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425 pointsbmease408 comments

I suspect that the average user of SE will not care one bit about this whole drama.

I do find it frustrating, puzzling, and sad how SE appears to have treated Monica Cellio. She provides an excellent summary (from her perspective) here: https://cellio.dreamwidth.org/2064709.html

one thing that I love about SE is that everyone is very professional. almost all answers are either sourced or can easily be seen to be correct. what I am worried is that if a lot of the normal mods quit and our replaced with new mods, who may be more political, SE will turn into Reddit where leftist politics prevail in all of the major subreddits and most responses to factual questions consist of options or unsourced "facts". if that ever becomes the case then I will be sad. although, when seeing how the admins of Reddit act, I'm guessing that acting like they do is good for business.

Give https://dev.to/stackoverflow/what-a-very-bad-day-at-work-tau... a read - the comment to which Sara replied and the response given.

The reddit future is a very real possibility.

What's the "reddit future" a reference to?

> SE will turn into Reddit where leftist politics prevail in all of the major subreddits and most responses to factual questions consist of options or unsourced "facts"

How much politics do you get in technical Q and A forums?

Currently not much. But maybe in the future if someone mentions a man page they will be banned for not calling it a people page

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/07/justin-trudeau...

At least there is this bit at the very bottom;

> Breaking news, October 6 21:00 UTC: the CTO stepped in, accepted responsibility, apologized to the community, and promised to contact me directly to apologize and discuss next steps. Finally! I look forward to that contact.

I suspect you're right. I stopped participating in SE years ago not for "political" reasons like this, but because it seemed to be dominated by power-happy mods and people whose main goal was to collect points and not to help others.

This kerfuffle, and I only got a little summary of it, makes my eyes glaze over. I'm certainly not against treating people with respect, but I'm not willing to stick my neck out for some of the unsavory characters here who aren't acting in good faith.

What they did to Monica Cellio was disgusting. And most likely based on pure hate.

I'm in the same place as you are, but in relation to wikipedia rather than stack overflow.

I remember adding a [citation needed] tag to an inaccurate claim, and then discovering that my change has been reverted. The reason the moderator gave was that [citation needed] didn't look good on the page. How do you argue with people like that. I'm not going to spend hours reading on wikipedia's policies just make it better.

SE is bad, but at least I get something out of it. That and the fact that SE's meta game is easier to play than wikipedia's. You just need to make sure you word your question in a way that it can only be answered definitively (no opinion), and preempt duplicate-heads with a list of similar questions and why they don't answer your question.

I've yet to have a question of mine closed as a duplicate, though mods have treated me passive-aggressively for taking away their sticks :^)

Can you give an example on how to word a question?

On Stack Overflow? A good question contains a reproducible problem (or at least an understandable question) and it's worded such that people with the same problem will find the question and answer by googling.

Better than that is better, but that's the threshold between bad and good.

So include error messages instead of just typing "I got a certificate error when …", because people who get the same error will paste their error message into google. Some of then paste it into bing. None type "I got a certificate error when …" into google.

Stack Overflow is about building a knowledge base where people find answers. SEO is essential to that.

What they did to her was wrong from my point of view, but it certainly was not 'based on pure hate'. Don't speak this exaggeration and nonsense. The person who fired her simply had no intention to spend time dealing with Monica's questions and chose the easy route of getting rid of what she perceived as a troublemaker.

Well, it is a pretty hateful way of doing things. I mean, that's how I treat people I hate; shun them, ignore them, not reply to them. So there's an argument there.

I agree though. It seems to me to have more to do with aggrandizing power and influence than with hate. What better way to get rid of competitors than to bait them into behaving "bigoted"? Look at the Monica case. She never refused to use someones chosen pronoun. She was baited into admitting that she already avoids certain ways of addressing people out of kindness and politeness and a desire not to rub people the wrong way. Now she's out. This has nothing to do with bigotry, and everything to do with a group of people that want to kick everybody else off every position of power or influence.

> I mean, that's how I treat people I hate; shun them, ignore them, not reply to them.

That’s also how I treat people I completely don’t care about or am aware of. My default behavior is to ignore, that doesn’t mean I hate everyone I ignore. If I assume this about people who ignore me, I’ll probably be wrong.

Should I assume Comcast is shunning me when they don’t respond? Or that they hate me? Or maybe they are just a stupid org that doesn’t care at all about me.

> "Well, it is a pretty hateful way of doing things. I mean, that's how I treat people I hate; shun them, ignore them, not reply to them."

That is a striking perspective, but perhaps just reflects a generational difference?

In a social media driven culture, where people grow up feeling that "attention == validation"... I suppose they could also feel that "indifference == hate" as a corollary.

I'm 56. I didn't grow up in the "Social Media" culture. But I recognize when a moderator of Mi Yodea is being attacked for seemingly contrived reasons.

Also, I suspect if she weren't a moderator on Mi Yodea the "woke" community would have had much less of a problem with her. (Even on HN, the politically-correct have to attack everything related to that issue.)

They intentionally took action against her on the Shabbos and Rosh Hashanah when they knew she couldn't respond. If you accept the trans community's claim that misgendering is an act of violence, then if follows that this is was act of 'violence' too.

> If you accept the trans community's claim that misgendering is an act of violence...

I've found that members of the cisgender community almost uniformly take offense at being misgendered. And responses from the cisgender male community often include threats of physical violence, especially when one persistently misgenders them or challenges the validity of their maleness.

That said, I'm rather troubled by Monica's treatment in this situation, especially its coincidence with Shabbos/Rosy Hashanah.

I get misgendered all the time! I go by "Ruvi" (short for Reuven) and English readers see that as a female name. So on forums I get called "she".

It's never bothered me.

Btw that cisgender community you speak of doesn't exist, right? You just made that up.

As a self-described "average user of SE", I find this drama pretty similar to drama I've seen circling around the Quora "community" for the last 6 months or so: confusing.

I use both SE and Quora to get answers, especially to extremely-niche questions. I understand that some people do use them for community and that people do interact and know each other on both platforms, but it's hard to understand complaints about a subpar community when the goal of the site doesn't seem to revolve around a community at all.

To me, SE is a Q&A site. It exists to let people ask questions and get those questions answered. If you took away the community entirely, would it be any less useful?

This probably comes off a bit flippant to the situation, but it's meant to illustrate that you're right: I'd say I'm a pretty average user of SE (in that I just use it to get answers, and occasionally write my own answers when I can, and so far it's worked perfectly well for me) and I don't care one bit about community-based drama.

> If you took away the community entirely, would it be any less useful?

My suspicion is that the answer is yes. You'd have to have actual data to be sure, but based on my experience with internet communities, there are probably a small number of people who bring in the vast majority of the value (i.e. answer the most questions, clean up/flag/categorize questions and answers). Those people spend a lot of time on the site and the community aspect (relationships, reputation, etc) is a big part of what motivates them to consistently return and add value.

I concur. You can see the same thing on HN, if you look closely. For a new or infrequent user, all comment threads are randos talking to other randos. For a frequent commenter who's been here for a while now, it's a community with a lot of transient commenters, but also a lot of regulars, who recognize each other's handles and sometimes carry discussions across time and multiple comment threads - and it's a big part of the value of this place. If HN was to suddenly replace all usernames with their SHA-1 hashes, being here would get much less interesting.

I’ve been here for four or five years, and I only recognize two or three people by their username. I don’t pay attention to the people - only the comments.

Compared to other communities, HN is particularly minimalistic when it comes to associating posts with authors.

I pay attention to comments first, too, but I can't help but remember the handles - especially if I had a back-and-forth with someone over the course of a day, and had to verify that I'm still replying to the same commenter. Like, I recognize your handle, I think we've been replying to each other on some thread some weeks ago.

(Then again, maybe I'm projecting, assuming more community in this place than there really is. I'm a HN addict after all.)

I've been here for just under three years, and I'm in the same boat, except I don't really even have but one username that I'm specifically familiar with due to HN (and that'd be dang). I've recognized familiar usernames from other places (such as when byuu occasionally shows up to talk shop about emulation), but that's a bit different.

I honestly think that's one of HN's strengths. Too often, in general discourse, who is talking becomes as important, if not more important, than what is being said. I feel that the lack of prominence of a poster/commenter's name is a plus - it invites the reader to focus on the message being written, rather than the source.

I'd actually argue that that that context-heavy communication (carrying discussions across time and multiple comment threads) often makes the conversation worse from the point of view of those transient commenters (which, I'd guess, is a majority of HN? You probably know better than me on that, though). I'd classify myself as a transient commenter here since I don't recognize names even though I've been on HN since 2011. I admit it probably makes the site more enjoyable for those regulars, though, and can sometimes also generate "good" conversation that wouldn't otherwise exist that is beneficial to transient commenters also.

I actually spent a long time lobbying Quora to make content anonymous by default for exactly this reason. It's really frustrating when I come into a comment thread and don't understand some context outside of what's actually being said. This isn't nearly as much of a problem on HN than it is on Quora (or even SE), but if I ask an intentionally-generic question I don't want people looking at who asked it and needlessly scoping their answers to the kind of answers they think I want. I also understand there are some psychological benefits to the opposite though (people wanting to know more about who asked a question to put a face to who they think they're helping), but IMO what little benefit it offers the OP dwarfs potentially unfortunate specificity for anyone else with that question in the future that might put them in a weird mix of "duplicate question" and "oh, but this one little thing is different for me".

To my experience, "context-heavy communication" is rather subtle on HN, more of an inside joke if anything. I can't think of a case where a comment would seem off-topic if read by a transient commenter; it's just that over time, you start recognizing other regulars and their views on some topics, and sometimes you may remark on it. Like, I recall participating in comment threads that branched off into "I recall you saying X on a related thread some time ago; could you elaborate on that?" somewhere deep in the discussion. Or, I know to not reply about topic Y to a particular commenter, because we've been through a long discussion about it some time ago, and essentially agreed to disagree. Or, someone will joke that it's time to submit and upvote some Erlang stuff to HN, and the joke mysteriously stays upvoted because, well, it's an inside joke.

> If you took away the community entirely, would it be any less useful?

The whole platform is based around the users creating questions and answers. The site puts much of the effort for curation and moderation on to the community, if you visit the chat rooms on there you'll find that there's groups of people who congregate there who do a disproportionate amount of that work of keeping things running smoothly.

So I think there is a risk of the site quality sliding substantially if the currently highly engage segment of the community there disengages.

One of the fascinating aspects of any user-generated-and-shared experience is that community forms. From original forums hoping to foster community to blog posts where folks live in comments to the rise of wikis and the the communities there, to the current optimization of "social networks", what makes the content good is the community who is willing to contribute to it. Just a pure "look for questions and answer them" will fail, and has over and over again, even with payment/bounties for answers, unless a community can form that takes pride in sharing knowledge, keeping things accurate, and trying to help. And once it declines, as these things can, into arguments from the louder voices, then the community suffers... and so does the quality of content moving forward.

So, without community, you wouldn't have the answers, and without the answers, folks stop asking the questions.

> If you took away the community entirely, would it be any less useful?

so for a while, due to strange quirk of circumstance, i had the inside track of a profitable adult website. it was your standard “streaming adult videos, no ads, charge hefty subscription” model. one morning the ceo says let’s do community. everyone’s going social. lets have blogs, message board, the whole shebang. Announcement made with much fanfare. The idiot audience thought community means they could talk to their favorite pornstar :) once the ceo clarifies that no, community doesn’t mean that, they turn on him like a pack of wolves. what do you mean, you want us to talk to each other ?! like random perv from oklahoma should message arbitrary perv from cleveland about which vid gets him off ? wtf ?!! the poor ceo’s got his back to a wall. he says, we’ll be the world’s largest adult community. the peeps are like, dude, largest community of pervs ? fbi will have a ball. half of us are scared our employer or our spouse or worse, teenage son hacks into our account. now you want us to have wacky avatars & actually talk to each other on a messageboard so whatever we say persists for posterity ? it quickly went downhill from there. they brought in a moderator, sort of like dang. he was supposed to police the crowds & tamp down on contentious disagreement. but hardly anybody participated, so they had to broaden dang’s role. so now everytime a video was posted, poor dang would have to watch the whole video and make insightful comments like “lady featured in this clip at 7:15 is the same lady in that other clip at 9:20” and so on. soon he became an encyclopedia of porn trivia. people actually started showing up on the community board just to poke fun of his wide acumen. Around that time i quit. But it was quite the experience. Community can be a major hassle.

Dang, dang.

This was an interesting read. If you wrote more of these stories out into a longer blog format I'd totally read it!

So you're telling me there's a dude named Dang out there with an incredible wealth of porn knowledge? That's really cool in the weirdest way and I bet you he can't even tell anyone about it for the rest of his life

I have a feeling this is like asking if you could take the community out of Little Italy in NYC.

For the tourist coming in, looking through the windows, having a canoli, does the community really matter? Are they even visible in the throngs of the crowd?

But for the people who live there day in and day out, the expulsion of a popular shop owner from their midst might be quite perturbing and a big stir.

At the end of the day, without those shop owners who come back every day, Little Italy probably would not be the same pleasant experience for the tourists. I imagine it’s similar for the largely invisible to the end user stack exchange community.

Average user here, I completely don't give a shit about any of this. As long as I can google to find answers to my bugs I'm fine.

While, in the beginning, a very active user, I've long now given up on that network. I can't remember when was the last time I asked a question without being forced to defend it for a period of at least a few hours, why it shouldn't be closed as a duplicate, offtopic or ... It used to be an excellent network, but nowadays it's just script-kiddies-playing-admins/editors playground. It is no longer a productive technical community, so I've gone back to specialized forums. Pity, I really liked the sites in the beginning.

I don't understand this cry against moderators. These people are volunteerily giving their time to keep quality bar high without any payment. If these people weren't there then SO will be full of duplicates, off-topic and opinion based Q&A just like Quora. A general tendency I have seen is just to ask (often poorly stated) questions without doing simple search to see if it is already answered. Someone needs to respect those people picking up garbage on the street.

I don't understand why people would volunteer to do work for a for profit entity. Especially one that will, apparently, fire you on a whim.

You work as an unpaid content author for ycombinator.

The ratio of value (or entertainment) provided to oneself versus value provided to another entity clearly differs significantly between a user of a site and an (unpaid) moderator of it.

That's such twisted logic. Are you saying I'm doing unpaid work for my social group when we have a conversation? Jesus Christ not everything needs a dollar symbol attached even if it benefits a company.

I think that was the point - that answering questions on SO is like having a conversation, and feels pleasant to some people, not like work.

At least it feels pleasant until a moderator or community manager starts interfering with it.

Have you ever answered a question on stackoverflow? Or upvoted something? That's the same thing, just to a lesser degree.

