A large number of Stack Exchange mods resigning over new policies
meta.stackexchange.com
meta.stackexchange.com
I abhor the recent trend of content decontamination like many others do. But for Q&A sites like SE, I think it is a necessity to stay on topic.
Yes, some moderators might have been too eager in some cases, happened to me too. But since these people are all volunteers, I think they should get some support from the community.
I mean I might have to look for another job if SE ever gets shut down and a lot of knowledge would immediately be lost.
Many people seem to know some mods personally. I have spend a lot of time on that site and couldn't even name one moderator by name/handle.
Quite ironic that a site with a wealth of knowledge has problems with monetization. Some things in the internet economy seem to be quite off.
When politics - i.e. status games and power plays - are prioritised over product quality, bad things happen.
Unfortunately SE seems to have chosen the former over the latter. I have suspicions that amateur modding is part of the problem.
I hope SE doesn't shut down, because currently it's still helpful in spite of itself - although probably more for experienced users than absolute beginners.
But I think a lot of people would like to see a saner and more concise alternative with a more generous and less confrontational culture.
Try a little exercise: ask a computer literate person not familiar with SE to find out what questions are on-topic on https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/
software development methods and practices
requirements, architecture, and design
quality assurance and testing
configuration, build, and release management
Questions that need improvement may be closed until someone fixes them.
Don't ask about...
explaining, writing or debugging code
support for tools or products
finding or recommending products or services, including tools, libraries or packages, programming languages, books, scholarly papers, tutorials, articles, or blogs
career or education advice
legal advice or aid
There are a lot of valid complaints about the way Stack Overflow moderates in general, but I don't get the impression that this particular squabble is over moderation practices -- it seems to be about upcoming changes to SO's Code of Conduct. I don't know what those changes are, so I'll reserve judgement. I am certainly hoping that it doesn't boil down to "I cannot abide being required to refer to transgender women with 'her' and 'she'," though.
If this is true, it's damning:
> Now if I avoid pronouns altogether by sticking to proper names or disengaging from the individual, that's being considered an insult too.
The complaints seem to be about some proposed new rule requiring users to explicitly write other users' pronouns, for no other reason than as a performative display of respect. This is quite different from a rule that says "If a user states that they prefer pronoun X, don't use other pronouns."
If moderators are really, truly being directed the way that quote suggests, then yeah, that's a bad directive, whether or not the intentions are good. But some comments here suggested that this had to do with a trans moderator, not a trans user, which makes me suspect the pronouns in question may have been not on public-facing Stack Exchange but in moderator chats/forums. And if moderator X is pointedly avoiding ever "engaging" with moderator Y when the position requires it, then that's going to be a personnel problem.
Those imposing the CoC are getting exactly what they want - driving anyone who disagrees from the field.
For the benefit of those of us who don't closely follow Stack Overflow meta-drama, can you explain what this is alluding to?
Monica mentions "this rule mandates specific, positive actions." but not what the rule is, which I find disquieting. What is the rule, and if it's so bad, and also public (it's a new rule everyone has to know, right?), why is being kept secret?
This is a decent (long) summary of what's been happening.
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/331513/lets-take-a-...
Mods should have cooler heads than this, I think.
The groups always exaggerate the impact of actions upon the rest of us when it's usually a no-op as far as we're concerned.
E.g. Reddit iama had this massive controversy around a Reddit facilitator being fired and everyone predicted insta failure or whatever. Lots of time passed and the product is still pretty damned successful (Bill Gates was on it within the last year). I'm sure Wikipedia has had "I'm stepping down" posts and whatnot.
Perhaps the learning is that it isn't a worthwhile way to seek meaning in your life to give away volunteer hours moderating sites unless they're your own or you're paid for it. It is a pointless place to put your self-worth because disagreements will occur and they will be enforced as the site owner desires. Your hours earn you no power.
Of course sometimes the bigger ones are great for another reason, their PR-run effort blows up in their face. The recent Beto AMA was a great dumpster fire of a read.
People enjoy doing things for others. It's a deep Need people have. If mass violence and wars, natural disasters of all kinds through the ages, have not been able to make us more selfish and wipe out that need, internet drama is not going to either.
The process is messy sure, and if you are experiencing it for the first time it can be confusing, repulsive and misleading. It's not a good idea to follow those feelings and make conclusions. Because those conclusions will obscure from your view, the reasons why anything good happens in the world.
Bear in mind there are many of us with many years in the online trenches who have reached the same conclusion - participation is one thing; giving over a huge part of your time and energy is more questionable.
Also the idea that people do it out of an altruistic need to help may be true in some cases but neglects the significant motivation of validation, the need to feel noticed and appreciated through upvotes and other reputation buzzes, and the following increase in "power" and "status", which isn't so obviously positive and healthy.
Then all the sidebar info (name, posts count, location, badges and tags) and forum signatures were removed, so you'd get no information on who's posting, making it nearly 4chan-style (not a big change on the usual level of discourse there, though). And yesterday only the users who have donated money (either to the forum or to fundraisers events) have their info + signatures back.
Heck, I was one type of user (wrote comments, had a 6+ year account) until things started to change. Years later, I became a mobile user to scroll through the memes because I wanted something to infini-scroll.
The gamble was that whatever was left of the old reddit would be a springboard for a more conventional user-generated content platform. They were right.
Someone's on-the-job performance doesn't mean they are always and forever in the right. Given the lack of any concrete evidence posted but lots of hand-wringing and pearl clutching about vague incidences, I think reserving judgment is the proper course.
It seems like SE got rid of a mod because they voiced concerns about an upcoming rule change... comparing that to assaulting someone is a cheap shot.
They did the comparison only to show how goatinaboat's appeal to trust is a logical fallacy. Before coming to a judgment, one should take the facts at hand, instead of relying solely on the trust you have of the people involved like goatinaboat did.
In this case, many details cannot be seen, so it's not proper to decide on a judgment solely on the fact that we trust Monica.
It is on the accuser to make the case.
"We aren’t going to share specifics out of respect for all individuals involved but this is a site reaching millions of people and we have to do what we believe fosters a spirit of inclusion and respect. When a moderator violates that, we will always do our best to resolve it with them privately. When we can’t we must take action."
(https://judaism.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5197)
So it look like we won't have anymore information, at least from the SE side.
The fired mod answered in the comments:
"Inclusion and respect are important, yes! I never said otherwise or did anything to violate either the current or forthcoming CoC (as best I understand the latter; y'all haven't answered my questions). Please read the email I sent in response to my firing. It doesn't have to be this way. "
[0]https://christianity.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6718/b...
