A large number of Stack Exchange mods resigning over new policies

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333965/firing-mods-and-forced-slippery-relicensing-is-stack-exchange-still-interested

by raesene9 • 7 years ago

338 308 7 years ago

meta.stackexchange.com

middleload• 7 years ago

It's not clear to me. Were those people paid or volunteers?

raesene9• 7 years ago

mods are volunteers, who provide their time for free to improve the site, I'm not aware of any mods that are paid.

ianai2• 7 years ago

How is that acceptable? People need to be paid for working.

fffjdtcsebj• 7 years ago

"they think I will in the future violate a thoughtcrime-style provision of a Code of Conduct change that hasn't been made yet"

Seems like a code of conduct issue?

jmkni2• 7 years ago

Spotted this on the hot question list, totally out of the loop on the latest SE drama, can somebody fill me in?

latk2• 7 years ago

There is a perpetual tension between those who want SE to be helping everyone, and those who want to curate a helpful resource. People involved with community moderation aspects tend to fall into the latter group.

For the last half decade or so SE has progressively abandoned this latter group, leading to a lot of pent-up frustration. Some changes SE has made are sensible (e.g. striving to be more welcoming and more inclusive), but the volunteer work of curators has only become more difficult. SE refuses to implement new tools to aid moderation, so that e.g. spam fighting is mostly done by volunteer projects.

That only sets the general scene. Since the last year or so SE has stopped engaging the community on Meta, mostly just announcing changes top-down. Tweets by third parties have larger impact on SE policy than long-standing complaints by the community. This has led to a further deterioration of the relationship. The illegal changes to the content license a month ago are a perfect example of this top-down, uncooperative approach.

Now the actual drama starts: in a closed moderator chat, there was some kind of discussion or disagreement. I'm not privy to the details. Not all of this is nice, e.g. it seems that SE is unwilling to protect trans moderators from vitriol by other mods. But to everyone's confusion, Monica Cellio was suddenly removed as a volunteer moderator. She is known as being extremely reasonable, experienced, and sincere. While she might have tried to discuss sincere questions, it is beyond belief that she would attack another moderator.

So moderators and other engaged users are deeply frustrated, see a company that no longer engages with the community, does stupid decisions, and has now fired one of the best volunteer moderators in a despicable manner. For a lot of people, this is the straw that broke the camel's back. E.g. one mod I know decided to resign because they now see themselves completely unable to achieve any positive change on the site. And if Monica isn't a good-enough mod, how can they hope to be remotely adequate?

Disclosure: I wrote the linked Meta.SE question. It is my belief that SE the company and SE the community need to cooperate for both to be successful. Yes, the community can sometimes be toxic. But the company seems to have given up completely on engaging with the community, and that does not bode well.

mellosouls5• 7 years ago

I think it's worth pointing out that there is also a commercial imperative involved in the tension you cite.

In fact, it is that - not "the community" - that is the ultimate decision maker here, though naturally the community being part of the USP, the commercial enterprise undermines it at it's peril.

As you disclose, you are seeing this from a particular point of view - the mods (whether or not you are one yourself).

It is worth bearing in mind that is a minority - if heavily invested - point of view.

Most users probably have little interest in the politics you describe, and the business only in so far as it affects returns.

jmkni2• 7 years ago

Thankyou.

I would browse Workplace SE quite a bit (it seems to feature on the 'Hot Questions' list regularly) and Monica Cellio has always come across as decent/smart/sincere, so yeah, that's pretty bizarre.

commentzorro• 7 years ago

> There is a perpetual tension between those who want SE to be helping everyone, and those who want to curate a helpful resource.

I never understood this. Why have one or the other instead of both. All questions funnel in on a "everyone" area for a particular type of question. (Junior people can moderate those to gain experience if the senior mods don't want to. This will give them experience, insight, etc.) Even the most repetitive and/or superficial homework question can be answered and not closed as duplicate. (Or at least pointed to the duplicates but not closed until the questioner has accepted a duplicate as an acceptable answer.)

When "good quality" appear or new/unique questions and answers appear they can be refined and moved over into a curated persistent section for future reference. The senior mods can take over at this point to make sure the reference Q&A are as they like.

I always hated that "closed as duplicate" reply especially if I'd already seen the supposed duplicates and didn't think they applied. This approach would allow those to be answered by new people or ignored if nobody wanted to answer.

cy_hauser• 7 years ago

> There is a perpetual tension between those who want SE to be helping everyone, and those who want to curate a helpful resource.

crispyambulance2• 7 years ago

    > There is a perpetual tension between those who want SE to be helping everyone, and those who want to curate a helpful resource. ...

This is the core issue and it's really hard to perceive unless you've watched stackexchange sites evolve over the years. There's a sizeable contingent of folks who truly believe in "the mission" of stackexchange and have uncanny strict interpretations of the rules as expressed in the FAQ's. In their minds, it's OK to downvote, close, mark-as-dupe or otherwise harshly dismiss contributions from others, especially new folks, that do not adhere to the strict interpretation of the rules. This is _especially_ evident (and wrong) in sites that feature intrinsically subjective subject matter like Workplace.