I think SO is poorly designed as a system. It certainly does encourage people to ask not-so-great questions. It doesn't handle them particularly well. And then expects people to clean up the mess for free. Those people of course feel stressed and overwhelmed, so are inclined to be rude, aggressive, and hasty in their decisions.

Like ldigas, I long ago gave up on SO because of bad moderation experiences. I'm grudgingly willing to respect those mods as humans, but I certainly won't as moderators. They do a poor job, needlessly offending and discouraging contributors. They could quit any time. They could go on strike at any time. But no, they just kept on.

I can definitely muster up some sympathy when people trapped in bad jobs are jerks. They are doing it to survive. But people who volunteer to be jerks? That's on them.

As someone who answers quite a few quesitons on SO I'd really like to see posts that were perceived as wrongfully closed to see if I agree (haha) and also to see how to fix the system.

Of course I have no hope that S.O. will change anything. When they started their "be nice" campaign I suggested the "CLOSED: This is a duplicate" message should be changed to "CONGRATS: This appears to be a duplicates so you win! There is already an answer [here]!"

In any case there are rules. One is "post the code you're having trouble with in the question, not a link offsite." The offsite link is useless if the code changes there or the offsite site goes offline. Some not insignificant percent of the time the question will just have a link to offsite code. I'll leave a comment saying effectively, "please add the code to the question" and then I vote to close, reason "missing code". The person never adds the code. Are they like you claiming S.O. is rude and unreasonable? Did they get their answer somewhere else and never come back to follow up? I have no idea.

Actually the rule is even more specific. "Make a minimal repo and post it the question itself". Almost no one makes a remotely minimal repo which is fine, but in general lots of people fail at the "repo" part period. In order to help them we'd need to download code, setup dev environments, make up test data, etc...."

What I do know is I often spend 30 to 240 minutes writing working examples for a single answer. I do that volunteerily for reasonable questions. When someone barfs out a "give me teh codez" question it can be very angering. They're basically asking for free labor. If that's not rude I don't know what is.

Here's a recent "give me free labor" question

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58206647/removing-the-ba...

Here's a recent "teach me an entire CS course" question

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58165198/how-to-process-...

And here's an answer I spent over 150 minutes on, trying to understand their code, trying to make a working sample, running into bugs, when I looked up 2.5 hours had passed.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58101753/drawing-a-torus...

And another more typical 30 minutes on this one

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58111380/in-webgl-the-pe...

note I'm not trying to brag. I hear your complaint often. I just don't run into it myself. Instead I see lots of volunteers answering questions and only voting to close the bad ones and they are bad ones.

> I see lots of volunteers answering questions and only voting to close the bad ones and they are bad ones.

Before answering questions in future give them a bit of a Googling. Find the ones someone like yourself didnt spend time on, the ones that instantly got closed as off topic or duplicate or moderator was grumpy today so closed.

I get it, wealth of free information and that, sure. But these are the top results in Google. The top results, not a /new queue where you’re hiding. The pages that someone having this problem will visit.

From the visitor’s point of view, SO is a cesspool of power tripping mods who love to close questions.

The solution? SO should noindex closed questions and add canonical links for duplicates. Simple enough, tell the damn search engines things are closed/redirected as well as the user. It would improve the end user experience infinitely to stop arriving on what they perceive as unnecessarily closed questions.

isn't that what a closed as duplicate question does ? it has a link to the answer. noindex doesn't help. we don't know how to word all questions so leaving the duplicate question indexable gives search more chances to connect a questioner with an existing answer

In theory yes, in reality it just serves to surface the duplicates that aren’t duplicates of the question at all.

In the absolute ideal these questions would be answered instead of closed as dupe but right now it just means following a trail of dupes and closures to maybe find the answer before giving up and going back to the search results.

Instead of that, give the user the wrong answer straight away so they can just back up one to the search to continue digging

> in reality it just serves to surface the duplicates that aren’t duplicates of the question at all.

Or the questions that are duplicate questions, but with an answer five years out of date that will never get updated because new people interested in the topic don't have enough magic beans to actually do anything.

> As someone who answers quite a few quesitons on SO I'd really like to see posts that were perceived as wrongfully closed to see if I agree (haha) and also to see how to fix the system.

This person[1] was getting unexpected results when calling is_integer. According to the duplicate, the solution is that they should call is_integer... which is what they were doing. The original close voter commented 'sorry I didn't read your question properly before suggesting the dupe', but it remains closed.

The question was answered in the comments: this surprising result was due to floating point error and rounding done by the print function. However, it could not be posted as an answer, because the question was closed. I voted to reopen, but the vote failed.

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/q/49847677/331041

EDIT: The share link I posted takes me to a different question when I'm logged in than it does when I open in an incognito window. WTF.

EDIT2: Apparently serving completely different pages to logged-in users and logged-out users is by design. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/271077/

Here's a link to question [1] that should work for everybody: https://stackoverflow.com/q/49847677/331041?noredirect=1

EDIT3: It doesn't work. Sorry. I tried my best, but only logged-in users will get the correct page from the links I posted.

>The question was answered in the comments

It's lucky that the person who answered had enough carma to write comments. SO's job seems to be to prevent users from answering questions.

Follow-up: Somebody started another reopen vote shortly after I linked the question here. It slowly accumulated four votes to reopen. However, those votes have now expired, so the question will remain closed.

> As someone who answers quite a few quesitons on SO I'd really like to see posts that were perceived as wrongfully closed to see if I agree (haha) and also to see how to fix the system

Slashdot had this as well, it was called meta-mod.

> I just don't run into it myself.

I think the reason for that is you’re a web developer. The majority of the admins too. For less popular domain areas, the experience is very different. I run into the issue all the time. The experience became so disappointing that I stopped writing answers there. Here’s a couple examples where downvoters destroyed, or almost destroyed, good questions with my answers to them: https://stackoverflow.com/q/57323981/ https://stackoverflow.com/q/57064879/

It drives me nuts that you need 10k rep to view deleted questions. I can't see your second question because I only have ~3k reputation.

I don't understand why it's a privilege in the first place. What's so dangerous about allowing me to read a 'bad' question?

SO is marvelously designed and I often discuss this with friends and colleagues. First imagine this: Experts who are often paid big dollars per hour are coming over and spending time in answering your questions for no apparent reason. The quality of content is very high when you compare with any other Q&A or even general social media website. I often find 50% of my programming answers at SO. If there is an accepted highly voted answer for a technical question, I would probably have better than 80% of chance that it works for me. I have saved enormous amount of time because of SO. It has accelerated my learning by 2X or 3X on specific language or framework. In many ways, general productivity of developers and in some cases their entire professional careers hinges on quality and content of SO. Now think about it: Why these highly paid people coming over to answer your questions? Why SO has not already became trash like many of its other predecessors and contemporaries? What is the magic resisting power it has?

The answer lies in its magnificent design. SO has community based voting for almost everything. Almost everything is gamified. There are people literally writing essays on why everyone should vote them to be an "officer" for X and how they will work hard on keeping quality bar high. There is an extra-ordinary passion in what they do. Its HN on steroids but with much better mechanics. It is almost completely decentralized and operates without needing people blessed with special dictatorial powers 99.9% of the times. Again, lot of these volunteers are highly paid IT/tech folks, not your ordinary 8chan Joe. They could have been doing anything else in their free time instead of technical answering questions at SO. This is much harder than dishing out fact-free opinions on non-technical websites as armchair expert. Again, no one gets paid for anything they do on SO. This is the beauty of gamification and extremely well designed community driven completely decentralized governance at its extreme. Its almost magical to me and I haven't found any other website on Internet achieve it at same scale and importance.

> Experts who are often paid big dollars per hour are coming over and spending time in answering your questions for no apparent reason.

They do so for the same reason they did that before SO and SE existed. A good chunk of people like to help each other. Another (partially overlapping) chunk likes to have their knowledge challenged, another (also partially overlapping) like to show off their knowledge in front of their peers. This was what made the Internet tick since the earliest days.

SO happened to come from within the community (Jeff and Joel were known experts), and had the right features to eventually channel most of the drive I described above through itself. But it's not like SO created it. SO is also accumulating some anti-features these days (like well-known propensity for closing 90% of interesting questions as duplicates or off-topic, or the recent moderator dramas, or targeted advertising they snuck in), so their future is somewhat uncertain.

> Again, lot of these volunteers are highly paid IT/tech folks, not your ordinary 8chan Joe.

A lot of "8chan Joes" are highly paid IT/tech folks. Or at least I'd assume so, given that it's true for 4chan.

> They could have been doing anything else in their free time instead of technical answering questions at SO. (...) Again, no one gets paid for anything they do on SO.

People also answer SO question on their employeers' time.

> This is the beauty of gamification and extremely well designed community driven completely decentralized governance at its extreme.

SO wasn't a "big design up front". It evolved over time. Gamification helps a bit, but I question it's critical to get highly-trained professionals to answer complex technical questions for free. Again, a lot of highly-trained professionals do that simply because they like it. On SO, or on HN (one of the big points of this site), or on old-school forums, or on conferences, etc. etd.

Honestly, this is typical of what I can't stand about Stack Overflow. Actual person reports actual problem with SO. The response? "WRONG! Actually it's marvelous! Magnificent! Magical!" I'm only surprised you didn't mark my comment as a duplicate.

Even if I were 100% wrong, this would be offputting. But I don't think I am. I'm in the top 100 users here; I was a Quora Top Writer; I was a Wikipedia admin; I've worked on community sites, including a Webby winner. I know something about online contribution. Yes, SO's design got them where they are. But that doesn't mean it's perfect. And until SO's fans can start seeing those issues, they stand no chance of getting fixed.

But my experience of the site (as an experienced long time user) is much more negatively affected by the “active moderation” than it is positively affected by it. I’d rather have ten duplicate questions for every question, than a race to ninja-downvote or close anything that is tangentially related to an existing question. The struggle to maintain quality in the content of the site appears to be destroying the quality of the experience of the site. In the end, if the experience is not good, nor will the content be if people stop visiting. I’m sure 99% of the negativity is coming from non-admins. The ninja downvotes and closevotes are coming from regular users.

I still visit but I basically stopped asking and answering because it’s just not worth the stress of having to defend my question or answer. I have a 10k rep account and I’m an experienced dev with a decent grip of English as a second language but I still never felt once that my answer was welcome or my question was good enough for the site. I can only imagine what a novice must feel when using SO.

> I’d rather have ten duplicate questions for every question

Sure, unless it really happens. I'd been burned by over-moderation as well but when I look at the process I think it's not arbitrary. There are controls and voting by more than one person. Remember, there is nothing a moderator gains by doing any of this.

Yes, I think moderators aren't to blame for the poor quality of the experience (mostly).

But I think this recipe is a disaster: users downvote and close-vote. Moderators look at votes and clean up accordingly. I think the problem is that the algorithms allow a small group of drive-by downvoters to destroy the experience. I'd be more than willing to accept a somewhat lower content quality for a more friendly experience.

Well, what is the downside to having duplicate* questions?

I would guess the vast majority of traffic to any specific question page is search, followed by specific links people have posted (on or offsite), and relatively little will come from browsing through lists of questions (tags pages) or something like that.

Search is going to surface the most up-voted and linked questions. Links people have posted are obviously very specific (no chance of confusion following the link).

I would say the upsides are that you end up with more opportunities to have nuanced differences in question handled, give more people a chance to answer questions, naturally refresh questions/answers over the years (eg: "How do I minify CSS in <stack>?" will have very different answers in 2019 than it did in 2009).

* I'm not necessarily suggesting exact duplicates, but allowing for questions to be re-asked after a year or two, and allowing any subtle difference in the situation, stack, etc.

So are the users (giving their time), both more and less experienced ones. But I would rather have a forum with a duplicate or two, than a forum where you cannot ask (a different question) because it is constantly closed off as a duplicate - sometimes in the time while you are writing an explanation of how it is different than the other one - by a mod who hasn't taken the time to understand the difference. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

And while I agree that some amount of moderation is necessary, it has long ago crossed that limit.

Mods should moderate in moderation, not to the extreme.

Just the other day I asked a question regarding Windows and Android around 12h (midday), and spend until 23h that day discussing with a mod, whether it should be moved to a site that deals exclusively with Android questions (and where it would be closed/offtopic because of the Windows part), or closed on the site where it was asked for being offtopic, because of the Android part.

That they - the mods - haven't understood the question became obvious only when we settled that discussion, and when they attempted to answer it themselves.

This is just a trivial example. But it shows the current state of affairs.

Just curious, by saying specialized forums did you mean the sub stack exchanges? Like dba or gamedev, or something else?

Which forums?

I think much of what feels bad about StackOverflow now stems from the surprisingly braindead way it treats duplicate questions.

Currently, moderators close the question with a link to the question they think it's a dupe of. Why not instead let people answer the question with a link to the answer that they think solves the poster's problem? If they're right then the asker can just accept that answer, and if not then people can add comments, post alternate answers, etc.

I've come across so many questions closed as dupes for answers that are years old. The tech has changed, the answer is not the same. The question is a duplicate, sure, but the correct answer is now different.

The mods are ignorant and quick to act poorly. StackExchange has sucked for several years at least.

> The question is a duplicate, sure, but the correct answer is now different.

Also, often I see newer and better answers under the 'original' question, but they never get the upvotes or the 'correct answer' badge. Sometimes I completely overlook them because they are just not as visible.

This is because the original asker has moved on with their life and doesn't care anymore. Maybe after a few years the accepted answer should be switched the one with the most upvotes? (Maybe with some margin, say, it must have at least 20% more votes than the next best one)

The answer with the most upvotes still gets shown. The problem is that much later answers that are more correct with later technologies, don't gather enough upvotes to make it to the front of the pack, so they get ignored.

Allowing duplicate questions, at least after some time, could fix this problem.

Yep - in fact it would make more sense to me if SO not only allowed duplicate questions, but also added a decay such that even highly-rated Q/A pairs would eventually get overtaken by newer content.

Questions and answers just aren't evergreen things that one can expect to last through the ages. And even if they were, treating them as such means that SO's new users generally can't contribute anything.

I find SO's current model really bizarre.

Maybe something like what HN does. From what I understand, recent things get shown higher here than older things. Older things need more upvotes to keep up. Probably something like votes/age or something.

But that diminishes their Power. That’s it.

When you say 'given up', do you mean you don't ask/answer anymore yourself or also that you don't use it at all?

Anyway, would be interesting to know which part of SE exactly you talk about. I've been sort of active for years on e.g. C++ tag on SO and never had any of those problems for any answer given or question I asked. On the contrary, I got a proper answer within hours. I admit that it happened more than once though that while typing a question I did some extra research and while doing so found the answer, on SO itself, and didn't have to post the question anymore so that rules out duplicates.

