There are a lot of people over at Stack Overflow (Atwood included) who believe that quality and inclusion are mutually exclusive.
I mean, there are people all over the tech industry who believe that, but the people at SO say it out in the open. Consider, for example, this very unfortunate comment in response to a post advocating inclusiveness at SO:
That many upvotes is just ridiculous, especially for a comment that so brazenly uses logical fallacies to prop up someone's comfort zone.
dev.to is far more inclusive than Stack Overflow. And, to be fair, we do have some of what SO would flag as "low-quality content". There are duplicate posts and questions. Not everyone speaks college-level English. People ask questions that could perhaps have been answered by a well-formed Google query. So what? It's not a zero sum game. You don't subtract the "low-quality" content from the "high-quality" content to get the value of the site. All of the content can coexist. There can be the same quantity of "high-quality" content either way.
I come here both to learn and to share knowledge. Most of us are here for the same reasons. That's what quality is. These days a dev.to post occasionally pops up in my Google results. Is it less valuable than an SO answer, just because SO deletes content that doesn't meet its stringent community standards? Of course not. If it answers my question or explains a concept I'm struggling with, the very last thing I care about is whether it's a duplicate or insufficiently-researched or tagged incorrectly, or whether there might be other posts on the site that are.
I believe that content doesn't write itself (not that I'm aware of, anyway). Good content is written by good people, and good people are driven away by condescension, microaggressions, obsessive in-grouping and out-grouping, and artificially high barriers to entry. Those behaviors should be the definition of "low quality".
I guess what I'm saying is, if you've decided that inclusiveness hurts quality, maybe that's because you've invented a definition of "quality" that specifically excludes certain groups of people.
I'm a developer who likes testing first, iterative processes, and refactoring, and I care about quality. I speak both C and Ruby with some facility, and enjoy both, which confuses some people.
I'm most disconcerted not by one person or the other arguing that point A is more important than point B (at least sometimes), but by the fact they think it has to be a choice. Being inclusive and insisting on quality at all times can be perfectly compatible, if done well. It's only when you don't care enough about the consequences of your inclusiveness, or about the quality of your quality (yes, really), that reductive, facile thinking backs us into a corner where someone's baby has to be thrown out with the bathwater (to mix a metaphor).
False dilemmas don't solve problems. They just ignore half the problem.
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There are a lot of people over at Stack Overflow (Atwood included) who believe that quality and inclusion are mutually exclusive.
I mean, there are people all over the tech industry who believe that, but the people at SO say it out in the open. Consider, for example, this very unfortunate comment in response to a post advocating inclusiveness at SO:
That many upvotes is just ridiculous, especially for a comment that so brazenly uses logical fallacies to prop up someone's comfort zone.
dev.to is far more inclusive than Stack Overflow. And, to be fair, we do have some of what SO would flag as "low-quality content". There are duplicate posts and questions. Not everyone speaks college-level English. People ask questions that could perhaps have been answered by a well-formed Google query. So what? It's not a zero sum game. You don't subtract the "low-quality" content from the "high-quality" content to get the value of the site. All of the content can coexist. There can be the same quantity of "high-quality" content either way.
I come here both to learn and to share knowledge. Most of us are here for the same reasons. That's what quality is. These days a dev.to post occasionally pops up in my Google results. Is it less valuable than an SO answer, just because SO deletes content that doesn't meet its stringent community standards? Of course not. If it answers my question or explains a concept I'm struggling with, the very last thing I care about is whether it's a duplicate or insufficiently-researched or tagged incorrectly, or whether there might be other posts on the site that are.
I believe that content doesn't write itself (not that I'm aware of, anyway). Good content is written by good people, and good people are driven away by condescension, microaggressions, obsessive in-grouping and out-grouping, and artificially high barriers to entry. Those behaviors should be the definition of "low quality".
I guess what I'm saying is, if you've decided that inclusiveness hurts quality, maybe that's because you've invented a definition of "quality" that specifically excludes certain groups of people.
I'm most disconcerted not by one person or the other arguing that point A is more important than point B (at least sometimes), but by the fact they think it has to be a choice. Being inclusive and insisting on quality at all times can be perfectly compatible, if done well. It's only when you don't care enough about the consequences of your inclusiveness, or about the quality of your quality (yes, really), that reductive, facile thinking backs us into a corner where someone's baby has to be thrown out with the bathwater (to mix a metaphor).
False dilemmas don't solve problems. They just ignore half the problem.