The thing is the "curator" people feel really strongly about what they're doing. Obviously, I am on the side of at least trying to help everyone even if that means "the rules" get bent.

Let's not blow this out of proportion. It's NOT "a firing" No one lost their livelihood.

wool_gather2• 7 years ago

Spot on. Monica is a fantastic person and was a huge asset to SE. I've continually expected to hear that SE had hired Monica as a Community Manager, as they have over the years done with other well-respected mods.

This is a "You maniacs; you blew it up!" moment. What just happened??

Dobbs3• 7 years ago

I really wish more details about this was available.

it seems that SE is unwilling to protect trans moderators from vitriol by other mods.

Reading Monica's post made me pretty sure this was trans related. I'm sad that I was right.

[From Monica's Post] unlike the rest of the CoC, this rule mandates specific, positive actions.

This is something I've heard many times from anti-trans activists in order to justify their purposeful, and intentional misgendering and dead-naming of trans individuals. I'm not saying that is what Monica is advocating, but my spidey-sense is definitely tingling.

[From Monica's Post] chastising me for raising issues and saying my values were out of alignment.

Again this is something I hear from anti-trans activists. We saw similar rhetoric from homophobic individuals back in the 90s. That their religion and values dictated that gay people were bad therefore they couldn't <insert action here>.

---

Without knowing more it is hard to say, but even if this isn't about trans people Monica's arguments aren't inherently right. One person's religious beliefs don't justify the disregard for others. A very extreme example would be that many KKK member's religion states that black people are inherently inferior, and we don't give that belief consideration.

If you know more, please do share, because right now it seems like one sides arguments are valid, but they can quickly fall apart depending upon the specifics.

workthrowaway• 7 years ago

that's like, not a "large number" but i digress... just wanted to say that i empathize with the mod that wrote they just were just tired. mods getting tired is reason #1 i left a few communities in the past.

it usually means that things aren't looking good. but there is little that could be done about it. i have not seen it last though. a new wave of people tend to come along with a fresh view on how to handle things. the meantime, though, is what's hard to live through. it's what makes people tired and what makes them move on...

nfogort• 7 years ago

Yay, maybe interesting questions/discussion won’t be shut down now!

Avamander11• 7 years ago

I have the feeling the people who fought back at the annoying closing and overly strict rules got pushed out, not vice versa.

goatinaboat• 7 years ago

I have always found Monica Cellio to be a great moderator. If she has been fired then something is deeply wrong over at Stack Exchange.

mieseratte6• 7 years ago

First manager I've had, great guy and despite his shortcomings I'd work with him again. Straightforward honest guy, did he work well, mentored me well. Then one day he assaulted another coworker in the break room.

Someone's on-the-job performance doesn't mean they are always and forever in the right. Given the lack of any concrete evidence posted but lots of hand-wringing and pearl clutching about vague incidences, I think reserving judgment is the proper course.

baud14725810• 7 years ago

Considering how rarely the community get any answer from the SE company, I doubt we'd ever get their side of the story.

vorpalhex3• 7 years ago

Aren't you ignoring your own advice by supporting the dismissal of a moderator before the policy they supposedly might break is even in effect?

It seems like SE got rid of a mod because they voiced concerns about an upcoming rule change... comparing that to assaulting someone is a cheap shot.

baud14725810• 7 years ago

A "Director of Public Q&A at Stack Overflow" answered with:

"We aren’t going to share specifics out of respect for all individuals involved but this is a site reaching millions of people and we have to do what we believe fosters a spirit of inclusion and respect. When a moderator violates that, we will always do our best to resolve it with them privately. When we can’t we must take action."

(https://judaism.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5197)

So it look like we won't have anymore information, at least from the SE side.

The fired mod answered in the comments:

"Inclusion and respect are important, yes! I never said otherwise or did anything to violate either the current or forthcoming CoC (as best I understand the latter; y'all haven't answered my questions). Please read the email I sent in response to my firing. It doesn't have to be this way. "

celticmusic4• 7 years ago

I'm curious as to what lead up to the assault.

ykevinator• 7 years ago

The moderators don't add value.

mellosouls5• 7 years ago

I think this is untrue. Some do, some less so.

Certainly there is a toxic tendency for some mods to become power crazed, assume a higher understanding of the world than the lowly non-mods and mod everything into oblivion.

There is also sometimes a tribal back-slapping tendency that doesn't always weed out this nonsense but encourages it.

I don't know if that is involved in this case.

SnarkAsh2• 7 years ago

There are a lot of very toxic moderators on the network.

