Bring back the Summer of Love (aka Make new users feel more welcome)

Question

I'm a big fan of SE sites and spend an awful lot of time on StackOverflow. When I saw an English Language site, I pointed a few of my friends and family this way (one of whom is an English professor and another is a TEFL teacher).

I thought they'd enjoy the site, expand their own knowledge and maybe contribute a bit.

I've since found out that they've all - without exception - stopped using the site, most of them without even posting. One of them said the comments tended to be rude and arrogant, another said she was made to feel unwelcome.

That's not to say that the community was wrong in any particular action/decision, simply that they saw users who weren't familiar with the rules being made to feel unwelcome. Unfortunately, it looks like they didn't get to experience the good bits and now they're very unlikely to ever do so.

I rarely end up on the EL&U site, so it doesn't affect me much personally. It did, however, make me think of the Summer of Love blog post by Joel which seems to describe the situation they've experienced.

In any case, I thought the opinion of a relative outsider might provoke a discussion on a way to improve the situation (or get me downvoted into oblivion which I'll be forced to claim proves my point).

I'd suggest a miniature, EL&U-specific "Summer of Love" effort with a focus on improving the outward image of the community and making [potential] new users feel more welcome.

Summary

I believe that the majority of respondents agree with the following:

• Low quality posts should be closed/removed from the site rapidly, irrespective of who posted [or Fixed!].
• An attempt should be made to educate new users so they don't repeat their mistakes [Not obligatory]
• Comments (and answers) should always be civil and informative, especially with new users. Being helpful too is a bonus.
• Neutral and concise comments are preferred, friendly comments are welcome, snarky ones are not. [See this MSO question for a larger discussion]

As more answers are added/voted around I'll keep this summary updated. Hopefully this question will become the community standard after it's been around long enough.

Answer 1

I have been wanting to ask this same question for 110 days now, give or take a few. When I first found EL&U, I was delighted. Since then, I've been dismayed many times by the lack of courtesy, kindness, and tolerance here. I have never even entertained inviting someone to the site (I know several PhD English professors, as well as ESL and regular English teachers). They're my friends, and friends don't invite other friends to be abused.

I realize this site does have standards found in the help sections. But comments don't politely refer people to the help sections. They are often just rude. Maybe not intentionally, but still, they are. (And I'm not above bad days, or annoyance at the thousandth newbie who wants his homework handed to him on a platter. I'm no saint.)

In the words of Jeff Atwood (same thread referred to above):

Still, I think this post would be stronger with actual real world examples of snarky comments (and some data on how often it was seen, next to the examples) to show people what not to do.

(Today) When this poster asked very politely asked Does “the motor speed” mean the speed of the motor?, the first comment (upvoted) was "Can you explain why it wouldn't be okay? Do you have the same problem with "internet speed"?"

(Today) This OP was asked (in comments) for context. On providing a link, the next comment was "Don't use comments to enhance the question. Edit the question to include all relevant information, including where you heard the expression" (3 upvotes) Then, on reading the link, another commenter wrote mockingly "I first saw it at this link that completely and entirely explains it using clear language. What is the point of this question?" (4 upvotes)

(Today) This user does a typical mash up of misunderstanding common to learners, in this case, thinking just changes a verb's tense. First comment (1 upvote): What makes you think the word ‘just’ makes any difference? In “did you win”, win is not a present form; it’s an infinitive. You cannot have two finite forms in the same verbal unit. Also, e.g. means ‘for example’ (Latin exemplī grātiā ‘for the sake of an example’), so for e.g. means ‘for for example’ and does not make sense. (No decipherable - to OP - helpful answer here; mostly a rant.) OP replies: "I wasn't sure, that's why I'm posting a question.. and wow... this community is pretty harsh in the way downvotes are given."

A not unusual comment here: "1) please try searching before asking questions here. A 3 second google search will give you answers 2) don't combine multiple questions into one." Not the worst rebuke in the world, but not nice, either.

