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Discussion on: Why I don't use Stack Overflow

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sebbdk profile image
Sebastian Vargr • Edited

I agree toxic behavior does go on on stack overflow.

But...

It's not your questions on Stack, or your answer, it's our answer & our question.

It also belongs to the people making sure we do not have to peer over 20 similar questions to find our answer, like it used to be a decade ago.

And it belongs to the people that update the answers to make sense in todays context for that question that was asked 5 years ago where the answer changed.

That unfortunately means it belongs to the toxic people out there too.

I think the best recourse here is to help those suckers acting toxic, they clearly forgot about the fact that they are supposed to be there to help people at some point.

Update, what I mean to say, let's embrace toxic behavior with empathy to fix it rather than ignore/disable it.

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facundocorradini profile image
Facundo Corradini

Hi Sebastian,

Believe me, I've tried. But at this point I think it would be like shouting "be nice" right in the middle of The Hunger Games. It's the system what creates the bad behaviour, and no amount of well-intended words will change that.

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sebbdk profile image
Sebastian Vargr • Edited

In my experience toxic behavior most often rears it head unintentionally, bad language, and thoughtless argumentation feeds confrontation, the cure is knowledge, empathy, and patience.

If we prevent' toxic behavior it will find it's way back eventually.
If we call it out, they will become defensive and try to retaliate.

If we teach one toxic person to be a better person, he might rub off on another and so on tho.
That takes a lot of time & empathy tho.

I think if we judge toxic behavior, we also need to judge our selves.
We might unintentially' be feeding the toxic behavior, by trying to "be nice".