Programmers.SE and the Summer of Love

Question

Programmers.SE, we need to talk.

We've had a rough couple of years, what with being originally a place to ask anything and everything and having to shape up. I get that it's annoying to still see off-topic question or questions that are unanswerable day in and day out.

But that's no excuse for the excessively rude and offensive comments and answers that currently happen on questions like these. Questions like that aren't great: they're probably off-topic. But when we have users with literally thousands of reputation leaving comments like the now-deleted:

No thanks, I'm not your [expletive deleted].

And answers like this that link to extremely condescending and overtly hostile GIFs like these, we have completely lost our way.

This isn't an isolated incident, either: hostile comments and answers like these happen all the time, and what appears to be increasing frequency, from people with enough reputation to know better:

• If I had a quarter for every time I've seen posts like this, I wouldn't need my job. Son, I suggest you learn to program if you want to create one.
• A young, good looking developer could always work as a stripper but even then it is not a surefire way. (+2)
• this is a rant ( there is not answerable question ) by someone with an inflated ego at best, and completely off topic (+5)
• There really isn't a question here, if under the thinly veiled bias and flamebait there is actually a small semblance of a real question then it not constructive and inviting of debate. And besides security being a non-issue - You keep believing that and high price consultants will be making bank for a long time cleaning up the mess. (+3)
• IMHO, if indeed it was asked like you quote it, this is a stupid question, and that should be the correct answer.
• nice rant, now - where is the question? (+1)
• Answer that links to LMGTFY and Guru.com (+1)
• Anything wrong with Google today? "Javadoc for C++" brings excellent results. (+3)

Let me be clear: we make the internet a worse place when stuff like this happens. We make our site look like trash.

Please, stop it. If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything. Vote to close, flag, down-vote, or leave a polite comment explaining to the user where they went wrong and just move on. If you find yourself unable to resist leaving a snarky or hostile comment on a question or answer you don't like, I humbly suggest you do what I did: take a break from the site. It'll still be here when you come back.

More reading:

• Kicking off the Summer of Love
• Etiquette for posting civil and informative comments
• What Are Some Examples of Good "Guiding Comments" to Leave Users To Help Understand The Site?

Answer 1

Responding negatively to those folks who copy paste their homework assignments is just a waste of time.

These people don't care how you react; they're looking for the one guy that will actually do their homework for them (some people will). Consequently, your negative comment will have no effect on the OP, and will only succeed in irritating your fellow community members and alienating new visitors to the site.

A better response is to downvote the question, and cast a moderator flag with a custom explanation, like this:

Request for speedy deletion: this question is a copy-paste of a homework assignment, with no effort on the part of the OP to do the assignment himself.

_{As an example, I cast a flag with this exact wording on the copy/paste homework assignment originally linked. Yannis deleted it (see his answer).}

Answer 2

Thank you for bring this up on meta.

I am constantly seeing rude, snarky, condescending, and even hostile comments like these all over Programmers, and appreciate you taking the time to bring this issue to everyone's attention. Its not all users, but its enough users to make a noticeable difference in the site.

I couldn't agree more with this

If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything. Vote to close, flag, down-vote, or leave a polite comment explaining to the user where they went wrong and just move on.

If you're actually interested in helping the user understand their problem so they can correct it, that's fine. But if you want to comment just to make a point and never see the question again, refrain from commenting altogether.

In addition, here's another bit of advice stolen from Arquade's Meta post on rude comments:

How should one react to rude comments?

Don't engage. Don't upvote the rude comment. Remember even if a rude comment is funny to you it may be irritating to others. Telling off the rude user will only make matters worse. If the rude comment also says something useful (e.g. "Hey stupid butt, your question is off topic") consider adding a polite comment that contains constructive information instead and flag the rude comment for removal.