One unfortunate used y'all or something like it, enough to warrant this comment: "Mayhap thou shouldst attempt to recast thy queries in the second person singular, for surely the second person plural hath soundly defeated thee, yea unto uttermost incomprehensibility, here most readily taken as mortal insult to the very tongue thou wouldst so dishonor with thine unlettered scrivenings." (upvoted)

And my two personal favorites. #1. An OP misunderstood a passage in the King James Bible (pardon my anglais, but the KJV is a bitch to read). My comment: "Sometimes, when in doubt, it helps to have a more modern translation at hand to compare." The following was a reply to my comment: "The typography, morphology, syntax, and lexical items used in English Bibles (which are, of course, always merely translations of Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew originals) represent nothing more than the translators' takes on the best way to represent something by current standards. Since "current" covers the last 5 centuries of English, this is, to say the least, a mess. Nothing in an English translation can be depended on; always consult the originals." (emphasis mine) Here is someone stating with authority that we are slackers if we read the Bible in our own tongue, and disregards the fact that we have no originals (that's correct; all we have are copies of copies of copies of copies of copies with who knows how many transcription errors.)

#2. This is a comment I got constantly for any answer which had no linked source: "-1 Always substantiate your "answer" with a canonical reference. Opinions are more appropriate in the form of comments, not answers." Meanwhile, the commenter was generous to others who almost never link sources. It was personal; but the point is, it was unfriendly. It was unkind. It was unpleasant.

This looks like a rant, but it's actually merely a substantiation of the OP's mild and wise admonition to be welcoming. This is a minute fraction of the insider (or insider wannabe) rudeness that occurs on this site.

In the time it took to write this answer, please note the quality of comment the OP got in reply to his post above, the number of views, and the number of upvotes. There must be something to his post.

Answer 2

As a relatively recent addition to the site, I would like to add my two cents.

As many above have pointed out, this site attracts three types of people.

1. There are the people who stumble upon us by accident of trying to learn English. [Some of whom post the most basic of questions that any native speaker should be able to answer (on the surface)].

2. People who are rather proficient in (or native to) the English language, and are seeking to understand the language, its nuances, and its usage.

3. The ivory tower intellectual: people whose knowledge of the language dwarves that of us mere mortals.

I believe there is a place for each of us here.

The English Language Learners: should be sorted. If it is someone who demonstrates an advanced learner's knowledge of the language and is using the site as a means of honing their understanding, I throw my arms open and welcome them. (I can think of a few off the top of my head who fit this category.) This does not mean we will tolerate poorly researched questions or the like. It just means that we will view these posters as being valuable additions to the site. Personally, I find their questions to be among the most interesting. I enjoy the challenge of trying to explain the idiosyncrasies of my own language to outsiders.

The people who are not sufficiently proficient in English need to be shown to English Language Learners. But, I think we can be more friendly about it. I think we should each adopt a friendly version of a stock comment. Something like:

Welcome to ELU. This really does not meet the site's standards for an appropriate question. We do have a sister site that might be better suited to your needs, however. Please check out English Language Learners. If you put a bit more research into your question and post it there, I think you'll get a better answer.

I think a common theme on the site is annoyance with these people. But, in general, if their question is basic but well stated, I try to give them an answer in addition to the above comment.

The Proficient: I would say these are our bread and butter. Today's 1 rep point, may well become tomorrow's 41K. We have to make an effort to treat these people with respect. I'm not suggesting to tolerate their bad posts. I'm saying that we should make an effort to explain to them why a question or answer is not up to standards. And, to do it politely.

Welcome to ELU. This really does not answer the above question. Perhaps you can give a link to the definition of the key terms. And, explain how the term is used in relationship to the OP's question.

Welcome to ELU. Generally speaking we don't answer proofreading questions unless there is a point of concern that has been explained. Perhaps you'd like to ask whether or not the sentence is grammatical with [XYZ vs. ABC]. I think that is your underlying question here.

I've been making an effort to do this more of late.

The Ivory Tower Denizen: Well, even they start out with one rep point. And, typically they will climb the ranks on their own. Just give them guidance on how to properly interact on the site.

Welcome to ELU. That is a really great answer. Can you please post a link to a source for that information? In general, we prefer sources when possible.

Everyone: In general, the most important thing you can do to be welcoming to someone is to leave a comment on their posts. FumbleFingers and Bradd Szonye are both excellent at this. If they find your answer interesting, they tell you so. If they find it flawed, they tell you so (generally politely until you're a regular ;-p ). But, they speak to people. In the month and change I've been active here, they were among the first to make me feel welcomed. It went a long way to making me stay.

So, in summary: Be kind. Don't tolerate crap, but, be nice while you're not tolerating it.

Answer 3

The problem as I see it is that some of the more active high-rep users perceive this as a site for lovers of English, whereas the Internet-using public at large perceives it as a site for users of English. Consequently, new users are made to feel like unwelcome interlopers when they come here and behave as the Stack Exchange experience has trained them to behave.