So the disagreement and comments by Monica regarding the CoC was about pronouns. But Monica had waited before another ex-mod talked about this [0], I think because she didn't want discussion about this CoC change to distract from her issue (being "fired" as a mod without discussion).
[0]https://judaism.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5193/stack-...
That's all SE has done here. Exercised a clause in the license. If you don't like that, don't submit content under licenses that allow it.
> Original contributions remain under prior version unless express permission to upgrade is obtained.
> You may Distribute or Publicly Perform an Adaptation only under the terms of: (i) this License; (ii) a later version of this License with the same License Elements as this License ...
That only covers adaptations. Ignore me.
[0]: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode
Basically if there was going to be a new rule, some of the mods would have preferred if SE had came to meta and asked for help writing it and feedback on it, and instead of being told what the new rule was going to be.
The lines here are so blurry, I can’t make heads or tails out of any of this. All I can tell for sure is that some of the mods are upset about something (but won’t or can’t say what) and they’re leaving SO. The forced abstraction of this whole saga reminds me of stories I’ve heard from people who lived under communist dictatorships: they’d have to peel back multiple layers of insinuations to try to figure out what was actually meant. The way some of the commenters on here are dancing around saying anything concrete suggests that there are a few people who do know what’s going on but are afraid to come out and say what it is.
Yep, there it is.
> Now if I avoid pronouns altogether by sticking to proper names or disengaging from the individual, that's being considered an insult too.
It seems like the new CoC requires that not only you don't disparage another's belief, which is fine and everyone agrees with, but you have to actively show that you agree with their point of view as well. You can't remain impartial.
https://literature.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1195/res...
One big point is that many mods resigned not over the future CoC change but over the plain unprofessional "termination" of the one mod in question (in multiple cases this being straw-camel-back regarding other recent missteps of the SO company). I recommend at least this interaction: https://judaism.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5197
All I can see online is everyone vaguely talking around the issue.
Make the facts public and let people decide for themselves.
The cycle certainly didn't start with groups over a computer network, but I think it's very unlikely that it started before written texts. So there's ~8k years window there. It's not literally timeless, but does feel like so.
Even the new CC-share-alike allows commercial mixins https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ .
So being that SE started with SO and thus heavy programming emphasis there should be a plethora of interesting mashups.
Instead the only SE content derived sites have been banal copies.
For the last half decade or so SE has progressively abandoned this latter group, leading to a lot of pent-up frustration. Some changes SE has made are sensible (e.g. striving to be more welcoming and more inclusive), but the volunteer work of curators has only become more difficult. SE refuses to implement new tools to aid moderation, so that e.g. spam fighting is mostly done by volunteer projects.
That only sets the general scene. Since the last year or so SE has stopped engaging the community on Meta, mostly just announcing changes top-down. Tweets by third parties have larger impact on SE policy than long-standing complaints by the community. This has led to a further deterioration of the relationship. The illegal changes to the content license a month ago are a perfect example of this top-down, uncooperative approach.
Now the actual drama starts: in a closed moderator chat, there was some kind of discussion or disagreement. I'm not privy to the details. Not all of this is nice, e.g. it seems that SE is unwilling to protect trans moderators from vitriol by other mods. But to everyone's confusion, Monica Cellio was suddenly removed as a volunteer moderator. She is known as being extremely reasonable, experienced, and sincere. While she might have tried to discuss sincere questions, it is beyond belief that she would attack another moderator.
So moderators and other engaged users are deeply frustrated, see a company that no longer engages with the community, does stupid decisions, and has now fired one of the best volunteer moderators in a despicable manner. For a lot of people, this is the straw that broke the camel's back. E.g. one mod I know decided to resign because they now see themselves completely unable to achieve any positive change on the site. And if Monica isn't a good-enough mod, how can they hope to be remotely adequate?
Disclosure: I wrote the linked Meta.SE question. It is my belief that SE the company and SE the community need to cooperate for both to be successful. Yes, the community can sometimes be toxic. But the company seems to have given up completely on engaging with the community, and that does not bode well.
In fact, it is that - not "the community" - that is the ultimate decision maker here, though naturally the community being part of the USP, the commercial enterprise undermines it at it's peril.
As you disclose, you are seeing this from a particular point of view - the mods (whether or not you are one yourself).
It is worth bearing in mind that is a minority - if heavily invested - point of view.
Most users probably have little interest in the politics you describe, and the business only in so far as it affects returns.
I would browse Workplace SE quite a bit (it seems to feature on the 'Hot Questions' list regularly) and Monica Cellio has always come across as decent/smart/sincere, so yeah, that's pretty bizarre.
I never understood this. Why have one or the other instead of both. All questions funnel in on a "everyone" area for a particular type of question. (Junior people can moderate those to gain experience if the senior mods don't want to. This will give them experience, insight, etc.) Even the most repetitive and/or superficial homework question can be answered and not closed as duplicate. (Or at least pointed to the duplicates but not closed until the questioner has accepted a duplicate as an acceptable answer.)
When "good quality" appear or new/unique questions and answers appear they can be refined and moved over into a curated persistent section for future reference. The senior mods can take over at this point to make sure the reference Q&A are as they like.
I always hated that "closed as duplicate" reply especially if I'd already seen the supposed duplicates and didn't think they applied. This approach would allow those to be answered by new people or ignored if nobody wanted to answer.
I never understood this. Why have one or the other instead of both. All questions funnel in on a "everyone" area for a particular type of question. (Junior people can moderate those to gain experience if the senior mods don't want to. This will give them experience, insight, etc.) Even the most repetitive and/or superficial homework question can be answered and not closed as duplicate. (Or at least pointed to the duplicates but not closed until the questioner has accepted a duplicate as an acceptable answer.)
When "good quality" appear or new/unique questions and answers appear they can be refined and moved over into a curated persistent section for future reference. The senior mods can take over at this point to make sure the reference Q&A are as they like.
I always hated that "closed as duplicate" reply especially if I'd already seen the supposed duplicates and didn't think they applied. This approach would allow those to be answered by new people or ignored if nobody wanted to answer.
> There is a perpetual tension between those who want SE to be helping everyone, and those who want to curate a helpful resource. ...
The thing is the "curator" people feel really strongly about what they're doing. Obviously, I am on the side of at least trying to help everyone even if that means "the rules" get bent.
Let's not blow this out of proportion. It's NOT "a firing" No one lost their livelihood.