It's incredible that pronouns can bring down an entire community. Pick you battles please, we're losing good things because of this silly conflict.

“Keeping your identity small” has certainly gone out of fashion.

PG Essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html

This essay would be harshly criticized if it was written today. It still might be someday.

Why do you say that?

Because given the prominence of identity as a central cultural debate, this essay comes across as tone deaf. I said it still might be because there's a tendency to judge past works by todays moral standards. For for instance, look at the twitter kerfuffle that ensued when Netflix decided to carry the old television show Friends.

Got a link to the friends issues?

Google isn't turning up anything. What was the issue with Friends?

Oh, I see.

Apparently friends is problematic. Racist, homophobic, transphobic, sexist and fat'ist (Is that an 'ist?).

Yeah there was some language and jokes in there that wouldn't be acceptable today. That was the gist.

There's two ways of reading this. You can read it from a technical perspective and take the message of something along the lines of "Don't invest your ego into unnecessary technical questions because it'll stop you having logical and productive discussions". But if this were written today in the context of something like this SE issue you could read it as tone deaf - a trans-man/women doesn't choose to face discrimination, they don't have a choice over their identity, they merely express their identity, so telling them to "Keep your identity" small is basically akin to saying that they shouldn't express their identity - something that PG as a straight white male doesn't have to worry about.

Disclaimer: It was written in 2009, read in context it's very clear the first interpretation is the correct one, there's an entire concept of identity that didn't exist in the public discussion when this was written.

I see what you mean. I guess perhaps another way of characterizing PG's advice would be to keep your identity as small as possible, but no smaller.

I think it's a pretty good idea to think about how to not be a "Java programmer" or a "kitesurfer" (to pick two things that I could be identified as), since the former sets my brain up to be implicitly against, say, Kotlin or Haskell, and the latter sets my brain up to be against windsurfing. And I like all of those things too!

But certainly, there are things that are core to someone's identity, and I guess that's where each of us needs to find our own boundaries.

Not that I expect this to become universal mores, but wisdom traditions from Buddhism to Deleuze advise us (generally speaking, blurring important distinctions) to have no core identity.

Identity can be a tool and a crutch. My feeling (as someone who identifies as human and has been hanging out/coping with the world for 3-4 decades -- a feeling, informed by a lifetime of good and bad situations) is that identity politics hurts more the identity-assertion people; the opposite faction is merely annoyed.

PG's essays contain a good amount of quote-unquote "real talk". His SJW-isms espoused on Twitter and the like are obviously only superficial, a defense mechanism widely recognized as a necessity among semi-known, substantially-wealthy persons.

This is pretty common amongst business leaders; comparing their statements against their serious work quickly shows that it's not all so warm-and-fuzzy.

Virtue signaling may be its own reward to the masses, but it serves a real function for the well-to-do in preventing or at least confusing a Marie Antoinette effect. If there's any "let them eat cake" to be found, they can point to an abundance of more recent "truth to power" statements that will create enough ambiguity to tamp down the fervor of the mob, if and/or when it comes to that.

Some people would say that "keep your identity small" is functionally (although not in tone or spirit) the same as saying "gay men, stay in the closet" because in the absence of anything saying otherwise, people will assume you're part of the majority.

Furthermore, some people would say that everyone staying in the closet is bad advice for the gay community overall, as it means the average person will only hear about the 1% of gay people who are arrested for sex crimes, not the 99% of gay people who are perfectly nice people living normal lives and minding their own business, or the great scientists and inventors and authors who happened to be gay.

This is, as I understand it, an area of substantial strength of feeling in the gay community - it's part of what underlies concepts like 'gay pride' and the famous chant "we're here, we're queer, we're not going to disappear".

And although I've used gay men in the example above, it applies to any minority group - although with different details, I've never seen a female programmers' pride march!

I'm not gay, but I'm chronically mentally ill. I get (a version of, at least) the whole closet thing.

But here's the nub: the mental illness belongs to some contexts (therapist, friends, intimate relationship) and not others (trying to sell a project to a client).

The part about preferred pronouns feels a little too abstract and counterproductive. This is a personal feeling, coming from a personal interpretation of sources of wisdom. And it's not because it makes other people react in this or that way -- the point is not conquering the Other, you can't do this anyway. It's about how you set about to cope with the world and grow with it; how you deal with your own subjectivity.

Maybe I'm wrong. It's a very different minoritarian perspective.

This reads as a blasé swipe at LGBTQ+ attempts to achieve equal rights, societal acceptance, and common decency from others. I'm guessing that's not what you intended?

Disclaimer: I don't have a strong opinion about the specifics of the stackexchange case. Without knowing all of the details, it seems the actions and new policy was a bit extreme and will do more harm than good.

Really? You got all that from "Keeping your identity small has certainly gone out of fashion"? How? This is a serious question, I absolutely have no idea how you're getting from point A to B here.

The comment I replied to was responding to a comment that said:

> It's incredible that pronouns can bring down an entire community.

This is obviously talking about the pronouns that transgender folks identify as. Where is the disconnect?

On a topic about pronouns, is "trans identity" not the obvious meaning/aspect of "identity" here? Yes, I know the PG essay. The PG essay is great when applied to not thinking of yourself as a "X programming language developer" so you don't get too caught up in language wars that really don't matter as much as they feel like, but it's pretty offensive to use it to argue against identifying as LGBT.

As far as I can tell, no one is arguing against identifying as LGBT in any of the comments here. Try to be more charitable when reading what other people have to say.

The obvious interpretation of "'Keeping your identity small' has certainly gone out of fashion." in this context seems to me to be "caring about pronouns is a big identity; people should have smaller identities than that".

That's not necessarily saying people shouldn't be trans. The charitable reading [aside below] is that it could be saying that if they're trans, they should still expect to be disrespected and we should be fine with that.

I think that there are respectful ways to make that point. What are the exact limits to how much respect we should be expected to extend to people who defy our preconceptions of society? The line exists somewhere. But that kind of conversation should be approached with care and clarity. To just hint at that point doesn't imply a nuanced view, but implies a general disrespect to a lot of the hard-won acceptance of LGBT people.

Aside: I don't think I'm wrong calling it a charitable reading. Charity doesn't mean I'm going to think endlessly until I find a non-offensive thing it could mean; I'm still going to weight my reading by how I expect most people to have read it. Ultimately I'm publicly arguing against what other people are reading, not the intention that exists privately in the writer's mind. Even if the author just happened to think now was a good time to remind people they should avoid Ruby vs Python holy wars, it's little use for me to read it as that and respond to that if no one else is reading it that way. If people really think the critics' reading (that the critics have explained) is so off-base, there's been plenty of time by now for them and others to elaborate on whatever the intended reading really was.

I'd put it like this: "Caring about pronouns to the point where you attack someone who, for stylistic reasons, chooses not to use any pronouns at all, on a site dedicated to answering questions from almost entirely anonymous people... is a big identity; people should have smaller identities than that."

You are obscuring the details of the case to make your case and you should be ashamed.

PG has an essay with that title: http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html#f2n

I know. I don't think it fits well here.

It's not really a good essay though; it's "I'm a rich white dude who never has to think about how politics might affect me and I don't see why anyone else should either."

Sorry, I edited my comment so your reply makes less sense now. Bad habit of submitting before I'm fully satisfied with the comment.

Right? Like, just accept people and call them what they ask to be called? Why make a big deal out of someone who prefers they or xe or he or she or whatever?

literally not the problem here

more like people cant use Bob in an example and say He because "what if Bob is trans" comes up. cant even say "they" to be neutral because apparently "singular they" is offensive.

this is dumb. its not a real problem for the site. the rest of us dont need to deal with all that because some people have nothing better to do.

I keep seeing this notion that the singular they is offensive. I thought its whole purpose was to be more inclusive. At what point did it become offensive and why is it considered to be offensive?

It's not. People are having a hard time adjusting and overreacting. It's only a problem if you using singular they specifically and only for trans folk, ie singling them out.

thats not a problem either. you cant force people to say anything.

You can't "force" people to say things, but it's still a problem when people are deliberately insulting, obviously.

The problem is a very small minority within the trans community assuming everything is a targeted attack when people are actually just acting naturally, living their lives.

Everyone shouldn’t have to adapt to appease the 0.0001% hyper-sensitive. That’s not a reasonable proposition.

when you stop forcing people to do things then theyll be much nicer in dealing with you

Quite literally, Monica said she avoids singular pronouns in general, not just for any particular group or person, because she doesn't feel that singular pronouns are required to moderate a community in most cases. That was the problem that lead to firing her and starting an undercover witch hunt, with SO leaking private chat excerpts and talking to media to bash her.

This isn't about singling anybody out with pronouns.

I was just recently at a gender-inclusivity seminar. The speaker asked everyone in the room to give their name, but specifically asked for NOT everyone to state their [preferred?] pronouns. Why not? Apparently the speaker is currently in a community were certain transgender members feel quite strongly that stating pronouns is itself problematic and hurtful.

For those of us not quite up to date on social movements, and for slow-moving organizations, this is obviously tricky to navigate. My workplace is just starting to encourage everyone to state their "preferred pronouns" prominently when introducing themselves and on all correspondence (e.g. in email signatures), and to avoid gendered pronouns when possible in many situations or at least use "singular they" (e.g. in abstract examples or documentation). Last week I thought that was quite progressive. This week I have learned that "preferred pronouns" is no longer an acceptable phrase, that "singular they" is offensive to some, that avoiding pronouns itself is problematic (at least in SE's CoC, apparently), and that asking someone to give pronouns is problematic and hurtful to some. I don't know where that leaves me or my workplace.

this is the problem cause 99.9% of us know how to get along just fine without these weird pronoun rules

theyre literally making EVERYONE work harder and waste time to not offend a single person who probably doesnt even agree with these rules

this article was posted here a while back:

https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...

I thought it was quite interesting.

Just do the best you can, try to be respectful of everybody, and be understanding when someone is not unhappy or offended. It's not something that needs to be a fight.

when its getting to the point that its turning into hr classes and laws that get you fired or jailed for being in the 99.9% of the population then yea people should fight back against it all

You obviously shouldn't be (and aren't) getting fired or jailed for being in whatever percentage of the population. But if people are going out of their way to hurt a minority, then something needs to be done to stop it. That's what those laws and HR classes should be addressing.

And if that's the thing you intend to be fighting, then yes, you've got a fight. But this shouldn't be a fight. Respecting people for their differences should be a normal part of being a decent person.

define hurt. you cant just make up rules. people can say whatever they want. its free speech and its important. and are you seriously ignoring all the people who do get fired and jailed? lol wait till it happens to you

i find your comment offensive so youre banned for life from the internet. is that what you want? or should my offense be my own problem? ill let you figure out which one is better

> "define hurt."

In this context, intentionally denying people their identity. Those bathroom bills that force people to use the wrong bathroom, for example. But anyone who insists on calling a transgender woman "he" or a transgender man "she", even after having been corrected, is intentionally hurting them. It's intentionally being an asshole to someone.

> "you cant just make up rules."

We can do. Hopefully after some careful deliberation, or you end up with stupid rules like those bathroom bills, but yes, rules get made all the time.

That doesn't mean we should legislate everything. We can't and shouldn't. But what should and shouldn't get legislated, or captured in less formal community rules, is an ongoing discussion.

> "and are you seriously ignoring all the people who do get fired and jailed? lol wait till it happens to you"

I'm not. Lots of people are indeed getting fired and jailed for being LBGTQ, belonging to the wrong minority, etc. But nobody is getting fired or jailed for belonging to a demographic that is 99.9% of the population.

> "i find your comment offensive so youre banned for life from the internet."

There's a massive difference between accidentally offending someone, and going out of your way to offend. I'm addressing the latter. If we manage to address that, it becomes easier to assume that the offenses we do experience were not intentional.

It's a unbelievable that we take the output of these seminars as gospel. They are just groups of people - with no more authority on what "proper behavior" is than the rest of us.

...and yet the community that supports them vehemently punishes anyone that strays from their constantly changing and often contradictory directives.

It's not gospel, it's a view. It's useful to understand people who have a different perspective. Their view may not be universal, but it's still a valid view.

“The moon is made of cheese. Disagreeing with that causes me intense emotional distress so no ‘decent person’ would do so.”

Are any views invalid?

It is tricky, yeah. Everyone has their own preferences, and no one set of rules will apply 100% to everyone. And, unfortunately, some people are simply acting in bad faith.

There was a discussion a few days ago about how a few people say that the terms "assigned male/female at birth" should apply only to intersex people and the trans community appropriated them. But if you look into it, you find that the trans community invented those terms, and the people who originated the claim are outspoken transphobes who want to invalidate trans people in any way they can. And there's probably some well-meaning people who were taken by those assholes, unfortunately. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21139083

At the end of the day, all you can do is respect people's individual wishes when they express them, and when they don't, go with the consensus and try to extend the benefit of the doubt. Someone who's been hassled and harassed their whole life is gonna be high-strung about some things; you don't need to agree with them, but give them a little slack when you can.

Edit: I'm curious what their rationale for asking people not to state their pronouns was. I can't think of any way that could benefit anyone. Do you recall what they said exactly?

none of the pronouns are offensive and we use the ones that fit 99% of the time but they is fine if you really want to be neutral

its only offensive if you listen to the 1 in a million people who want to make a big deal and control everyone elses speech

> apparently "singular they" is offensive

I think the point was that 'singular they is offensive' only when people have specifically asked for certain pronouns (ie you're blatantly disregarding people's requests)?

except this is a code example on the site

im not going to write bob and alice and then worry about "well what if these fake people in this example i made up are actually trans" lol give me a break.

Agreed. If you're the author and Alice and Bob are the imaginary characters in your example, then you get to decide their gender.

Same as an author who is writing a novel, is free to invent characters and assign gender, sexual orientation, and any other character traits they want.

It's your story, they are your characters. You decide if it's a he, she, xe, or whatever.

You certainly haven't been keeping up with Twitter culture if you think this.

twitter culture is outrage culture. its a bunch of maniacs yelling at each other and they should all be ignored

Should, but aren't. That's the problem.

its the same people that are on twitter and then go to work and school and bring this with them. they should be ignored in real life too but nobody wants to deal with the hysterical accusations from the far left

What is this "Twitter culture" you're talking about? Could you sum it up?

most people on twitter and a lot of the verified people basically police each other for how "woke" they can be with social justice

and if anyone steps out of line against the insane number of rules about who you might slightly offend then you get mobbed and "cancelled" by being called a racist/sexist/bigot/transphobe/nazi and whatever cool word is in use until you lose your job and lifestyle and are permanently branded a terrible person

“Bob, a cis heteronormative middle aged white man from Seattle, wants to send a message to Alice, a bicurious housewife from Kentucky”

IMO the real issue here is not pronouns per se but rather it is SO's behavior in response (firing, ghosting, inconsistency).

