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Comment by dancek | Hacker News Reader

For those unaware of the context, StackExchange fired a (volunteer) moderator in September causing a wave of moderator resignations. Now in January they fired two Community Managers (ie. employees) and a third CM resigned.

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/342039/firing-commu...

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I’m not sure how I feel about the ethics of volunteers massively contributing to the growth of a for-profit company.

StackExchange wouldn’t be anywhere near as big as they are without its volunteers and yet they only care about their bottom line.

Are there any non-profit alternatives?

Tesla owners once famously banded together to help Tesla through 'delivery hell' [0]. They did this for the love of the company and the company mission, despite not being paid and their actions only benefiting Tesla's bottom line.

Is it not fair to say that volunteers have autonomy, and that we should respect that autonomy? In other words, if they don't feel they are being exploited, then why should it bother us? Why should we create an issue out of X when those who are actually involved don't see X as an issue?

[0]: https://www.autonews.com/article/20181008/RETAIL01/181009775...

In some cases (helping a favoured enterprise grow) the inevitable outcome of the effort is the desired result (Tesla increases revenue, remains solvent).

In other cases the inevitable outcome is not desired (cddb sold to private interest, required subscription for continued use, no recognition of contributions by volunteers).

I am not bothered when someone promotes their favorite brands or products. I am however bothered when companies encourages and promotes such a mindset.

Thank the volunteers, that's fine. Incite regular consumers to become proselyting agents for free? A bit too close to manipulation, exploitation and cultish behaviors for me.

Do you have any examples where that’s been the case? I’m stretching my mind to think of any and have come up empty.

Almost every company-sponsored hackathon is like that. And every Google prompt to help them feed their recommendation database "to help improve their products" is the same.

I don't really get objections like that. The entire business model of Stack Overflow is, and always has been, the provision of a platform for people to help each other. They provide all of the infrastructure that allows this all to happen. Everyone who participates knows that they are a for profit company. Nobody is being forced to participate against their will. I don't see how retaining the ability to sell their product to corporations and to sell advertising space on the site in exchange for providing a completely free platform for people to help each other on a voluntary basis can be called evil or wrong in any way.

Just my personal opinion.

A lot of times the trade-off for volunteers is having power and influence in important communities (see Reddit, Wikipedia and StackOverflow itself), which they can (and often have) leveraged for money, propagating their own views and suppressing others, or just to get themselves off. So you can't always paint them as exploited.

Stack Overflow is a bait-and-switch. They tricked volunteers into writing all their valuable content but now those contributors are finding that the bait of community participation and prestige was just a sham. SO will extract as much value as they can from having the critical mass but without volunteers creating new content (answers) they will soon become a tumbleweed site of people “facing an issue” asking plaintively how to “do the needful” into the vacuum.

I used to contribute to Stack Overflow (from around 2014-2017). I did it because it was fun — answering questions was like solving programming puzzles, and moderation tasks were rewarding as well. Eventually, I joined a couple teams of users (called SOBotics and Charcoal [1]) where we wrote bots that used the Stack Exchange API to automate moderation tasks. This was an awesome hobby, and my teammates were a group of really awesome people I considered friends.

At that time, even though I knew SO was a for-profit corporation, it really didn’t feel like one. Nearly all of the staff (including the CEO) were regular users (often since long before they were hired) who were well-respected and made great decisions, and a lot of them hung out on Meta and in chat and were a lot of fun to interact with. (That’s why Shog9 and Robert Catarino’s firing is such a big deal: they were among the few remaining staff members who were from this era and still had this level of trust, respect, and friendship with the community).

My participation tapered off in 2018 because I became busy with school, but I still dropped by every now and then, and I kept up with Meta. Around this time was when the company started deteriorating — at first, we started to notice that they had pretty much stalled on improving moderator tooling (leading to serious growing pains and a lot of the “unfriendliness”). Then, they started making a series of bad decisions [2] which hinted that the company no longer understood or cared about their community. For the most part, everyone wrote these off as just mistakes or unfortunate business decisions, but our patience wore thin after repeated violations. The firing of Monica Cellio was the straw that broke the camel’s back — we realized SO was no longer the lightweight, friendly company it used to be, and a lot of high-profile users left as a result [3].

I haven’t looked much into non-profit alternatives, but a bunch of high-profile users have launched a project called Codidact [4]. We’ll see if it takes off — that’s a pretty lofty goal, but they are some pretty impressive people. I don’t plan to go back to SO, but I might join the Codidact project — after all, I was ok SO because of the community, not the corporation.

[0]: https://sobotics.org/

[1]: https://charcoal-se.org

[2]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/331513/258777

[3]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/333965/258777

[4]: https://codidact.org/

There is a non-profit, open source alternative being built now: Codidact [0]. Many of the people building it are former members of SO, including Monica Cellio.

[0] https://codidact.org/

StackExchange content is published under a liberal language. There's nothing wrong with making money by orchestrator value creation for the general public, at no charge to consumers. Benjamin Franklin called this "doing well by doing good".

> 2020-01-16: Official policy on limiting "featured"ing the moderator resignation notice to only 24 hours

Wow. SO's response to the (IMO very justified) revolt of its volunteers is to simply suppress news of the disappearances.

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