And a comment below explaining why you don't upvote rude comments:

"Don't upvote the rude comment." I feel this is really important. When we do that, we're pretty much giving tacit approval to whatever has been posted and sending the message that the community approves of this type of behavior

The majority of people I see posting questions on here are asking for help, and I hate seeing them turned away with sarcasm, rudeness, and a condescending or elitist attitude. I don't think SE would succeed if it wasn't for the millions of people that volunteer their time to help others solve their problems, and having these sort of comments all over the site, with frequent upvotes, is a good way to make volunteers think this site is not for them, and to leave the site.

Also stolen from Arqade's post:

Is there anything I can do to get rid of rude comments?

Just flag them; there's a little flag icon to the left of a comment. Click it and select "rude or offensive" in the menu that pops up.

The comment will be flagged for moderator attention, a moderator can remove the comment if they agree the post is rude/offensive. However if 3 or more users total flag the same comment as rude, it will automatically be deleted (see this comment for the formula). If the comment is very high scoring it might take a couple extra flags to automatically delete, but it only takes 3 flags to delete most comments.

Note that nothing bad can happen to you or even the poster of the rude comment when you flag. These flags are anonymous. By flagging a single comment you're not getting anyone into trouble, you're just helping keep the site a clean, civil place. If you feel someone is being persistently and problematically rude, flag one of their posts/comments (or one of your own posts) with an "other" flag and explain the situation; a moderator can privately contact the user about persistent rudeness.

tl;dr

• If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all
• Don't upvote rude comments
• If you see rude comments, flag them as rude/offensive for removal

Answer 3

TL;DR: "Summer of Love" tries to solve not simply the wrong problem (very rare really bad comments are already self-policed well enough by community, and mildly rough ones more likely than not apply to content that is bad and should be deleted in the first place); but aims to offend and punish people who are trying to solve the right problem (Q&A vampires). If you want to solve the problem of people posting "We don't do homework" comments, the only sustainable solution is to contain/eliminate the content asking to do homework.

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I will try to do something which IMHO @Robert Harvey tried to allude to.

There is a reason why some people feel strongly negatively about people posting "Do my (home)?work for me" "I didn't bother with any effort myself" questions.

Moreover, some people (myself included) feel that such questions (or more importantly, Q&A vampires who produce them) are a significant negative - not just to SO/PSE site, but to, as Joel likes to put it, "Better internet" - or more specifically, "better life and work experience to genuine software developers". They are a LOT bigger negative than even the mildly rude "LMGTFY" or "What have you done" comments.

• Please note that I don't advocate outright crude language or "you are stupid" type insults. But most of the huffing and puffing issued by those pushing for "Summer of Love" seems to be over relatively mild comments only offensive to those looking very hard to be offended.

  In the grand scheme of things, "Here's my homework copy/pasted" is a lot more evil than "We don't do homework for people" comment; while the actually problematic "You are dumb/imbecile" is a very rare occurrence that already doesn't stand much of a chance of not being deleted shortly.

Why are they are a LOT bigger negative?

Giving those Q&A vampires an ability to leech off of the community allows them to inflate their grades in school - frequently (given their skill) enough to allow them to graduate with CS degree they don't qualify for. I've interviewed enough of them.

Then, when they get hired as cheap resource by management, they create significant drain on life, time, effort and soul of those of us who are forced to "team up" with them; when it takes more time to explain every single task to them than to do it yourself; and any failure to "help them succeed" is seen by senior management as your failure, not theirs. And they always look JUST competent enough to avoid the sack, since SO allows them to "do their work" (by outsourcing it) well enough to justify their comparatively low salary.

Those of you who only work in a small company/startup may not necessarily grok this problem. Those who work for a large company more likely will.

Answer 4

I think you, and a lot of the others focused on the "summer of love," are suffering from confirmation bias. You believe there is a problem with rudeness, so you go out of your way to find it. There is always going to be a handful of rude people among the many, nothing can be done to stop that. This "rudeness epidemic" is something that should be handled by the moderators on a per user basis, creating some big community with hunt of rudeness will not end well.

Answer 5

What kind reaction would you expect to a post looking like this?

