022, 92 percent of respondents identified as male, and three-quarters as white or European. The platform acknowledged then that it has “considerable work to do.”

 

But in 2023, Stack Overflow’s survey, published on June 13, stripped out questions about gender and race. “I kind of would understand if they decided not to ask about people, but they still ask geography, age, developer type, years of coding, and a bunch of things about salary and education,” says Sasha Luccioni, a member of the board of Women in Machine Learning, an organization lobbying to increase awareness of, and appreciation for, women in the tech sector. “But not gender. That’s really screwed up.”

 

[Dalija Prasnikar 1396]

2 minutes ago, Lars Fosdal said:

https://www.wired.com/story/stack-overflow-gender-problem/ and there is this... 
Can the moderation be a factor when women, minorities and non-native english speakers are put off by SO?

That is complete nonsense. Company loves analyzing their surveys by skewing context and seeing things that are not there. There is no barrier for entry for anyone based on who they are. Anyone can be as anonymous as they like or present themselves as they please. There are moderators with names UserXXXX.

[Lars Fosdal 1792]

Yet, the 2022 survey statistics shows that less than 1 in 10 of the responding users are female.

[Uwe Raabe 2057]

Does anyone have gender statistics for this forum at hand? What is the percentage of female users here?

[Dalija Prasnikar 1396]

30 minutes ago, Lars Fosdal said:

Yet, the 2022 survey statistics shows that less than 1 in 10 of the responding users are female.

I am not questioning the number, but the explanation is moot. 

 

I have noticed that US folks (companies) have some strange desire to treat anyone outside of white male group as some sort of victims, which is both insulting and is not based in reality. I don't know, maybe women in US feel differently, but again, that has nothing to do with SO and moderation, but general culture. I have noticed that some people try to play victim card purely because it will give them advantage, and maybe some even think that is so, but that is something they need to fix on personal level.

 

Also one of the explanations for low participation of women on SO is that they are afraid, but maybe they are just more thorough in their research and are better in solving problems on their own. I certainly used SO for years before I joined, but not because I was afraid, but simply because I didn't have the need to ask any questions. And when I joined I did that because I wanted to leave comment under one question about some high DPI bug, but then I needed 50 rep to do that, so I started answering...

 

Point is, that anything is possible and it depends on each individual. Painting everyone with the same brush based on some completely unrelated characteristic is pure nonsense.

Edited June 20, 2023 by Dalija Prasnikar

[Lars Fosdal 1792]

17 minutes ago, Uwe Raabe said:

percentage of female users here?

Quite low.  Not many female developers using our ancient tool, it seems.

We need more women in IT to end the boy's club attitudes that exist in many places.

[Dalija Prasnikar 1396]

17 minutes ago, Uwe Raabe said:

Does anyone have gender statistics for this forum at hand? What is the percentage of female users here?

Probably rather low. Maybe a handful, unless we count all the Italian guys named Andrea and Danielle as women, too  (PS those names are female in Croatia and it took me a while to find they are male names in Italy)

[Lars Fosdal 1792]

Someone needs to make a ChatGPT SO front-end that helps you ask questions that are acceptable to the moderators of SO 😛

As for ChatGPT generated answers... I don't mind those as long as they are verified to be correct before publishing.  Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case.

[Dalija Prasnikar 1396]

1 minute ago, Lars Fosdal said:

Someone needs to make a ChatGPT SO front-end that helps you ask questions that are acceptable to the moderators of SO 😛

They just tried that and it was complete disaster https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425162/we-are-seeking-functional-feedback-for-the-formatting-assistant

[Lars Fosdal 1792]

Quote

We realize from your responses that there are a lot of things that can be improved

AI is not easy, for sure.  

[Fr0sT.Brutal 900]

51 minutes ago, Lars Fosdal said:

Can the moderation be a factor when women, minorities and non-native english speakers are put off by SO?

I consider these numbers just another reason to buzz about "offended minorities", they did the right decision removing these properties. Guys (AFAIK this word relates to all genders in English?), let's face the truth - vast majority of coders are male. "It's a fact you can't deny". Tech university where I studied had about 1/5 of girls. At work there are ~1/4 of female coders. I'm sure there's no any kind of discrimination - girls, in mass, just not interested in tech stuff. However, of those who do there are really smart ones (and smarter than me :)).

