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Comment by blub | Hacker News Reader

I think you might have a point :)

Many (most?) of us were too surprised by the stupidity of the pronoun wars to notice the deeper lesson - building a "community" of non-paid volunteers on the online property of a for-profit company is asking to be stabbed in the back whenever that volunteering effort is no longer deemed necessary.

And I have to agree with you, I don't think Stack overflow will lose anything of value if all those moderator volunteers resign or are removed. Maybe it's different for other stack exchange subomains, but SO moderation can be easily codified as a set of rules and outsourced.

The saddest part is the whining from the moderators. These people actually thought they had a real relationship with the company and that they had rights... that's mindbogglingly naive. :-(

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> I don't think Stack overflow will lose anything of value if all those moderator volunteers resign or are removed. [...] SO moderation can be easily codified as a set of rules and outsourced.

...outsourced to whom? I don't understand how you imagine the site to work without the moderators.

> The saddest part is the whining from the moderators. These people actually thought they had a real relationship with the company and that they had rights... that's mindbogglingly naive. :-(

What about being treated with basic respect and courtesy, or not having vague public allegations (to the press!) made against you over good-faith policy discussions?

And of course the company is not obligated to be communicative and helpful to the community their livelihood depends on. But it's positively stupid not to do it.

Outsourced to anyone who understands English and can follow a checklist.

This is why there's laws by the way - they regulate what a company can do in relation to its employees and customers. Mores and social expectations don't work on companies.

SO's reputation has taken a hit on the internet, but OTOH they were already always criticized, ironically for the aggressive moderation. It's not clear they're stupid, because it's not clear that they've actually lost something yet. It is clear they're assholes.

To be clear: Are you suggesting SE pays money for the services that the community moderators are doing for free right now? Because in that case this move would definitely be monumentally stupid. There's ~600 mods on the network right now, even at 1$ per day that's 200k a year (not to mention the impact of outsourcing this to people who don't give a damn).

They have a fleet of voluntary moderators with best interests right now. They work for free. This is a shareholder's wet dream, and it's real. All it would take to keep this going is them not being so incredibly tone deaf and uncaring.

The "aggressive moderation" that SO is criticized for is not even performed by the moderators that are resigning right now. It's performed by the community itself - moderators deal with the exceptional human behavior like spam, harassment, vote fraud etc.

> mindbogglingly naive.

Absolutely. What drives the attention of the execs at Stack Exchange is first and foremost Stack Overflow. Everything else seems like a liability to me, specially sites like Mi Yodeya and Christianity, where sensibilities are much shallower.

Just think how unwelcoming the community of SO is sometimes... and their just talking about code! Religion SE sites must be hell IMO.

So what's the demand, really? A better community? Creating a new site? SE derives its absolute value from the questions already answered. Community could have mattered in the beginning (you're trying to scale) but now? who cares? "I already have what I needed from you guys" is what execs are thinking.

If I remember correctly, stack overflow is CC BY-SA, so were we to make a new site we could just migrate large portions of the existing content.

Which, interestingly enough, was another issue before the Code of Conduct changes. In particular, community members were asking about SE changing from CC BY-SA 3.0 to 4.0, and what legal implications that had. I rarely check meta, but it appears to have warmed up the distrust. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333089/stack-exchan...

> who cares? "I already have what I needed from you guys" is what execs are thinking.

To be clear, this (perceived) exec sentiment you describe is why moderators are resigning/suspending activities. And given that, this sentiment seems incredibly short-sighted.

my understanding is that they're resigning because of how unbearable the experience as a moderator is, aka not being taken into account when taking strategy decisions. They are nonetheless not part of the SO ecosystem, and thus they are not accountable for their advice, which is a perfect reason for SO execs to not pay attention to them.

This is I believe a call for self-importance. "Look at us, we matter". And execs have long being saying "no, not really". Who is right in the end, that escapes me. I lean towards those who are getting a paycheck out of it, but that's just my point of view.

What was it about pronoun wars? I'm not in the loop. If you don't mind sharing.

Too short to draw reasonable conclusions from, but a primer:

1. Code of Conduct change was announced to moderators, mandating the use of preferred pronouns where known.

2. The extent of "mandating" was (and frankly remains) unclear. One point of contention being "is avoiding pronouns altogether allowed"?

3. A moderator was removed for allegedly repeatedly violating the existing code of conduct in the discussions surrounding this. There is disagreement over the justification, but it is unquestioned that the process (there was none), the lack of warnings or mediation attempts, the timing, and the subsequent communication by StackExchange were all ATROCIOUS.

4. This being yet another grave misstep of several over the past years led to about 10% of the moderators across all sites resigning over the past weeks.

More context: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333965/firing-mods-...

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