![]() Initiatives like the Summer of Love, the closing overhaul, revising the “Be Nice” Policy, and our coaching experiment all came from our desire to build a place where everyone feels welcome. We’ve struggled to put our money where our <3 was.Ĭaring about this isn’t new to us. All these experiences add up to making Stack Overflow a very unwelcoming place for far too many. Or sometimes, everything actually goes well, and they get an answer! So they thank the poster… only to be told that on Stack Overflow, “please” and “thank you” are considered noise. They get an answer… but the answerer gets scolded for “encouraging ‘low-quality’ questions.” They get downvoted, but don’t know why, or called lazy for not speaking English fluently. They get snarky or condescending comments for not explaining what they’ve tried (that didn’t work). Too often, someone comes here to ask a question, only to be told that they did it wrong. But it’s built on mechanics and norms that push people away if they don’t know the ins-and-outs. It was one of Joel and Jeff’s earliest decisions. Stack Overflow is intended to be an inclusive place where every programmer can participate. And a lot of devs feel like Stack Overflow is an intimidating, unwelcoming place. When someone tells you how they feel, you can pack up your magnifying glass and clue kit, cuz that’s the answer. Feelings have no “technically correct.” They’re just what the feeler is telling you. We sent mixed messages over the years about whether we’re a site for “experts” or for anyone who codes.īut how do we really know that too many developers experience Stack Overflow as an unwelcoming or hostile place? Well, the nice thing about problems that relate to how people feel is that finding the truth is easy. We failed to give our regular users decent tools to review content and easily find what they’re looking for. We trained users to tell other users what they’re doing wrong, but we didn’t provide new folks with the necessary guidance to do it right. The real problem isn’t the community - it’s us: Sure, a few are… just generous, I guess? But our active users regularly express their frustration that we haven’t done more to make outsiders feel more welcome. The majority of them are generous and kind. Now, that’s not because most Stack Overflow contributors are hostile jerks. Our employees and community have cared about this for a long time, but we’ve struggled to talk about it publicly or to sufficiently prioritize it in recent years. ![]() Too many people experience Stack Overflow¹ as a hostile or elitist place, especially newer coders, women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups.But sometimes, loving something means caring enough to admit that it has a problem.
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