This question would surely be considered off-topic, but... A friend of mine who lives in France is going to marry soon. And we (his friends) are looking for a nice place to make a geek party somewhere in Central Europe. If someone has had an experience like this please let us know.

Downvote, close-vote, flag for deletion? Yeah I did all that, ^{yeah post closed, flag is marked helpful} now guess what?

Guess what? Post still hangs there, right at the front page. Guess what? it even attracted an upvote. Next thing would probably be some kind soul going to suggest something helpful in comments.

You know, I spend some time at Programmers, studying questions and answers. I learn a lot and where possible, I try to teach others by answering, I gain a reasonably high rep and I am proud of that.

I use every opportunity to refer colleagues to particular Programmers questions that relate to our day job, especially when there are my answers ^{(for comparison I rarely did so with programming community I participated in prior to SE)}. By doing so, I hope they get impressed by my contribution and in particular with the fact that it is done in high-quality, high standard,

professional looking environment

 
Now, next guy I point to some valuable answer, reads it, gets impressed, clicks QUESTIONS to see what else is there and what they see is...

looking for a nice place to make a geek party

 
Would you expect me to complain seeing snarky comments on a visible post like that.

Give me a break. Give me a freaking break.

The guy I mention above -- that colleague I pointed to some good answer -- would better see that community has low tolerance for garbage like that.

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I would sure worry about snarky / unprofessional stuff in reasonably (even remotely) appropriate posts - even downvoted, even not too high quality - exactly for the reasons explained above. I want others I refer to Programmers to see it following high professional standards. In that sense, your heads-up would be helpful if it was accompanied with relevant examples. But it isn't.

Ultra low quality posts used as examples here are whole another game to me. These posts damage site image no matter if there are snarky comments there or not. Such posts should be quickly deleted.

All eight example questions that were referred to since revision 6 are currently removed. If you worry about snarky comments in posts like that, well the real solution is simply to delete these posts - the sooner the better. Whatever comments are there, will be deleted along the way, making it not an issue.

Answer 6

I'd like to suggest that the most ubiquitous excessively rude comment on Stack Exchange is built into the software itself: It's branding someone's honest attempt at soliciting help to improve their programming skills as "not constructive" simply because it doesn't fit an increasingly (and, let's face it, unintuitively) tight set of rules about the desired scope of questions on the site.

The most context-appropriate definition for constructive that Webster's gives is "promoting improvement or development." Which is a perfect description of what any newcomer who comes here to ask a question is looking to do. To respond to someone who came here because they feel they need help by immediately shutting down their question and branding it as "not constructive" is an incredibly brusque slap in the face.

And the delicious irony is that this rather harsh label largely serves as a catch-all phrase for a whole host of reasons that are not actually the same thing - the question is too open-ended, the question is scoped too broadly, the question is poorly worded so nobody's quite sure what's being asked - is not constructive. (And what it's almost never used to flag is questions that don't have anything constructive about them.) It provides the person with a slap on the wrist, but little useful feedback about what could be done to improve their attempt at asking for help.

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I can think of a few things to suggest that might help.

First is to break add a few more labels. Right now the "not constructive" flag is serving as a catch-all for a whole host of completely orthogonal complaints, such as "too open-ended". This would help cut down on the use of a phrase that can have rather insulting connotations, and also generally increase the constructiveness of the feedback provided by the type of flag.

Another would be to require someone to include an explanation, in their own words, of why they chose to flag the comment in that way. For preference, some constructive advice on how to improve the question could also be included. At the very least, this might help cut down on how frequently people like me come to the Meta site to air their genuine confusion about why all these questions are getting closed.

Finally, what about encouraging people to first try advising the questioner about how to improve their question before flagging it? This site's primary focus is Q&A, and to that extent it seems like it should mostly be here for the newbies, and to that extent being able to flag a question without really having to engage or the person who's asking it first seems to run counter to what the site's culture should really be about. And the more skilled people are presumably mostly be here to share their skill with others. One extremely useful skill to share is how best to seek advice.