Stack Overflow has really forgotten how to engage with the community and especially so with the community of moderators. These moderators are not getting paid. It is a huge amount of volunteer effort they put as hobby. SO should express a lot of gratitude for these moderators who keep SO in sane condition. But SO has been bringing one policy change after another without getting the full support of this community. I think it started with CoC changes that required everyone to become overly polite which many users and moderators did not really agree with. The recent debate on gendered pronouns has frankly been a real mess done in haste and without transparency. If SO does not fix their ways of engaging with the community, I am afraid more and more moderators are going to leave this place.
Why can't the CEO of Stack Overflow comment, engage, apologize and bring everyone together? Isn't that what a leader of a company supposed to do? Instead of sending out your PR minions with callous demeanor, no empathy and staying meek while your company goes into the toilet?
If I were running a company of this size, put everything aside and build trust from the users. They built the community in the first place.
I vouched. please voice your issues if there is something wrong with this, as it seems correct and likely plays a role here as well (new CEO might still not be onboarded yet etc)
It's a new account posting a comment that's mostly just a link. It probably tripped the spam detector and got killed automatically, without anyone flagging it.
There are things you cannot say on HN and they are not even subtle about it. It seems that any hiccup in the glorious people's take over of yet another thing we built is one of the forbidden subjects.
yorwba is right. andrewxdiamond's comment was autokilled by a software filter that applies to new accounts and is based on past activity by trolls. We review the comments that are killed that way and eventually restore the good ones that haven't been vouched for yet. We also mark the account legit so that its posts will be exempt from the filter in the future.
y4mi's comment was probably flagged because "Why are people flagging this" is off topic and is covered, in spirit if not in letter, by the site guideline that asks people not to go on about downvotes on comments. Once the comment was vouched for and unkilled, there was no need to take the thread in that direction.
If you see a comment that's killed or flagged and shouldn't be, and vouching doesn't work, you can always email us at hn@ycombinator.com.
I suspect this was all already in motion, as it's been going on for some time. My understanding is it's CMs... Unlikely from new CEO though but he could've course corrected.
Let's assume for a moment that SO has failed and slowly fades into obscurity. How do we stop this same problem from happening again?
Individual Linux distros fail, as do some websites or email servers - but the fundamental underlying protocols make sure no one entity exists that ruins everything.
Does anyone know of a good way to do something like that here?
The SO content is licensed under cc by-sa 4.0, so theoretically someone could take it all and start again. Might work with enough of the resigning moderators behind it. But I don't think anyone could get enough of them behind it.
What I wonder is if the recent LinkedIn ruling implies that SO can’t prevent others from scraping the site. And given that the content is already liberally licenses maybe scrape plus rehost is all that’s needed. Of course there are a lot of technical details that could sink this but I can’t see legal issues hindering it.
Oh I had no idea. Definitely gained some respect for SO. I guess in this case, the information is at least available in case SO really jumps the shark.
Eh, I don't know. Posting content under the terms that it will be licensed under cc-whatever seems pretty different from trying to relicense software you have paid a company to use.
The money isn't the important part. I should have just left that part out. The important part is where SO says "by posting content you agree to license it to us, and we agree to relicense it as cc-by-sa."
I didn't understand what you were getting at with the comparison, they seemed totally unrelated to me. I think I see now though. If I look at it a certain way I see "receiving content and then relicensing it" in both circumstances.
I think that the context which needs to be ignored to make them the same in that way is very relevant though - the devil's in the details. In one circumstance you are posting content under the agreement mentioned above, in the other you are receiving content from someone who has agreed to no such conditions.
Seems like the disconnect here is whether SO should be able to put the relicensing terms in their terms of use and have that be enough. Personally I lean toward yes, but could probably be persuaded in the other direction. Would a check box next to the answer box be enough consent do you think? Or do you feel no one has a right to relicense any content they haven't produced themselves?
>Seems like the disconnect here is whether SO should be able to put the relicensing terms in their terms of use and have that be enough.
That may be, but they didn't put such terms in their terms of use. They just retroactively changed the license. Or rather, they fraudulently misrepresent the license of the content. It would be like Github relicensing all content they serve under cc-by-sa. It's absurd.
>Or do you feel no one has a right to relicense any content they haven't produced themselves?
You can agree to all sorts of terms. I didn't. A huge number of contributors didn't. SO would have to go back to all contributors and renegotiate terms with them individually. Of course, no such attempt has been made.
I assumed we were talking about them "relicensing" the content from the all-rights-reserved-whatever to cc-by-sa. In hindsight that was poor wording on my part because it wouldn't actually be "relicensing" since the contributor is contributing it under cc-by-sa to begin with. So no relicensing is necessary.
In my first comment I said cc-by-sa 4.0 because I had just gone to the site footer to see what license they were using. I knew it was some form of creative commons, but I didn't know which one.
I didn't know until just now that they are changing (or trying to change) the license on all existing content from cc-by-sa 3.0 to cc-by-sa 4.0. That I doubt they can do and I very much disagree with the move even if they can.
Interestingly, they also appear to have unilaterally changed the license on all content from cc-by-sa 2.5 to cc-by-sa 3.0 in 2011. The comment on Jeff Atwood's answer at https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/95033 is fun.
I've been bouncing this idea around in my head... my notion is you need to design social media* to be heavily distributed over many small sites, with a common fabric, a meta-media, connecting them.
So small sites will still fail, in fact they'll fail often, but the meta-media as a whole can continue. If anything, it forces them to be responsive because unhappy members will vote with their feet.
It also gets around many of the censorship problems that large sites have. Large sites don't want to make their algorithms or policies clear because there's a massive gain in gaming their system. A diverse collection of small sites is effectively immune to this: it's easy to game one site, but it doesn't get you much of anything.
There's still the expense of moderation, and I think it's where a meta-system shines. If you can draw moderators from anywhere, they're naturally disinterested. You can set up a standard set of procedures for how moderation is done without actually specifying what the rules are. The site owner has sole discretion as to what the rules are, and can override moderator decisions, limited by their willingness to micromanage and upset membership.
The incentive to moderate is that if you want to appeal a decision or otherwise request moderator attention, you must yourself do moderator duty to earn enough "civic duty" points. It's like jury duty, only more directly tit for tat. And I think a well designed system would help educate people as to why certain decisions are made, leading to greater investment.
I think there are huge technical barriers to such a scheme, especially building a UX that works across systems and dealing with not terribly technical site admins. Hell, I'm not even sure what the "meta-media" part of it is, whether it's discussions or interest groups or are there meta-sites that somehow overlay multiple real sites on common topics.
But it would be a fun project...
* Is there a more generic term than "social media" that would better include SO?
In my experience SO has canonical answers for ~95% of all issues already. Sure, it will tick on as new things happen but that will be almost noise with whats already there.
I think this reality is not lost on the owners. Mods have volunteered millions of hours of free labor to get SO to where it is today. And now that the corpus is in place their usefulness has come to an end. They are now less of an asset and more a liability to SO corporation.
One of the challenges SO - at least the ones related to code and Linux - have clearly been dealing with over the past few years is that as time passes, the answers to a question change, e g. today it is vastly more common to use systemd for things, and the commands to run (systemctl, journalctl) reflect that.
The role of the mods vs. the role of the user is a big question mark to me. In which question has a moderator helped in a relevant sense? For me they always have just been gatekeeping (tags, close votes) which never made sense to me.
Tags and close votes are handled by normal users (well, those with a bit of rep). Moderators are for the "people stuff" like spam, vandalism, vote fraud, rudeness/harassment and so on. They do not significantly contribute to question closure or tagging.