For most people, English is not a hobby, like cooking or cycling or photography, to be studied in all its manifestations and savored for its quirks and tortured history and discussed as one might talk about a dream or a lover. It is a medium of communication and a tool, and in many parts of the world, its use is not optional: you have to use it to get things done, whether you're fond of it or not. So people have reasonable questions about it, as they will, and they know that Stack Exchange is a place you can go to ask reasonable questions in a respectful way and get useful answers from experts. So they go here, and whoa, there's a SE site called "English Language and Usage" and it's huge, it's one of the biggest boxes on the page and it's right up at the top. And from there they go here, and there are lots of questions about English at different levels of expertise, so clearly this is the right place. And so they ask their question...

...and it gets closed as "off-topic." Your question is too basic for us, you silly child. Why didn't you consult Fowler's Modern English Usage before wasting everyone's time? Or the OED Online (you do have an active subscription, don't you)? Both are clearly listed as resources in this years-old question on our meta site; why didn't you check there first? We can't help you here, I'm afraid, and if this question is an example of what you're capable of, it would probably be best if you didn't try to ask any others in the future. Perhaps you'll have better luck asking your "question" at our sister site for children and ESL students.

This community needs to face the truth about itself. Despite what it says on our tour page, this is not a site for "serious English language enthusiasts," and it never will be. It can't be. It's too big for that, and it has the wrong name for it. Whatever hopes and dreams we might have about this being a utopian society for language lovers, it's simply not reasonable to expect the rest of the world to ever see it the same way. Ever.

For a group as aggressively anti-prescriptivist as we tend to be, we certainly do take a prescriptivist attitude toward the functions and goals of this site. My advice: let ELU be what it will be, a site for people who use English and want to learn to use it a little bit better, and treat those people accordingly.

Answer 4

I've since found out that they've all - without exception - stopped using the site, most of them without even posting. One of them said the comments tended to be rude and arrogant, another said she was made to feel unwelcome.

While I enjoy the idea of having people swing by the site to hang out and have fun, EL&U is intended to be a site to help people solve problems. We need to make sure we focus on that particular goal.

That being said, I do agree that many of the comments are arrogant and rude. EL&U suffers from a jackass expertise problem in that a lot of high rep users act as if they are an authority on the subject matter when, in reality, they just have more useless internet points.

Furthermore, our particular subject material makes this even worse because there are longstanding opinion wars around what is or is not proper English. This makes interacting with new users even more difficult because they can accidentally wander into old fights between these opinion and the posters on this site are more than willing to restart the opinion flinging.

There is also an inherent temptation to wax eloquent simply because most of the high rep users have an honest love and appreciation for the language. It can be hard to use one sentence when four sentences work just as well.

In my opinion, these three things combine into one horrible first encounter for new users. You basically get some mixture of:

• People who think they are experts but aren't
• People arguing amongst themselves in comments
• People that appear to be showing off their mad English skills by typing paragraph after paragraph to explain one small point

Ick.

But past all of those things, we also have an longstanding battle between "care about everything" and "care about only the most useful things". Many of the recent meta discussions have revolved around this debate and I think this has seeped out into the main site in the form of far too much snark.

It is okay to guide users into making better questions. It is okay to edit posts and improve them. It is okay to challenge invalid assumptions behind questions. It is not okay to this in a snarky manner or in a way that would put the poster down or belittle them.

It can be challenging to endure the wave after wave of boring, newb questions but that is one of the reasons we are here. We are here to solve problems and answer questions.

So, in the end, I agree that a Summer of Love would be great. But to me that means doing what we do without the jackass attitude. Or, in Joel's own words:

So we decided to declare the summer of 2012 as The Summer of Love, a.k.a. “The Hunting of the Snark.” The goal is simple: to keep Stack Exchange a welcoming, friendly place without lowering our standards. No, you may not ask “plz send me the code” questions, but if you do, we will explain to you, in a friendly and professional way, what you did wrong.

And the Meta.SE thread Joel linked is a great place to start looking for ways to improve yourself.

Answer 5

I like to think that every critique (disregarding for the moment its supplier's intention or tone) demonstrates the supplier's vision for the SE. Editing out chaff from questions leaves questions that are easy to understand and quick to scan. Discouraging link rot by including relevant quotes saves the reader time and promotes the site's autonomy. Diligent moderation of the logic and sources behind posts builds an academic presence online, filling a niche that similarly structured sites do not provide on all posts (NSFW). This thread, too, asks for discourse to be friendly as well as academic.