No, it's pronouns. More generally, it's "I expect you to conform with the way I perceive the world, even if it's not the way you perceive it."

The entire point of a pronoun is to convey my perceived relation to the noun. We do it all the time with possessives and formalities; if gender is truly a fluid, to-be-perceived, non-biological construct, then why shouldn't we treat it the same way?

Based on Monica Cellio's blogpost (https://cellio.dreamwidth.org/2064709.html), I think what happened is that, last year, she posted saying that she prefers, when possible, to refer to people in ways that don't require using pronouns at all. Later, this was misinterpreted to mean that she refused to use people's requested pronouns, and she was fired from her position. That might have been reasonable if she had actually said that, but it sounds like she didn't say anything of the sort.

That makes me think that it's not really about pronouns, it's about people using bad-faith misinterpretation and unjustified accusations to hold a witch-hunt. Pronouns are just the purported subject.

But I'm new to the whole kerfuffle, so I may be missing something.

You're giving them too much credit. She said she'd prefer not using pronouns at all. They said if she avoids using pronouns, she's just as guilty as using the wrong one. Then they fired/de-moded her based on her stated preference, assuming she would not follow the future rules.

They also did this at 6 pm on a Friday. She's Jewish.

> They also did this at 6 pm on a Friday. She's Jewish.

In fairness, there really isn't a good time to fire someone. I would normally think that the end of the work week is one of the least bad times to fire someone.

Agreed, but I'm speaking more to the hypocrisy of being expected to be sensitive to the personal beliefs / self-identity of the person you're addressing. The very principle they "fired" her for.

Edit: Also, even if that's the best time, you should ensure you make personal contact, and not just do the equivalent of a ghosting.

No, I agree. There is a minimum level of etiquette that should be followed when terminating someone, even if it is for cause, and even if they are a volunteer.

Is this particularly onerous because she'd be unable to do work to defend herself the following day, as it was the sabbath?

(Honesty question. I'm curious what the connection is, and that's the best I can think of.)

Basically yes. Using their own standards, they should have known that she wouldn't be able to receive any notification for at least a day. Not only didn't they discuss it privately with her before taking action, they essentially allowed rumor to spread unanswered for a full day, if not all weekend.

> They said if she avoids using pronouns, she's just as guilty as using the wrong one.

People that think like this baffle me

When I refer to people online, I rarely use 'pronouns'. IMO in online communication, it's most clear/neutral to just refer to people by their name or username, e.g. if I'm referring to you I might just say @beerandt. I can't imagine how that could be seen as offensive in any way

I don't get it either.

I can see a case where trolls could abuse it, but that shouldn't preclude well-intentioned use.

The way she writes about a sharp distinction about a "negative commandment" vs "positive requirement" in the rules here makes it sound like she's really against respecting people's preferred pronouns and looking for a loophole that doesn't require her to do so. I don't have anything against gender-neutral language, but that kind of seemingly-motivated reasoning makes me uncomfortable, and I wouldn't be surprised if this sort of thing made SE think she was looking for loopholes to get out of respecting the CoC.

If it were a common expression of homophobia to to refer to gay people's husbands/wives/boyfriends/girlfriends as their "roommate", SE made a rule against doing that, and a moderator asked if it would be fine if they always referred to the partners by their full names ... I wouldn't really get the impression that the moderator is trying to follow the spirit of the CoC.

Maybe not every user needs to be on board with the spirit of the CoC, but the moderators that are responsible for enforcing it probably should be.

I suspect the reason that some people are so insistent on preferred pronouns, is a backlash against people who insist on misgendering them. They've had to fight for every shred of recognition.

This could have been a complete non-issue if there hadn't been so much stubborn hate and disrespect towards transgender and non-binary people. A single case of misgendering would be easy to take as an honest mistake if it wasn't against a context of decades of hate and denial of their identity. So use of pronouns seems to have become the main signifier of whether they're getting the respect they deserve.

That doesn't make one particular view on the use of pronouns right or wrong, but it does make it complex and laden with a lot of baggage that not everybody is aware of.

I get that, and sort of sympathized at one point. But for one thing, if you're not allowed to avoid the controversy except by not speaking at all, then the hands been overplayed.

Personally, I always try to draw the line from a natural rights approach. If one "right" requires the infringement of the rights of someone else, then it's not really a natural right. If your personal belief requires me to have a certain personal belief, it's not a natural-right, it's a form of religious jihad.

People need to realize that if you aren't "normal" in some way (whether it's a personality quirk, weird hobby, odd fetish, or disability, or whatever) that life isn't guaranteed to be easy, and you're going to need to take certain conversations or commentary with a thick skin. (I know "normal" can be a no-no in this topic, but I mean in general terms, which I think is still appropriate for this context.)

And the "coerced" or "forced speech" approach really doesn't make sense in practice if we're strictly looking at self-identity. If it were strictly about self-identity, we'd still say pro-life and pro-choice, instead of pro-woman and anti-abortion. "Racist" would basically be off limits except for the very small number of people that openly embrace it as a badge. Making any assumption about anyone's outward appearance (or any assumption about the underlying motive of anyone's actions) could land you in trouble with the thought police.

People say 1984 and BNW, but I think the whole thing is...it's very Victorian- just with a different set of taboos and standards. Although with the direction me-too is headed, with people being offended (or even feeling harassed or assaulted) just by being asked-out in (what they perceive to be) an offensive manor, we've almost come full circle.

I mostly agree with you. There's two extremes in this: restricting speech because it's impossible not to offend someone, and intentionally offending someone. I think both are bad. I think the best way forward is a good faith best effort. Try not to misgender someone, but if that means you avoid gendered pronouns in general, and not just to single out transgender people, then that should certainly be fine. And when you get it wrong, correct yourself. At the same time, it's pointless to condemn someone for getting it wrong; mistakes happen. But it would be nice if they're just honest mistakes, and not people intentionally trying to misgender people.

So yeah, we need some balance. You can't expect to never ever get offended, but at the same time, we should be trying to accept people who are different.

The comparison with racists doesn't quite work, as they're defined specifically by not accepting people who are different in a specific way. Of course they'd like to see that normalised, but at the same time they oppose the normalisation of others who are not hurting anyone in any way, and that's something that needs to be called out. But transgender people just want to be themselves, not hurt anyone, and not get hurt by anyone. And I think the reason they overreact is because they get hurt so much. I think you and I would react much the same way if we were constantly under attack merely for being ourselves.

This gave me an aha moment. It's really just an attempt at legislating mortality. But I need to ponder that.

>And when you get it wrong, correct yourself.

This is where I strongly disagree. At most, the compromise is to keep it ambiguous. Otherwise you're putting your personal belief system over mine, and expecting me to modify my outward behavior to accommodate your beliefs (and by defying my own).

Whereas my beliefs would require no outward change in behavior on your part, let alone one that you might find internally immoral. You would just have to be tolerant.

Re: the racist thing. The technical definition doesn't fit the applied use of the term. Most people the left labels racist are at most apathetic, if you leave them out of it. And I don't mean forcing them to treat everyone equally. I mean being accused of racism if you don't actively support whatever political agenda is the flavor of the week.

It's the same forced participation that draws the comparison. And it's counter productive because it fosters resentment.

>they oppose the normalisation of others

This has become some sort of fetishisation, 99% of people being called racist want normalisation through assimilation. There's no personal grudge because a person is different. It's the special treatment being demanded that people have a problem with.

>But transgender people just want to be themselves, not hurt anyone, and not get hurt by anyone.

By demanding that others go against these same principles.

> if gender is truly a fluid, to-be-perceived, non-biological construct, then why shouldn't we treat it the same way?

Because no one sane can keep up outside of a small personal group of friends.

That's what I'm saying. Pronouns (of all types, not just gender) should convey the speakers perception and intent, so there's nothing to keep track of. Think of vous/tu or thou/you. If you have kids, it's the difference between saying to your spouse "our kid drew all by himself" and "your kid drew on the wall". The pronoun selection conveys meaning perceived by the speaker, and not always the literal categorical noun substitution. But it's for the speaker to decide.

I'll leave you with this. An older gay friend was involved in gay rights stuff back in the 1970's. He said there were two kinds of activists in the organizations. Those that wanted to achieve goals and those that wanted to involve themselves in internecine politics. His experience is the latter win.

I suspect that's what's going on at SO.

The other side can view it similar to past bigotry in history. It's unfortunate when people in society don't blend in for the correct pronouns to be used automatically and even more distasteful when other people dismiss the effort of an unfortunate person in trying to liv life without being reminded by others showing no care in the world for the person. In any case I doubt stack exchange will be hurt by this conflict.

Apparently, the issue here is that SE removed a respected moderator but isn't telling the community what happened, why, what the removal process was or will be in the future, etc. Pronouns is what was being discussed at the time, but it doesn't seem to be the high-order bit.

It was for SE, apparently

It'll be here soon enough and it'll be interesting to see how it's handled, especially as the parties pushing for change tend to apply pressure as a group to those in authority (in our tech world, project leaders and moderators, but beyond it's appeals to universities or the media…) and flag/downvote (or worse) against those who show any dissent.

The Opal project's little kerfuffle[0] a while back comes to mind, and the subsequent adoption by several Ruby projects of the Contributor Covenant[1] (of which, it never seems to be applied to its supporters - maybe that's just me being cynical). It convinced me that the best way to go is no code of conduct (I favour the delightfully named NCoC[2]) for most projects.

[0] https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941

[1] https://github.com/bundler/bundler/issues/3444

[2] https://github.com/domgetter/NCoC

I can't help but feel that NCoC isn't scaleable. "Let's all be reasonable" is a great strategy when a handful of people are working on something and they are all more interested in getting the job done than talking about it. But it runs straight into the fact that there actually are people - particularly in the open source community that are perfectly willing to shout abuse at other contributors until they quit: https://adtmag.com/blogs/dev-watch/2014/04/linus-torvalds-ra...

I agree. I've had other devs call me all sorts, in public, and it's not nice. One Ruby committer called me an "asshat" on his Twitter feed, simply because he failed to read my pull request properly and then seemed unable to admit it. Weird. One maintainer on another project called me a troll for opening an issue. Recently, I had one of the Rubygems maintainers be rude to me for the heinous crime of… suggesting client side validation in an issue thread! I think they have the Contributor Covenant but it doesn't seem to apply to maintainers. I get this stuff so often now I'm never surprised.

Still, like many things, it's a choice between one bad thing and one worse thing, and these "covenants" and other well-meaning straitjackets have the same old free speech arguments applicable to them - it's not nice to hear people be nasty but it's worse to have some jumped up little authoritarians choose how us plebs should be "nice" while they get free reign to be horrible.

I wonder, has Torvalds ever acted like that to people's faces?

I think the really obvious point is that there is actually a middle way. You don't need authoritarian enforcement of speech, you need communities willing to just step in and say "That's not appropriate". Someone confident and willing to just step into a Torvalds rant and say "Hi Linus, let's step away from the technical issues, this isn't the way you should be communicating your issues". Often here what we're seeing is that these bad acts are actually allowed to continue by the community and only challenged by the people at the receiving end of the attacks.

Again I agree, but that is the NCoC way.

Ben would you mind then being called she/her then if that is so silly? I'm a hetero woman and I've been called a male few times when gaming and this is not silly, people are rejecting your identity and I can't even imagine how bad this is for trans/NB people.

People are not "rejecting your identity" if they use the wrong pronoun. That is an emotional interpretation of an error.

You assume that was an error, based on what?

Some people are. There are people who intentionally use the wrong pronoun, exactly because they reject someone's transgender identity. We cis-gendered people may not notice this, but to transgender people, it is every-day reality to be confronted with someone who insists on denying their identity. Consider the stupid bathroom bills in a couple of US states for example.

So against that background, it's entirely understandable that they react more emotionally also to accidental mistakes. That doesn't mean overreaction is a good idea, but it's a backlash against a long history of having their identity denied. If we don't like the backlash, maybe we should work harder to address the original hatred that it's reacting to.

I run a product/community of teenage game developers. The girls in my community do not want to reveal that they are girls, probably because they do not want to stand out. So basically everyone thinks it's full of boys (especially the boys), but in reality 50% are girls. So it definitely depends on the person and circumstances how they want to be perceived.

With European names, I also saw plenty of times when wrong genders were assumed, but those things shouldn't be taken as malice. It would be weird for an adult to use that a a means for insult, so why not assume it's an honest mistake?

But that's their choice. It was used as an insult in a pretty straight forward way (I was there you know?) and I didn't mean honest mistake of guessing wrongly based on name or nickname. I have experience being told that I can not be a woman because women don't play wow on fridays.. yea or because I'm a programmer. This even wasn't a one time incident.

Alright that is pretty bad.

The same insult doesn't really work on men in that same setting, since we're not really a minority. So we're more armed against someone calling us "she".

But I can imagine it's hard to have to justify yourself every time for being a woman. Yeah that sucks, a lot of jerks out there and not much to do about it.

I stand corrected.

I don't think the pronoun movement is about people using the wrong gender by mistake, and that's definitely not "rejecting your identity".

I'm male, and sometimes people outside my native country misread my name and read it as the feminine version of it. I've answered phone calls and gone to appointments where people were actually expecting a woman, not a fully grown man. That's people being silly, not rejecting my identity.

But I don't want any part in this discussion, like the OP in the article, I'll keep using "they" to refer to people on the internet.

It is not a mistake when you tell someone you're female and they're saying your not, at least where I come from :)

Could all of this been avoided if SE had a field in user profiles that is basically "Please use the following pronoun when referring to me: _______"? The user could fill this in with She, He, They, Qwotzl, whatever.

You'd need to ask for at least three grammatical cases: nominative, accusative and possessive. We considered trying this a while back with our organisation's personnel tracker, but concluded it needed a disproportionate amount of user effort. So we abandoned it in favour of just stating the user's name and/or singular "they" everywhere (in line with UK GDS guidelines[1]).

[1] https://design-system.service.gov.uk/patterns/gender-or-sex/

Which is partly why I find the pronoun database at "Pronoun Island" interesting/useful because its a database of most of the common substitute pronouns and almost all of their English grammatical cases.

Though, as you determined singular "they" is a simple enough implementation without needing a database lookup and keeping a pronoun database on hand.

http://pronoun.is/

[ETA: It's a small shame this particular DB is AGPL, keeping it from being maximally reuseful as a shareable standard library. Though data is not code and AGPL may not technically apply, but there's no separate data license such as a CC license mentioned in the repo, so one must assume AGPL-like conditions.]