I've seen a few posts come through about the issues the Stack Overflow Community are facing, but it occurs to me that I've never actually come across this Community in all my years using the site.
My best guess is that deep down in the meta corners among moderator types, there is some form of interpersonal communication going on, and sometimes there must be difficulties there. But for me, and I assume most of the people who will ever use the site to ask and answer silly JavaScript questions, that's something we're never going to see.
I used to answer a lot of questions on Stack Overflow, until eventually it became big enough that the Internet Point Chaser personalities were just too quick on the draw to answer anything and everything. Cool. That was the plan all along I guess. So now I just use it to google the order of arguments in date conversion functions for languages with poor documentation, which I assume is what roughly 100% of the people using the site do.
I don't think that aspect of the site will suffer from controversy like this in the long run.
> I don't think that aspect of the site will suffer from controversy like this in the long run.
I think the unstated assumption that needs to be made is that the moderators that remain still do a good enough job of moderating the question so that the user contributions can be valuable.
I don't know if the point-chasing ruins the questions I see; but I still see StackOverflow in the search results whenever I'm searching for error messages. Though, I've increasingly found GitHub Issues show up in the results too.
The big question is if moderation on stackoverflow contributes anything really. Closing questions always seemed such a useless thing to me when there already is a good mechanism (downvotes) to signal that a question is 'bad'. Why add a process on top that just prevents people to interact with a question if they want to?
I guess that Stackoverflow Inc. realized that the mods don't really contribute something of value.
I find that weird, the mods also keep flamewars at bay and just in general keeps things civil. If SO manages to drive the unpaid mods away, eventually they will have to start employing scores of mods themselves.
Someone being eager to be a mod does not mean they'd make for a good mod. Imagine if HN was modded by a new guy every two weeks (eagerness doesn't tend to last and is not a precursor to perseverance in my opinion at least).
Most jobs need less prior training than you might expect. A lot can be learned in a short period of time when you are on the job.
I haven't seen any statistics, but it looks like only a few well known mods are leaving. So, almost all mods are remaining.
There are a little over 600 total moods on StackExchange. Over 20 mods on the StackOverflow part of StackExchange. The announced departures from StackExchange are in the tens.
For better or for worse, SO will be able to scrape by with the remaining mods.
The only real problem for SO is the lack of trust. I've lost trust in the employees of SO. With every post from a SO employee, it gets worse and worse.
Who are the direct competitors of SO, if any? I would like to use a different site, if possible.
Here is a company that wants to get some work done by the masses. The points system is to incentivize users, however there are administrative tasks that need to be done and mediation on conflict prone topics which can’t attract points for obvious reasons and they choose a vetted moderator model. so they anoint some trusted people as moderators
Over time the moderators forget that are spending their free time working for a company in exchange for some virtual badge or title and start thinking they are responsible for a community and feel ownership
Then they take a strong stance with company and are shocked to loose the virtual badges and titles
Here is the thing when you are a part of a community and take a strong stance they may disagree sideline you or kick you out no surprise here and that goes 100x when it’s a company
If you are working for a company in exchange for virtual badges, you are working for a company in exchange for virtual badges you are not the Shepard owner of the community
And lastly on my rant when I hear “we the stack over flow moderators” i picture a wide group of people some helpful some selfless some looking to be part of a community some thinking they own the community ...
> Then they take a strong stance with company and are shocked to loose the virtual badges and titles
What are you describing here? There is exactly one moderator who was let go involuntarily, and she did not take any stance against the company whatsoever. I do not get the impression that you have a clear picture of what's going on.
> spending their free time working for a company in exchange for some virtual badge
Most of the activities you perform as a moderator do not grant badges (even if they would for "normal" users). In fact, said dismissed moderator only noticed her dismissal when she suddenly received badges for her everyday moderation work.
> thinking they are responsible for a community and feel ownership
There is no ownership over any community. That's just the wrong word. But the moderators are the part of the community that is closest to the company. If the company ignores the moderators, it ignores the community at large.
FYI, the moderators don't close questions. Reviewers do that. All moderators are reviewers, 99% of reviewers aren't moderators. Moderators' tasks are e.g. to determine whether a comment or answer is an insult or contains a password, and what should be done.
What would be the advantage of not closing a question? I voted to close one this week that read, basically, that something unspecfied was "similar to" something correct, and asked why the unspecified thing was a syntax error. It can't be answered, why should it be left around for answerers or search engines to see?
Closed questions are still visible to search engines. Question closing is for those who have an obsessive need to categorize things and/or like to wield power. I have never seen a SO question, or have my own question closed, and thought "Wow, that really improves the site!"
https://stackoverflow.com/q/57358883 (the most recent question tagged imap+ruby) links to about a dozen "related questions", and the list excludes closed questions. Again, I think that list would be worse if it included closed questions. Your opinion?
The first linke to a question (when I searched) is to https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2687566, which "is not a good fit for our Q&A format. We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion".
I can see how answers to that question will tend to be opinionated rather than factual, so... do you (any HNer, really) think SO's topic rules should have included such questions? Or do you think the such questions should be off-topic, but off-topic questions should be left alone?
Genuinely curious here. I've read so many disapproving comments about closed questions on SO, and I don't understand the substance behind them.
> "What are good resources for learning JavaScript in a weekend?" isn't a good fit for StackOverflow
I can see that it's not a question which has a 'terminal' set of answers. But it's not a bad question.
I also think it's less flamebait-y compared to ... say, "why do people use Emacs when vim exists" or "what's the best language".
From the perspective of coming across questions like this from searching for e.g. "learn JavaScript in a weekend": it's seeing a negative signal when looking for a positive one. If people are asking and answering things which I (and Google search) think are useful, then "Closed, don't want this" seems a bit of an obstacle.
> Why are people disapproving of closed questions?
My main interaction with StackOverflow is visiting it from the search engine result page.
The most common kind of closed question I see (from memory) is "closed as duplicate". The answers to the question I came across aren't the same as the question it duplicates. I think I'd notice this less if the answers were just merged. -- But, I'd also be concerned about if it's falsely marked as duplicate, that'd be frustrating.
Wow, thanks for putting a name to something that'd been annoying me for decades! It's so frustrating having to re-calibrate your expectations of the value in a community when this happens to it.
It makes me think Communism could be on par with Capitalism if people started chasing points instead of money. Oh wait !
Anyway another use of Stackoverflow is open source support by open source software authors.
I've been using ByteBuddy recently (java bytecode manipulation library) and the doc is very superficial all the more so the library in itself is a gigantic net of classes and dependencies to inject (the problem with DSLs based on object oriented systems is that you're never shown the DSL's full syntax but has to deduce it from the individual bricks).
Turns out the author is very active on Stackoverflow and these posts have constituted 95% of the sources I read to learn how to handle this library.
I'd always associated the term "karma whores" with people who recycle and repost stuff for the imaginary Internet points.
"IPC personalities" would be people who are actually reasonably well-intentioned, but sort of "stalk" the New/Rising equivalent queues (or tags on SO) to be able to "frist ps0t!!1" a reasonable looking (but obvious!) comment or answer.
The classic "low brow dismissal" or low hanging fruit humour type comment comes to mind (Correlation is not causation, but will it run Linux, has Netcraft confirmed it, etc.).
You answered questions and enjoy it. Other people answer questions before you get to them and that makes worthy of name calling - losers with silly interests? You then claim the site's plan all along was to attract such people to ruin your experience? And all-but claim the only people who talk to each other must be cave dwellers hiding in the dark corners?
Is it any wonder you don't feel engaged, connected, or part of any community when you hold views like that?