Stack Exchange is not really any different than visiting a stranger's home. SE has its own set of rules and customs. It takes effort to sit back, listen, and understand them without questioning them. Just accepting them for what they are without any judgment.
Stack Exchange has high standards for what it considers to be an acceptable question as well as an acceptable answer. These standards are quite different than nearly all other forums that came before it. It was their site and they created the rules. It's our job to play their game.
If I don't like the rules of the game that they've laid out, then I can play a different game. There are literally hundreds, if not thousands of other forums where you can ask questions and get answers with less standards and barriers to entry than Stack Exchange.
One of the reasons SE emerged as the leading Q&A site is that they imposed these strict set of rules. They provided a very structured way to both ask a question (minimally sufficient reproducible example) and to produce an answer. Another goal was to limit discussion.
Packaging all these ideas together along with points and badges lead to its tremendous success. Getting answers to programming questions before SE wasn't nearly as easy. But their gamification with explicit rules worked better than that came before it.
If the first Q&A volunteers from SE did not adhere to these rules of the game and if they were not strictly enforced, then it wouldn't exist today. It exists precisely because these rules exist and were adhered to.
As a human being who uses emotional-based reasoning, it can hurt whenever an interaction on SE is met without the expected conclusion. When someone posts a question on SE, the expectation is that it is answered. Getting a question downvoted or closed does hurt, but it's very likely that these actions are just the rules of the game playing itself out.
This really isn't different than playing Monopoly and landing on the 'Go to Jail' square. It doesn't help meeting your goal for the game and can sting in that moment. Eliminating the Go to Jail square from Monopoly fundamentally changes the game. You can imagine more 'negative' rules from Monopoly being eliminated such that the game wouldn't even resemble itself anymore. And if such a game were invented, it likely would never have been successful. If I don't like Monopoly's rules, I can play another game.
SE is successful because there are a strict set of rules that restrict the set of content that can be posted. It is these rules that have lead to its success.
This doesn't absolve SE from criticism just like it doesn't absolve Monopoly from criticism. You are free to dislike any of its set of rules. But at the end of the day, you still have to play by the rules or find a different site.
This also doesn't absolve any of the people moderating, asking or answering questions, or commenting. It's possible to break the rules or code of conduct. SE has guidelines for this as well. As humans, there is going to be some failure to maintain civilized discussion. But, enforcing a rule correctly as a moderator that someone else might perceive as negative (going to jail) is just part of the SE game.
> SE is successful because there are a strict set of rules that restrict the set of content that can be posted. It is these rules that have lead to its success.
The sites have never been even remotely consistent in their enforcement of the rules, so it is really not possible to make the claim that "strictness" is what has made stackexchange a success. Many of the things that the strict people abhor are some of the best things on the sites-- like comments, open-ended questions, answers that question the question. This is especially true in stackexchanges like "The Workplace".
It remains to be seen what really caused Monica to get ousted (not "fired") as a moderator. I expect it to be something quite ugly relating to the upcoming guidelines that most people haven't seen yet.
This is a "You maniacs; you blew it up!" moment. What just happened??
> it seems that SE is unwilling to protect trans moderators from vitriol by other mods.
Reading Monica's post made me pretty sure this was trans related. I'm sad that I was right.
> [From Monica's Post] unlike the rest of the CoC, this rule mandates specific, positive actions.
This is something I've heard many times from anti-trans activists in order to justify their purposeful, and intentional misgendering and dead-naming of trans individuals. I'm not saying that is what Monica is advocating, but my spidey-sense is definitely tingling.
> [From Monica's Post] chastising me for raising issues and saying my values were out of alignment.
Again this is something I hear from anti-trans activists. We saw similar rhetoric from homophobic individuals back in the 90s. That their religion and values dictated that gay people were bad therefore they couldn't <insert action here>.
---
Without knowing more it is hard to say, but even if this isn't about trans people Monica's arguments aren't inherently right. One person's religious beliefs don't justify the disregard for others. A very extreme example would be that many KKK member's religion states that black people are inherently inferior, and we don't give that belief consideration.
If you know more, please do share, because right now it seems like one sides arguments are valid, but they can quickly fall apart depending upon the specifics.
Anti-trans and anti-CoC sentiment are certainly part of the issue at hand, but likely not by Monica. Some of the resignations may be partially motivated by hate, many of the responses definitely are. However, there are many other aspects of the firing that are problematic by themselves, regardless of the reason for the firing.
It doesn't matter what Monica believes, only how she acts and speaks. It is my understanding (based on hearsay) that at no point in this incident did she make statements that would be considered transphobic by a reasonable person. While she was uncomfortable with upcoming CoC changes, she was also asking for clarification and guidance in good faith. Definitely not in that “I'm just asking a question!” trolling style. Asking sincere questions would be the sign of a potential ally, it is illogical to shut those down. However, some of the relevant correspondence is in personal emails, so we'll never know the truth.
I'm confident that she didn't say or do anything that would violate the current or upcoming SE CoC, but that the director firing her felt that Monica's questions were evidence that she would not uphold the upcoming CoC. This is silly: if a mod feels they are unable to fulfil their position they can just resign, no need to boot them in advance. I dislike the “thoughtcrime” meme, but here it might actually fit.
There's also an aspect that I find more troubling, which is the legitimacy of CoCs. They only protect the community when violations are investigated fairly. Normally the problem is that the CoC is not enforced enough. Here, a CoC was enforced without there being a violation, and that gives ammunition to the idiots who think the sole purpose of a CoC is to silence insufficiently progressive speech.
Edit 1: the first resignation is in that explicitly lists the CoC as reason for resignation [1]. The CoC will apparently require that correct pronouns are used.
Edit 2: the new CoC will allegedly require pronouns, i.e. will not allow the avoidance of pronouns. As a person who prefers non-standard pronouns, such a requirement is counterproductive because it requires some people to act against their conscience, whereas avoiding pronouns still avoids misgendering and lets everyone save face.
[1]: https://christianity.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6718/b...
Also “write neutrally” tends to not actually be written neutrally. “Guys” being one of the common examples, it is used neutrally but inherently has a male biases. This can be frustrating to many women, trans or cis. Invisible Women has a lot in it about this problem and knock on effects of it.
Why are you using the word transsexual? It is largely a medical term at this point referring to the someone who has undergone full SRS. As it is generally considered quite rude to talk about people’s genital configuration the LGBT community has largely moved on from this term to transgender.
The other threads show that there has never been a complaint about misgendering anyone on purpose but the new CoC lays out bunch of very difficult to characterize commandments.