As far as I recognize, none of them are among the resigned. They'll probably be more prominent now that reasonable kind people like Monica have been removed.

scarejunba2• 7 years ago

Every one of these community groups inevitably has some sort of internal political strife of some sort. I've never found any meaning in attempting to engage their politics in any more than the most basic sense.

The groups always exaggerate the impact of actions upon the rest of us when it's usually a no-op as far as we're concerned.

E.g. Reddit iama had this massive controversy around a Reddit facilitator being fired and everyone predicted insta failure or whatever. Lots of time passed and the product is still pretty damned successful (Bill Gates was on it within the last year). I'm sure Wikipedia has had "I'm stepping down" posts and whatnot.

Perhaps the learning is that it isn't a worthwhile way to seek meaning in your life to give away volunteer hours moderating sites unless they're your own or you're paid for it. It is a pointless place to put your self-worth because disagreements will occur and they will be enforced as the site owner desires. Your hours earn you no power.

Avamander11• 7 years ago

I think I haven't really read an AMA for years now, they're all very bland now.

mieseratte6• 7 years ago

Bigger names, politicians, etc. too often seem to be bland, seemingly PR-run affairs. For smaller names and niche topics, there is often some legitimate discussion worth reading.

Of course sometimes the bigger ones are great for another reason, their PR-run effort blows up in their face. The recent Beto AMA was a great dumpster fire of a read.

dsr_• 7 years ago

The quality of iama clearly declined and has not recovered. Is that success? Not by my standard. But it might be successful from Reddit's corporate point of view, since they are no longer paying her salary.

hos234• 7 years ago

Misguided yet understandable conclusion.

People enjoy doing things for others. It's a deep Need people have. If mass violence and wars, natural disasters of all kinds through the ages, have not been able to make us more selfish and wipe out that need, internet drama is not going to either.

The process is messy sure, and if you are experiencing it for the first time it can be confusing, repulsive and misleading. It's not a good idea to follow those feelings and make conclusions. Because those conclusions will obscure from your view, the reasons why anything good happens in the world.

_Codemonkeyism2• 7 years ago

People enjoy power over other people. The benefit of closing questions or moderation on Stack Overflow is questionable.

mellosouls5• 7 years ago

If sure you didn't intend it, but your tone "misguided", "if you are experiencing it for the first time..." is rather condescending.

Bear in mind there are many of us with many years in the online trenches who have reached the same conclusion - participation is one thing; giving over a huge part of your time and energy is more questionable.

Also the idea that people do it out of an altruistic need to help may be true in some cases but neglects the significant motivation of validation, the need to feel noticed and appreciated through upvotes and other reputation buzzes, and the following increase in "power" and "status", which isn't so obviously positive and healthy.

scarejunba2• 7 years ago

Oh no, I've been around this stuff for decades and I contribute to Wikipedia. It's the tying your self-worth and identity to it that's going to lead to unhappiness. I like contributing to Wikipedia. If I were banned, I'd just eat it and go away. It wouldn't hurt me.

baud14725810• 7 years ago

One of the forum I'm a member of had some drama the last two weeks, over forum avatars. First all the avatars were replaced by the one from a notorious moderator/news poster making browsing a very interesting experience, at least for myself, since I recognize people there more by avatar than handle and I was catching myself "nope, that's not that mod, it's so-and-so".

Then all the sidebar info (name, posts count, location, badges and tags) and forum signatures were removed, so you'd get no information on who's posting, making it nearly 4chan-style (not a big change on the usual level of discourse there, though). And yesterday only the users who have donated money (either to the forum or to fundraisers events) have their info + signatures back.

thanatropism• 7 years ago

Reddit is one hell of a case study where owners were willing to let a lot of user goodwill burn and came out on top.

Heck, I was one type of user (wrote comments, had a 6+ year account) until things started to change. Years later, I became a mobile user to scroll through the memes because I wanted something to infini-scroll.

The gamble was that whatever was left of the old reddit would be a springboard for a more conventional user-generated content platform. They were right.

mellosouls5• 7 years ago

There is no detail of the actual argument, just loads of people claiming to be in the know and indicating toxic behaviour and dramatic battles behind the scenes.

There's a lot of flouncing resignations and "we need to talk" style essays also revealing little of substance.

Considering the passion involved some people have clearly been hurt, but perhaps that's due to the amount of time they have invested in somebody else's commercial enterprise ("our community") while believing it's something more.

Perhaps what they are trying to say is the "something more" (presumably the voluntary contributions) is being undermined by paid staff. It's not clear.

At the moment it all reads a bit like a tin pot Game of Thrones though.

mieseratte6• 7 years ago

There's a lot of flouncing resignations and "we need to talk" style essays also revealing little of substance.

I feel similarly, I've read all of Monica Cellio's posts and still have no real idea what is going on. Lot's of talk of DMs and messages and emails, but nothing concrete posted, just he said / she said, all while alleging personal innocence and purity.

If there is some concrete evidence and examples, put up or shut up. This is the internet, your word isn't worth much.