I think it's just natural effect. Just like, say, from Norwegian miners 99% are likely white male (IDK in fact, probably nowadays only robots work there? :))

Edited June 20, 2023 by Fr0sT.Brutal

[Fr0sT.Brutal 900]

13 minutes ago, Lars Fosdal said:

We need more women in IT to end the boy's club attitudes that exist in many places.

Funny fact. A couple of local IT forums where I actively chatted were quite severe to noobs and dumb questions. And I know some guys (male guys) were creating female-named accounts just to get more gentle relation and receive answer even if the questions were dumb/elementary/googleable.

[Lars Fosdal 1792]

2 minutes ago, Fr0sT.Brutal said:

Norwegian miners 99% are likely white male

No idea. We don't really have that many mines these days. However, women can drive heavy machinery as good as or better than men.

https://forskning.no/svalbard-partner-historie/kull-karer-og-kvinnfolk/1023284 informs

Quote

There were strict regulations from the 1860s that prohibited women from working in the mines. In Svalbard, it was only at the end of the 1970s that women were allowed to participate in this type of work.

 

[Fr0sT.Brutal 900]

3 minutes ago, Lars Fosdal said:

There were strict regulations from the 1860s that prohibited women from working in the mines

And that restriction could have been caused by the care of women's health. Conditions in mines are really heavy even for strong men.

[Lars Fosdal 1792]

4 minutes ago, Fr0sT.Brutal said:

restriction could have been caused by the care of women's health

The health risks are the same for men and women in that environment. Even when pregnant.

Apart from the ability to exert physical strength (not including my niece who is a strongwoman national champion), women are no less fit than men to work in difficult or demanding enviroments.

 

I also have a machine-engineering niece, and another one that is currently doing her master on material techology.

But, as always, we are drifting - no, racing - away from the core topic, and I am (as often) to blame.

 

[Dalija Prasnikar 1396]

8 minutes ago, Fr0sT.Brutal said:

And that restriction could have been caused by the care of women's health. Conditions in mines are really heavy even for strong men.

Yes, there are definitely some jobs that are not meant for women. I am not saying that there are no women that can endure it, but in general jobs that require physical strength and stamina are not a good fit for women.

It is a safety issue as they can more easily get hurt and could lack strength in critical moments and it is not just about them as there may be situations where others working with them can get hurt, too.

[David Heffernan 2345]

48 minutes ago, Dalija Prasnikar said:

I have noticed that US folks (companies) have some strange desire to treat anyone outside of white male group as some sort of victims, which is both insulting and is not based in reality.

The lived reality in the US for many groups is very different from that of white males. Prejudice doesn't mean everybody in a group has the same (worse) experience. It means that overall the experience of one group is significantly worse than others. 

 

37 minutes ago, Fr0sT.Brutal said:

Guys (AFAIK this word relates to all genders in English?), let's face the truth - vast majority of coders are male. "It's a fact you can't deny". Tech university where I studied had about 1/5 of girls. At work there are ~1/4 of female coders. I'm sure there's no any kind of discrimination - girls, in mass, just not interested in tech stuff.

"I'm sure". How are you sure? 

 

8 minutes ago, Dalija Prasnikar said:

Yes, there are definitely some jobs that are not meant for women. I am not saying that there are no women that can endure it, but in general jobs that require physical strength and stamina are not a good fit for women.

It is a safety issue as they can more easily get hurt and could lack strength in critical moments and it is not just about them as there may be situations where others working with them can get hurt, too.

This is ridiculous and quite wrong. If this were to be true then it would follow that all men were stronger than all women. Patently not true.

[Dalija Prasnikar 1396]

2 minutes ago, Lars Fosdal said:

Apart from the ability to exert physical strength (not including my niece who is a strongwoman national champion), women are no less fit than men to work in difficult or demanding enviroments.

I am sorry, but that is just not true. Women are generally physically weaker than men of same constitution and weight. I am talking about muscle strength, lung capacity, stamina. Again, I am not saying that there are no women that could work in some extreme conditions, but I think this is the wrong place to push equality. Imagine an accident in the mine, where men would be in better position to survive and also to help others.