Was this written in response to my post? Did it seem like I think my experience has been ruined in some way? That certainly wasn't my intention.
I'm just a bit puzzled, because I can't find anyplace on the website where you could talk to another person in a way that could conceivable use a personal pronoun, and thus run afoul of this particular controversy.
As I said, my best guess is that there's a meta discussion forum someplace that moderators can use.
Are you implying that it's the main Q&A discussion that is having this issue?
Moderators are uniquely affected by the policy (and moreso its weirdly phrased FAQ) because they have to enforce it. It's fine if you don't think you'll have to care yourself, but they inevitably have to.
Was this written in response to my post? Did it seem like I think my experience has been ruined in some way?
Yes, and yes, it reads as "I was engaged until Internet Point Chasing Dweebs came along and took my fun away. Cool - sarcastically said, not cool at all, I'm smarting and resent the change. I guess I was a fool to think it would last and rationalise that it was a plan I should have seen and then chastise myself for not seeing it; I will pick myself up and get over it while pretending I'm not bothered at all, and leave those idiots to their stupid trivial JavaScript".
I can't find anyplace on the website where you could talk to another person in a way that could conceivable use a personal pronoun
Monica Cellio particularly is involved in Workplace.stackexchange a site where people post interpersonal questions about their workplace, and there are many comments and replies on posts and answers which have references such as "In Alice's reply, she focuses on the legal side, but I'd like to draw attention to power dynamic between blah blah", or "I'm not sure this applies, OP said she is in Canada which has different expectations about blah blah", and often with regular posters discussing the question in amongst comments and their replies.
There's also actual discussion forums (Slack-style web chatrooms) e.g. https://chat.stackoverflow.com/ which is where long comment chains get moderator-moved to for more realtime he-said/she-said discussions. I believe many chatrooms per stackexchange sub-site.
Plus moderator private chat / moderator to company chat.
As I said, my best guess is that there's a meta discussion forum someplace that moderators can use.
There is a meta site for every StackExchange site, yes. e.g. https://meta.superuser.com/ for SuperUser, and then there's meta.stackexchange.com for an overall meta-meta site.
I answer quite a few question that are tagged with one low-traffic tag. Four or five people provide 90% of the answers with that tag (I've never counted exactly) and the same handful have done that for several years now. Would you be surprised if that handful of people got to know each other, in a semi-distant, pseudonymous way?
until eventually it became big enough that the Internet Point Chaser personalities were just too quick on the draw
SO was explicitly designed to attract those personalities to author all its content. Now it has the content they have served their purpose and this is the transitional stage where they are purged.
If I had to guess I would say they were just not a profitable demographic for SO to advertise to. If you are an expert with your own network do you need SO’s job board, for example. They are trying to pivot to sell low-end services to newbies who are attracted to the site by the aforementioned content. But how long can they sustain that with no new worthwhile content?
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. :-(
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Well it takes more than an url to make stackoverflow. You need a critical mass of content and people in it and a source of revenue, or whatever is needed to support hosting. Also, you need to code and design and support the site. And make it attractive regarding stackoverflow and Google search.
I feel https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/390495/308851 is even more important than this one. It's the answer from George Stocker to "What could Stack Exchange Inc do to make moderators who've recently resigned want to stay?"
> Coming up with solutions and sharing them with us is a recipe for disaster, as you've seen. You have a community full of problem solvers. Bring us the problem.
Tremendous.
Twitter is notorious for this: while you might eventually get through to them that a problem exists and they should do something, they seem never to involve the community in upcoming changes or "fixes" to problems.
SE/SO reminds me more and more of how a cult is run. It's no secret that they are ideologically driven, although they kept it under lid until 2015 when they then flipped finger to their own rules and abused the platform for political causes.
Since that time it has been going downhill - not that it hasn't had problem before that. But I noticed a significant change in the "vibe" of the community from that point on.
The problem is that this can not be easily fixed as it require change of convictions. It's not about community anymore, but political wars intertwined with international agendas (which includes Y Combinator too btw).
Personally, I passed the 100k milestone, got my mug and t-shirt and deleted my account.
„ It's no secret that they are ideologically driven, although they kept it under lid until 2015 when they then flipped finger to their own rules and abused the platform for political causes.“
These are political, ideological driven posts. Not everyone agrees with the political content; the point being, whether you do or not, this doesn't belong on a site such as SO.
And the international agenda I am refering to is in particular United Nations' agenda 2030 which is also rooted in ideology, and is what these companies are working with, directly or indirectly:
> "Bigotry of any kind. Language likely to offend or alienate individuals or groups based on race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, etc. will not be tolerated. At all. (Those are just a few examples; when in doubt, just don't.)"
"etc." => politics, in this case back-ref "Language likely to offend or alienate individuals or groups" as not everyone agrees with the political message(s) posted, and the use of the platform users signed up on for entirely different purposes.
That's not politics. That's basically just saying don't be a jerk and say something hurtful regardless of the reason. You seem to be making a leap of judgement that etc means don't post politics at all instead of don't attack someone for their political opinion and then you're mad that on a completely different personal site he says he's against some actions and that companies need to not be okay with this. He gives no actions he's planning on taking just says that they should discuss it. He doesn't demonize someone for how they voted or their political party and even cites people from the opposing party with whom he agrees. Your position comes soon appearing like you're chomping at the bit to make anything you disagree with somehow some evil conspiracy plot where a certain segment of the population you disagree with us out to get you. You're allowed say different things at home than at work. I doubt heavily his opinions at home are solely made into policy at work in a vacuum.
There's literally a politics.stackexchange now. Perhaps the real "loss of innocence" was the establishment of religion stackexchanges (possibly Judaism was first?), making politics and clashes inevitable.
> international agenda I am referring to is in particular United Nations' agenda 2030
This is conspiracist nonsense, attributing a bottom-up progressive movement to a top-down international organisation that actually isn't progressive at all (and is in fact dangerous to certain activists).
No it's not. Read their official link, it's right there..
If you know how UN works you would know it works indeed bottom-up outside inter-governmental affairs. Their agenda (see link) is actually implemented mostly through local groups and NGOs in cities and communities all over the world.
Specific areas like groups pushing "smart cities", environmental groups, banning of cars and so forth, private as well as public, may have different names and arenas, but most use the very same UN framework for their guidelines and goals by the group's leadership.
The standardization of the education system is also part of this, with terms such as common core, national standards etc.. The directives, plans, goals, framework and ideology comes from a top organization, primarily UNESCO in this case, but is implemented by youth organizations [0] (but not only) and so forth.
UNs top-bottom model is for the inter-governmental structure, specifically based on regionalism [1], which comes in addition. This would be governments that state they will ban fossil-fuel cars by 2025, or reduce carbon emissions by 2030 or whatever it may be related to one of the stated UN goals.
It's organized to work complimentary.
And UN's origin is absolutely in the progressive field (socialism at the time of its birth). They share the same foundation as communist philosophy, from equality and social justice [2] to over-arching centralized governance [3] (the ultra-left would disagree with the latter, but in all practicality, marxist-leninist if you will).
The UN is a body established by the victors in WWII to allow them to negotiate about - instead of fighting out - their conflicts. It's not a world government, a Communist plot, or social justice experiment. It's a forum for the major powers to regularly talk to one another, and to jointly oversee various treaties and programs they set up (like UNRWA).
WWII and the invention of the atom bomb convinced (almost) everyone that major powers should talk rather than fighting one another head-on. That's why the UN exists.
Your source [3] is not from the UN, and it's not about any UN body or program. It's written by an obscure outside group that wants to create a world parliament within the UN. It doesn't reflect on the UN in any way.