Dayshine• 7 years ago

Well, they were internally discussing a proposed Code of Conduct. I imagine mods are bound by an NDA, and management are choosing not to share.

caymanjim• 7 years ago

I was going to write essentially this. Obvious there was a disagreement, obviously there are at least two sides to the story, but after reading a number of meta posts (and responses to the meta posts), including from the person whose firing apparently started it all, I haven't seen a single statement about what the actual issue was. I don't see any value in publicly complaining about treatment without providing details about what actually occurred.

All I see is a handful of people saying "I liked that person and I don't think they should have been fired". I'm not sure what the larger community is supposed to do with this information.

MauranKilom5• 7 years ago

perhaps that's due to the amount of time they have invested in somebody else's commercial enterprise ("our community") while believing it's something more.
Perhaps what they are trying to say is the "something more" (presumably the voluntary contributions) is being undermined by paid staff. It's not clear.

You have it right, this matches sentiments I've read by long-term contributors. For many of them, contributing to "our community" and improving SO as a knowledge base are sufficient motivation to donate vast amounts of free time. If SO no longer cares to at least pretend they are more than a corporate entity that extracts money from voluntary unpaid labor, those contributions will likely dwindle.

legostormtroopr• 7 years ago

Its bittersweet to see Stack Overflow continue its downward spiral. Given all that is happening there, I'd give it about 12 months before they start implementing a paywall there of some description.

Insanity• 7 years ago

I doubt the paywall idea to be honest. They have other revenue streams like SO for teams.

perlgeek• 7 years ago

Do Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky still a say in how SE is run? If yes, now would be the perfect time to step in and moderate the discussion.

romanovcode• 7 years ago

He quit just a month or so ago. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2019/03/28/the-next-ceo-of-st...

mellosouls5• 7 years ago

In the linked post Jeff Atwood is in the comments moaning about the title.

aedron• 7 years ago

I believe it was also Jeff Atwood who, for the longest time, could not fathom why people did not like being forced to use OpenID to log into Stack Overflow. Like, he could literally not fathom it and agonized in blog posts over his own inability to understand people (he was quite honest about it). Even though they caved on this point, to this day Stack Overflow actively fights new users trying to get in and participate on the platform (I have long since given up).

w-m• 7 years ago

One of the moderators resigned by citing a persistent pattern of corporate missteps and a monumentally deplorable moderator dismissal.

Jeff Atwood commented under the resignation: "It is definitely hard to see long time deep contributors go, but this is sometimes the way of life. I don't begrudge anyone after ~10 years wanting a change."

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/389906/moderator-re...

Hardly seems helpful to me in calming down the heated minds.

baud14725810• 7 years ago

Jeff Atwood had left half a decade or more ago, to work on a forum platform, called discourse. Joel Spolsky was CEO until last month, but I don't know how much he worked directly on the Q&A.

Izkata2• 7 years ago

Atwood has not worked there since 2012 and has no say in the day-to-day operations: https://blog.codinghorror.com/what-does-stack-overflow-want-...

raxxorrax• 7 years ago

I see a lot of people arguing about mods being too strict.

I abhor the recent trend of content decontamination like many others do. But for Q&A sites like SE, I think it is a necessity to stay on topic.

Yes, some moderators might have been too eager in some cases, happened to me too. But since these people are all volunteers, I think they should get some support from the community.

I mean I might have to look for another job if SE ever gets shut down and a lot of knowledge would immediately be lost.

Many people seem to know some mods personally. I have spend a lot of time on that site and couldn't even name one moderator by name/handle.

Quite ironic that a site with a wealth of knowledge has problems with monetization. Some things in the internet economy seem to be quite off.

TheOtherHobbes• 7 years ago

IME business cultures polarise along the politics/product axis.

When politics - i.e. status games and power plays - are prioritised over product quality, bad things happen.

Unfortunately SE seems to have chosen the former over the latter. I have suspicions that amateur modding is part of the problem.

I hope SE doesn't shut down, because currently it's still helpful in spite of itself - although probably more for experienced users than absolute beginners.

But I think a lot of people would like to see a saner and more concise alternative with a more generous and less confrontational culture.

dandare• 7 years ago

necessity to stay on topic

Try a little exercise: ask a computer literate person not familiar with SE to find out what questions are on-topic on https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/

aloisdg• 7 years ago

Ask about...

    software development methods and practices
    requirements, architecture, and design
    quality assurance and testing
    configuration, build, and release management

Not all questions work well in our format. Avoid questions that are primarily opinion-based, or that are likely to generate discussion rather than answers.

Questions that need improvement may be closed until someone fixes them.

Don't ask about...

    explaining, writing or debugging code
    support for tools or products
    finding or recommending products or services, including tools, libraries or packages, programming languages, books, scholarly papers, tutorials, articles, or blogs
    career or education advice
    legal advice or aid

from the faq/tour: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/tour

MrStonedOne3• 7 years ago

This is natural selection at work.

