What fluff (and what level of fluff) is acceptable in posts?

4. Does (or should) the policy depend on which community (i.e. which subsite of codidact.com) the post belongs to?

Yes.

Different communities, although using the same software, can and will have different standards for what makes a good post. Some aspects of this will almost certainly transfer readily between communities, while others will be more specific to the community in question.

Therefore the issue should be raised in the meta category of each respective community where it applies.

posted about 1 year ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

Canina‭

70 78 760 152

Should we remove such fluff? ... If we should remove fluff, should we remove all kinds of fluff? Or are there exceptions? (e.g. "emoticons are fine"). ... Does (or should) the policy depend on which community (i.e. which subsite of codidact.com) the post belongs to?

In principle, I think that - in line with the Codidact community-oriented model - this sort of decision ought to be made at the per-community level. Personally, I would hope that every community decides to take a quite hard-line stance in favour of removing fluff. In my mind, the question is not whether there are "exceptions", but what the community deems to be fluff. To label something that way is, I think, a tacit acknowledgement that it does not add value to the post, wastes the reader's time, and therefore should be removed.

Is an edit that only removes fluff a good, non-trivial, desired edit? ... If we should remove fluff, should we remove all the fluff?

I think this is somewhat the wrong question, because I personally endorse making trivial edits as long as they're in the right direction (previous discussion on Stack Overflow meta). But yes, assuming there is consensus to remove fluff, edits that remove fluff are desirable.

I mean e.g. if the fluff is because the author wanted to be polite, maybe we should leave one piece of fluff to honor his or her willingness to explicitly sound polite.

This comes back to the definition question again IMO.

... At the same time I can imagine that maybe humanistic communities want to appear more humane and maybe fluff like greetings is acceptable there.

There are many other ways to do this. Even very technical communities can come across more humane than they typically do, I think. My personal preference is:

• Use hypotheticals explicitly in order to frame the question, and use reader-inclusive language (i.e. "Suppose we have...") in questions.

• Depersonalize the language in answers and scrupulously avoid the second-person pronoun (especially don't write things like "your problem is"; even "the issue in your code is" is not great); but write answers that either explicitly address the reader with imperatives ("To solve the problem, do X") or mirror the reader-inclusive language ("We can avoid this issue by...").

• Make sure to keep in mind the likely level of expertise of someone who would need the question answered, and tailor answers to that level (without sacrificing technical correctness more than needed to simplify, and without misusing jargon).

• Use analogies in answers; avoid unmarked metaphors if possible (some readers have difficulty processing them).

In text media, conversation is not inherently eusocial - respecting the reader is. That can mean respecting the reader's time (hence removing fluff); it can also mean respecting the reader's feelings. However, if I'm reading a question and answer on the Internet to try to get information, I would not feel slighted because the person asking the question omitted salutations and "thanks in advance" directed at future answerers, or if the answers failed to offer praise for asking a good question. If anything, it's the opposite: I'm excluded from that conversation, as the reader, while I'm nominally "right there" - so it is disrespecting me.

If we should remove fluff, is 'nothing personal, just maintenance; please see this question' a good response in case someone gets offended by fluff removal and/or insists on keeping his or her fluff?

I'm not convinced that this question will become the best possible reference for such comments in the long run; but I think the general form of this is good. Depending on How Bad Things Get (TM) I can imagine the need to write something firmer, and have it available for copy-paste or some other automatic use.

posted about 1 year ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

1y ago

Karl Knechtel‭

23 36 149 28

I think the basic question is:

Would future readers of the question want to see it?

The main way to use a Q&A site is not to ask or answer questions, but to view existing posts. A post may have 1 person asking, and 5-10 answering, but it could easily have thousands of people reading it in the years after.

Reading questions after is also one of the main reasons people use QA sites over forums, chats and blogs. Stack Overflow became popular, in part, because people were tired of Googling something and finding a Forum thread ending with a pithy "never mind, I figured it out".

So to answer the questions in OP:

1. We should remove fluff if, and only if, future readers would not care for it; we should leave it in if future readers are unlikely to object to it.
2. Jokes may or may not fall under point 1, depending on the joke. Greetings, thanks and supplications (like please) should almost always be removed. These are social rituals between asker and answerer, because some people know the answer but refuse to help unless sufficiently supplicated. Emojis IMO are a special case and should be asked as a separate question.
3. We should remove all fluff that falls under point 1, not rewrite it.
4. The general rule in point 1 should apply everywhere. How this is judged may depend on the community.
5. When giving feedback, you should always think back to the first time on a Q&A site that you got yelled at for breaking a minor rule you didn't know about - then give feedback the way that you would have liked to receive it then.

posted about 1 year ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

1y ago

matthewsnyder‭

31 17 117 42

Not allowing fluff was the norm Elsewhere, and I consider it the norm here unless explicitly stated to the contrary.

I am not aware of a community here that has stated they like content-free greetings, closings, and the like. I would therefore feel free to edit out such fluff, preferably shortly after a post is written so it doesn't bump things later.

I do agree this should be up to each site, although we could set a default here for cases where sites haven't made their position clear. Over on EE, we have. See the To the Point section of https://electrical.codidact.com/help/asking. I have edited out fluff a number of times there. If you keep a place clean from the start, there is less objection to each individual cleanup action.

posted about 1 year ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

Olin Lathrop‭

46 122 342 122