Why does it have to be this harsh?

Question

I have enjoyed my first few months here at the Workplace, and I found the community to be very helpful, with insightful and mind opening discussions. However, in the last six months, something changed. I started feeling more and more hostility from this website, with more direct attacks, quickly closed questions and harsh remarks. And it's not a matter of rules, because most questions could be shut down using the "it depends" justification, that is just an excuse.

I don't know if it was a turnover in the community, and I don't have data to support my impression, but I realised that, while at the beginning I was always eager to visit and interact with The Workplace, over time I have started steering away from it, as I associated it with negativity. It's a shame, but right now, when I have a question related to work, I think twice before going to The Workplace, as in most cases I will be meeting not helpfulness and collaboration, but hostility and self-aggrandisement.

I am keeping my account for the moment, but I felt it was right to give some feedback on the current situation. Feel free to comment, or even better, Close/Delete/Deride this post. Thanks for reading.

Answer 1

I took a look at some of your questions that were closed.

Look at it this way: you got some thoughtful answers and comments in response to your questions before they were shutdown. THAT's what counts. There's a lot of great thought-provoking content on here and not all of it is correlated with upvotes.

For whatever reason some folks get hung up on the scores, rules, badges and gameification of stackexchange sites. They take them so seriously that they have no problem being dismissive to anyone who they perceive has violated "the faq". It's not that they're trying to mean, it's just that they feel a strict sense of obligation to the rules and they think its OK to downvote, close, mark-as-dupe or make smug remarks to a "violator". Sometimes that is perfectly warranted, other times, it can be a problem. In particular, I really dislike it when someone who is clearly facing a difficult work-life situation and writes a detailed question and gets wacked for trite reasons. Lately the "you can't ask 'what should I do?'" reason has been used more.

This has been going on for a long time on all stackexchange sites. In the last year or so, there's been a push to address the behavior which makes people feel excluded. There's now a new code of conduct. And to that, there's been a bit of a backlash. Some people really DON'T like that initiative and have either rage-quit the sites or, I think, have deliberately put more of an edge on their "editorial" behavior in defiance to it.

The solution, I think, is to detach yourself from expectations that people will respond in a certain way. Sure, try to frame your questions to get past the persnickety police, but don't worry to much if your question gets closed. It's not a big deal.

Answer 2

People need to flag things if this is the case. And raise posts on meta when questions are closed unfairly.

Please, do these things!

As moderators, we have a limited view into what is happening on the main site as we cannot possibly read everything (sorry, we're humans...). If there are users that are consistently causing issues we will not know unless there are flags.

A good exercise if you feel too many questions are closed would be to take a list of say 10 or more and post them asking for explanations to why they are closed.

I should also note that Workplace has held steady around 50% question close rate. I don't have any fancy SEDE-fu to write a nice query but the moderator tools link (10k users only, I guess) consistently shows just over 50% of questions closed and has as long as I can remember. It's possible I'm misremembering the overall close rate but I do recall it staying somewhat consistent.

The more troublesome statistic there to me is only 15%ish of closed questions are ever edited.

Answer 3

Sorry you're feeling that way Monoandale :(

I do find myself nodding along in agreement with you though - there's been a significant shift in the atmosphere over the last few months (and not for the better).

I'm not sure what the root cause is - there was definitely some pretty serious unpleasantness around the recent moderator elections and I know that has lead to at least two prominent members deciding to walk away from the site but that alone doesn't account for all that I'm seeing in my opinion.

The trigger-happiness with close votes has been an issue on here for some time and recently seems to have gotten worse - perhaps because some of the members who used to push to get questions fixed/reopened aren't here any more or are feeling a bit too jaded to put the effort in. Similarly with the handling of the negative/harsh comments.

I know that I'm sounding pretty doom-and-gloom about the situation, and yes I do think it's a real issue but I also know that there are still a lot of really good users here who believe in helping people.

If you ever find yourself wondering whether to post a question and are concerned about the potential reception come in to The Water Cooler and have a chat - there's usually a few of the regulars kicking about in there who will be happy to chew the fat over an issue, even if it's something that would be considered legitimately off-topic for the main site. During the day (UK time) we also often have one of our friendly neighbourhood mods (Snow) in there as well and despite his prediliction for listening to large amounts of Taylor Swift songs he's a good guy.

PS: It could be worse.. it's not like we're Stack Overflow or anything ;)

Answer 4

Don't worry about it, I've been here for quite a while and haven't seen anything like that in terms of questions and answers.

Some people have had personal issue, perhaps justified, perhaps not. But in general everything is pretty much the same.

Joe hands out excellent advice to all and sundry and the rest of us try our best.

Answer 5

Unfortunately this problem isn't isolated to Workplace, it's an issue across the entire Stack Exchange network. The good news is, the Stack Exchange team know about the problem, and are actively trying to improve things.

In fact, they could really use your help! They are currently gathering data on comments, to try to do a better job of identifying unwelcoming comments, and they need volunteers to evaluate these comments. Here's the link you can use to take part. Please be aware, this link is to StackOverflow specific comments, but their efforts will expand to help other Stack Exchange sites over time.

It's also worth mentioning that we seem to have a really good moderation team on Workplace, and (in my opinion) they are helping to foster a good community environment, as evidenced by Elysian Fields♦ answer. It's good that you raised this question, because the issue isn't going to improve until the community acknowledges that there actually is a problem.

Answer 6

Yeah I can feel it too. I'm kinda afraid to ask another question on here.

In agreement with the other comments I too thank Joe and others who are taking their time out to answer questions, rather than close questions, downvote, delete-vote and criticize.

I truly hope the community managers are closely following the developments on this very useful site.