Monica Cellio's account of losing her moderator status on Stack Exchange
judaism.meta.stackexchange.com
judaism.meta.stackexchange.com
> ... The policy is an update to the Code of Conduct that requires us to use people's preferred pronouns (when known). ... I completely agree that it is rude to call people what they don't want to be called; knowingly misgendering someone is not ok. But the policy was about positive, not negative, use of pronouns. I pointed out that ... [I] write in a gender-neutral way specifically to avoid gender landmines, and sought clarification that this would continue to be ok. To my surprise, other moderators in the room said that not using (third-person singular) pronouns at all is misgendering. The employee never clarified, and this is one of the questions I asked in email. In my email I said clearly that I'm on board with "use preferred pronouns when using pronouns", but from the fact that they fired me without warning (or answering the question), I conclude that that's not the policy. I haven't seen an actual policy, though I am being accused of violating it.
Further condensing, moderator asked questions about proposed policy change requiring proactive use of people's preferred pronouns. These questions were not answered. After lengthy back-and-forth, moderator status was revoked.
This is only one side of the story, but seems appalling at first glance.
And now here we are.
Also of note is an emerging new standard: Actual CoC violations are not the threshold for punishment, perceived risk of potential CoC violations is. I saw Aurynn Shaw advocate for this position earlier this year[0], and knew dark times were a-coming; it was hot-takey enough to sound like a great idea to people who pride themselves on being radicals.
[0] https://mobile.twitter.com/aurynn/status/1128053124323655680
... by forcing 99% of users to bend to the will of the remaining 1%?
Do so many people not understand that trying to limit the freedom of others for your own personal benefit is tantamount to tyranny and oppression? The very thing they claim they are against?
The fact that the space this is currently being fought over is a corporate sponsored forum is irrelevant to the intent of this group of people.
The whole site is about gamification of altruistic behavior. Answering questions is important, but pruning the unhelpful answers is too.
Even when making an honest effort to engage in meaningful discussion you might get sent to oblivion without a single reply or any sort of guidance. It feels like I’m violating unspoken community rules and no one bothers to clue you in.
Example, I made a comment earlier pointing out that North Korea tends to reject outside help due to the juche methodology. That comment was at 3 points, now it sits at 0 and I really have no clue why.
At this point I don’t think I’ll see an upward trend in karma growth, not that it particularly matters.
On SO what you need to do is quite clear, on HN it’s (to me at least) a mystery
Just accept that silent passive-aggressive censorship is part of the culture here and ignore it.
Anyway, the secret to karma on HN is to submit interesting articles, ideally from sources that few people here are likely otherwise stumble across. While there are probably a few high scorers who get most of their points from comments, I'd bet the vast majority are from submissions.
And as the other reply to you says, don't pay too much attention to the points. Submit interesting stuff, keep making good comments, and please stick around.
* Write your code for other people who may be up at 3am trying to figure out what's wrong with the logic.
* Be considerate of other ideas, smart people who disagree are usually both correct but differ in benefits and consequences.
* Consider if you are writing beyond the scope of the ticket, no code is easier/faster to debug/understand than no code.
Notice, there are no rules of what to do, but what is attempting to be avoided. Unfortunately, the Western Thinking (TM) (as opposed to Eastern Thinking) asks the question "What is...?" Like:
* What is the correct way to address someone?
* What is the acceptable code style?
* What are the maximum number of lines in a function?
The problem with this thinking is that it ignores outcome and enforces concrete thinking. The irony here being that the goal is to be considerate of people and they are being utterly inconsiderate to the moderator.
They are good suggestions, but I would put them in another category than CoCs.
Peterson, for the sake of his own career, made it into the larger debate you describe. In fairness, it’s a debate that engages a lot of people, but the legislation in Canada was never intended to affect common parlance.