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Comment by fennecfoxen | Hacker News Reader

Stack Overflow destroyed a lot of its social capital and pissed off its own community in the wake of the Monica Cellio affair a little under 2 years ago. (This one was touched off by the Judaism Stack Exchange moderators asking questions about pronoun policy, but ended up with basically every community involved up in arms, including many in their LGBTQ+ community.)

One hopes the new owners will do a better job of managing community relations. It will be difficult for them to do worse.

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This is very true. It sidetracked nearly all the communities for a full year, triggered resignations, and caused lawyers to get involved.

They've done other things to cause various 'controversies' with their base... changing the license answers are under, hiding controversial questions, etc... but their amazingly unprofessional treatement of Cellio caused more lasting damage than any of that.

It's interesting, I'm on Hacker News almost every day and have benefited enormously from Stack Overflow yet I have no idea what you're talking about or who Monica Cellio is. My guess is that the vast majority of their users haven't either.

I only mention this because seemingly major events in online communities don't always have the impact that people involved or following closely think they do.

As with Wikipedia, there's a community of volunteers curating and moderating SO. Drama in that community doesn't necessarily bubble up in obvious ways like the site going down, but I'm sure it has an overall effect on content moderation and quality over time.

The only way I'm aware of it is prominent users/moderators having changed their display name to things like '<original name> - Reinstate Monica'.

Or maybe I also saw an HN thread about it, but mainly that. (I still see them.)

Yep. Same. Read HN at least 2-3x/wk and use Stack Overflow and a bunch of their related sub-sites about the same frequency. No clue who this is or what the event is referring to.

(Nor do I want to gain any clue)

> (Nor do I want to gain any clue)

OK! Duly noted.

I wouldn't expect you to. HN doesn't report on everything happening in every online community.

It was a thing Stack Exchange did to a Stack Exchange community moderator, that had a big impact on those involved with the Stack Exchange community. I didn't mean to imply that the repercussions were felt around the world; just that it was a big deal in the group that was intimately involved.

There were newspaper articles and half a dozen HN threads about it, though. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21149770

Same.

Monica was just the spark that lit the fire of the community-management disaster, but they'd been stockpiling fuel. Even the pronoun question itself was only raised as part of a somewhat clumsy top-down directive to move away from the "ideal questions and answers are universal and impersonal" approach that had previously served to render the matter of pronouns a non-issue. As things progressed, it soon became clear that Stack Overflow's corporate strategy was to try its hardest to stick their collective fingers in their ears and throw volunteers under the bus.

A thoughtful reader can imagine how pseudonymous moderators of the LGBT stack exchanges might be shocked by the company itself breaching an expectation of privacy, talking to the press using the volunteer's real name, and radically misrepresenting her position. What might be next? Might some of them be outed? Would a Google search for their name, too, reveal only the Stack Overflow controversy?

One open letter reads: "Stack Exchange has rewarded years of service by putting one of its volunteers in danger – and there’s now a very real feeling that we may no longer be safe on this platform." https://dearstack.artofcode.co.uk/

A resigning LGBTQ moderator wrote of the broader situation, "[Stack Exchange draws] vocal bigots from the woodwork with prompts to discussion, and then [vanishes], forcing us to decide between tacit approval through silence or defense of our own against an unchanging torrent of bigotry." https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/334575/dear-stack-e...

A lot of volunteers just went straight out the door.

Honestly I've used stack overflow since it started and read tech news daily. I do not know or care about Monica Cellio or internet/twitter drama.

I would bet money that if I asked any of my friends or colleagues they wouldn't know either.

Sure. That's a little like saying you use Wikipedia regularly. I have ~10k rep on Stack Overflow from >200 answers, but I'm still a small fry compared to the volunteer moderators and the true power users.

There are people who spend an insane number of hours closing or editing basic "How do I do this" questions that would otherwise overwhelm the site (whether or not you agree with the standard these users set for the site is a separate discussion). When Monica got removed, the people who had made SO a significant part of their identity were understandably upset (the fact that she managed to raise >$25k to sue SO for defamation[0] should show just how upset). Why should anyone try to make the site better when SO was insulting its most helpful users and self-sabotaging?

I dramatically cut down on my time spent learning by answering questions. It's certainly a minority that did so, but I think it's a formerly-prolific minority.

[0]: https://www.theregister.com/2020/01/02/stack_overflow_settle...

Stack Overflow doesn't run on social capital, it runs on providing ads to people who need to find answers to their incredibly specific problem.

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