I'm Resigning as a Stack Overflow Community Elected Moderator | Hacker News Reader

I'm Resigning as a Stack Overflow Community Elected Moderator

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68 pointsbtilly12 comments

Can someone give me the ELI5 or subreddit drama of what is going on over at SO? This is the second post on the subject I've seen.

Here's a link to a HN thread with links to summary resources[0].

The TL;DR is an internal conflict between moderators and SO's policy on the use of preferred gender pronouns versus gender-neutral pronouns like "they" leading to the dismissal of a moderator for querying into the use of the latter.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21153224

> preferred gender pronouns versus gender-neutral pronouns like "they"

Not even. The issue is with the need to care about one's gender whatsoever on a tech q&a site. Your compiler surely doesn't care. What place does a pronoun have on SO at all?

And really it’s even more meta than that - as far as I can tell. It’s the treatment from SO management of moderators who had honest questions and feedback around authoring answers without pronouns being called bigots for the position that it just makes for a better answer overall without pronouns.

Stack Overflow has expanded to have multiple communities some of which are outside tech. I think the moderator at the center of this moderated questions about a religious topic.

So your compiler might not care about pronouns, but apparently gods are very interested in such things. Unfortunately this seems to be the religious equivalent of "undefined behaviour" so you get people believing that their god is on both/all sides of the issue, similar to how the bible was used to both oppose and support slavery in the American south.

The argument (as far as I can tell) is fairly subtle and revolves around whether it's okay to carefully avoid using pronouns for someone if they have a preference that differs from what you believe your god approves of.

Stack Overflow policy wants you to use whatever the person you're addressing prefers, but some people think their god would prefer them to reword a sentence to avoid using the "wrong" pronoun and that this isn't against the letter of the policy, even if it's clearly against the spirit.

I am trying to follow up what is going on, but it is funny how as a non native speaker all these pronouns and gender discussions are alienating. I heard people saying to use neutral pronoun - but the one I learned was It, which sounds very strange. This seems so incendiary that I would never post in a public forum in English with my real name anymore, god knows who will dig my comments in the future. I don’t share the same culture and I don’t understand this nuances and how is appropriate to approach native English speakers (especially if they need special care with words). I work in one of the fortune 100 companies out of US - and we are getting trainings about this stuff but nobody understands much - people just look at each other puzzled and lost. This is really unfair to non native speakers, to add all these new rules and cultural assumptions - in my case is my working language.

Many languages don't have different language for sex and gender either, but American puritans are forcing the whole world upon their own weird ideas. There's no need for sex or gender on stackoverflow anyway, it's so bizarre to read all these dramas happening in programming circles.

It's a little more than that, I think.

It started with a gendered pronouns disagreement, but it lead to Stack Overflow firing a well-liked moderator while lying about her in public.

Apparently mod Monica questioned a new code of conduct in a forum for mods to question such things. Employee Sara Chipps, with the approval of the CTO, fired her and then lied to the press about an observant jew right before Shabbat.

This pissed off a bunch of moderators -- including more than a few who supported the CoC change. The CTO stepped in and made some noises about discussing with Monica, but didn't have the balls to say the truth: Our decision is final, piss off.

Some nontrivial subgroup of mods feel disrespected by the way the company has treated them and the community. They felt, like, for example that they should have the opportunity to comment on a new CoC and to have their opinion seriously considered by Stack Overflow.

In the middle of this is the millions of dollars of free labor donated by mods to run the communities. Approximately 10% of mods have bailed so far. (10 hours per week times 50 weeks per year at a paid rate of $25 or $33-ish to the employer times 70 mods is $1.15m).

> Employee Sara Chipps, with the approval of the CTO, fired her and then lied to the press about an observant jew right before Shabbat.

Then wrote a lengthly sob story blog post about what a bad day it was for Sara, with the word "I" appearing 38 times and really nothing at all about how bad of a day it was for everyone else.

Whatever Sara may or may not have done (I'm mildly curious what post you're referring to?), this seems to have either ex ante or ex post approval from the CTO. I think it's a mistake to not view this as a clear assessment of how stack overflow views the mods. my .02.

Would you mind linking to the blog post?

More context:

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

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