All of this seems to be some weird Meta bubble that doesn't affect or concern regular users in the slightest.
What users care about is not getting downvoted for reasonable questions, not seeing everything closed as duplicate even though the other answer is 10 years old and contains only/mostly outdated and bad answers, ...
The things you describe are all things that volunteer moderators affect.
Do you think that moderators just chat on meta? That users do not know about how moderators work doesnt mean that they do not work.
Remove the moderators, or downgrade them to some automated process and the user experience will change. Moderators do not only talk on meta with each other.
Problems with user created content sites are all the same:
The default license is always that the user grants only the site they post to the ability to host the content.
It would be nice if the default, by law, was that user created content posted publicly was available for re-hosting. Otherwise, the company would have to ensure the user understands that they are gifting the company future control in a specific way.
The result of the current climate is that these companies go against who gave them their power and because of their content arsonal are immune to reprisal.
With a default public license enforced by law, we'd see so much more innovation and cooperation of content hosts. The balance of power between content creator and platform would shift.
This would essentially solve most problems with Facebook, reddit, stackoverflow, linkedin, and more all at the same times. They'd have to try harder to do right by their users or risk losing them to a competing platform with the same data.
Also because after I deleted my account all of my 2000+ answers are now attributed some user012345, not my username.
Seem they do whatever they want with the license. They just changed it from v3 to v4 of the cc by-sa with attribution required and without mine and many other's permission...
The content is not the only valuable thing. The community is. And communities are hard to move.
If, tomorrow, some angry internet god partitioned things so that the disappointed moderators left and set up the old database at a new URL, and at the same time wiped the original sites, the original sites would still likely be most popular this time next year.
I would like to see GitHub/GitLab adding a section like SO to the repos, slowly it would build more updated content and the repo owners could moderate. I think the amount of centralized knowledge in SO is not good for the web.
This. Issues are often used as interactive FAQs and it feels weird to have to go to SO if I don’t want to pollute a project’s issues just to ask a question.
AFAIK, and I don't want to go trying to find Meta threads to support all this, but these summarise my feelings after reading quite a few over the past year or two:
StackExchange (SE) announced that users must start being polite and welcoming to beginners and new users, trying to address the perception of hostility and unfriendliness. Generally coming from a well intentioned place, but without good plans for how that would work, except declaring "be nice" and hoping that would do it. There is a break of opinions between "a new user should have a welcoming experience" (both sides - company and users - agree) and "there is an endless flood of 'give me the codez' and homework questions and spam, we're wading through the garbage to your company benefit, and now we get criticism that we aren't doing your dirty work with a smile on top, please acknowledge" (many users agree, the company refuses to engage), and "blunt technical answers are not impolite" (company refuses to engage). SE's unresponsive stonewalling or ignoring questions and suggestions annoys users.
When mods complained about the lack of support from SE, e.g. long standing requests for moderator tools with better UIs, or more guidance from SE employees, SE ignored them.
SE announced that they were retroactively relicensing all content. When people objected, questioned the legality, asked for clarification of specifics, SE ignored and did not answer. It appears they have done this once before, and did not engage then either, but this time might be more serious.
When there was an increasing number of people sharing their bad experiences with SE around the internet, SE more or less blamed the users, and when the users suggested ideas to improve SE in various ways around this (e.g. changes to the flow of onboarding new users, which SE was trialing on some sites), SE ignored and didn't engage.
SE rolled out a new Code of Conduct and insisted everyone will respect people's pronouns[1]. Long standing, well respected, polite, moderator Monica Cellio stopped being a moderator in uncertain conditions, but AFAIK she tried to use gender-neutral language when someone's gender was known, and SE steamrollered her for it.
As a result of her loss of moderator status, several other moderators have either stepped down in protest, or signed an open letter revealing many complaints about how SE has been interacting with moderators - or not interacting - in the private mod/company chatroom which normal users can't see.
Many times through these arguments, an SE employee or two has put out some corporate fluff feelgood non-answer which ignores all raised issues and restates some platitudes or fiat-idealism, which users have taken as worse than silence and/or an insult.
There is a general feeling/suspicion/conspiracy theory that SE is setting itself up to be sold for huge piles of cash, and is trying to stamp out rudeness, appear welcoming, "clear up" licensing concerns, shrug off squeaky-wheel users, and absolutely not say anything controversial, and that SE either has no coherent leadership and direction for the future, or has one they know the users will object to and are therefore silent about it.
Involved in this, although I don't have any idea how closely involved, is SE's spread from purely technical topics to a much wider range of sites covering politics, religion, hobbies and more general interests.
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/conduct says "Be inclusive and respectful. [..] Prefer gender-neutral language when uncertain." and "No bigotry. [..] Use stated pronouns (when known)."
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Edit: One of many rant/complaint posts full of links you can dive into: pascalmahe↗
Thank you for this!
Especially this part:
>SE rolled out a new Code of Conduct and insisted everyone will respect people's pronouns[1]. Long standing, well respected, polite, moderator Monica Cellio stopped being a moderator in uncertain conditions, but AFAIK she tried to use gender-neutral language when someone's gender was known, and SE steamrollered her for it.
I'd seen Monica Cellio's resignation and the general reaction when SE announced the new CoC and was really weirded out when all the answers to said CoC were of the "but do I _really_ have to use people's pronouns? And what if they post it after/elsewhere? Can I be punished for that?" variety. It looked (to me) like everyone was trying to avoid a weirdly specific case.
Knowing that's what happened to Monica Cellio makes it a lot clearer.
I don't know if this is worth nitpicking, as an English person I'm less familiar with how people use "due process" casually; I assume its casual use means "a fair procedure was followed" and that is fine for your comment, but it is also "the legal requirement that the state must respect all legal rights that are owed to a person"[1]. In other discussions I've seen wording that moderators were "fired", as if they had been employees.
If she actually was an employee, fired under strange circumstances and denied legal rights by the state, that would be more serious issue and change many views on StackExchange the company. I nitpick because I think it helps to keep an appropriate context that much of this is arguing about perceptions, experiences, fair treatment and site direction, but is not about any legal-related accusations that I know of relating to moderators. Especially as there is legal concern about the content relicensing[2].
There are legal-related concerns, but not precisely due-process ones. Monica goes into it more on her blog, particularly in the comments of this post [1] where she discusses the possibility of taking legal action against the company. She feels that StackExchange libelled her by making public accusations of specific & evidently inaccurate bad conduct to the press [2] while making themselves unavailable for any sort of communication and resolution.
As far as due process goes, there was an established process on the website for removing moderators, which StackExchange did not follow in her removal. Nothing legally questionable about it since they can run their site how they will, but certainly questionable enough to burn goodwill.
More precisely, Monica objected to singular they (both as gender-neutral form and if chosen as preferred pronoun), insisting she would rather write without pronouns at all. But to this day neither she nor we know what exactly her alleged violations of the existing CoC were (nor which warnings she allegedly received).
The second point depends on the existence of any termination clause or not and its exact wording.
For example, violating say BSD 3-clause license advertising clause in derived work does not prevent you from distribution of the original, nor another version of said work that does not violate the license.
If the previous license allowed the company itself to change it without explicit copyright reassignment, it's in the clear.
Your second paragraph makes sense if they went back to the original licence. They haven’t so far. All old answers (99.999%) are currently served with a misrepresentation of license terms. If they do not go back to the correct license, they have no right to continue distributing. Without the terms of the license, they have only fair use rights under copyright law.
ALSO, the previous license did not allow the company to relicence.