The biology has to do with it that no matter what we decide how to speak in society, it doesn't inherently change the fact sex has very much biological meaning and words don't change that. That is the belief consideration we give a lot of power even though we should not.
You can change your sex but not your gender.
All these ex-mods wrote these coy essays with discussions of free will and human rights in order to avoid discussing the issue at hand.
Trans people are surely a more important part of the StackExchange community and business than a few unpaid volunteers.
I am not sorry that Monica’s feelings were hurt by a demand for basic human decency.
This is either incorrect or relies on an unconventionally broad notion of "misgendering." Normally misgendering is understood to be the act of using pronouns other than a person's preferred pronouns, the point of controversy is that now simply avoiding pronouns can be considered an act of misgendering. This is new territory.
Particularly on a Q&A site, avoiding gendered pronouns altogether strikes me as the _most_ practical policy. It's what I (try my best to remember to) do on Hacker News. I don't know what pronouns the GP prefers, and I can't very well ask them right now, so if I have to refer to them, I'll either say "they" or "the GP".
Jeff Atwood commented under the resignation: "It is definitely hard to see long time deep contributors go, but this is sometimes the way of life. I don't begrudge anyone after ~10 years wanting a change."
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/389906/moderator-re...
Hardly seems helpful to me in calming down the heated minds.
I'm not mentioning this "top user" thing on my resume anymore, because not relevant.
The site is still an excellent source of information about all things that were cool ten years ago, such as Java, Spring, SQL, Python.
Reminds me of the company take overs where the key asset is human capital and they all just walk out the door after the deal. Congrats you bought an empty building for billions
Don't think SE is ever going to be profitable if they can't keep key figures happy
Seems like a code of conduct issue?
Is the flag system being abused?
Stack Exchange has become a frustrating site to use.
"Closed as duplicate: different and unrelated question"
reopen further explaining the question and how its not related
"Closed as duplicate: the first question that was immediately closed with no replies"
OR!
Google around, find SE link on issue, everybody is arguing about why the user wants to do it that why, convinces them to do it another way, only I don't have that option, so I open my own question, and its closed as a dupe of the one from google where the original question was never answered.
or
Post helpful answer that actually answers the users question as asked without berating them for wanting to do it that way
Get yelled at in the comments for creating noise?
---
The moral of the story is that stack exchange needs to die so that something else can come from its ashes that is able to look back at SE as an example of how not to do shit.
I've also noticed a recent trend that moderators on SO are also now deleting questions to stop any objections to the close votes from lower-ranked users, it's ridiculous.
I can see quite a lot, not everything though, and I don't want to grind reputation asking inane questions to get access to more, to keep my detailed questions from being closed without explanation and then deleted. These kafkaesque trials are ridiculous and obnoxious.
Yes, I know, which puts the entire outcry here (from likely low-score users) in a very comical light. "Ban mods"—what they really are asking for is "ban high-score users who do not like my low-quality questions".
Thanks for telling me you're part of the problem. You're not nearly as infallible in your judgement about what's a "bad question", it's plain and simple hubris most high-ranks have. The system should not allow such consolidation of power, there's a very good reason most democratic countries have separated the three powers.
Why should you be able to flag for close, downvote and get to delete all at once? It's basically all the power there is, especially bad if you own a tag badge. We have enough people to separate those tasks, it'd definitely reduce one person's ability to do harm.
> high confidence by the community = high points
High confidence at answering questions. We don't get to vote on moderation, closed as dupe, deletion etc. Karma is only a weak indicator of being a good moderator. Sure they may know the subject well, but that's not reflective of a good and empathetic moderator.
Frustration with this is one of the main reasons I just stopped logging in and participating. SE is now static web search results.
Because it's somehow hard to be welcoming? I guess it is for some people and now instead of a snarky comment they're just voting down, making everyone feel much better (/s).
> as answers or those that can’t be bothered to search for anything, just want a solution HERE AND NOW.
If only privileged users on SO closed such questions, but they don't. People are very rightfully complaining.
> but people are complaining a lot more these days than before. That, too, says something about the community.
It's always fun to blame users/someone else I guess.
Could just be that you've gamed the system.
As many have noted, there is a conflict between the goal of a wiki and the goal of getting answers to people.
I speak as someone with a decent score answering questions, who had to fight tooth-and-nail for years to stop people from downvoting and close-voting questions they didn't understand in one of "my" tags.
I put a lot of effort into editing questions to make them clear. More often than bad faith, I see people who don’t have the experience to know what a good question is, or who really struggle to express themselves in English.
Often it’s only through interaction that I can tell if people are making the effort or not. Does SO need more people editing and doing triage? A different interface that bridges the gap between Q&A and wiki? I don’t know.
Don't try to process more question volume that you can adequately rate, it isn't that hard. The path to hell is paved with good intentions (to make SO a better knowledge site).
Are they all the same?
You repeatedly make really broad generalizations about SO mods that do nothing to help make your point.
That sounds like defeatist attitude.
Stack Exchange could add a rule forbidding asking why or adding answers that have caveats the question asker already said in op were unacceptable and deal with part of the issue
They could also add a system to review, rate, and appeal moderator actions, and penalize people who's moderator actions aren't proper.
They could also add a regular segment to their blog or meta that is just about showcasing improper moderator actions in the light of this is why they thought that was the proper action, this is what they missed, this is how we can avoid that kind of mistake in the future.
But all of this really has to be built in from the ground up, as no existing mod community with go along with that being added after the fact.
Any such answer I see, I flag as not an answer to the question, and those answers are often converted to comments or deleted. It seems you are not really familiar with all the tools in your disposal on SO.
> They could also add a system to review, rate, and appeal moderator actions, and penalize people who's moderator actions aren't proper. These tools already exists, sans the penalizing. The whole idea is not to penalize anyone. Just as users are not penalized for asking bad questions, likewise users are not penalized for potentially bad votes.
It's very difficult to sustain a technical solution in the face of human nature that moves at such a comparatively glacial pace.
.. that would make the outcome significantly more frustrating, as the only way to discover the real requirements is then to post an answer which the questioner regards as wrong.
Doesn't matter if Y is non-negotiable, or if I've purposely constrained Y, to get a specific answer for a specific technology.
How infuriating for a "Questions and Answers" site, to be told when you're asking a question, that the question you're asking is wrong, and that "you should instead have asked ..."
I swear to god, the SO mods are the dumbest, most priggish, humourless beaureucrats in existence.
[0] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/66377/what-is-the-x...
For example, people who insist they can’t use a Laravel package because of “performance”, but it turns out they just don’t know how the composer autoloader works.
