Is calling an individual user or their post "pedantic" a CoC violation?

Question

It happened someone called my post (or maybe me) pedantic.

@bad_coder I don't say you're wrong in posting this, but I can see why people downvote this, as they could find it pedantic.

I'm wondering if that's a CoC violation? It seem to fall within:

No subtle put-downs or unfriendly language.

No name-calling or personal attacks.

Because all the uses of the word pedantic I've found on MSE weren't personally directed at one user or their post. It's always collective or self-deprecating, like: "is it pedantic?" or "am I being pedantic?"

If it's being applied to a single user personally (and/or their post) it seems just unfriendly.

Answer 1

You, basically reporting a bug, voluntarily and for zero compensation, for a company's staff to decide whether to work on it or not (they did), and others feeling the need to mark it by downvoting as not important (while they marked a similar report as important the day before), leading to said exchange, is, in my opinion, nonsensical.

In six years I can say and with confidence that the commenting feature that was added for requesting clarification / suggesting improvements is overly, overly, overly, misused, and needs fixing by means other than you can flag no longer needed comments (which creates work for other volunteers, incidentally).

(Not at all specific to MSE.)

I don't see a CoC violation in this particular comment, but I see a whole lot, which I've tried to summarize above.

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_{It is my understanding that it's OK to go off on a tangent when answering on MSE. If I'm mistaken, let me know.}

Answer 2

If someone will post a comment saying e.g. "You are pedantic!" then yes, that might indeed be violation of the CoC and flag worthy as unfriendly.

If someone will post a comment saying e.g. "Your post is pedantic so I downvoted" then I don't think it's violation of the CoC or flag worthy. It's not personal, it just explains a downvote. The word pedantic isn't used in a bad way in this case.

And if someone posts a comment saying e.g. "The reason you got downvote might be because others find it pedantic" is just a friendly attempt to explain downvote cast by others, so taking this as offense is totally wrong.

Answer 3

Overall context matters.

This is meta. Some people are pedantic - literally looking at typography to the pixel and looking at the minutiae of seemingly minor things. Other people... just want to ask programming questions (Shouldn't on meta!). Rest of us are in between.

While it's no longer what we do, it's also occasionally been annoying enough that SE lore includes a founder (jokingly) threaten physical violence with a giant S. Not everyone likes pedantry, or going into the minutiae. Looking at the post in question - and as I said context is important, it's sitting on -6/+3 while I write this, and that seems a reasonable potential reason for the downvoting.

It happened someone called my post (or maybe me) pedantic.

Someone said "I feel some folks might be downvoting the post cause it's pedantic" is very different. It's an observation (of the folks voting) rather than an accusation of excessive pedantry. In this context, I think the intent is roughly as subtle as two halfbricks - "Yeah, there's downvotes, maybe this is why" as opposed to any accusative.

Answer 4

Is calling an individual user or their post "pedantic" a CoC violation?

Yes. That said, the specific comment you're talking about is not the user that's making the comment calling you or your post pedantic. It's attempting to read the minds of those who downvoted instead, ascribing these thoughts to them. Which may be arguably quite useless, but I would not call it a CoC violation.

In addition to that, like Shadow already said, sometimes there are no better words to explain a downvote either, and not explaining a downvote is seen as unfriendly too. For the sake of brevity and staying within character limits, sometimes 'pedantic' just works better than 'excessively focused on minor details to the point of it becoming annoying'. And there's a previous comment that does do the more verbose thing:

Not my downvote, but I can see why one would downvote this. The only difference is the switching of places between Next and Cancel. It's not like that makes this entire screenshot useless, but at the same time there really isn't any need to update them either. If one was busy updating all screenshots, then yeah go ahead. But to go digging for a screenshot that's ˜98% the same.

After that, yeah, summarizing that in a single word (pedantic) in the next comment is probably fine. I would definitely take that context into account when moderating comments, at least.

Then again, nobody here can read minds (I hope), so commenting about why other people may have downvoted isn't always useful if you can give no actionable advice on improving the post. Especially if you've encountered particular users before and you know that they are likely to create a fuss when you leave such a comment, sometimes it's better to just downvote too, or stay silent, and move on...