Stack Exchange has become a frustrating site to use.

"Closed as duplicate: different and unrelated question"

reopen further explaining the question and how its not related

"Closed as duplicate: the first question that was immediately closed with no replies"

OR!

Google around, find SE link on issue, everybody is arguing about why the user wants to do it that why, convinces them to do it another way, only I don't have that option, so I open my own question, and its closed as a dupe of the one from google where the original question was never answered.

Post helpful answer that actually answers the users question as asked without berating them for wanting to do it that way

Get yelled at in the comments for creating noise?

---

The moral of the story is that stack exchange needs to die so that something else can come from its ashes that is able to look back at SE as an example of how not to do shit.

Avamander11• 7 years ago

It would help to just remove the current moderators that are super pedantic about building a "knowledge base", when actually they just like exercising their power.

I've also noticed a recent trend that moderators on SO are also now deleting questions to stop any objections to the close votes from lower-ranked users, it's ridiculous.

LeoNatan2513• 7 years ago

Questions are rarely deleted by moderators. The community, through voting, is very often the one to delete through voting directly, or through severe downvoting, in which case a bot removes bad questions. And if you have higher score, you can still see these deleted questions and answers.

LeoNatan2513• 7 years ago

What you are describing is human nature. The same things happen on Quora and other Q&A sites. As long as human nature doesn't change, the same patterns will emerge.

MrStonedOne3• 7 years ago

As long as there isn't a push to fix it and prevent it and stop it, and coach around it, the issue doesn't get solved.

That sounds like defeatist attitude.

Stack Exchange could add a rule forbidding asking why or adding answers that have caveats the question asker already said in op were unacceptable and deal with part of the issue

They could also add a system to review, rate, and appeal moderator actions, and penalize people who's moderator actions aren't proper.

They could also add a regular segment to their blog or meta that is just about showcasing improper moderator actions in the light of this is why they thought that was the proper action, this is what they missed, this is how we can avoid that kind of mistake in the future.

But all of this really has to be built in from the ground up, as no existing mod community with go along with that being added after the fact.

rusk5• 7 years ago

Ah yes, the good old "X/Y Problem" [0]

Doesn't matter if Y is non-negotiable, or if I've purposely constrained Y, to get a specific answer for a specific technology.

How infuriating for a "Questions and Answers" site, to be told when you're asking a question, that the question you're asking is wrong, and that "you should instead have asked ..."

I swear to god, the SO mods are the dumbest, most priggish, humourless beaureucrats in existence.

[0] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/66377/what-is-the-x...

ceejayoz8• 7 years ago

About 90% of the time it is an XY problem, though. A couple clarifying questions and it turns out the OP really needed something much simpler.

For example, people who insist they can’t use a Laravel package because of “performance”, but it turns out they just don’t know how the composer autoloader works.

Avamander11• 7 years ago

I would be okay with the moderation if there were some constraints to non-community mods. I find these kafkaesque processes unacceptable where same people downvote, close, dismiss flags and delete.

It's just impossible that they don't make any mistakes judging the questions but SO makes it near impossible to fight back or correct any mistakes you might've made (mistakes they don't really tell you, keep in mind).

In the end StackExchange owners should decide on what's the point of SO, if it's meant to be a historical archive about solutions that are often outdated and pedantically kept like that, citing vague rules. Or do they want a site where people can ask questions, actually get helpful corrections and to get up-to-date answers - basically as the smaller communities are where people haven't accumulated reputation in (tens of) thousands.

dtech• 7 years ago

XY Problem is very real though, especially among beginners, which by its nature SO has a lot of.

bane• 7 years ago

You see this phenomenon here on HN all the time. Find anybody asking a question or help to figure something out and the first couple answers will likely be "why are you doing it that way?", followed by almost completely useless advice to do something else entirely a completely different way.

commandlinefan3• 7 years ago

the dumbest, most priggish, humourless beaureucrats

Clearly you've never been to reddit...

AnIdiotOnTheNet3• 7 years ago

to be told when you're asking a question, that the question you're asking is wrong

I've long associated this behavior with Linux evangelists, and one wonders how much cross over there is with the people who answer questions on SO. It seems like both categories would be attractive to the kind of holier-than-thou mindset that would do this.

mark-r7• 7 years ago

Part of the problem is that it's not just mods, it's anybody who's gained enough points to get some extra power on the site. Without a formal vetting process beyond "got enough points?" there's no way to control the quality of the actions.

squeaky-clean• 7 years ago

I deleted my account when I had a notification that a 5 year old question of mine was edited to remove a "thanks for any help" at the end. This was after the blog post stating SE had an unfriendliness problem and they would stop doing things like that.