You’re not there to babysit the question asker or convince them to change their approach/hair style/choice of library.
I know it’s frustrating to see people doing something wrong, or that you don’t agree with, but you know what you can do?
Just... don’t get involved if you can’t answer the actual question that was asked, and if it’s a bad question, let it die a natural death.
Asking the poster about X, and offering a solution Y' which will solve X should at least be attempted.
If the poster insists on Y, then he'll also have to accept the answer "sorry, you can't do it that way, for the following reasons".
No!
Goodness me, why is this so difficult?
It should not be attempted. That’s an arbitrary expression of your opinion on the poster.
If the question can’t be solved in the way it’s asked let it die gracefully with a “no you can’t do it that why” and suck up the down votes when someone comes along and proves yes you actually can.
I know it’s frustrating for you, but asking a question isn’t about you.
It’s a glib response to suggest that this is just done when Y is a terrible question for new users.
It’s also very common when Y is a very good just very difficult or obscure question.
I think it’s quite clear that a common sense approach isn’t working on this topic.
The solution really is, if you have nothing meaningful on topic to contribute, then don’t.
There really needs to be a way to make this behaviour on SO punitive somehow, giving people points for it results in the current situation.
Qs on a Q&A site become a sort of permanent record that other people stumble across, not just a wham bam thankya ma'am transaction that only the Q-asker sees. By revealing XY problems, a better service is provided for everyone who stumbles upon the Q.
> Goodness me, why is this so difficult?
Because not everyone agrees with you. This faction war has been going on at SE forever.
The fact that it is a permanent record that lives on is another argument in favor of the "just answer the damn question".
Context changes. Requirements change. Someone in the future might need the exact answer for some reason, but instead they get some useless back-and-forth and low-effort condescending answers that is super-specific to that asker.
Asking for more context, adding disclaimers before answering or linking to alternative solutions in the comments is fine, but it's a pain in the ass when the answers doesn't match the questions.
(in a pleasingly condescending manner too - I might add!)
Well, if StackOveflow/StackExchange is still following Jeff Atwood's philosophy, asking a question isn't necessarily about the questioner either. The question & the answer is for the community more than questioner.[0]
Understandably, most question askers see Stack Overflow as a "Siri/Alexa" type of resource to ask a question. E.g. If I ask Siri voice AI, "where's the nearest Starbucks?", she doesn't talk back about any X/Y problem such as "Is your actual problem that you're not getting enough sleep and therefore you're really asking how to cure insomnia instead of a caffeine fix?" No, Siri just responds with the address of the closest Starbucks. Why can't Stack Overflow be just like that?!?
The above "Siri" type perspective is a huge misunderstanding because the messaging from founders Atwood/Spolsky about Stack Overflow's editorial purpose is very nuanced and difficult to grasp. It's been 11 years since 2008 and that "wiki" intention is still drowned out by the frustrated by users who simply want any of their questions answered: they don't care if it's a duplicate; they don't want pushback on X/Y; they don't want their question downvoted/closed/deleted.
In contrast, the moderators (a.k.a. the high rep fellow users) of Stack Overflow are definitely not in the mode of mimicking Siri/Alexa. They're humans and they definitely will "talk back" to you and ask, "what exactly are you trying to accomplish?" Heck, the famous blog by Microsoft's Raymond Chen (The Old New Thing) is basically a collection of essays about various "X/Y Problem" submitted by customers.
(To downvoters... I don't mind the downvotes but please help with quality of this discussion: If there's a public statement from Stack Overflow explaining its true intended purpose that contradicts my cite, please reply with a reference to it for the benefit of readers of this thread.)
[0] https://twitter.com/codinghorror/status/991082088689381376?r...
Part of the confusion might be that they're very unclear about this point. For example, on the front page right now the following is prominently displayed:
> Stack Overflow is an open community for anyone that codes. We help you get answers to your toughest coding questions, share knowledge with your coworkers in private, and find your next dream job.
Emphasis mine. Clearly that is something very different from building a "Q&A wiki" which you allude to.
I guess the impedance mismatch comes from the fact that the route they chose to get to their "Q&A wiki" goal was to curate questions from individuals, rather than to for example extract questions and answers from a more regular help forum.
So individuals go on SO and think the site is about helping them, and then get confused about what happens next.
That text blurb on the landing page is relatively new. It may not accurately reflect Stack Overflow's long-standing strict editorial focus. The new SO landing page appeared less than 4 months ago around June 27, 2019.[1][2]
In contrast, the following "wikipedia" intention is from the SO launch 11 years ago back in September 15, 2008: "Stack Overflow is a _collaboratively edited_ question and answer site for programmers"[0]
So from September 2008 to June of 2019, it has been ~11 years of endless confusion from users because Atwood/Spolsky's intended editorial purpose of Stack Overflow has been poorly explained -- and I would also contend that it's non-intuitive for most users and hard to understand. E.g. The following is too nuanced to explain to drive-by casual SO users: I'm not just asking _my_ particular question to get _my_ particular answer but actually seeding _a_ question that's also also a _helpful_ contribution to the _community_ to build a repository quality answers to questions.
>I guess the impedance mismatch [...] So individuals go on SO and think the site is about helping them, and then get confused about what happens next.
Yes, I totally agree why the confusion happens and why the same complaints about SO have been repeated for over a decade. It's because SO's editorial purpose is basically invisible and only manifested in the powers given to moderators[3] to downvote/close and for the tradition of fellow users pushing back with X/Y dissection instead of simply answering the question.
Does the June 2019 landing page mean that SO has changed and they want to be more of "Siri/Alexa" type of resource? I'm not an employee and I don't know.
[0] 2008-09-15 launch: http://web.archive.org/web/20080915103343/http://stackoverfl...
[1] 2019-06-26 old: http://web.archive.org/web/20190626143412/https://stackoverf...
[2] 2019-06-27 new: http://web.archive.org/web/20190627173410/https://stackoverf...
[3] footnote about "moderator" powers : a Stack Overflow user only needs 15 points to flag a post as "duplicate". And voting to "close" only requires 250 points.
Those thresholds are so low that SO is basically asking non-hardcore users to also exercise moderation powers. In other words, the "moderators" are not an elite cabal; they're your fellow users voting to flag questions as "duplicate". Why are my peers flagging questions as duplicate?!? I don't know. As the old saying goes, "maybe we've met the enemy and the enemy is us."
List of reputation scores required for various "moderation" privileges:
Maybe a meta-moderation system like Slashdot had could have helped. In the end though I think their implementation was ultimately flawed. They created a great platform for asking questions, but that wasn't what they wanted to create.
