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Discussion on: Advanced devs and beginner devs can co-exist harmoniously. It's not rocket science.

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Alex Olson

I tried to reach out to the SO community when a saw a thread on meta about it, but, as you can see from the comments and posts everywhere in that thread, they just don't seem to get it: meta.stackoverflow.com/a/365847/20...

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Ben Halpern • Edited

Wow, seeing your comment after @isaacandsuch referenced the response here makes me feel like I'm in the company of a celebrity. 😊

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Alex Olson • Edited

Ha! Thanks. I am absolutely nobody, especially compared to the creator of a worldwide friendly dev community like dev.to. :) I guess though that is exactly what perplexes me. If I, as pretty much just your average developer, can clearly see the toxicity and exclusion happening at SO, then how can so many others not see it? Or refuse to see it?

I also believe that Jeff & Joel didn't sit down at genesis of their baby community and make it one of their core values to exclude people, but rather that this has happened/happens as a byproduct of some of their (what I consider) unfortunate views/opinions that have now cemented themselves into the community at large. I was, however, glad to see the response from the CTO on twitter which gives me hope for SO's future. I also think though that such thinking will need to spread to the everyday-rank-and-file in-the-trenches moderators/user-mods/and active community before we'll see real change.

A small part of me would love to see some of those types of people meet with people who feel excluded by SO face-to-face. I believe there's something about the medium of written word that emboldens many of the "old guard" of SO and I dare say that they wouldn't be so bold if having to face the people they are excluding directly.

Anyway, thanks for writing this open letter (of sorts) to Jeff and thanks for using your far-reaching voice to spread the good word, as it were. I really do hope things change. I think SO is indeed too valuable a resource to calcify and go stale.

You rock Jess, Ben & entire dev.to team!