Can somebody please summarize what happened in the SO management? How did SO lead the community in the past? What has changed?
This post is lacking some context for outsiders. I have been writing questions and answers for several years, but I've never noticed the the SO management has anything to do with it other than hosting it.
Before even opening the link I knew it was something having to do with the use of pronouns. Sometimes I think we are concentrating on (and fighting over) the wrong problems. Anyway, there's a timeline of the drama directly from Monica:
> "A queer moderator resigned in anger, with complaints about community managers, other moderators, and the "entrenched power structure", and vague accusations of bigotry"
>"a different moderator (henceforth OP) asked a question, tagged "discussion", on the moderators' private Q&A site ("team"): should we require people to use people's preferred pronouns? (Again, the moderator, who is trans, used the term "preferred".) OP self-answered to say, somewhat vehemently, that we absolutely must require this and using wrong pronouns is misgendering. I answered saying that we already have a negative commandment, don't call people what they don't want to be called (like wrong pronouns), which is proper, but this question calls for adding a positive requirement to use specific language and we shouldn't do that. I talked about writing in a gender-neutral way, that we rarely even need third-person-singular pronouns in our discussions, and not using a pronoun at all isn't misgendering. This was the top-voted answer, something like +53/-10 last I saw it. Note: Three different community managers posted answers after I did, and none said my answer was inappropriate in any way. (One disagreed with it, which is fine.)"
The problem isn't really the site or the admins, it's mainly the community and moderators.
They almost instantly lock new questions if they're not very specific, they are hostile and they're elitist. If you haven't researched your qustion for hours before, be prepared to get a lot of downvotes for your ignorance.
I used to post somewhat regularly on SO, I never post anything anymore since there is no idea because the community and moderators are too unfriendly.
The site itself is very nice though and many answers are still very good.
> If you haven't researched your qustion for hours before
Is this not the point though? I generally spend hours chipping away at a problem until I'll resort to asking StackOverflow. There's no point wasting everyone's time if the information is already out there.
How do you resign from something you're not paid for? So preys on needy people and turns them into jerks (moderators) who put down people seeking help and add net negative value. Kind of like flaggers on yc.
Good riddance, find another place to put people down and get paid in magic beans while the boss gets paid in cash ( I will never understand people who get paid in self esteem to work for profitable companies).
As a person who has been a user of StackOverflow for years and still unaware of what these "Community Elected Moderators" are, can someone explain what's the role of these guys exactly?
Their job is to stay on top of the usual exceptional behavior you will find on the internet: Spam, vandalism, rudeness/harassment, vote manipulation, sockpuppetry, user bans, ban disputes and so on.
Contrary to popular belief, moderators have no special impact on questions getting closed (or downvoted) - that's handled by the "normal" users.
134 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 123 ms ] threadHaving a CoC is a good thing and maybe you think it’s too SJW and maybe others think there are offensive moderators and are leaving the site
Personally I think some moderators have confused moderator with area owner and want to run it as they think
If I were running a company of this size, put everything aside and build trust from the users. They built the community in the first place.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2019/09/24/announcing-stack-o...
I vouched. please voice your issues if there is something wrong with this, as it seems correct and likely plays a role here as well (new CEO might still not be onboarded yet etc)
There are things you cannot say on HN and they are not even subtle about it. It seems that any hiccup in the glorious people's take over of yet another thing we built is one of the forbidden subjects.
y4mi's comment was probably flagged because "Why are people flagging this" is off topic and is covered, in spirit if not in letter, by the site guideline that asks people not to go on about downvotes on comments. Once the comment was vouched for and unkilled, there was no need to take the thread in that direction.
If you see a comment that's killed or flagged and shouldn't be, and vouching doesn't work, you can always email us at hn@ycombinator.com.
This is really the core of the issue IMHO.
Individual Linux distros fail, as do some websites or email servers - but the fundamental underlying protocols make sure no one entity exists that ruins everything.
Does anyone know of a good way to do something like that here?
Why is it so important whether money transactions were involved?
I didn't understand what you were getting at with the comparison, they seemed totally unrelated to me. I think I see now though. If I look at it a certain way I see "receiving content and then relicensing it" in both circumstances.
I think that the context which needs to be ignored to make them the same in that way is very relevant though - the devil's in the details. In one circumstance you are posting content under the agreement mentioned above, in the other you are receiving content from someone who has agreed to no such conditions.
Seems like the disconnect here is whether SO should be able to put the relicensing terms in their terms of use and have that be enough. Personally I lean toward yes, but could probably be persuaded in the other direction. Would a check box next to the answer box be enough consent do you think? Or do you feel no one has a right to relicense any content they haven't produced themselves?
That may be, but they didn't put such terms in their terms of use. They just retroactively changed the license. Or rather, they fraudulently misrepresent the license of the content. It would be like Github relicensing all content they serve under cc-by-sa. It's absurd.
>Or do you feel no one has a right to relicense any content they haven't produced themselves?
You can agree to all sorts of terms. I didn't. A huge number of contributors didn't. SO would have to go back to all contributors and renegotiate terms with them individually. Of course, no such attempt has been made.
In my first comment I said cc-by-sa 4.0 because I had just gone to the site footer to see what license they were using. I knew it was some form of creative commons, but I didn't know which one.
I didn't know until just now that they are changing (or trying to change) the license on all existing content from cc-by-sa 3.0 to cc-by-sa 4.0. That I doubt they can do and I very much disagree with the move even if they can.
Interestingly, they also appear to have unilaterally changed the license on all content from cc-by-sa 2.5 to cc-by-sa 3.0 in 2011. The comment on Jeff Atwood's answer at https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/95033 is fun.
So small sites will still fail, in fact they'll fail often, but the meta-media as a whole can continue. If anything, it forces them to be responsive because unhappy members will vote with their feet.
It also gets around many of the censorship problems that large sites have. Large sites don't want to make their algorithms or policies clear because there's a massive gain in gaming their system. A diverse collection of small sites is effectively immune to this: it's easy to game one site, but it doesn't get you much of anything.
There's still the expense of moderation, and I think it's where a meta-system shines. If you can draw moderators from anywhere, they're naturally disinterested. You can set up a standard set of procedures for how moderation is done without actually specifying what the rules are. The site owner has sole discretion as to what the rules are, and can override moderator decisions, limited by their willingness to micromanage and upset membership.
The incentive to moderate is that if you want to appeal a decision or otherwise request moderator attention, you must yourself do moderator duty to earn enough "civic duty" points. It's like jury duty, only more directly tit for tat. And I think a well designed system would help educate people as to why certain decisions are made, leading to greater investment.
I think there are huge technical barriers to such a scheme, especially building a UX that works across systems and dealing with not terribly technical site admins. Hell, I'm not even sure what the "meta-media" part of it is, whether it's discussions or interest groups or are there meta-sites that somehow overlay multiple real sites on common topics.
But it would be a fun project...
* Is there a more generic term than "social media" that would better include SO?
World-Wide Web.
As in, the WWW should be "heavily distributed over many small sites, with a common fabric, a meta-media, connecting them."
;-P
See also Project Xanadu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu
That is StackExchange though...
I still like it for the antifragile nature of it.
I think this reality is not lost on the owners. Mods have volunteered millions of hours of free labor to get SO to where it is today. And now that the corpus is in place their usefulness has come to an end. They are now less of an asset and more a liability to SO corporation.
That's how it looks like from the outside anyway.
One of the challenges SO - at least the ones related to code and Linux - have clearly been dealing with over the past few years is that as time passes, the answers to a question change, e g. today it is vastly more common to use systemd for things, and the commands to run (systemctl, journalctl) reflect that.