Great resource, thanks! It would be interesting to see more context for each of the entries, such as examples in published work—I certainly noticed they'd incorporated ones used by science fiction authors that I like. Though I understand that such examples may still be quite thin-on-the-ground.

> We are disappointed with the lack of responsiveness to community concerns. On Meta Stack Exchange, bug reports, feature and support requests go unacknowledged, sometimes for months or years, and some excellent posts never receive a staff response. Meanwhile, there have been cases when staff have responded to complaints on Twitter almost immediately, taking action without due process and without consulting with the impacted sites.

It’s sad that more and more companies ignore normal support channels (a very well established and proven one in SE’s case) and only answer to Twitter shaming. For one thing, it’s very unfair to those of us who don’t (otherwise) use Twitter — I have to keep an account just for tech support, and even then I highly doubt my requests are valued as much as ones from accounts with 10k or more followers.

I don’t understand why gender/pronouns is even being discussed. Someone’s personal feelings don’t really have any place in a question/answers site. It’s fine to respect a persons feelings and such when talking to a person but when answering a question or asking the question. The gender/pronoun is irrelevant.

It's confusing to me too. Very clearly this is a battle for which there are only losers and no winners.

Regardless of what SE should do with pronouns, a mod shouldn't get fired for clarifying

+1. Couldn't agree more!

This is not the first time nor this is specific to SO. Here[0] is another occurrence of something similar to those interested.

[0]https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29538...

The folks moderating SE are very pedantic about the wording of passages. Once I called SE a "forum", and I was politely told not to call SE a "forum". I would really hate to be a person that is not very fluent in English and trying to interact with SE.

One of my latest questions got as first comment : "Please use English punctuation when writing in English."

Certainly polite but a bit jarring as a non-native speaker that feels fluent. Also a bit nonsensically-bureaucratic : I made the mistake because I didn't know any better, after the comment I still couldn't correct the mistake because I still didn't know any better, I wasn't even sure what rule of punctuation I had wronged.

I would've preferred a direct edit instead of a comment prompting though I guess that can be seen as worse by some people.

> ... nonsensically-bureaucratic : I ...

Maybe you put a space before a colon, and the eagle-eyed moderator spotted it :-)

(English rarely has a space before a punctuation mark — except for a dash in British usage. Americans—I think—do this.)

Yeah exactly, in French for example you put a space before a colon, a question mark, exclamation mark, while in English you don't, it is quite hard to spot for a lot of people.

OP is about someone who is extremely fluent in English, an expert in the eyes of the community, who was kicked out pecificaly for the sin of trying to interact with SE in fluent English.

SE's management with this rule is disarming any discussion on the matter a priori, thus avoiding any complication for itself.

Because for a lot of people part of their identity is wrapped up in how offended they can be and expressing it out loud.

This reminds me of the time when stack exchange updated their terms of service to include an arbitration clause. The community was in uproar over this decision, yet the clause stands to this day.

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/309746/a-new-2018-u...

Stack overflow's terms of service is pretty terrible, receiving the worst rank in terms of user hostility on TOS;DR.

https://tosdr.org/#stackoverflow

That hardly seems fair. For 99.99% of users everything they do on the site is publically available. There is no private messaging, no private anything. The entire history of everything on all sites being public is one of the explicit goals of the site. So "sharing with 3rd parties" means absolutely nothing. Those 3rd parties could scrape the site or they could download the archive.

https://archive.org/details/stackexchange

It doesn't seem like they should be marked as having a poor TOS for at least half the things listed as those things are basically the known purpose of the site.

This simply isn't true - your most sensitive information is not public, yet is shared with 3rd parties. From their privacy policy:

"We collect location information about you including your IP address, your location, browser information, and how you came to the Stack Overflow Network."

(SO also collects your email address, interests, and employment status upon registration - this is not mentioned specifically in the privacy policy)

"This is the case for individuals who have registered for an account, and non-members who engage with the Stack Overflow Network by visiting our website(s) but who have not completed an account registration."

"We share this information with certain third-parties (e.g., talent recruiters, payment processors, and advertising providers)"

https://stackoverflow.com/legal/privacy-policy

I remember when Stack Exchange was about fixing broken code.

Politics have crept into every aspect of life unfortunately.

Politics is part of every human endeavor: between kids on the playground, in the workplace, at the level of local, regional, national, and international governments and businesses.

Politics and the negotiation of status and access between various in and out groups is a fundamental part of being human.

Thank you. There is a tendency in tech people to dismiss politics as less than important ("just politics", "just political"). It's a fundamental part of our social fabric.

Simler & Hanson provide a pretty solid explanatory framework: http://elephantinthebrain.com/

Have only read parts of that, but describing attributes to human nature mostly fails to do so and attaches them to the author instead.

No, not everything is political. From that perspective you could substitute the term politics with "battle for share", which can be political, but doesn't encompass the whole set of politics. You can even generalize that further and it gets more primitive along the way:

"Every day is a battle for survival"

Of course it is political play to attach attributes to groups and then highlighting fault lines. But it is the most primitive form of what many people call politics.

And since it doesn't accomplish anything productive, many people have the need to remove politics from platforms like SE, because they just see it as a distraction to the topic at hand and is pitting people against each other. Pronouns do that, most of the gender discussion does that and now we have also started a new discussions about racism that won't net positive results.

All because some people crave some validation? Maybe that is not always the case, but it seems that people wanted a conflict and that is what they got.

> No, not everything is political

Name literally anything and I will point out its political implications.

Number theory!

Not sure, there must be something related to politics at the Wikipedia number theory page [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_theory

Some Christian fundamentalists oppose modern set theory, which is an integral part of number theory: https://boingboing.net/2012/08/07/what-do-christian-fundamen...

That would not constitute proof. But to humor you and me, what about cornflakes?

Cornflakes? Not very hard.

It is related to GMO (genetically modified maize), maize/corn, large (subsidized?) agriculture in US, life stock feed (which one can argue is inefficient), high fructose corn syrup.

(Took me 5 minutes to come up with that, by just reading Wikipedia.)

I have no stake in this discussion, but man, anything to do with Corn is a minefield.

https://www.bankableinsight.com/the-politics-of-corn.html

The food literally created due to political beliefs?

"The story of corn flakes goes back to the late 19th century, when a team of Seventh-day Adventists began to develop new foods to adhere to the vegetarian diet recommended by the church. Members of the group experimented with a number of different grains, including wheat, oats, rice, barley and maize. In 1894, John Harvey Kellogg, the superintendent of the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan and an Adventist, used these recipes as part of a strict vegetarian regimen for his patients, which also included no alcohol, tobacco or caffeine. The diet he imposed consisted entirely of bland foods. A follower of Sylvester Graham, the man cited as inspiration of graham crackers and graham bread, Kellogg believed that spicy or sweet foods would increase passions." [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_flakes

Looking at everything in life through the lens of politics is certainly possible, but it will probably make you unhappy.

I love the comments stating "everything is political", is there a book that can convince and help delibrately build better politics?

Politics is how our society has wars. It is vastly less destructive than hot wars but exactly the same as far as being based on what you can get away with rather than what is right or rational.

Stack Exchange started a lot of other sites on the side.

Some of them are about religions, and that brings on politics. Since religion and politics are intertwined.

https://christianity.stackexchange.com

https://islam.stackexchange.com

https://judaism.stackexchange.com

https://buddhism.stackexchange.com

https://hermeneutics.stackexchange.com

https://hinduism.stackexchange.com

Don't forget Politics StackExchange! - https://politics.stackexchange.com/

Honest Question: Why continue to support stack exchange through this? They have shown themselves to be disingenuous at best. They are now profiting off free labor. They started it because ExpertsExchange was hiding answers. They rode the high horse to hypocrisy.

Why continue helping people like that succeed?

Why not just start a new one? Leave en masse to a new playground. Speak with your answers.

Show the powers that be they can't treat the sharecroppers like this anymore.

Hasn't history shown the way? It's repeating itself all over this controversy.

Is this an inevitability? How can this be prevented?

It feels like the issue regarding Monica is just the issue we are all talking about, but ultimately, it goes much deeper.

what do you mean by support? I google and sometimes use their content and that's it. There are other sources.

By support I mean, continue to moderate their website for them. Answer questions for them. Ask questions of them.

Continue to give them time and help them create the product they are going to sell to someone else and keep all the money for themselves.

And also support by voicing concerns. Showing them what their user base wants when they clearly don't care what their user base wants, only what they want in their wallet.

I ask questions there because I get good answers quickly. Sometimes I see questions in my field of expertise and I answer them. Which other site should I go to instead to have that?

This is the last straw for me. The ads were also out of control.

Real documentation is better anyway!

> Real documentation is better anyway!

If SO was the alternative to real documentation to you, you’re probably part of the reason why SO quality has declined so much and why moderation got heavy-handed over time, with collateral damage: lazy ass users asking RTFM / I-can-haz-code questions.

(Years ago I answered questions for a while on SO, accumulated a few thousand points, and participated in modding queues. I know how bad the bottom 30% or more of SO questions are.)

Even with the quality slipping from the early days I think it's quite remarkable how high the quality is when you consider the distribution of quality of questions that get posted. The low quality review queue on stack overflow is just brutal. Part of what makes it a good resource is that the worst of the questions just don't get seen by many people.

>Why continue to support stack exchange through this?

To exploit the new rules and demand everyone refer to you by your preferred pronoun of "God". If you're into that kind of thing.

"Master" would also work well. Or "Daddy" if you're into that kind of thing. Hmm, I'm starting to actually like this policy...

"Don't confine me within your normative definition of 'pronoun'!"

SO has so much information already, I think it would be frustrating for people to have to walk away from it and start from scratch, and a huge loss to the community (or anyone who has ever googled "how to do X in lang Y"). However when your community is built on top of a VC-funded for-profit company this is always a risk you take. Maybe the only solution is starting over with a non-profit model.

> I think it would be frustrating for people to have to walk away from it and start from scratch

All the StackExchange Q&A content is covered by a Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike license (CC BY-SA). You can start your own website and use all the content. The only sense in which you'd be starting over is with building the community; the existing questions and answers are free to use.

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333089/stack-exchan...

Didn't know that - thanks!

Unfortunately StackExchange fell into the trap of trying to support social justice warriorisms.

Either they will fold or they will come to realize that the only ways to deal with users that are preoccupied with genders, religion, sexual orientations and whatever protected class they can come up with are to lose them or ignore them. You can’t go along with their demands because there will always be a new demand, each one crazier and more irrelevant than the last one.

I'm curious as to what part of the issue was about "social justice warriorisms", especially since Monica herself and most of the other mods who resigned were okay with the principle of calling people by the pronoun they prefer to be called by.

Perhaps my reading of the situation is way off, but at the risk of making a fool of myself:

My understanding is that Monica wanted to use gender neutral pronouns throughout her writing as a general case, but that this was deemed "not good enough" (or indeed hateful) in the cases where someone has chosen specific pronouns. So I suppose this is what the GP is referring to. And I can't argue that it seems like a rather extreme position - although I'm happy to be persuaded otherwise.

That is what this is about? There is something wrong with the way our culture is shifting. There is absolutely nothing wrong with Monica's choice. It is literally the most pacifist choice you could make. Anyone who feels "harmed" by her choice is only harming themselves.

I care deeply about social justice, and I'm totally on Monica's side here. Even more so because as far as anyone can tell, she wasn't even violating a CoC yet, and would probably have followed it if it was sufficiently clarified. But at the most basic level, I feel gender-neutral language should always be okay.

In fact, I think it would be healthy if language in general developed in a more gender-neutral direction. We don't use special pronouns to divide people based on other characteristics, so why gender?

It was a matter of one party being insufficiently SJWist for another party. SJWism is a continuum, not a binary.

I've read elsewhere that if a radical lives long enough he'll eventually be chastised for being insufficiently radical. I don't know if it's true, but I for one will find it hilarious in a decade or two when today's SJWs are having to apologise for deriding the idea of human-animal marriage or for opposing lettuce rights in the backwards years of 2019. Or will, anyway, if I haven't died in a re-education camp by then.

I consider myself a 90’s Clinton-era progressive, which means I’m pretty much dead to the 2019-era left. Just like Reagan-era conservatives are unrecognizable to “true conservatives” today. The camps are moving so extremely to each side it’s hard to identify with anyone politically anymore.

It's terribly sad that StackExchange is less likely to respond to a well-reasoned argument by informed and invested moderators like this than a pack of idiots on Twitter hooting for blood. Cancel-culture is cancer.

This is totally sad. I really wonder how a company could publish a year ago in 2018 "Our Theory of Moderation, Re-visited.":

> Trust people. > Supporting people should be your default reaction

and then a year later be in this current state.

Worse is, SE seems to unable to reactify the situation in a meaninful and trustful way.

Shouldn’t the CTO fire the person who was directly responsible for firing Monica? Why isn’t that part of it?

because she has 46k Twitter followers and the company fears Twitter above all else

Not sure I understand - who is she that you're referring to?

Sara Chipps.

Because if you read the apology, he's actually backing her up. The "apology" is a lot better written than the terrible thing that was posted a day or so ago, but it is STILL essentially "We're sorry that you are upset."

It's not an apology. AFAICT the facts of the matter haven't changed here at all.

I see firing in such a case as a cop-out, a cowardly way to appease mob-mentality.

In this case if the employee responsible for firing the moderator did such acts repeatedly despite management warnings than perhaps it's a good idea to fire that person. However this doesn't seem to be the case, the CTO correctly assumed responsibility in his apology of green-lighting the moderator's firing.

He does the right thing, in my opinion, by promising a better process that wouldn't lead to such a hurtful (and seemingly unfair) dismissal.

You don't fire an employee for mistakenly deleting your production database, you update your process so this cannot happen (at least not by accident).

In some cases, that is true. In other cases, it is an important part of removing a toxic element from your organization.

There are some people who refuse to behave in the best interests of the group, no matter how much direction you give them.

...but you are correct that they are often only one part of the problem. Then again, often firing them will motivate some of their supporters to quit.

I imagine that was the impetus behind firing Monica, so perhaps turnabout is fair play.

> if the employee responsible for firing the moderator did such acts repeatedly despite management warnings than perhaps it's a good idea to fire that person

> There are some people who refuse to behave in the best interests of the group, no matter how much direction you give them

I think we agree on this.

If an employee refuses to change behaviour despite multiple warnings he/her is fair game for dismissal. However I think firing someone without prior warnings is abusive unless it's for something criminal or malicious. You can probably guess that I don't care much for at-will employment...

Because the person responsible for firing Monica is "just doing their job", which is aligned with the political agenda.

Deciding to fire someone in such a questionable and unusual manner is never "just doing their job". Someone made a really poor call here, and is trying to excuse it with accusations and events that never seem to have happened.

