Once, enough people have left and SE has become a hollow shell of its former self, it will become a textbook case of how to run a good and valuable company into the ground. I would guess if SE had not responded at all rather than make the series of statements they did, they would have done better in the community eye.
It's like image hosting sites, right? Eventually they all turn into ExpertsExchange and another site springs up that promises to do it all different. StackExchange held out longer than I would have expected.
It's what motivated me to join SuperUser back when it was new almost 10 years - pure hatred for expertsexchange.com results always coming up in Google results.
All good things come to an end. :(
I believe theoretically someone could fork the entire site, but I haven't studied the recent license changes.
Judging just by the editorializing title, this isn’t anything I want to get involved in.
It seems to be en Vogue to hate the SO team. But having tried to understand some of the recent hubbubs, I never saw anything that can’t be attributed to fast growth, and excused with a basic assumption of good faith.
I fail to see how this is excuses under those circumstances. Basic assumption of good faith goes both ways, and fast growth does not mean throwing your very important users to the curb without good reason.
Stack Exchange is interested only in making big money since they know they missed out for a very long time and they think they deserve to be a billion+ dollar company just like many of the top 100 websites, if the community is interested in making money for Stack Exchange so that's fine otherwise SE is okay with becoming Quora for developers thanks to their influence in search engines and making money by brute force.
The TLDR is that they implemented a policy requiring the use of made-up pronouns for imaginary sexes. One person was fired, seemingly for being woke but not woke enough. Many others quit.
this explains it better. They never said anything about 'made up pronouns'. Rather that as a writer they are meant to write from a neutral perspective regardless of gender. SO said it was against a policy and has failed to provide such policy. It's clear to me this is a result of either grossly incompetent SO mods or a targeted attack.
See #2:
"An SE employee announced an updated clarification to the Code of Conduct (CoC) in the TL requiring the use of preferred pronouns if known; announcing that the change is in effect for moderator communications (among moderators or from moderators to a user)."
So, like I said, she was woke (used they to avoid "misgendering"), but not woke enough (didn't want to use "Xer" or "FlimFlam" or whatever).
I have never seen so much petty pointless drama about a bunch of people being told "don't be jerks" and then responding like children who have had their toys (diamonds) taken away when they acted like jerks in my entire life.
Ten trillion years of unending stellar-scale nuclear fusion could pass and less energy would have been released into the entire Universe than has been expended in one femtosecond as impotent rage by Stack Exchange contributors being "fired" and then complaining about it.
If Hacker News implemented a policy wherein I had to refer to everyone as "cutie pie" and I questioned it and then they nuked my account-- so what?
IMHO, the biggest problem SE has had this entire time and continues to have throughout all of these various issues (abrupt relicensing, community moderator firing, etc) is that there is constant zero transparency. Even the times they do respond and even seem genuine, it shortly becomes clear that they were not
SE's willful lack of responsibility and lack of transparency make them an actively hostile entity towards all users, including members of communities they wanted to be more inclusive towards (good supposed intent, incredibly poor/disastrous execution). This is clear from a number of responses from people in the LGBTQ+ community that disagreed with how things have been handled by SE
I know there are good communities on SE that want to somehow try to save it, to fix this, but the only way that happens would be a complete reorganization/removal at the highest levels. It is likely best that SE have a mass exodus and become a ghost town and its members move elsewhere and try again, hopefully to build something better. Of course, any new alternative to SE runs the risk of becoming another SE.
I really hate to see it, because I've learned a lot just from lurking and reading questions and answers... there's so much wasted potential
Where does 'community' fit into the business picture? There is a corporate owner, and (eventually) there are some kind of advertisers or other customers.
The volunteers who provide the content are not part of the business picture. Possibly if they organized they might be, but currently they're like chickens on a farm.
At one time all that was the obvious inevitable endgame of "walled gardens / web 2.0" That was why these sites were funded by investors.
Did this stop being obvious at some point since AOL and Yahoo went out of fashion? I'm sorry if I sound bleak, but this kind of horrorshow is a known problem.
18 comments
[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 55.3 ms ] threadAll good things come to an end. :(
I believe theoretically someone could fork the entire site, but I haven't studied the recent license changes.
It seems to be en Vogue to hate the SO team. But having tried to understand some of the recent hubbubs, I never saw anything that can’t be attributed to fast growth, and excused with a basic assumption of good faith.
The HN title is the title of the linked SE post (with a prefix stripped).
I fail to see how this is excuses under those circumstances. Basic assumption of good faith goes both ways, and fast growth does not mean throwing your very important users to the curb without good reason.
> We’re seeking to align the company so that it can continue growing in 2020
It’s a simple fact, infinite growth is cancerous and unsustainable.
this explains it better. They never said anything about 'made up pronouns'. Rather that as a writer they are meant to write from a neutral perspective regardless of gender. SO said it was against a policy and has failed to provide such policy. It's clear to me this is a result of either grossly incompetent SO mods or a targeted attack.
See #2: "An SE employee announced an updated clarification to the Code of Conduct (CoC) in the TL requiring the use of preferred pronouns if known; announcing that the change is in effect for moderator communications (among moderators or from moderators to a user)."
So, like I said, she was woke (used they to avoid "misgendering"), but not woke enough (didn't want to use "Xer" or "FlimFlam" or whatever).
Ten trillion years of unending stellar-scale nuclear fusion could pass and less energy would have been released into the entire Universe than has been expended in one femtosecond as impotent rage by Stack Exchange contributors being "fired" and then complaining about it.
If Hacker News implemented a policy wherein I had to refer to everyone as "cutie pie" and I questioned it and then they nuked my account-- so what?
Looks like you haven't really understood what the issue is but I can't be arsed to care enough and explain.
SE's willful lack of responsibility and lack of transparency make them an actively hostile entity towards all users, including members of communities they wanted to be more inclusive towards (good supposed intent, incredibly poor/disastrous execution). This is clear from a number of responses from people in the LGBTQ+ community that disagreed with how things have been handled by SE
I know there are good communities on SE that want to somehow try to save it, to fix this, but the only way that happens would be a complete reorganization/removal at the highest levels. It is likely best that SE have a mass exodus and become a ghost town and its members move elsewhere and try again, hopefully to build something better. Of course, any new alternative to SE runs the risk of becoming another SE.
I really hate to see it, because I've learned a lot just from lurking and reading questions and answers... there's so much wasted potential
(edited for accuracy)
The volunteers who provide the content are not part of the business picture. Possibly if they organized they might be, but currently they're like chickens on a farm.
At one time all that was the obvious inevitable endgame of "walled gardens / web 2.0" That was why these sites were funded by investors.
Did this stop being obvious at some point since AOL and Yahoo went out of fashion? I'm sorry if I sound bleak, but this kind of horrorshow is a known problem.