My best guess is that deep down in the meta corners among moderator types, there is some form of interpersonal communication going on, and sometimes there must be difficulties there. But for me, and I assume most of the people who will ever use the site to ask and answer silly JavaScript questions, that's something we're never going to see.
I used to answer a lot of questions on Stack Overflow, until eventually it became big enough that the Internet Point Chaser personalities were just too quick on the draw to answer anything and everything. Cool. That was the plan all along I guess. So now I just use it to google the order of arguments in date conversion functions for languages with poor documentation, which I assume is what roughly 100% of the people using the site do.
I don't think that aspect of the site will suffer from controversy like this in the long run.
I think the unstated assumption that needs to be made is that the moderators that remain still do a good enough job of moderating the question so that the user contributions can be valuable.
I don't know if the point-chasing ruins the questions I see; but I still see StackOverflow in the search results whenever I'm searching for error messages. Though, I've increasingly found GitHub Issues show up in the results too.
I guess that Stackoverflow Inc. realized that the mods don't really contribute something of value.
I haven't seen any statistics, but it looks like only a few well known mods are leaving. So, almost all mods are remaining.
There are a little over 600 total moods on StackExchange. Over 20 mods on the StackOverflow part of StackExchange. The announced departures from StackExchange are in the tens.
For better or for worse, SO will be able to scrape by with the remaining mods.
The only real problem for SO is the lack of trust. I've lost trust in the employees of SO. With every post from a SO employee, it gets worse and worse.
Who are the direct competitors of SO, if any? I would like to use a different site, if possible.
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On this page which is updated daily, https://stackexchange.com/about/moderators I count 629 moderators across 173 sites.
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For example, the Wayback machine shows that on December 9, 2018, the moderators on the StackOverflow part of StackExchange were these 26:
Michael Myers, Robert Harvey, BoltClock, George Stocker, Brad Larson, ThiefMaster, ChrisF, Flexo, Ry-, Bohemian, meagar, Martijn Pieters, Jon Clements, josliber, Madara Uchiha, TheLostMind, Undo, deceze, Aaron Hall, Bhargav Rao, Andy, Cody Gray, Yvette Colomb, Samuel Liew, Rob, Ed Cottrell
Today, I see these 23. If you remove George Stocker, 22:
Michael Myers, BoltClock, George Stocker, Brad Larson, ChrisF, Flexo, Ry-, Bohemian, meagar, Martijn Pieters, Jon Clements, josliber, Madara Uchiha, Undo, deceze, Aaron Hall, Bhargav Rao, Andy, Cody Gray, Rob, Baum mit Augen, Jean-François Fabre, Samuel Liew
Yes. That's a significant drop, but not enough for the users of StackOverflow to notice a difference.
Then they take a strong stance with company and are shocked to loose the virtual badges and titles
Here is the thing when you are a part of a community and take a strong stance they may disagree sideline you or kick you out no surprise here and that goes 100x when it’s a company
If you are working for a company in exchange for virtual badges, you are working for a company in exchange for virtual badges you are not the Shepard owner of the community
And lastly on my rant when I hear “we the stack over flow moderators” i picture a wide group of people some helpful some selfless some looking to be part of a community some thinking they own the community ...
What are you describing here? There is exactly one moderator who was let go involuntarily, and she did not take any stance against the company whatsoever. I do not get the impression that you have a clear picture of what's going on.
> spending their free time working for a company in exchange for some virtual badge
Most of the activities you perform as a moderator do not grant badges (even if they would for "normal" users). In fact, said dismissed moderator only noticed her dismissal when she suddenly received badges for her everyday moderation work.
> thinking they are responsible for a community and feel ownership
There is no ownership over any community. That's just the wrong word. But the moderators are the part of the community that is closest to the company. If the company ignores the moderators, it ignores the community at large.
What would be the advantage of not closing a question? I voted to close one this week that read, basically, that something unspecfied was "similar to" something correct, and asked why the unspecified thing was a syntax error. It can't be answered, why should it be left around for answerers or search engines to see?
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/imap+ruby doesn't link to any closed questions about using IMAP in Ruby, for example, and I do think that page would be worse if it included closed questions.
https://stackoverflow.com/q/57358883 (the most recent question tagged imap+ruby) links to about a dozen "related questions", and the list excludes closed questions. Again, I think that list would be worse if it included closed questions. Your opinion?
The first linke to a question (when I searched) is to https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2687566, which "is not a good fit for our Q&A format. We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion".
I can see how answers to that question will tend to be opinionated rather than factual, so... do you (any HNer, really) think SO's topic rules should have included such questions? Or do you think the such questions should be off-topic, but off-topic questions should be left alone?
Genuinely curious here. I've read so many disapproving comments about closed questions on SO, and I don't understand the substance behind them.
I can see that it's not a question which has a 'terminal' set of answers. But it's not a bad question. I also think it's less flamebait-y compared to ... say, "why do people use Emacs when vim exists" or "what's the best language".
From the perspective of coming across questions like this from searching for e.g. "learn JavaScript in a weekend": it's seeing a negative signal when looking for a positive one. If people are asking and answering things which I (and Google search) think are useful, then "Closed, don't want this" seems a bit of an obstacle.
> Why are people disapproving of closed questions?
My main interaction with StackOverflow is visiting it from the search engine result page.
The most common kind of closed question I see (from memory) is "closed as duplicate". The answers to the question I came across aren't the same as the question it duplicates. I think I'd notice this less if the answers were just merged. -- But, I'd also be concerned about if it's falsely marked as duplicate, that'd be frustrating.
(FYI, duplicate isn't the top close reason. The fuzzy trio unclear/overbroad/unreproducible accounts for very roughly 50% and duplicate 20%.)
Wow, thanks for putting a name to something that'd been annoying me for decades! It's so frustrating having to re-calibrate your expectations of the value in a community when this happens to it.
I first saw that term used on Slashdot, but subsequently also on community sites where points weren't explicitly called karma.
I think I might prefer "Internet Point Chaser" though, because it's a bit more lighthearted.
Anyway another use of Stackoverflow is open source support by open source software authors.
I've been using ByteBuddy recently (java bytecode manipulation library) and the doc is very superficial all the more so the library in itself is a gigantic net of classes and dependencies to inject (the problem with DSLs based on object oriented systems is that you're never shown the DSL's full syntax but has to deduce it from the individual bricks). Turns out the author is very active on Stackoverflow and these posts have constituted 95% of the sources I read to learn how to handle this library.
Comrade Xi is way ahead of you.
Of course there is a capitalist way to approach the same problem. Free money off vouchers at Doral Resort with every early IRS return.
"IPC personalities" would be people who are actually reasonably well-intentioned, but sort of "stalk" the New/Rising equivalent queues (or tags on SO) to be able to "frist ps0t!!1" a reasonable looking (but obvious!) comment or answer.
The classic "low brow dismissal" or low hanging fruit humour type comment comes to mind (Correlation is not causation, but will it run Linux, has Netcraft confirmed it, etc.).
Is it any wonder you don't feel engaged, connected, or part of any community when you hold views like that?
I'm just a bit puzzled, because I can't find anyplace on the website where you could talk to another person in a way that could conceivable use a personal pronoun, and thus run afoul of this particular controversy.
As I said, my best guess is that there's a meta discussion forum someplace that moderators can use.
Are you implying that it's the main Q&A discussion that is having this issue?