Edit: Wow speaking of edits, am I reading this right that Jeff Atwood himself edited the title to remove the word "stealing"?

haasted• 7 years ago

There is an unfortunate karma-reward for making edit suggestions. This regularly results in people making tonnes of similar edits across the site, eg correcting a common spelling error, adding slightly-related tags, or, like your case, removing things that to a Puritan appears superfluous to the question.

Aeolun2• 7 years ago

It seems he does not enjoy being called a thief?

pfortuny• 7 years ago

Yep: it seems so. That is pretty unbelievable; one posts a question and it gets CHANGED.

carlesfe• 7 years ago

Hah, exactly my experience:

Open question about potential Android bug. I mention I have checked threads A, B, and C, and the symptoms of my bug are different, therefore why I opened a new question

"Closed as duplicate: thread A"

Sigh.

ratsmack2• 7 years ago

Google leads me to the site because I have the exact problem. I'm excited to see someone has already asked the same questions that I would on the problem. Then I see the dead end and wonder if anyone actually read and understood the question.

"Moderators" with a preconceived notion of what the question or subject is all about are not moderators.

tester347• 7 years ago

How is that possible that I created like 100 questions on SO/SE over years and 90+% of them weren't closed/marked?

Im that lucky or people tend to do not care about quality of their questions and then cry about how SO is bad?

fourthark4• 7 years ago

Maybe you have better communication skills than average, happen to include enough code so that people know you are putting in the effort.

IME down/close votes have at least as much to do with soft skills and English proficiency as quality of the underlying question.

detaro• 7 years ago

Did your questions fit in a pattern of questions that SE fails at, or did they have straight-forward answers?

cujo• 7 years ago

Funny thing, I frequent a few of the SE sites, and the only ones that have this problem are the tech ones.

apacheCamel• 7 years ago

I feel like there is a lot to be said about this. It could be that a large portion of the tech sector is living up to the stereotypical "arrogant/egotistical/know-it-all" label that we get hit with quite often.

jmngomes• 7 years ago

Could it be that the problem is just a lot more visible on those specific sites, because they have a lot more users than any of the others?

https://stackexchange.com/sites?view=list#traffic

pjc503• 7 years ago

StackExchange needs a sibling forum.

I know forums are in opposition to everything that SE stands for, but for quite a lot of cases the questioner would benefit more from a back-and-forth, or open-ended discussion, and then at the end of the process if it's been refined then turn it into a question. If not, then let the thread auto-close and maybe even expire into deletion.

Also, any SE equivalent needs to understand the power dynamic between questioners and answerers, and what motivates people to put in the huge volunteer effort on which it's built.

zbentley• 7 years ago

Programmers, among others, are notoriously unable to give up on arguments. What makes you think discussion would help someone refine inquiries into a question rather than just an endless tribal war or bikeshedding session?

Additionally, I can't imagine any format less friendly to a beginner/intermediate programmer than an endless thread of experts arguing minutiae and holy-wars couched as objective fact. Even as an advanced user, sometimes I want a straight and to the point answer, even if it's not the best possible one, so I can get on with my work or research from there.

Remember, SE is foremost a site for readers seeking existent answers. Not askers. Not answerers. Neither of those last two groups has dwindled substantially enough in response to askers/answerers complaints to impact the experience of users seeking existent answers. Therefore, in my opinion, SE still works well.

jkeuhlen• 7 years ago

Each site has a chat room where you can have the back-and-forth to clarify a question or refine it. So this already exists to some degree.

apostacy2• 7 years ago

One of the most frustrating things is when SE modes decide to deputize themselves on behalf of third parties, and try to enforce the laws of other countries or the intellectual property rights of decades old software.

I've seen questions about how to bypass DRM on 20 year old software deleted. And why do they assume that the DMCA applies in other countries? What if you are asking how to build an unauthorized media player in a market where it is not for sale anyway?

I remember in like 2011, someone asked how to virtualize OSX Tiger on a non Apple host because they needed to use this proprietary software for their business. The top answer was that it was 100% impossible to do this (not true) and that they were a horrible human being for even considering it because it violated Apple's TOS. I've also seen this happen when people want to do things like retrieve music that they paid for off of their devices.

I have heard that in Saudi Arabia husbands have a legal right to monitor their wives communications. So if a Saudi woman posted on SE asking how to remove a keylogger her husband installed, would it be deleted for violating local law?

Or what if a Saudi woman simply wanted help cracking the Google authorized wife-tracking app[1], so she could flee? That would be violating local laws, and upsetting Google.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2019/02/12/693994447/apple-google-critic...

marcosdumay3• 7 years ago

And why do they assume that the DMCA applies in other countries?

The company is on the US, so it would be illegal for them to keep the answer.

ridaj• 7 years ago

Talking about X/Y problem — the actual incident described here doesn't seem to have anything to do with it, but rather to the ham-fisted handling of a disagreement between the company and a moderator. Or is there some relation between the two, eg was the disagreement about how to handle answers to what look like the wrong questions to ask?

edgarvaldes• 7 years ago

Post helpful answer that actually answers the users question as asked without berating them for wanting to do it that way
Get yelled at in the comments for creating noise?