I think there is goodness in all of these visions and thus that there ought to be a place here for each. But there are complications. It can be hard to convey the intended tone in writing, especially when formal. It's not difficult for a comment meaning to be precise-but-concise to come across as curt. Or for emphases via italics or quotes to seem like mockery. Or for speaking plainly to seem brunt or condescending, and speaking with big but perfectly suited words to seem pompous. I cannot add emoticons, or I and me, or friendly forum acronyms (e.g., TIA and HTH) and sometimes the pleasantries they expand to without feeling I'm detracting from my own vision of a scholarly ELU or upsetting forum etiquette. And yet, by not adding them, I sometimes find a gruff or austere reading of posts I wrote with a nicer tone in mind.

And actions too can be mistaken: A new user, by misunderstanding the site or its culture, may do or say something that mistakenly seems aggressive.

So some things may seem harsh by accident or misinterpretation. But there are others that come across too brusque, more at-home on a more recreational website. For these, I've been wondering what others think of a loosely-defined "Milestones protocol," where the correction of unwanted behavior is dealt with according to the status of the user. For questions and answers, the user's rep is easily visible; in comments, it can be seen by hovering over the username.

A user with 1 rep who posts a question easily answered by Google-search or related ELU question ought to be held less accountable than one with 100 rep, who may be an active user on another SE. Because the 1 rep user is new, if their question gets closed it is good to tell them what that means and how to avoid it in the future. The gist is to deal gently with users with lower rep and post counts, who may be unfamiliar with the site. (Admittedly spammers and sock puppets may match these criteria, so if not blatant a severer strategy may be needed for repeat offenders.)

The idea is to encourage good habits in new users and discourage bad habits in more experienced users. This happens naturally a lot of the time, but it's easy to get caught up in the question and forget the credentials/background of the source. I think this could be a nice addition to the excellent suggestion of Summer of Love.

Answer 6

I have had a few colleagues and friends use the site. Their main comments to me included:

1. They felt that people just upvoted at will just because someone with high-rep answered a question.

2. Two told me they answered a question and then a higher-rep person took their answer and "expanded" on it as their own answer. Both basically said they would probably never use the site again.

3. Almost all commented on some of the encyclopedia type answers. Their comments on these were that they weren't going to read an answer that is 50 lines unless it really takes 50 lines to make the whole point. And then they also couldn't understand how these answers were so upvoted.

4. They found it hard to want to cite a bunch of references when they see other answers don't.

My opinions on these:

1. There is a bit of chicken/egg stuff going on here but there is definitely some in-voting. I am sure we can all produce ridiculous answers that had the most votes or accepted. Not sure I see this on many other stack sites.

2. Definitely true. I go out of my way to vote anything above average for new user. I will also downvote any user taking advantage of another user's answer. I think it is nicer to help them expand. This is a common issue on the non-tech stack sites.

3. I don't read these answers, so no opinion if they are good or not.

4. I could see comments about citations putting new users off here. If it is something that you can google and it's a top hit or if it is common reference then why comment on it?

I received mixed feedback on ELU. I think part of it has to do with the diverse reasons why people use the site, part of it because of some possible inclusionist behavior, and part of it because the English language has a few major branches and for some questions we would just have to agree to disagree.

Answer 7

I'm a newbie educating myself on the culture here. I have had experience on a Usenet site where the nastiness was orders of magnitude greater than anything I have seen here; I have seen some snark, but not yet ad hominem personal attacks. I would agree that starting anything with "What is wrong with you/those (ethnicity)?" is an atrocity – but you only seem to have one example of that, before my time.

On the other hand, it takes two to tango, and a noticeable feature of internet culture – it goes back before the Millennials, confer my Usenet experience , which was the late 80s and early 90s – is that some (not all) students not only want you to do their most basic homework for them, entirely for them, but also have a sense of entitlement about it, so they do not need to ask politely. It's do this for me, do that for me, peel me a grape. I have met this in realspace too: the niece of a friend wanted help with an assignment, received pointers, and then complained that I should have written it all for her, and in a different language to boot. I haven't spoken to her since. If I ever meet spoiled brats like that here, with an heroic effort of self-control I may remain silent, but making nice to them is not on the agenda.

If the community wants to try to be more polite, well and good, but do the questioners have no obligation of couthness as well?