Yes, and yes, it reads as "I was engaged until Internet Point Chasing Dweebs came along and took my fun away. Cool - sarcastically said, not cool at all, I'm smarting and resent the change. I guess I was a fool to think it would last and rationalise that it was a plan I should have seen and then chastise myself for not seeing it; I will pick myself up and get over it while pretending I'm not bothered at all, and leave those idiots to their stupid trivial JavaScript".
I can't find anyplace on the website where you could talk to another person in a way that could conceivable use a personal pronoun
Monica Cellio particularly is involved in Workplace.stackexchange a site where people post interpersonal questions about their workplace, and there are many comments and replies on posts and answers which have references such as "In Alice's reply, she focuses on the legal side, but I'd like to draw attention to power dynamic between blah blah", or "I'm not sure this applies, OP said she is in Canada which has different expectations about blah blah", and often with regular posters discussing the question in amongst comments and their replies.
There's also actual discussion forums (Slack-style web chatrooms) e.g. https://chat.stackoverflow.com/ which is where long comment chains get moderator-moved to for more realtime he-said/she-said discussions. I believe many chatrooms per stackexchange sub-site.
Plus moderator private chat / moderator to company chat.
As I said, my best guess is that there's a meta discussion forum someplace that moderators can use.
There is a meta site for every StackExchange site, yes. e.g. https://meta.superuser.com/ for SuperUser, and then there's meta.stackexchange.com for an overall meta-meta site.
I answer quite a few question that are tagged with one low-traffic tag. Four or five people provide 90% of the answers with that tag (I've never counted exactly) and the same handful have done that for several years now. Would you be surprised if that handful of people got to know each other, in a semi-distant, pseudonymous way?
SO was explicitly designed to attract those personalities to author all its content. Now it has the content they have served their purpose and this is the transitional stage where they are purged.
If I had to guess I would say they were just not a profitable demographic for SO to advertise to. If you are an expert with your own network do you need SO’s job board, for example. They are trying to pivot to sell low-end services to newbies who are attracted to the site by the aforementioned content. But how long can they sustain that with no new worthwhile content?
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. :-(
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.
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.
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.
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-...
...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.
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.
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.
Tremendous.
Twitter is notorious for this: while you might eventually get through to them that a problem exists and they should do something, they seem never to involve the community in upcoming changes or "fixes" to problems.
Since that time it has been going downhill - not that it hasn't had problem before that. But I noticed a significant change in the "vibe" of the community from that point on.
The problem is that this can not be easily fixed as it require change of convictions. It's not about community anymore, but political wars intertwined with international agendas (which includes Y Combinator too btw).
Personally, I passed the 100k milestone, got my mug and t-shirt and deleted my account.
Anil Dash?
This is the post Joel Spolsky posted, breaking the user rules that stated among other things that political posts where not allowed:
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/297859/can-stack-ov...
Then, a couple of years later -
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/342440/time-to-take...
at the same time Sam Altman posted his (since I mentioned Y Combinator, but in fairness, at his own blog):
https://blog.samaltman.com/time-to-take-a-stand
These are political, ideological driven posts. Not everyone agrees with the political content; the point being, whether you do or not, this doesn't belong on a site such as SO.
And the international agenda I am refering to is in particular United Nations' agenda 2030 which is also rooted in ideology, and is what these companies are working with, directly or indirectly:
https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/post2015/transformingo...
Where were these rules? I've never seen such prohibition.
> "Bigotry of any kind. Language likely to offend or alienate individuals or groups based on race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, etc. will not be tolerated. At all. (Those are just a few examples; when in doubt, just don't.)"
"etc." => politics, in this case back-ref "Language likely to offend or alienate individuals or groups" as not everyone agrees with the political message(s) posted, and the use of the platform users signed up on for entirely different purposes.
> international agenda I am referring to is in particular United Nations' agenda 2030
This is conspiracist nonsense, attributing a bottom-up progressive movement to a top-down international organisation that actually isn't progressive at all (and is in fact dangerous to certain activists).
No it's not. Read their official link, it's right there..
If you know how UN works you would know it works indeed bottom-up outside inter-governmental affairs. Their agenda (see link) is actually implemented mostly through local groups and NGOs in cities and communities all over the world.
Specific areas like groups pushing "smart cities", environmental groups, banning of cars and so forth, private as well as public, may have different names and arenas, but most use the very same UN framework for their guidelines and goals by the group's leadership.
The standardization of the education system is also part of this, with terms such as common core, national standards etc.. The directives, plans, goals, framework and ideology comes from a top organization, primarily UNESCO in this case, but is implemented by youth organizations [0] (but not only) and so forth.
UNs top-bottom model is for the inter-governmental structure, specifically based on regionalism [1], which comes in addition. This would be governments that state they will ban fossil-fuel cars by 2025, or reduce carbon emissions by 2030 or whatever it may be related to one of the stated UN goals.
It's organized to work complimentary.
And UN's origin is absolutely in the progressive field (socialism at the time of its birth). They share the same foundation as communist philosophy, from equality and social justice [2] to over-arching centralized governance [3] (the ultra-left would disagree with the latter, but in all practicality, marxist-leninist if you will).
[0]: https://www.un.org/en/events/youthday/
[1]: https://www.britannica.com/topic/new-regionalism
[2]: https://www.un.org/en/events/socialjusticeday/
[3]: https://en.unpacampaign.org/
WWII and the invention of the atom bomb convinced (almost) everyone that major powers should talk rather than fighting one another head-on. That's why the UN exists.
What users care about is not getting downvoted for reasonable questions, not seeing everything closed as duplicate even though the other answer is 10 years old and contains only/mostly outdated and bad answers, ...
This is what is is actually hurting SO.
Do you think that moderators just chat on meta? That users do not know about how moderators work doesnt mean that they do not work.
Remove the moderators, or downgrade them to some automated process and the user experience will change. Moderators do not only talk on meta with each other.
If SO wants more control over moderation practices, it should start paying moderators.
Incidentally I also think that a better/smarter voting system combined with less moderation could be good for the platform (note: not no moderation) .
The default license is always that the user grants only the site they post to the ability to host the content.
It would be nice if the default, by law, was that user created content posted publicly was available for re-hosting. Otherwise, the company would have to ensure the user understands that they are gifting the company future control in a specific way.
The result of the current climate is that these companies go against who gave them their power and because of their content arsonal are immune to reprisal.
With a default public license enforced by law, we'd see so much more innovation and cooperation of content hosts. The balance of power between content creator and platform would shift.
This would essentially solve most problems with Facebook, reddit, stackoverflow, linkedin, and more all at the same times. They'd have to try harder to do right by their users or risk losing them to a competing platform with the same data.
https://archive.org/details/stackexchange
Also because after I deleted my account all of my 2000+ answers are now attributed some user012345, not my username.
Seem they do whatever they want with the license. They just changed it from v3 to v4 of the cc by-sa with attribution required and without mine and many other's permission...
If, tomorrow, some angry internet god partitioned things so that the disappointed moderators left and set up the old database at a new URL, and at the same time wiped the original sites, the original sites would still likely be most popular this time next year.
I see lot of references to policy changes, lack of empathy & such. But would like to know exactly what actions by the company caused this stir.
StackExchange (SE) announced that users must start being polite and welcoming to beginners and new users, trying to address the perception of hostility and unfriendliness. Generally coming from a well intentioned place, but without good plans for how that would work, except declaring "be nice" and hoping that would do it. There is a break of opinions between "a new user should have a welcoming experience" (both sides - company and users - agree) and "there is an endless flood of 'give me the codez' and homework questions and spam, we're wading through the garbage to your company benefit, and now we get criticism that we aren't doing your dirty work with a smile on top, please acknowledge" (many users agree, the company refuses to engage), and "blunt technical answers are not impolite" (company refuses to engage). SE's unresponsive stonewalling or ignoring questions and suggestions annoys users.