Problem is: SE can edit and rephrase the whole question in order to be more helpful (both the question and the answer) for future visitors. The original question and intent from the OP doesnt matter that much to SE.

sambe• 7 years ago

I would argue it was always like that. Some of it seemed to be actively encouraged by Jeff Atwood/moderators/senior users. You forgot another common one: "not clear what you are asking". I normally have to reply to this with "the question is in the final paragraph". Which often results negative comments and perhaps the question being closed. Or trying to edit a bug out of an answer, being refused because you didn't change enough, tidying up some wording, and getting the edit rejected for supposedly changing what the person is saying.

I don't think any of it is specific to SO - online communities seem to attract people who like everything to be extremely specific and rule-based, regardless of whether that creates the best outcomes. I've seen mods destroy several forums.

SO gets a lot of other stuff right though. I don't think it will die anytime soon, nor does it need to in order to improve things.

mark-r7• 7 years ago

I've seen proposed edits on my own answers that would have changed them from correct to incorrect, so that's a real problem.

GordonS2• 7 years ago

I agree about SO becoming a frustrating site because of crappy mods - in particular, questions being closed by someone who plainly hasn't even read the new question... drives me nuts!

However, it really doesn't look like natural selection is at work here - I recognise several names in the list of resigned/fired mods, and they were some of the good ones.

No, it really looks like SO is well on the way to "becoming evil", forsaking community in the name of profit - which cannot end well for them.

dwohnitmok• 7 years ago

AFAICT among mods there is a good deal of discontent because of the precise opposite reason. In their opinion Stack Overflow has gone overboard with the "Welcome Wagon" and made it overly accommodating to newcomers without thought for the downstream impacts to mods and quality answers.

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/386324/the-stack-ov...

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/331513/lets-take-a-...

This particular wave seems to be touched off by the firing of a well-loved mod over disagreements in a new CoC.

bobloblaw45• 7 years ago

Man as someone trying to learn something new I avoid posting to that site like the plague. Oh yeah I'll search but you couldn't pay me to make a post because I've seen what happens to the people that post the question I was searching for.

ahaferburg• 7 years ago

None of that has anything to do with the topic discussed here.

_Codemonkeyism2• 7 years ago

Stack Exchange has developed the same group of power people that rule Wikipedia. They have arcane rules with the major effect of keeping people out.

Stack Exchange is good to read, but hard to ask a question that is not immediately due to some rule.

sireat• 7 years ago

What I am curious why haven't we seen a quality mashup of a SE site? Some sort of interesting curation/filters etc.

Even the new CC-share-alike allows commercial mixins https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ .

So being that SE started with SO and thus heavy programming emphasis there should be a plethora of interesting mashups.

Instead the only SE content derived sites have been banal copies.

kevin_thibedeau• 7 years ago

Google will kill it like the Wikipedia clones.

thrownaway954• 7 years ago

In order for a community to succeed, there must be a continual rotation of the people in power so that no one can be corrupted by it. Moderators to me are the same as a dictatorship. There shouldn't be any moderators on SE, the community should be voting on what is valid question and upvoting the best answers as it has always done. There is no need for a single person to police each community. If something is off topic then the community can vote on removing or moving the topic or answer.

The issue with SE is the fact that they have allowed moderators to have too much power and too control over the communities. In changing their policies it has caused a removal of the moderators so that communities are force to come together to survive then I feel that this was a good step for SE as a whole. Though there will be some hard times at first I think that SE will become the site that it founders actually envisioned.

baud14725810• 7 years ago

I think the issue is not just moderator vs rest of the community, but also SE company (well, its employees) vs the moderator vs the rest of the community, with all groups having different purposes and goal (and even the moderators and community have more sub-groups, around openness, quality, governance and so on). It's not just the case of mods having too much power.

baud14725810• 7 years ago

And one could even add more fault lines, between SO's community and mods and the rest of the sites of SE, since the rest of the sites don't have the same issues as SO, for example regarding discrimination, inclusivness, welcoming..., but rules are made and applied by the SE company on all the sites, creating even more issues.

fabian2k• 7 years ago

In most, if not all of the resignations the primary reason for resigning was the way the firing of one moderator was handled. The internally announced changes to the policies were not necessarily the reason for the resignations. The headline is pretty misleading in that regard.

chrshawkes• 7 years ago

I personally decided to boycott the site for several reasons explained here. In short, the site allows dicks to run rampant and I find more answers on GitHub these days.

http://bit.ly/2mfUvCs

Jun82• 7 years ago

My understanding is that the train of events that resulted in mod Monica Cellio’s demodding from SE started with a gender-related complaint tweet (https://medium.com/@cellio/dear-stack-overflow-we-need-to-ta...). Companies are now very sensitive to this pattern, esp. true for SE due to the ongoing changes there.