This is... weird, IMO.
I'd much prefer as a new user "I think I know what you're trying to do, your way is gonna cause you a bunch of pain, there's a better way, and here's why" to zero answers and a dead question.
IMO it ok to suggest alternatives in the comments though. Alternatively, you can open a new question, answer it yourself and link to it on the old answer... I think it's allowed, but who knows.
(My favorite is the one where they were actually asking about PHP)
I saw someone post eleven different questions with almost the same code in a 48 hour period the other day - each time about a tiny specific question but you could tell they were trying to do something (online/offline user detection) via a method that wasn't suited for it.
These XY answers should contain a mention of Y, if relevant, skip the scolding, and answer the question.
If you have the answer but would rather the person not do it, just put a disclaimer on top of your answer.
If the question/answer combo is way too specific that there's no chance someone is going to to benefit from it the future, maybe it should die, like other posters said.
A common one I come across is people trying to track who's online/offline with window.onbeforeunload.
The answer is always "that's not reliable, you can't really use it for this".
A good answer mentions the alternatives - storing the user's last activity and considering them logged out after X minutes, using websockets for a presence channel, etc.
I see no reason to avoid the "you can accomplish your underlying goal in a better way" answers.
Only if the question is "Is window.onbeforeunload reliable to track online/offline users?"
In every other case, that should be a disclaimer on top of an answer to the actual question.
Maybe future users don't need 100% reliability for some reason. Maybe they're just trying to find out if something like onbeforeunload even exists.
Sure, showing better ways is fine. As long as there is an actual answer somewhere (preferably with the disclaimer), instead of cute but condescending non-answers like [1].
We're gonna have to disagree on this.
That's like me asking "how do I get to this restaurant", and you give me directions to the place that burned down a year ago without mentioning that. Useless, and infuriating when I drive a half hour to discover it.
Consider that the asker might just using the restaurant as a reference to some other place. Or someone "hearing" the answer in the future wanted to know the address to visit the ruins. The information might still be useful. Consider that you might not always know better.
If this were a chatroom or forum, fine, answer informally. But we're talking in the context of a Q&A webiste.
Like it or not, regexes are able to parse a limited subset of HTML.
By explaining why they only can parse this small subset is a great teaching opportunity on Chomsky Hierarchies. And the people searching for it might learn that XML parsers exist.
By actually giving an answer to the question (after saying the above of course) you might be helping thousands of people parse very simple HTML when they're in a hurry.
By saying [1] you're just adding low-effort content on the internet that doesn't teach anyone anything, but make you look cool to your peers.
By explaining to them Chomsky Hierarchies they can understand limitations of regexes and learn about parsers and.
By showing them the regex able to parse a limited HTML subset they might be able to try it out and see such limitations by themselves on their own screen. Additionally they might be able to learn some new regex tricks.
Maybe you learned things in a different way, but lots of people enjoy learning stuff by doing and by seeing demonstrations.
Besides, I concede that "helping thousands of people parse very simple HTML when they're in a hurry" has its merit, but IMHO that's also how you end up debugging a production bug at 3am while losing faith in your fellow developers and humanity, so I'm not sure if it's a net plus. YMMV.
And yet it is not only wrong, but the answers below do a much better job at explaining Chomsky Hierarchies and other things correctly.
Why is it wrong? "Have you tried using an XML parser instead?" is wrong because HTML is not necessarily XML/XHTML. The first working draft of HTML5 was published a year before that answer, and non-XML websites existed since the 90s, so there's no excuses.
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> but IMHO that's also how you end up debugging a production bug at 3am while losing faith in your fellow developers and humanity, so I'm not sure if it's a net plus
And that's why you treat people like adults: you tell them the limitations of each method, instead of making a meme.
And btw, you can get bugs at 3am with a XML (or HTML) parser too.
I often come across these questions in Google searches months/years after they were closed, and I'm pretty darn sure I legitimately need to do Y. (If I'm wrong, it's for a very different reason than the OP.)
It's just impossible that they don't make any mistakes judging the questions but SO makes it near impossible to fight back or correct any mistakes you might've made (mistakes they don't really tell you, keep in mind).
In the end StackExchange owners should decide on what's the point of SO, if it's meant to be a historical archive about solutions that are often outdated and pedantically kept like that, citing vague rules. Or do they want a site where people can ask questions, actually get helpful corrections and to get up-to-date answers - basically as the smaller communities are where people haven't accumulated reputation in (tens of) thousands.
Typically I answer[1] these kind of questions by answering what I think is the solution to X, and then I'll follow up with "but if you still really want to do Y" and my attempt at solution for that.
If it's not very clear what they're trying to do, I will just answer Y but follow up with asking what they're really trying to do and that there might be a better way than Y because...
[1]: on IRC or forums, not on SO
The trouble is, if you’re going to reply that way, you should strive to first answer the question, as asked. If the answer is bad practice, of course, you should mention that.
That’s the respectful way to handle a misguided question, in my opinion. Give the reader both solutions, explain why the alternate is better, and leave it to the reader how to proceed from there.
I've been doing this stuff a long time, there's usually a reason why I'm doing it the way I'm doing it. I understand you don't like it, think it shouldn't be done that way, and so forth.
But I promise you, I've already considered the alternatives. And if you mention an alternative I haven't considered, I'll consider it then.
But please, for the love of god, just answer the effing question and stop assuming you know the nuances of my problem better than I do.
Lest we forget, stack exchange is already rising from the ashes of the 'Experts Exchange' if anyone remembers that --
People who've been doing it long enough probably also have the experience to know how to ask a good question that explains the why of the unusual request.
"I unfortunately stuck on an low-power embedded device that for some weird reason only supports MD5" is going to be treated differently on SO than "I'm new to PHP and I'm using MD5 for to encrypt passwords but I can't reverse the encryption to read the password!"
just answer the damned question, and if you have concerns, ask. I'm more than happy to explain it, I just don't want to have an hours long discussion when I asked a fairly specific question.
It's also part of asking a good question. I don't understand the uproar especially on a Q&A site.
It leads to a page with a clear question at the top and a great deal of text below which is not an answer to that question.
...and is often a way to shift the conversation to an argument about why the asker is doing it that way instead of giving them the information they actually asked for. I don't have time to argue about the sequence of events and layers of requirements that led to me asking the question, it doesn't matter if this "isn't the right way" to do it, it's the way I need to do it.
Clearly you've never been to reddit...