That combination, and the fact that it resulted in a major scandal for SE, makes it absolutely justifiable to fire the person responsible.

It's only because the events got out of hand, not because of the action per se. The same person has been doing this for many more cases where it was just fine and this is perfectly clear by the tone of the CTO.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21175225

"Beware of words. The moment you look away, they will take on a life of their own; they will dazzle, mesmerize, terrorize, lead you astray from the reality they represent, lead you to believe they are real. The world you see is not the kingdom seen by children, but a fragmented world, broken into a thousand pieces by the word. It is as if each ocean wave were seen to be distinct and separate from the body of the ocean."

I would love a nice couple paragraphs that said "here's what happened", otherwise taking any side in this is just taking shots in the dark, I'm basically reading "certain events happened with a certain individual and that's not okay"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21173643

+1 I feel I should care about this but I don't believe it's worth investing the time to go through walls of text of 'he said' 'she said' biased explanations. I'm probably better off..

As asked: https://cellio.dreamwidth.org/2064709.html

Is there a TLDR of what happened anywhere?

Based on GP's link: Controversy over gender pronouns

Moderator got fired for wanting to not use pronouns at all, because they though preferred pronouns were confusing to non-native English speakers instead of preferred pronouns.

Seems like there was a disagreement regarding the use of gender pronouns that resulted in 73 moderators getting "fired" or leaving.

The author of that summary mentioned one thing I found especially egregious, which is a policy that stated avoiding using pronouns was out of alignment. If I understand correctly, when she asked how they would know if she was avoiding pronouns or just naturally not writing them, she was fired. I may have this wrong as I just skimmed the summary. Also it seems she had multiple disagreements on this front before.

Is the implication that the LGBTQ+ community found it _more_ offensive to use e.g. "they" than "he" or "she"?

I'm so confused. Wouldn't "they" (the gender neutral version) be _more_ inclusive? Is there some other alternative that's even better that I haven't considered? I hope I'm not offending anyone by asking this. Just trying to make sure I understand.

Monica wanted to write in a way such that she would never use the words "he", "she", or singular "they". Stack Exchange said it's not OK to write in a restricted way like that, the words must be used.

As I understood it, Stack Exchange didn't say anything. They just fired her for asking.

They said that by firing her.

Yes, people will often find it offensive if you use "they" after asked to use "he" or "she".

If someone says "I am a man, please use he/him for my pronouns" and you use 'they' - that would generally be considered at least odd, if not inappropriate.

I don't think that means it's inappropriate to use "they" as the default if no other information exists though.

uh but using "they" as a neutral way to talk about anyone is just fine. people have been doing that for literally centuries, its called "singular they"

this is all about people wanting to be outraged for no reason

"Singular they" is indeed well used, but it's not normally used when the gender of the person in question is explicitly known.

If you use "they" for someone who has specifically said to you "please use the pronouns 'she/her' when referring to me", you are being rude, not neutral.

"Where's Dave?"

"They're in the garage, I think"

is common to hear, just as

"He's in the garage, I think"

Many will mix between the "he/she" and "they" in the same conversation. Quite often referring to their closest friends and family rather than pointed attempt to misuse a pronoun.

> ["They"] is common to hear, just as ["He"]

> Many will mix between the "he/she" and "they" in the same conversation.

That does not match my observed reality at all. All natural languages I know are gendered the same way English is.

Singular "they" is already exceedingly uncommon by itself; and across all the languages, and in my whole life-time, never once I or a conversation partner used "they" instead of the specialised pronoun, or mixed in a conversation, when the gender of the person in question is explicitly known as GP wrote. The same is true for all written material I read in my whole life.

ok so what? the entire problem is its not known because its different than normal. so we cant use the default gender because someone somewhere might not agree? and we cant use singular they because they dont like it?

so what, we need to read minds? why? for the 0.01% of people who demand everyone else change? how about we forget all this and stick to the defaults. if YOU have a specific pronoun then you can ask but we dont need to rewrite posts and content at all

All I can say is it matches mine. So we're at impasse I guess.

English speech varies. Even across the UK there are dozens of regional accents and dialects. Now add the many regional variations across the USA and other world Englishes. All with their own traits and habits, some more widespread than others. A deep rabbit hole with many forks then.

Common enough that I would not think it the slightest bit unnatural on hearing, or give it a second thought. I wouldn't give it a second thought reading it in a natural conversation in a book - not just in intentionally neutral business or net writing, so that's not going to be memorable. It's not an idiom I'd single out as localised to any one group or region. It would be memorable and feel odd reading if it were all that way in a novel's quoted conversation, or nearly all names with few pronouns like some telesales scripts seem to encourage.

Not as common as he/she certainly, but I dunno 1:4 or 1:8 or something. I couldn't say what proportion is names not pronouns either. FWIW My people skew international, educated, Scots and perhaps city in a part of the UK that's well north of London.

> "Where's Dave?" > "They're in the garage, I think"

I am born and raised US, have lived all over west coast and midwest, and have traveled extensively throughout all regions of US. I have never heard people use the singular they in this pattern.

Where are you from? Wondering if perhaps it is a regional dialect difference.

a lot of times its when youre talking about people where you dont know the name or gender but its a single person

easy to just say "they" instead of he or she. if you know what they are then you wouldnt keep using they

North West of England. My circle skews international, educated, Scots and perhaps city. I've not noticed it as specific to any of the many regional or international dialects. So I can't pick it out as Scots or Mancunian for instance.

It may fall under the generic UK North-South speech and language split.

1 was fired. 73 then left in support of her.

That is helpful, but still far from a couple paragraphs. Nobody owes me anything on this, but I am not taking the energy to parse through this and then SO's responses and then reread TFA to get an actual factual sequence of events here, which ultimately ended in someone losing their moderation status on a Q&A website. This probably comes off as really callous but honestly, Watergate or the Bay of Pigs or (more close to home) Stallman's resignation can be explained in a couple of sentences.

On a mod and employee chat group, they were discussing a new future code of conduct. One element said "You must use people's preferred pronouns if given". A mod (volunteer) (Monica) said "Is it OK if I never use any 3rd person singular pronouns?" She got no answer for a while and was then fired as a mod on Friday at 6pm less than 1 hour before before Shabbat and Rosh Hashana (she is Jewish and a mod of the Jewish Stack Exchange). Stack exchange published a note saying she broke the code of conduct. 73 other mods then either resigned or went inactive.

Thank you, if this is accurate it's perfect.

Could you please help me understand how this relates to Cellio's previous concerns in October 2018 about a problem with Twitter and customer support and moderation?

Does that concern ( https://medium.com/@cellio/dear-stack-overflow-we-need-to-ta... ) have anything to do with the pronoun code of conduct problem at issue here, or is it totally unrelated other than Cellio's involvement?

I have to admit, having read Cellio's summary of the situation, I'm puzzled why "avoid using pronouns to refer to people where possible" would be a controversial view. If you use the wrong one, it may cause harm. If you use none at all, your interaction is more futureproof. For example, if I write about a person who feels comfortable being called "him" but the person later chooses to prefer being called "her", but if if I had avoided using "him" entirely in the first place, then I would never worry about having to retroactively edit or delete my writing to avoid harm.

> Does that concern have anything to do with the pronoun code of conduct problem at issue here, or is it totally unrelated other than Cellio's involvement?

No, it's an entirely seperate issue. However, it's a symptom of the same general problem of the company prioritizing its political/profit-seeking/marketing agendas while ignoring its community (there were dozens of relevant feature requests that had been ignored for years, yet the company took drastic action within 40 minutes of a Twitter post).

> I'm puzzled why "avoid using pronouns to refer to people where possible" would be a controversial view.

None of the details are public; all we really have so far is a couple vague summaries, plus a few more hints and implications. However, it seems the company's reasoning seems to be something along the lines of "if you avoid using third-person pronouns, then you're refusing to acknowledge people's identities."

The October 2018 incident was the previous round of Twitter warriors harrassing SE into kowtowing to their agenda at the expense of the SE user community.

That is one side of the story. I'm quite certain there's another side to it, as with anything. (In fact, I'm quite certain there's many more sides to it, with all the people who have jumped on.)

Wow, the extreme vagueness there, the perfect conviction in their rightness. I have no idea what the actual situation was, but that kind of writing makes me deeply suspicious I'm not getting both sides.

Note that nearly every time communities begin discussing the authoritative forcing of community members to use "correct pronouns" in communications, it invariably ends in firings, resignations, and the community bitterly divided.

It's ironic that certain social activists, who outwardly claim to be motivated by a desire for mutual respect and an acceptance by the community for diverse lifestyles, are so quick to destroy the reputations of those who show even the smallest hint of resistance to their demands. The type of respect they truly seek is that which comes from the fear of the consequences of anything less than total agreement.

If you're not aware of the drama, then it really isn't meant for you. The following threads have some background (and dang has linked a few more threads leading up to these): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21175225 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21176712

The tl;dr (but still pretty long) is that Stack Overflow instituted a new Code of Conduct that required the use of a person's [preferred] pronouns. This change in the Code of Conduct was well intentioned but some people took issue with how it was implemented without much community input. A mod (Monica Cellio) had some level-headed discussion/questions about writing in a gender neutral style vs. affirmatively using a person's pronouns. She was fired with basically no due process, and it's pretty clear that she wasn't being mean or intentionally violating the Code of Conduct. A bunch of other mods got upset with how she was fired and they quit. SO has now issued two non-apologies and is rushing out a new Code of Conduct with a short timeframe for feedback, which is almost sure to make more people angry- plus they haven't been very concrete about which, if any, mods will be getting their jobs back after this fiasco. I don't envy SO's position- they have to keep mods happy, but if they walk back their original CoC change they would be telling the entire LGBTQ+ community that they are valued less than a few mods. However, this is entirely SO's fault with the way they have handled things- including not firing a mod that used more hateful language which makes their enforcement of the CoC inconsistent- so don't feel too bad for them.

I understand your intention is positive, and I enjoyed the nuance of your post.

As a member of the 'entire LGBTQ+ community', we're not monolithic, or even close to it. SO is the first mainstream website (at least in the circles I run in) that has even attempted this kind of thing.

I'm willing to cut them a little slack as they navigate a topic which has been incredibly fraught.

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that rolling back to the old CoC would make every LGBTQ+ person feel unvalued. Everyone, regardless of community membership or not (you can probably tell that I'm struggling for appropriate language here), has differing levels of sensitivity to any issue. Some people are glad when others make an effort to do the right thing, others won't be pleased unless their individual needs are met 100%, and some are angry that society is moving in one direction and they can't be openly bigoted anymore.

However, if you're looking at it from a policy perspective, rolling back the CoC or not can be viewed as a signal, which every person is free to interpret as they wish. This is probably going to be dependent on whether you like the changes or not (some LGBTQ+ people have spoken up and said that the changes to the CoC are actually harmful). My interpretation: rolling back the CoC signals that SO wants to go back to a point when the mods were happier, work things out with the mods from there (there are several other complaints the mods have), and that the LGBTQ+ issues take a backseat. Not rolling things back signals that SO wants the LGBTQ+ community to feel valued and included, but tells the mods that their complaints won't be dealt with the way that they want. I don't think it's possible for SO to send the message that everyone is valued equally- even if they say it their actions won't reflect it.

Sure, fair enough. Sorry to make you have to contort so much to provide a correct-seeming response.

but if you "cut them a little slack" then there is only overflow left

that's why it explodes

> fired with basically no due process

> mods will be getting their jobs back

Are mods paid for their work? Is it a formal 'job'?

Mods are volunteers, but most mods on SO take their responsibilities very seriously. The terminology that has been used during the last few days has been "firing" rather than "removal of moderation privileges," so I stuck with that.

Monica mentioned in her post that she was the second choice candidate for a community manager position, which is an actual job at SO, but I'm not clear on whether she was actually offered a job and if she accepted. Either way, this indicates she was a fairly active mod if she was being considered for a job.

What is being fired in this context? Are these moderators employed by SE? Or do we mean she was banned as a moderator?

I've been trying to sort out all these recent posts today and I think your summary is a pretty good one.

At the risk of being downvoted, as a cisgender same-sex attracted member of the "LGBTQ+ community", I suspect only a relatively small number of outspoken transgender activists would have a problem with revisiting this policy change with the aim of restoring goodwill in the community. We are so often lumped together by broader society as LGBTQ+ (and variations) that many people outside the world of gender and sexual minorities don't realize how much conflict there is between the LGB people and the T people.

It seems ludicrous to me that anybody should care about the pronouns of anonymous question-askers on the internet. But then again I also don't see much sense in performing tons of free moderation labor for StackExchange.

It seems pretty simple to me.

If you don't know what pronoun to use then the correct one is "they", and if you do know then using the wrong one or deliberately going out of your way to avoid one is just rude.

Obviously, lots of answers will flow perfectly naturally without using pronouns and those should be fine like that.

I refuse to use pronouns for people outside the binary and I'll only use the pronouns they have claimed.

I think this is a state and corporate power issue. I have never in my life been compelled to say certain words or risk losing my professional reputation, access to SO and more, but I can't, in good conscience, participate in this Orwellian social experiment I have never been asked my opinion of and for which, even the slightest deviation from the company line earns one virtual persona non grata status.

I'll use 'they' and be done with it.

This should read 'the pronouns of the binary identity they are now claiming.'

apparently anything on the site like a code example that talks about people like Bob and Alice cant use He and She - because it might offend the 0.01% of people who think that everyone needs to state their pronouns. apparently even saying They isnt enough.

its what happens when you give in to the tiny minority that will always complain about something

i think the disagreement is the trigger.

It looks like the deeper issue is that the way how some SE people dealt with the disagreement has been causing a lot of pain and distrust.

when 99.99% people agree then we dont really need new rules

like its pretty simple, use it if someone asks but otherwise just stick with the defaults that everyone understands

When would a mod use pronouns anyway? It seems like an edge case of an edge case, in terms of gross count of incidents.

You might be underestimating how commonly Alice and Bob are used in algorithm explains.

An edge case on the programming sites certainly. But they've grown beyond that.

The site in question deals with religion.

Do you have a source for your claim that code examples with Alice and Bob with she/he pronouns are not accepted on Stack Exchange? I haven't seen any claim like that before.

see the linked article the other comment posted. its point number 1

You mean this quote:

>June 2018: There was a TL discussion about gender-neutral pronouns and then "preferred pronouns". (I know they're not "preferred", but this was the phrasing used by the people bringing it up.) Some moderators who are not native English speakers expressed confusion. I said I avoid singular they for that reason, 95% of the time you can write around the problem, and (on SE) I'm offended when someone edits my posts badly to solve a gender-neutrality problem. (Editing well is fine, which usually means pluralizing or using a name or something like that instead of either generic "he" or singular "they".) Some people said not using preferred pronouns invalidates the person; I said for me it's not about the person at all but the quality of my own writing (an important part of my identity). Tension rose, other people said some things I saw as bullying, and I stepped out. For a long time after, I didn't enter the room unless strictly necessary. Note: no employee said anything to me about my role in this conversation, and while some other mods disagreed with my position, none said anything like "this is a Code of Conduct (CoC) violation". Employees witnessed this discussion.