When mods complained about the lack of support from SE, e.g. long standing requests for moderator tools with better UIs, or more guidance from SE employees, SE ignored them.
SE announced that they were retroactively relicensing all content. When people objected, questioned the legality, asked for clarification of specifics, SE ignored and did not answer. It appears they have done this once before, and did not engage then either, but this time might be more serious.
When there was an increasing number of people sharing their bad experiences with SE around the internet, SE more or less blamed the users, and when the users suggested ideas to improve SE in various ways around this (e.g. changes to the flow of onboarding new users, which SE was trialing on some sites), SE ignored and didn't engage.
SE rolled out a new Code of Conduct and insisted everyone will respect people's pronouns[1]. Long standing, well respected, polite, moderator Monica Cellio stopped being a moderator in uncertain conditions, but AFAIK she tried to use gender-neutral language when someone's gender was known, and SE steamrollered her for it.
As a result of her loss of moderator status, several other moderators have either stepped down in protest, or signed an open letter revealing many complaints about how SE has been interacting with moderators - or not interacting - in the private mod/company chatroom which normal users can't see.
Many times through these arguments, an SE employee or two has put out some corporate fluff feelgood non-answer which ignores all raised issues and restates some platitudes or fiat-idealism, which users have taken as worse than silence and/or an insult.
There is a general feeling/suspicion/conspiracy theory that SE is setting itself up to be sold for huge piles of cash, and is trying to stamp out rudeness, appear welcoming, "clear up" licensing concerns, shrug off squeaky-wheel users, and absolutely not say anything controversial, and that SE either has no coherent leadership and direction for the future, or has one they know the users will object to and are therefore silent about it.
Involved in this, although I don't have any idea how closely involved, is SE's spread from purely technical topics to a much wider range of sites covering politics, religion, hobbies and more general interests.
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/conduct says "Be inclusive and respectful. [..] Prefer gender-neutral language when uncertain." and "No bigotry. [..] Use stated pronouns (when known)."
----
Edit: One of many rant/complaint posts full of links you can dive into: pascalmahe ↗ Thank you for this! jacobush ↗ She was also kicked out without due process, before the CoC was in effect, or its wording even known. jodrellblank ↗ I don't know if this is worth nitpicking, as an English person I'm less familiar with how people use "due process" casually; I assume its casual use means "a fair procedure was followed" and that is fine for your comment, but it is also "the legal requirement that the state must respect all legal rights that are owed to a person"[1]. In other discussions I've seen wording that moderators were "fired", as if they had been employees. TraceWoodgrains ↗ There are legal-related concerns, but not precisely due-process ones. Monica goes into it more on her blog, particularly in the comments of this post [1] where she discusses the possibility of taking legal action against the company. She feels that StackExchange libelled her by making public accusations of specific & evidently inaccurate bad conduct to the press [2] while making themselves unavailable for any sort of communication and resolution. esyir ↗ It's not just that. It's the difference between negative enforcement (don't misgender) and positive enforcement (use their pronouns, no exceptions). MauranKilom ↗ More precisely, Monica objected to singular they (both as gender-neutral form and if chosen as preferred pronoun), insisting she would rather write without pronouns at all. But to this day neither she nor we know what exactly her alleged violations of the existing CoC were (nor which warnings she allegedly received). jacobush ↗ >"clear up" licensing concerns AstralStorm ↗ The second point depends on the existence of any termination clause or not and its exact wording. jacobush ↗ Your second paragraph makes sense if they went back to the original licence. They haven’t so far. All old answers (99.999%) are currently served with a misrepresentation of license terms. If they do not go back to the correct license, they have no right to continue distributing. Without the terms of the license, they have only fair use rights under copyright law.
Especially this part:
>SE rolled out a new Code of Conduct and insisted everyone will respect people's pronouns[1]. Long standing, well respected, polite, moderator Monica Cellio stopped being a moderator in uncertain conditions, but AFAIK she tried to use gender-neutral language when someone's gender was known, and SE steamrollered her for it.
I'd seen Monica Cellio's resignation and the general reaction when SE announced the new CoC and was really weirded out when all the answers to said CoC were of the "but do I _really_ have to use people's pronouns? And what if they post it after/elsewhere? Can I be punished for that?" variety. It looked (to me) like everyone was trying to avoid a weirdly specific case.
Knowing that's what happened to Monica Cellio makes it a lot clearer.
If she actually was an employee, fired under strange circumstances and denied legal rights by the state, that would be more serious issue and change many views on StackExchange the company. I nitpick because I think it helps to keep an appropriate context that much of this is arguing about perceptions, experiences, fair treatment and site direction, but is not about any legal-related accusations that I know of relating to moderators. Especially as there is legal concern about the content relicensing[2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Due_process
[2] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333089/stack-exchan...
As far as due process goes, there was an established process on the website for removing moderators, which StackExchange did not follow in her removal. Nothing legally questionable about it since they can run their site how they will, but certainly questionable enough to burn goodwill.
[1] https://cellio.dreamwidth.org/2019/10/15/stack-overflow-dela...
[2] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/01/stack_exchange_cont...
One can be construed as "no attacks". The other is coerced speech.
This is particularly hilarious. By "re-licensing" they are actually violating the original licenses under which the content was licensed to them.
When you do that, you no longer retain the right to distribute the content. (Since you just breached the license!)
What's hilarious is that, trying to "clear up" license concerns, they actually gave themselves a heap of risk. (Class-action law suit, anyone?)
For example, violating say BSD 3-clause license advertising clause in derived work does not prevent you from distribution of the original, nor another version of said work that does not violate the license.
If the previous license allowed the company itself to change it without explicit copyright reassignment, it's in the clear.
ALSO, the previous license did not allow the company to relicence.
This post is lacking some context for outsiders. I have been writing questions and answers for several years, but I've never noticed the the SO management has anything to do with it other than hosting it.
https://cellio.dreamwidth.org/2019/10/05/stack-overflow-fias...
> "A queer moderator resigned in anger, with complaints about community managers, other moderators, and the "entrenched power structure", and vague accusations of bigotry"
>"a different moderator (henceforth OP) asked a question, tagged "discussion", on the moderators' private Q&A site ("team"): should we require people to use people's preferred pronouns? (Again, the moderator, who is trans, used the term "preferred".) OP self-answered to say, somewhat vehemently, that we absolutely must require this and using wrong pronouns is misgendering. I answered saying that we already have a negative commandment, don't call people what they don't want to be called (like wrong pronouns), which is proper, but this question calls for adding a positive requirement to use specific language and we shouldn't do that. I talked about writing in a gender-neutral way, that we rarely even need third-person-singular pronouns in our discussions, and not using a pronoun at all isn't misgendering. This was the top-voted answer, something like +53/-10 last I saw it. Note: Three different community managers posted answers after I did, and none said my answer was inappropriate in any way. (One disagreed with it, which is fine.)"
They almost instantly lock new questions if they're not very specific, they are hostile and they're elitist. If you haven't researched your qustion for hours before, be prepared to get a lot of downvotes for your ignorance.
I used to post somewhat regularly on SO, I never post anything anymore since there is no idea because the community and moderators are too unfriendly.
The site itself is very nice though and many answers are still very good.
Is this not the point though? I generally spend hours chipping away at a problem until I'll resort to asking StackOverflow. There's no point wasting everyone's time if the information is already out there.
Contrary to popular belief, moderators have no special impact on questions getting closed (or downvoted) - that's handled by the "normal" users.