I've long associated this behavior with Linux evangelists, and one wonders how much cross over there is with the people who answer questions on SO. It seems like both categories would be attractive to the kind of holier-than-thou mindset that would do this.
Embedded engineers, game programmers, mechanical engineers you ask them a question they'll usually be happy to blather on. Ask a Cisco certified engineer a question and he'll make fun of you for daring to ask. Sometimes I think it's cultural too.
If you look at the people that founded SO and their careers it's obvious why the place is a toxic mess.
Edit: Wow speaking of edits, am I reading this right that Jeff Atwood himself edited the title to remove the word "stealing"?
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/02/farewell-stack-exch...
Open question about potential Android bug. I mention I have checked threads A, B, and C, and the symptoms of my bug are different, therefore why I opened a new question
"Closed as duplicate: thread A"
Sigh.
"Moderators" with a preconceived notion of what the question or subject is all about are not moderators.
Im that lucky or people tend to do not care about quality of their questions and then cry about how SO is bad?
IME down/close votes have at least as much to do with soft skills and English proficiency as quality of the underlying question.
It almost seems like "closed as duplicate" needs to be split into "closed: duplicate," and "closed: you should just quit your job instead of solving this problem."
I know forums are in opposition to everything that SE stands for, but for quite a lot of cases the questioner would benefit more from a back-and-forth, or open-ended discussion, and then at the end of the process if it's been refined then turn it into a question. If not, then let the thread auto-close and maybe even expire into deletion.
Also, any SE equivalent needs to understand the power dynamic between questioners and answerers, and what motivates people to put in the huge volunteer effort on which it's built.
Additionally, I can't imagine any format less friendly to a beginner/intermediate programmer than an endless thread of experts arguing minutiae and holy-wars couched as objective fact. Even as an advanced user, sometimes I want a straight and to the point answer, even if it's not the best possible one, so I can get on with my work or research from there.
Remember, SE is foremost a site for readers seeking existent answers. Not askers. Not answerers. Neither of those last two groups has dwindled substantially enough in response to askers/answerers complaints to impact the experience of users seeking existent answers. Therefore, in my opinion, SE still works well.
I get what you're saying, but I can tell you personally I learned SOOO much from getting into arguments with people and then going off and doing research during the argument.
And sometimes I'll completely do a 180 after a few years because I REMEMBER those arguments, and I eventually understand their perspective because I started coming across the problems they were having.
I may not always do a 180, but I WILL more fully understand the pros and cons of everything.
And this is a major reason why the "discourse" here on HN is only half useful.
Too many people think not being challenged is somehow good and educational. Perhaps for a subset of people, but there are many like me who learn through challenge.
Just consider that often the very act of responding to someone forces you to consider their position better. Which is why trite dismissal is one of the poorest forms of argumentation ever made.
I've seen questions about how to bypass DRM on 20 year old software deleted. And why do they assume that the DMCA applies in other countries? What if you are asking how to build an unauthorized media player in a market where it is not for sale anyway?
I remember in like 2011, someone asked how to virtualize OSX Tiger on a non Apple host because they needed to use this proprietary software for their business. The top answer was that it was 100% impossible to do this (not true) and that they were a horrible human being for even considering it because it violated Apple's TOS. I've also seen this happen when people want to do things like retrieve music that they paid for off of their devices.
I have heard that in Saudi Arabia husbands have a legal right to monitor their wives communications. So if a Saudi woman posted on SE asking how to remove a keylogger her husband installed, would it be deleted for violating local law?
Or what if a Saudi woman simply wanted help cracking the Google authorized wife-tracking app[1], so she could flee? That would be violating local laws, and upsetting Google.
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2019/02/12/693994447/apple-google-critic...
The company is on the US, so it would be illegal for them to keep the answer.
The law in the US is such that a high-profile site that does business in the USA, like SO, is entirely reasonable if it wants to to err on the side of caution on these things. Not all the questions around the DMCA have been settled by the courts, so, no, we can't necessarily say for sure what is legal and illegal. But we can say that volunteering to help everyone to figure this out could be a very expensive proposition.
For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A...
But my bigger point is that they essentially act as toadies when they are not obligated to. I think it is actually worse when they try to act as enforcement agents of behalf of terms of service for corporations that they have no relationship with.
And there is no moral context considered. What if a Saudi woman being held hostage wanted technical information to escape and seek refuge in another country, but doing so violated some company's TOS? I am certain that SO would side against the woman, because of their narrow and sycophantic attitude.
For example, I was enrolled in the Meego developer program in 2011, and was given a free Exo Tab tablet from Intel. When the project was canceled, I was supposed to destroy the tablet after one year. Intel technically retained ownership of the tablets on paper, so that developers would not have to pay taxes on them.
So, I posted, asking to find out how I could get the specialized drivers and interface software for Windows 7 on the device. But the mods decided that they should act as agents on behalf of Intel and the US Internal Revenue Service, even though nobody else cared.
I asked a simple technical question about where I could hypothetically get software for hardware I was in possession of.
A representative from Intel assured me that Intel had no plans to enforce this agreement, and it was merely on paper so that we did not have to pay taxes. Additionally, I seriously doubt that the IRS would want to track me down and fine me for not paying taxes on the $700 tablet I received. And the development program was canceled anyway, so why not put it to other use? And how do they know I was not going to honor my agreement and destroy it anyway??
But no, the toadies on SO decided that just in case I wouldn't honor my trivial agreement with Intel and just in case I wouldn't pay taxes, they would prevent further discussion of it. How could they possibly know my intentions? Nobody asked them to interpret the intentions of Intel and do what they think is their bidding for them! They are a bunch of toadies who way overstep their bounds.
[1]: https://meta.superuser.com/questions/2212/is-discussion-of-t...
You are asking a company to help you do something illegal, on writing and published to the entire world in a high visibility site. Do you really thing they shouldn't reserve the right to deny help?
The DMCA bothers me a lot, because on my country I have the right to remove restrictions on anything I own, yet it's hard to find a safe forum to discuss how to do it without it being taken down for some commercial reason. But it's really undeserved entitlement to expect other people to risk themselves helping you.
But I still think it's legitimate for a company like SO to err on the side of taking things down. You can cast it as being toadies, you can cast it as CYA. You can also cast it as an abundance of caution. It's probably a distinction without a difference, but words are funny things like that. The lawyers who are often setting these policies are presumably thinking in terms of their professional responsibility, which is to minimize the chance that their employer gets sued. They're probably not thinking in terms of unlikely hypotheticals involving hostage scenarios, because "We thought it was OK to bend the rules because otherwise X might happen" is unlikely to hold up in court. The American courts are more like Immanuel Kant than Jeremy Bentham about these sorts of things. Nor do they give a crap about your free tablet, or whether or not Intel gives a crap about your free tablet. It's way too expensive for them to be making these decisions on a case-by-case basis.