I don't see anything in there that would apply to fictional characters (Alice and Bob). It all seems to be only about real people. Also I don't see anything in there that indicates Stack Exchange says you can't refer to Alice as "she", unless Alice specifically wants to be called by some other pronoun.

theyre editing posts for perceived or pretend offense

if it was a specific person then theres nothing to edit because you would just use the pronouns and there wouldnt be any issue. they dont talk about anyone who specifically wanted different pronouns in that story

> theyre editing posts for perceived or pretend offense

Who are "they"? Monica in that part is upset about people coming along and adding weird grammar into her posts. Those people could be other mods, or could be even regular Stack Exchange users. At no point does she say Stack Exchange staff are editing her posts, or that the editors were following a Stack Exchange rule.

> then you would just use the pronouns and there wouldnt be any issue

Monica has said she never uses 3rd person singular pronouns. So no, she would not "just use the pronouns". And people have taken issue with the fact that she never uses 3rd person singular pronouns, that's the reason she was fired.

> they dont talk about anyone who specifically wanted different pronouns in that story

Just because Monica doesn't mention a specific person by name in the blog post doesn't mean there wasn't a specific person involved with the situation. I think it's very likely the story Monica is talking about involved a specific person.

exactly "they" are people who create problems where they dont exist.

if YOU specifically dont have a specific preferred pronoun then theres no problem to be concerned over. editing posts to be gender neutral is the most privileged form of outrage ever

This is pretty inaccurate and inflammatory.

why? its literally the points right here https://cellio.dreamwidth.org/2064709.html

"apparently anything on the site like a code example that talks about people like Bob and Alice cant use He and She" is wrong.

SE wanted people's correct pronouns explicitly used if they were given. Has nothing to do with rhetorical Alice or Bob, and SE didn't object to calling women 'she'.

Furthermore, the actual root of the controversy here is that Cellio was removed of her admin title too swiftly, and generally SE hasn't managed their admins very fairly or well.

Overall it looks like you're trying to spin whole scenario as "the LGBTQ+ snowflakes are whining again" and that's not the actual story here.

yea ok if they werent whining then there wouldnt be a problem would there? we wouldnt even be talking about pronouns if nobody cared huh? lol whatever

Stack Exchange is now a political battleground and long are gone the days when it was a tool for sharing technological knowledge. They are now competing who is more oppressed instead of who knows more.

That's what you get when you let ideology become more important than the core of the product.

This is only the beginning of the downfall.

the free & freemium web have an arbitration gap and it will get worse before it gets better

stackexchange works because questions can get answered with relatively little money changing hands (AWS & advertisers mainly), but that means employees can't offer due process on disputes without erasing the company's margins.

these companies can't offer centralized due process to everyone because it would open them to being DDOS'd by competitors / trolls. Maybe justice can be crowdsourced in the same way as javascript questions by identifying neutral people in the stackexchange network, but that would be a huge experiment and open SO/SE to community backlash when it went badly.

If only SE could somehow get a bunch of people to work as moderators without paying them. Except that is exactly what happened; but recently SE managed to piss off a large number of its volunteer moderators, who have (among other things) written the linked complaint.

I have read every hn submitted articles about this drama, but I still don't get what this is all about. Maybe because of my english not being the best.

I'll do my best to summarize the situation, at least as well as I understand it.

When speaking in English, it often sounds awkward to repeatedly use the same proper noun in a sentence or paragraph. So, instead of repeated use of the actual noun, a pronoun is used.

When referring to individual people, or to some animals, the most common pronouns to use are "he" or "she", depending on the person being talked about. When referring to a group of people, the typical pronoun is "they". It's also possible to use "they" as a non-gendered pronoun for a single person.

By itself, the mere grammatical fact of these pronouns is not particularly interesting.

However, right now the United States, and other countries, are experiencing social and political tension around a broad range of related topics - how do we treat people of different genders? How do we treat people who are transgender? Or people who don't feel like they're clearly masculine or feminine? Should gender even have a great role in society?

Usage of pronouns has become a particular sticking point during this tension. For example, let's imagine a person named "Pat". Pat was born as a male, but wishes to be identified as a woman. When talking _about_ Pat, I have a few options in how I talk about he/she/them, and which I choose to use will divide me into one of two political camps.

-----

I could refer to Pat as "she", indicating that I respect her choice and identity, which also implies that I find her framework of gender at least tolerable or imaginable.

I could refer to Pat as "they", which is typically not particularly offensive, and some people prefer it. It shows that even if I don't agree with their choice, I want to sidestep awkwardness with them. This lightly shows me as being in the gender-inclusive camp.

I could refer to Pat continuously as "Pat". This would tend to sound awkward, and Pat might wonder why I won't use pronouns to talk about Pat, and might be mildly offended, but it shows I'm at least aware enough of Pat's feelings to try and avoid serious offense.

I could refer to Pat as "he", which would indicate that I do not respect his choice. Pat would likely feel that I don't respect him at all, and that I'm being belligerent in opposing his framework of gender.

-----

It seems like the inciting incident on StackOverflow in particular unfolded as follows:

* StackExchange began to introduce a new policy, intended to promote being inclusive of people of different genders and gender expressions.

* If I understand correctly, the policy indicated that writing should strive to be gender neutral. I believe in particular that this meant that the pronoun "they" should be preferred.

* One particular Moderator (by the username Cellio) of the site attempted to clarify, about whether writing that _avoided_ pronouns rather than using pronouns, would be allowed.

* _In Particular_, Cellio was concerned that the usage of the "they" pronoun to refer to individual people could be confusing to non-native English speakers, as "they" is more commonly used to refer to groups of people.

* Drama ensued, in which the stance of Cellio was cast as ideologically equivalent to the stance of someone who would intentionally use the wrong pronouns. (i.e., because Cellio was indicating that they did not wish to refer to a hypothetical Pat as "they", the assumption was that Cellio would refer to Pat as "he", even though Pat would prefer to be referred to by either "she" or "they")

* StackExchange thus fired the Cellio.

* Other people found this firing to be unfair, with a few reasons for finding it unfair:

People who agree with the ideological framework of gender which promotes inclusivity and sensitivity felt like the fired moderator was actually being quite reasonable, and that this was an over-reaction or misunderstanding.

People who don't agree with that ideological framework of gender see this as another example of an opposing political camp colonizing more spaces.

There are a handful of people who believe the firing was reasonable, but I don't believe I can adequately express their viewpoint.

Thanks. This whole debate is more than strange for me, having a primary language (hungarian) which do not use gender pronouns at all when referring to a person/object.

I think this is the best summary I've come across; I wish this was the highest-voted comment in this thread!

It's very easy to read, and doesn't fall into the TLDR camp. Thanks!

In the early 2000s, Community Leaders (unpaid volunteers who 'worked' as moderators on AOL) sued AOL for compensation for their work under the Fair Labor Standards Act. They won $15 million.

All volunteers should do the same. StackExchange mods, Reddit moderators, etc. Stop working for free to advance the financial interests of these for-profit companies looking to exploit your labor.

I don't understand how they are not actively engaging with the community. It's going to cost them every day this is not taken care of. Key people already left, more will leave, and the damage will still be here. Even if they come back to how it was before doesn't mean everybody will come back after that like nothing happened.

I see the moderators as (major) part of the problem.

> There was a time when the most valuable asset of the Stack Exchange network was the people who freely contributed their time and energy to build communities in support of its mission.

Deleting valid or interesting questions is not something I consider to be a valuable contribution.

I'm totally out of the loop about what this drama is about, and I'll stay that way.

These are unpaid community moderators. They are essentially volunteers doing this work because they want to. So let's ponder to ourselves and relate this to our own lives, what kind of relationship do we have with the organizations and people we do volunteer work with?

If you're at a point where you're so dissatisfied that you're writing a sprawling open letter, a manifesto of your dissatisfaction, going as far as buying a domain and setting up a website to publicize how upset you are, just to complain to a place that you volunteer at, you know, maybe it's time to just let it go. Maybe don't volunteer there. StackExchange isn't even a charity, it's a private for-profit company.

At the end of the day, people visiting the site just did a quick Google search and wanted their questions answered for free. They are generally unwilling to pay for this service. If StackExchange didn't exist something very similar would take its place. None of the general public needs to hear about whatever moderator drama took place, even if something criminal happened. It's not our problem.

The users don't actually implicitly value what the moderators do. So if the moderators aren't happy, they should do something else with their valuable time.

I have to agree: Voice your concerns and then vote with your feet.

That said, I am confused as to why a letter representing a group of people adept at concise and clear communication would have no real goals or structure.

This is a shockingly unempathetic way to view the situation. These people have poured lots of their time into making SO work, and they deserve to be heard. There's no way anybody could build this service without volunteers. These things don't just spring up from the ground on their own, and as someone who uses the SE properties for personal and professional reasons, I hope these moderators can find some sort of satisfactory resolution.

I agree. Without these people the site could fall into a mess of bad answers or a self promotion answer driven platform like Quora.

Sounds like they are so important they should have been compensated. I mean, if they were so critical to the success.

They've got compensated in visibility. I don't know any moderator with less than 20k points to date.

And the more points you have, the upper you stay in the ranks and you can always embed their badge in your website.

So, yes, they don't earn money, but they receive visibility

What does this visibility mean? Can it be converted to cash somehow?

Maybe create an ICO for these points?

I suppose if your profile on StackOverflow is high enough you could put it on your cv.

SO also has a jobs site, which I suppose can be linked to your profile if you want it to.

A company I consulted at one time was trying to improve it's profile for job applicants so they wanted people to put up their github profiles and SO profiles in some advertisements or whatever they were doing - I think it was on linkedIn they were doing this. Anyway I think they stopped because nobody had a particularly high impressive number so why would you even want to do that (but they did it)

Lots of SO points means I spend a lot of time there answering questions (usually during work hours). Not sure I’d want to advertise that.

I would totally agree with that, however I have over the years developed the suspicion that people who make hiring decisions might not be operating at the same logical level that I am.

Given both that suspicion, and how they seem to behave about prominent github profiles and such, I think that being in the top 20th percentile or so on SO and a strong focus on the tags that correlate to the terms in a job announcement might be a big draw to some HR people/managers who just really don't want to mess up one more time! After the fifth complaint or so of programmers we hire don't know how to code or whatever - it might be soothing.

yes, if you do freelancing

Sounds like they gave value but got none to me..."visibility" ain't worth shit. How much SO got in the bank? What's the ratio of visibility to dollars here? I've never seen an SO badge anywhere and never mentioned in any resume.

Some of them rise up to community managers and are then compensated. The person who recently got steamrolled was getting very close to that position.

I think some sympathy is due for the working-for-free workers on stack exchange, at least from us, Hacker News' unpaid content authors.

They contribute to the community that is owned by the company that then profits from the community.

In return they get points.

Points allow for showing how important they are to the community.

Points that have zero cash value.

Disgruntled volunteers are not going to be easy to replace.

There are more forms of wealth than just cash. Some people find it rewarding to help others, and SE is set up to make it so that people could create the canonical answer to a particular question. This is a force multiplier so that helpful answers can reach a maximum audience.

This probably won't continue to feel satisfying if SE doesn't show respect for its volunteers. The force multiplier only exists because the moderators keep the site clean and well-organized. It sounds like SE both explicitly and implicitly showed gratitude for this effort, but now they are failing to do so.

what're you trying say, exactly? that people who get more satifaction from doing a job should be paid less?

if you want to start assigning a dollar value to subjective experiences like that, the argument goes both ways. you should pay more to people who experience more emotional distress from their jobs. but in that case a majority of companies would probably go bankrupt, since most people despise their jobs.

The self-promotion is the main thing that makes Quora useful though. If you want to know what are all the startups that have attempted solving problem X, it's usually impossible to get a complete answer without using Quora. Just searching Google / Crunchbase / HN / ProductHunt etc. will miss the last third of startups, that you can only find mentioned in the relevant Quora thread.

Per Monica, a senior SO employee --Sara Chipps -- is publicly lying about Monica. Monica's claim is multiple messages went unanswered, and then...

> Sara Chipps, Director of Public Q&A, left responses on various moderators' resignation posts maligning my character. You can see an example on my Mi Yodeya post. The cut-and-pasted message included, specifically referring to me: "When a moderator violates [inclusion and respect], we will always do our best to resolve it with them privately." Both halves of that statement are false. [1]

Let's call publicly talking about an observant Jewish ex-mod on Rosh Hashana a lagniappe.

This pretty strongly seems StackOverflow saying use personal pronouns and don't question our policy, or GTFO.

Which is of course fine -- their house, their rules -- and frankly something I generally support. But given both the willingness to de-mod Monica, ghost her, and then (again, per Monica) lie about it in public, and (2) be far more responsive to a random twitter message than multiple longstanding mod requests, SO's position is quite clear.

So yes, mods saving SO millions of dollars of paid employee time per year should certainly re-evaluate their relationship with their corporate beneficiary.

[1] https://cellio.dreamwidth.org/2064709.html

>There's no way anybody could build this service without volunteers.

Agree. Maybe it should cease exploiting the good will of its users and either pay them, or wither away.

I think you should invest the time to read what happened, the moderator the letter was written to support has her detailed write-up here [0].

[0] https://cellio.dreamwidth.org/2019/10/05/stack-overflow-fias...

> going as far as buying a domain and setting up a website to publicize how upset you are, just to complain to a place that you volunteer at, you know, maybe it's time to just let it go.

This is a terribly shortsighted interpretation. Stack Exchange is a community like any other. Volunteers tend to care about the communities they take part in.

It is entirely reasonable to complain if you volunteer in a community and see the organizers of the community take action that cause it to deteriorate.

Telling people that participate in a community to shut up and go elsewhere solves no problems. It doesn’t improve the community. It doesn’t even necessarily help other communities.

Honestly? Your comment is so devoid of empathy that I am not sure if you are intentionally trolling or not.

> The users don't actually implicitly value what the moderators do.

You have no proof for this statement, just like most of your other statements.

i don't think it's trolling. it's just a different opinion. may not agree but i do appreciate individual expression.

> Maybe don't volunteer there. StackExchange isn't even a charity, it's a private for-profit company.

This. Stop giving your time for the profit of people who don't care about you. You want to help the community? You want to be respected? Great! Find some like-minded people, start a new site, maybe even make it a non-profit or at least democratic. But above all, stop making rich people richer off your labor

Yeah, it kills me when they say they are "people who have invested a lot in the network". Sorry, kids, but investors get stock. Employees get paid. And only non-profits have volunteers.

