This is a classic example of a publicity stunt based on the awful premise that people should be <i>happy</i> that Stack Overflow isn't more toxic. After all, on some places on the internet people openly talk about raping or killing people, so what's a little mean spirit and oppression on a tech help site?<p>What's more, the author has defined "toxic" in a way that guarantees a negotiation process <i>after</i> results are offered. They can simply sink the discussion by demanding that, "diversity of thought means I need a new Nazi and a hyper conservative anti-lgbt religious person on my panel. Surprise surprise, no one can agree on anything."<p>I seldom reach for this categorization off the bat, but given that this is a <i>classic</i> anti-debate tactic that I see all the time, I'm going to call it. This entire effort is disingenuous bullshit, and I flagged it hoping to avoid having to see more of this kind of bad logic and bad posting on the Hacker News main page.
This competition is a prosecutor's fallacy (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecutor%27s_fallacy" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecutor%27s_fallacy</a>), <i>especially</i> since the definition of "toxicity" in this problem is 100% arbitrary.<p>Also, about the required input fee:<p>> <i>I am offering a free $10,000 of my own money. If you really believe that you can win, then obviously $500 won’t deter you at all.</i><p>Since we're talking about statistical modeling, the rational argument would be that a person would only participate if expected value of winning the competition is greater than the input pot. A ~5% chance of winning, given the time investment and opportunity cost involved, isn't compelling enough to risk it. That's why Kaggle competitions are free.
I don't know how one would define toxicity for the purpose of this challenge, but I am certainly baffled as to how people accuse StackOverflow of being a 'toxic wasteland'.<p>Some people can be a bit curt or even rude with poorly worded or low-effort questions but I can't say that's something I see there in even 1 out of 25-50 questions I see.<p>I suspect that some people get frustrated when they first try to ask questions and get rebuffed because they didn't follow the rules of the site. If you hop on there asking open-ended opinion questions or asking something that can easily be found with search, then yeah it might get closed rather quickly. Doesn't make SO a toxic community by any means.
I disagree with the tweet about SO being a toxic wasteland, but OP really undermines his point by being so combative about it. Especially when he turns around and says stuff like:<p>> If someone really believes that Stack Overflow is toxic then they should back it up with actual data and not hysterical and slanderous remarks.<p>It's poor form to call a woman's opinion "hysterical". There are other words that can convey a similar meaning without the heaps of sexist baggage that "hysteria" has historically implied. I suggest "inflammatory" here.<p>It's pretty telling that of the few comments on medium, two are actually people from SO trying to distance themselves from OP's "challenge".
I can imagine an environment in which less than 10% of the posts are toxic, yet it feels toxic to one person.<p>I’m at a conference between sessions, and there are small groups of people standing around, discussing the latest developments at breakneck speed. Back and forth. Talking a mile a minute. Saying half an idea out loud, and letting others fill in the blanks. Tons of jargon and inside references I don’t understand. I squeeze into one of the larger circles, and I would like to join the conversation, at least to understand what they are talking about, and perhaps add something to the conversation, if I can. I finally see an opening, and ask a question. Each person in the group is suddenly silent and stares at me for a few seconds. Finally one person says, “RTFM noob”. Everyone stifles a laugh, and the conversation picks up where it left off.<p>Count the number of “posts” in this example. Hundreds, or maybe low thousands. How many were toxic? One.
Doing the math… Yeah. That’s much less than 10%.<p>Does this feel toxic to me? Oh yeah. Does it feel toxic to everyone else? Some would say yes. Some would agree with you and say, “No. This does not feel like a toxic wasteland to me. I’ll admit, there’s a small amount of toxic discussion, but at least it’s much less toxic than other conferences I have attended.”<p>My point is that you can have a forum where less than 10% of the comments are toxic, and yet that forum can feel very toxic to some of the people.
So your 10% challenge does not prove anything.
Response by StackOverflow's David Fullerton: <a href="https://medium.com/@dfullerton07/cto-of-stack-overflow-here-27d84691d9a3" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@dfullerton07/cto-of-stack-overflow-here-...</a>
Why have facts when you can just dump the term "toxic inhumane wasteland[…]shaming[…]…excluding women and people of color" without a shred of evidence and running away?
It's really weird that even stack overflow as organization admits that they have diversity problem and they are looking for ways to fix that.<p>Why this person needs to question that, it's already been accepted? Then he includes so many caveats to this challenge that it looks that he's the only person who needs to believe that stack overflow is a totally fair and unbiased environment.
Actually looking at other things the woman making the "toxic wasteland" comment wrote, I certainly don't agree with her on everything, but I'd say she actually makes a lot of good points. Particularly about how delivery style matters.<p>And yet, her comment itself is clearly an exaggeration (let's be real, no one is going to take up the $10K challenge), and is just as toxic as anything she mentions. It just shows that it is always far easier to see problems and possible fixes in other people's behavior, than in your own.
Stack Overflow's semi-hostile approach to asking questions you can look up yourself was one of the most useful lessons I ever learned. It forced me to explore all my options before asking a question, because getting called out for not doing basic research was pretty embarrassing.<p>Maybe I'm an outlier here, and maybe some people don't appreciate that barrier to entry, but it seems to work. I don't think I've ever run into any <i>really</i> hostile or offensive comments while using Stack Overflow.
I'm sure it's going to go really well when you propose a contest in an attempt to marginalize a woman's perspective by calling her hysterical.
> All posts must be chosen at random, where each post has an equal chance of being included in the study (simple random sample)<p>Well there is a massive bias straight off.<p>Nobody arrives at a post at random, nor will the toxicity be uniformly distributed.<p>When last did you go to Stack* and say "Show me a random comment please".
What is the definition of "toxic"?<p>For the record, obviously not 10% are "toxic" (based off of my personal definition of toxic).<p>But what if I considered comments that are off topic or slightly factually wrong as "toxic". By that definition, 10% would be possible.
This is just a publicity stunt, some no name guy who sells books and has negligible twitter followers. Hence publishing on Medium.<p>Just because its on Medium it doesn't mean anything, its like linking your personal Facebook page. He took a twitter poll of 20 people.