Maybe that's not exactly how SO was thinking. Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood are not lawyers, nor do I know if they consulted their lawyers. Nor am I a lawyer. But I had a dream where I played one on TV once, and that's more than a passing qualification for weighing in on legal matters around here.
>Get yelled at in the comments for creating noise?
Problem is: SE can edit and rephrase the whole question in order to be more helpful (both the question and the answer) for future visitors. The original question and intent from the OP doesnt matter that much to SE.
I don't think any of it is specific to SO - online communities seem to attract people who like everything to be extremely specific and rule-based, regardless of whether that creates the best outcomes. I've seen mods destroy several forums.
SO gets a lot of other stuff right though. I don't think it will die anytime soon, nor does it need to in order to improve things.
However, it really doesn't look like natural selection is at work here - I recognise several names in the list of resigned/fired mods, and they were some of the good ones.
No, it really looks like SO is well on the way to "becoming evil", forsaking community in the name of profit - which cannot end well for them.
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/386324/the-stack-ov...
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/331513/lets-take-a-...
This particular wave seems to be touched off by the firing of a well-loved mod over disagreements in a new CoC.
it usually means that things aren't looking good. but there is little that could be done about it. i have not seen it last though. a new wave of people tend to come along with a fresh view on how to handle things. the meantime, though, is what's hard to live through. it's what makes people tired and what makes them move on...
I say this as someone who has previously run for (and lost) a moderator role.
That doesn't mean exploitation isn't real and shouldn't be combated, but I think there's also a grey area that should be acknowledged.
By the way, what do you think of open source, and companies which use it?
For example, I don't know if HN makes money off this forum, but all of us commenters are contributing content that furthers the site's goals (hopefully). Yes, dang and sctb are paid to moderate this forum, but if there were no comments, there would be nothing to moderate.
Does that mean that by virtue of participating here for seven years I somehow have some right to tell them how to run their business? No, because there's no employment agreement. And even if there were any agreement, I doubt we would have the ability to do anything about some sudden change in direction from the C suite.
The realization that mere comments or the moderation of them on an internet forum create uncompensated content that someone else may profit from is apparently not as plain as I thought it was.
Some of these in fields, and sometimes even in close alignment to payed people.
In the context of SO there is a community producing Creative Commons (while there was recently a license change making the company less trustworthy) contents to help people and some people love helping others and the assumption is that the value this brings to all is bigger than the value for the company. Until recently the combination seemed to work. The company runs the platform to advertise their job boards and enterprise versions of SO and the community manages the content. But recently changes seem to be frustrating.
For comparison see also Wikipedia volunteers vs. Wikipedia foundation, Mozilla foundation&corp vs. Contributors, and even people happily submitting pull requests to Microsoft products on GitHub.
Both are turning more and more to be more profit-seeking, (Mozilla more than Wikipedia ) and it is tarnishing their reputations
SE has always been a for-profit business, this makes Volunteering more like Free Labor and less like "doing something good for humanity".
Generally speaking, I do not believe For-Profit business should be allowed to seek Volunteers for their labor, this includes SE, Reddit, etc
If a business model can not pay for labor, then it needs to be a Non-profit Foundation, not a for-profit business
> If a business model can not pay for labor, then it needs to be a Non-profit Foundation, not a for-profit business
Considering executive compensation at many non-profits, I don't think non-profit status alone is a good indicator of anything.
As for SO / SE, I didn't volunteer time and effort in light of their non-profit status, I volunteered in light of their mission. It was about putting in some amount of effort to make the world a better place. I couldn't care less if they made money off of it, just like I don't care if someone takes my open-source work and manages to make a business of it.
None of these positions are with a private business operating for profit.
I don’t see how it’s my problem that their business model isn’t profitable. The board & C-suite still draw a salary, and the company value is built on unpaid labour.
(True - there's not much direct revenue from this comment I'm typing here, but this is Hacker News, the place where the imorotantninfirmationnos and YC is in the center of it, don't you see how cool they are?)
?
Or is it the snarky one, because I’m 100% genuine
Both of those (assuming the work is for for-profit companies) are controversial as well.
There's a lot of flouncing resignations and "we need to talk" style essays also revealing little of substance.
Considering the passion involved some people have clearly been hurt, but perhaps that's due to the amount of time they have invested in somebody else's commercial enterprise ("our community") while believing it's something more.
Perhaps what they are trying to say is the "something more" (presumably the voluntary contributions) is being undermined by paid staff. It's not clear.
At the moment it all reads a bit like a tin pot Game of Thrones though.
I feel similarly, I've read all of Monica Cellio's posts and still have no real idea what is going on. Lot's of talk of DMs and messages and emails, but nothing concrete posted, just he said / she said, all while alleging personal innocence and purity.
If there is some concrete evidence and examples, put up or shut up. This is the internet, your word isn't worth much.
It might not be legally binding, but Stack Overflow could plausibly delete their account as punishment.
All I see is a handful of people saying "I liked that person and I don't think they should have been fired". I'm not sure what the larger community is supposed to do with this information.
> Perhaps what they are trying to say is the "something more" (presumably the voluntary contributions) is being undermined by paid staff. It's not clear.
You have it right, this matches sentiments I've read by long-term contributors. For many of them, contributing to "our community" and improving SO as a knowledge base are sufficient motivation to donate vast amounts of free time. If SO no longer cares to at least pretend they are more than a corporate entity that extracts money from voluntary unpaid labor, those contributions will likely dwindle.
shrugs
”Collect points to gain the power to fuck with other peoples questions!”
Stack Exchange is good to read, but hard to ask a question that is not immediately due to some rule.
Certainly there is a toxic tendency for some mods to become power crazed, assume a higher understanding of the world than the lowly non-mods and mod everything into oblivion.
There is also sometimes a tribal back-slapping tendency that doesn't always weed out this nonsense but encourages it.
I don't know if that is involved in this case.
As far as I recognize, none of them are among the resigned. They'll probably be more prominent now that reasonable kind people like Monica have been removed.
The issue with SE is the fact that they have allowed moderators to have too much power and too control over the communities. In changing their policies it has caused a removal of the moderators so that communities are force to come together to survive then I feel that this was a good step for SE as a whole. Though there will be some hard times at first I think that SE will become the site that it founders actually envisioned.