Stack Exchange describes themselves as a "a hyper-growth enterprise software company" [1]. I have no idea why anybody's giving them free labor. I'll happily volunteer for Wikipedia. But until somebody sets up a non-profit Q&A site, there's no way I'm contributing content.

[1] https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/09/24/announcing-stack-overf...

They invested time and effort with the goal (presumably) of building/maintaining the community. You may think that is a poor decision on their part; but it is still an investment, and they are still volunteers.

It's not investment when other people get the returns. At best, it's a gift. At worst, it's a con. I also question that there is a "the community" in a meaningful sense of that term.

> Sorry, kids, but investors get stock.

Ironic phrasing, considering that we parents invest insane amounts of time and money into kids. And no, we don't get stock. Not even a percentage of future earnings.

Yet we keep investing more and more anyway. Not all returns are financial.

If you really can't tell the difference between the child you chose to have and a for-profit, investor-backed corporation seeking hyper-growth, I'm not sure if I can help you.

Yes, not all returns are financial. But companies exploiting others' generosity to get rich is a cuckoo's-egg strategy.

Aside from a few of the biggest Stack Exchange sites (including Stack Overflow) most of the 170 sites don't have ads and don't make profit. The only profit is very indirect, demonstrating that Stack Overflow the company can run sites like these, something which is now in doubt. (Disclosure: I'm a mod on one of the small SE sites and helped author the letter.)

Maybe they should and maybe they will move on--but that will be to the serious loss of both StackExchange and StackExchange Inc.

That's what a lot of them are doing, something else with their valuable time. They're just letting Stack Overflow know why on their way out.

The problem is perhaps the extent to which people invest time and effort into other people's private corporations. The Wikimedia Foundation, for all of its flaws, actually does try to listen to its users and build a public good. But when you play around in a corporate sandbox where you are just a commodity to be sold to advertisers, you don't have any rights.

I think it's a flaw in human nature really -- we expect to be recognized and given status for building community and providing value. But when you do that for a for-profit company like Stack Overflow or my own experience with TV Tropes wiki, you may find out one day that your value is only in your imagination, and you can be shut out of your community. This is not how it happened in tribal societies, or in small cities, but the information age has enabled even more detachment from empathy than the industrial age did. Now you can take away someone's community from them on their holy day from a chair a thousand miles away.

Just because quit is an option doesn't mean some can't or shouldn't choose to try and make a final ditch effort to save something they care about.

Sure, to somebody who doesn't care, its easy judge the fact that they care, telling them to just stop caring. Unfortunately people don't work that way and if you ask somebody who has volunteered at a food shelter or drop in center for 5 years if they would walk away the moment they stopped liking the direction it was going, its not hard to see why some would have a hard time saying yes

They aren't working at a food bank though. They are helping a company make money. If you heard your waiter complain that the for profit restaurant he volunteered for treated him badly, repeatedly, and had no signs of changing, you might ask him why he doesn't consider not working there anymore.

So basically volunteer, but if you want to change things you should just leave? SO gets the spoils of labor and you get a high quality knowledge base.

"I don't know what's going on here and I don't intend to learn, but everybody upset about it should just go do something else" is never a useful take.

> I'm totally out of the loop about what this drama is about, and I'll stay that way.

Yes, you who claims not to want to know, and then spends time and effort writing vitriol about the subject you don't want to know about.

the thing is that stack exchange has managed to disrupt the old newsgroup/forum based way of helping newbies get into new languages/handle problematic issues in languages they are used to.

In some ways they have improved this old system because of their ability to bring relevant questions together in such a way that you can build up a pretty big view of your problem space.

In many ways they have worsened the old system, for example by deleting questions that did not have example code. As I have said here before when you are really stumped you might not be able to make any example code that does what you want.

However there is a similarity between the old and new system, people working for free because they love their languages (also maybe because it improves their profile in the language and allows them better consulting jobs, positions in the future)

In the old system if there were problems with how a mail-list or whatever solution was being run you would probably get something like this so it seems reasonable to me that people would do the same thing in the new system.

Dear moderators,

Stop flagging stuff as dupes, then I will support your thing. And also why do you work for free,

Love, Kevin

I'm confused here. What's the TL;DR of what happened?

yea these pronouns affect like 0.01% of people but go ahead and worry about them instead of everyone else and youll ruin every community

when are people gonna figure out that you cant make everyone happy and the people who whine about pronouns wont ever stop

nice downvotes lol, cant handle the truth?

Pronouns affect most people. Most people use them. If you are talking about trans people, it's estimated to be about 1-3% of people. That's roughly one in thirty to one in a hundred people.

That puts it at about the roughly same numbers as the number of redheads. It's uncommon, sure, but it's not totally minuscule.

Trans folks are also one of the most likely (if not the most likely) minorities to suffer physical violence just for who they are. All they are asking for is the same basic level of respect and politeness that anyone else gets.

no its not basic respect, stop making it so dramatic

theyre not talking about any specific person are they? no, they want to change all the examples to be gender neutral. why? when people hear Bob they think He. they dont ask "well what if bob is trans?"

> All they are asking for is the same basic level of respect and politeness that anyone else gets.

Well no, that is the entire reason the situation isn't an open-and-shut-nothing-to-see-here non-controversy.

The other 97-99% of people go through life without ever particularly asserting that a specific personal pronoun needs to be used for them. They'll get antsy if someone is trying to insult them, but it looks a lot like the insult matters more than the pronoun. That 99-97% of people don't really control their public identity; have you ever seen someone trying to shake a nickname they don't particularly like? An identity is in the hands of the community. Asserting control is actually highly unusual, transexual or otherwise, and goes beyond the bounds of routine politeness.

The issue is that there is an activist minority (who may or may not be part of the trans community) who want to force people to talk in a certain way. That is not basic politeness and respect. It is complicated and context specific - especially once people start getting sacked and excluded over it.

> That 99-97% of people don't really control their public identity; have you ever seen someone trying to shake a nickname they don't particularly like?

Yes? "Hey, I don't really like being called that." "Oh shit, sorry, didn't know."

> That 99-97% of people don't really control their public identity

What? Sure they do. They were clothing that puts them in a particular group. (Or do you feel you'd have a hard time identifying punks or businessmen?) Or they'll wear religious symbols. Or speak with an accent. Or carry a firearm. Or any number of other external identity markers beyond gender.

> It is complicated and context specific

It really, really isn't. If you are unsure, ask someone their pronouns. If you make a mistake, quickly apologize and move on. Literally end of story.

ah no, when you get fired for these social justice rules then its a problem. sorry you think its so simple because if it was then there would never be any issues would there?

you cant force people to say things even though they'll probably use what you tell them because most people are nice. but were not going to change the rules for 99.9% of people and worry about preferred pronouns all the time in every little occasion just because someone exists who doesnt follow the normal pronouns

> What? Sure they do. They were clothing that puts them in a particular group. (Or do you feel you'd have a hard time identifying punks or businessmen?) Or they'll wear religious symbols. Or speak with an accent. Or carry a firearm. Or any number of other external identity markers beyond gender.

None of that is control, and it would be equivalent of a transsexual choosing their dress and appearance - which they already do.

It isn't that these requests are unreasonable, it is simply that this is a situation that goes well beyond basic politeness. This is asking society to change how it uses language.

And this change being achieved by bureaucratic fiat rather than because everyone thinks it is a good idea. It may or may not work out, but it just isn't basic politeness - there is real change being pushed here.

1-3% does not pass the sniff test. Way too high.

A quick search gives the number 0.6% according to a 2016 study.

That number is likely under-reported, and there has been a significant rise in the number of people who feel comfortable identifying in the past few years. A study performed in 2017 found that 2.7% (of roughly 80,000 surveyed) identified as trans or gender non-conforming: https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/pediatrics/14...

I've seen the numbers that range from ~1% (or a little under) to as much as 3%, like the study above.

its not, its overreported. its trendy to change gender so people do it until theyre done with the phase. why do you think theres so many reports about people switching back and regretting their decision or going against their parents who forced them when they were younger?

Gender non-conforming is a much wider net. This study you link of 9th and 11th graders, it is not surprising that a large percent (2.7% as you said) reported as trans or GNC.

The original comment above stated "trans", though, not T+GNC.

2.7% identified as transgender, genderqueer, genderfluid, or unsure. The study just used narrow definitions of trans and GNC.

> If you are talking about trans people, it's estimated to be about 1-3% of people.

Transgender Demographics: A Household Probability Sample of US Adults, 2014

American Journal of Public Health

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5227939/

Transgender individuals made up 0.53% (95% confidence interval = 0.46, 0.61) of the population

Health and Care Utilization of Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Youth: A Population-Based Study

Pediatrics Journal

https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/pediatrics/14...

Participants included 2168 (2.7%) students who identified as TGNC and 78 761 (97.3%) students who identified as cisgender.

There's a reason I give such a wide range. Maybe I should widen it to 0.5-3%, but I believe that in the past 5 years we've seen an increase in the number of people who feel comfortable with a trans or gender nonconforming identity.

youth? yea you dont get to decide until youre an adult. this is just kids being forced into it by parents who want to follow some social justice trend

and guess what there are 100s of these kids being treated for abuse and psychological damage now https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7541679/Hundreds-yo...

Trans and Gender Non-Confirming != Trans

Using that article as a source for trans population is like saying 40% of the US population are people of colour, therefore 40% of the US population is black.

The TGNC group identified as transgender, genderqueer, genderfluid, or unsure. Cis people with unusual gender expression didn't count.

Plus how many of them care about pronouns other than he/she?

yea exactly people use he or she because of your name and looks

if trans people change their name then people will just use the pronoun that goes with the name automatically so its specifically people who have a name that is not normal for that pronoun or visually look different that even have a problem

so its super rare for this to be a major issue to spend all this time even discussing it

A persons that have trouble distinguishing colors are ~10%, but I don't see websites having option to turn colors off and use black and white (it would be nice, but I won't make it a end of the world event). Or I don't see moderator discussions that referring to something as "red" or "green" is bad for color blind people.

If one already uses gender neutral pronoun, it should be enough, if it is not, then that person is a jerk similar to e.g. someone that whats to be called a "sir" (as in "yes, sir").

If a community destroys itself over showing basic respect to a marginalized group, it probably shouldn't have existed at all.

basic respect? you realize these are code examples that sometimes talk about people and use normal pronouns that everyone understands just fine?

if theres a example with bob and alice and we say he and she, whats the problem? do we really need to be extra careful in case Bob in the example is trans?

Like thats really a problem? this doesnt have anything to do with basic respect. its just people who want to control everyone else

Yes, if Bob asks you to use they/them pronouns then you should use they/them pronouns for Bob, just like if they ask you to use the name Robert.

Intentionally using the wrong name or pronouns for someone is disrespectful, and would be considered an HR violation in a California workplace.

its just posts on the site not real people. chill. you need to realize context and not get all offended

and when you let someone control what you can and cant say because of their feelings its gonna be a bad time. california is already eating itself. is that really what you want?

None of this is about posts involving hypothetical people (like Alice&Bob in cryptography examples). You're the only one who thinks that.

The topic is about when a real user asks that they be referred to with specific pronouns, and other people instead refer to them with different pronouns or avoid using gendered pronouns. This whole conversation is about real people.

whos that person then? you wont find a name because its not about specific people. if it was then it would be pretty simple to just use the pronouns when talking to them and there wouldnt be any issue

but this is about editing posts to be gender neutral. why do we need to do that? if YOU dont have a specific pronoun then whats the problem?

There are already all sorts of controls over what people can and can't say in professional settings. You can't use the N-word or keep asking someone out after they've said no in a workplace environment. These controls exist for reasons that should be obvious with a moment of thought.

This is different from a public space where the rules are more relaxed (but there are still some controls). And you're welcome to be as shitty as you want in your own home.

yea theres a difference between what you CANT say and what you MUST say

guess what, rules against what you cant say are fine but you cant make me have say something. thats tyranny. youre welcome to be as outraged as you want in your own home but you dont get to control my life because of it. its called freedom.

No, there are things you are forced to say in workplaces. For example, you can't act nice towards almost everyone on a team but ignore the only Black person.

That's exactly what trans people want, to be given the same respect as everyone else. If you use pronouns for everyone other than the only trans person on the team, they're quite rightly going to be upset.

no youre looking at it backwards. if the only black person on the team kept saying I want you to call me "your majesty" and i ignored them then its not cause theyre black but because theyre unreasonable and demanding from everyone else

guess what, easier to dump the unreasonable person. but of course if you cant see people for more than their skin color then youll think its discrimination. i cant help you with that.

and heres a bonus story for the day about how this gender neutral stuff is hurting people and kids: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7542005/Girls-skipp...

Just standard anti-trans fear mongering then. If you cannot tell the difference between they/them and your majesty then it's hard to take you seriously. I hope I never have to work in the same team as someone with such poor judgement.

Who else remembers the world before SE, when people just did exactly the same thing as SE, but on mailing lists, and we found answers via web search, and we didn't need all this moderation, categorization, voting, etc?

Stack exchange works a lot better for me than mailing lists did. Its greatest contribution is the near elimination of duplicate questions.

FAQ lists served the role of duplicate-consolidation in the pre-stack-exchange era. They seemed adequate for this task.

Except that every new question gets shut down as a duplicate and the older question being "duplicated" is 5 years old, full of obsolete answers, doesn't address the subtle differences in what people are asking, etc.

They want to use the Q&A format to build something Wikipedia-like for each site's subject areas but the incentive structure hasn't lead to Wikipedia-level content curation.

Mailing lists, sub-Reddits, forums... they all end up high duplicative. But people are also paying attention to all those duplicated answers, and the next go 'round they contribute an even better answer, and maybe that ends up in a FAQ or wiki and someone actually puts in the effort to keep it up-to-date.

Or Google figures out the best answer based on being newest, click rates, whatever other voodoo that they do. Which, in my experience, is almost never a Stack Exchange.

Stack exchange has had issues from the beginning with absolutely horrible people being mean aggressive and deflective, telling people they are idiots for not providing 110% of available information in their first answer. Moving to close questions as duplicates or irrelevant while the answer still hasn’t resolved anything. The site supported this because it helped promote their “one true answer high on google ranking”-value drive

It’s been an extremely toxic environment, which however was very useful for searching out answers to common questions after the fact.

Now not too long ago I thought from their public communication that they wanted to fix this, or at least make some serious headway towards reducing the toxicity and vile. But no. Instead they decided to hire the assholes and have them be assholes to the community moderators. This time over something as silly as the right to not always actively referring to people in gendered terms.

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