ForHackernews• 7 years ago

esp. true for SE due to the ongoing changes there

For the benefit of those of us who don't closely follow Stack Overflow meta-drama, can you explain what this is alluding to?

Jun82• 7 years ago

Recent change in management discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21062191 was widely interpreted as getting ready for SE to be sold. At this point any sort of bad publicity would be shunned, especially. of the “it’s not a welcoming community” kind.

lonelappde4• 7 years ago

That Twitter kerfuffle was in 2018. Has there been ongoing train of events since then?

Monica mentions "this rule mandates specific, positive actions." but not what the rule is, which I find disquieting. What is the rule, and if it's so bad, and also public (it's a new rule everyone has to know, right?), why is being kept secret?

hapless2• 7 years ago

Using the correct pronouns for trans people. That’s it.

Summoner• 7 years ago

There's been a steady breakdown of trust and goodwill between SO Employee's and moderators/power users over the last year. Part of why this blew up so fast is probably that there's no good will left between the two groups anymore; and people immediately assumed the worst and reacted in anger.

This is a decent (long) summary of what's been happening.

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/331513/lets-take-a-...

kazinator• 7 years ago

You know, maybe removing a whole site from the "Hot Network Questions" list is the easiest thing to do technically, if the goal is to stop certain questions from that site from showing up in that list right now?

Mods should have cooler heads than this, I think.

altfredd• 7 years ago

And then they removed "Hot Network Questions" altogether (replaced them with "Network Questions, Manually Featured by Moderators"). And then all of moderators left. Wow.

jjakque• 7 years ago

Anyone else felt disconcerting about the reoccurring theme of platform attracts communicated generated content, only to shift interest/motive once critical mass is achieved?

marcosdumay3• 7 years ago

Community starts with good people; creates good content; attracts more people; that new people tends to average; contents tends to average; new people tends even more to average; contents quality becomes average; community isn't good anymore.

The cycle certainly didn't start with groups over a computer network, but I think it's very unlikely that it started before written texts. So there's ~8k years window there. It's not literally timeless, but does feel like so.

Wowfunhappy5• 7 years ago

GP wasn't talking about the community, but of changes dictated by the corporation running the website for that community, which is an important distinction.

umvi• 7 years ago

So why hasn't an alternative to SO emerged where users can come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and he who has no money, come, ask and learn! Come, ask questions and get expert answers without money and without price

MauranKilom5• 7 years ago

Isn't that how literally any forum operates? Maybe the SO format has some merit that made it come out so far ahead of any kind of forum?

Wowfunhappy5• 7 years ago

I am legitimately curious—and concerned—about the relicensing of answers. It really seems as though they shouldn't be able to do that. And if they can, can they also change the license to "all rights reserved by SE"?

oliwarner2• 7 years ago

Like GPL, CCBYSA allows you —the licensee— to pick a future version of the same license. That is, if you receive a copy of work under v3, you can make it available under v4, no questions asked.

That's all SE has done here. Exercised a clause in the license. If you don't like that, don't submit content under licenses that allow it.

Wowfunhappy5• 7 years ago

I don't think that's true, see: https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/4.0_upgrade_guidelines

Original contributions remain under prior version unless express permission to upgrade is obtained.

Pfhreak2• 7 years ago

Reading between the lines, it looks like a queer mod felt unsupported by SE over a long period of time, and SE eventually decided to make a code of conduct change. These mods disagreed with that change (some using language like "thought crime") which precipitated their resignations?

MrStonedOne3• 7 years ago

It looks more like one mod voiced something potentially ranging between legit concerns to outright argumentative opposition (we don't know) and got demodded for that, and a bunch of other mods are quitting in protest in part because of that, and in part because they feel it went from a mod as first class citizens community with a business component to a top down structure of decisions they have no say in.

Basically if there was going to be a new rule, some of the mods would have preferred if SE had came to meta and asked for help writing it and feedback on it, and instead of being told what the new rule was going to be.

commandlinefan3• 7 years ago

reading between the lines

The lines here are so blurry, I can’t make heads or tails out of any of this. All I can tell for sure is that some of the mods are upset about something (but won’t or can’t say what) and they’re leaving SO. The forced abstraction of this whole saga reminds me of stories I’ve heard from people who lived under communist dictatorships: they’d have to peel back multiple layers of insinuations to try to figure out what was actually meant. The way some of the commenters on here are dancing around saying anything concrete suggests that there are a few people who do know what’s going on but are afraid to come out and say what it is.

csande172• 7 years ago

I read through the resignation notices linked from OP, and this one seems to provide some more detail: https://christianity.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6718/b...

twic3• 7 years ago

Hold on, it's not clear to me that Aza's and Monica Cello's resignations are connected like this.

zo1• 7 years ago

Aza's formal resignation is here:

https://literature.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1195/res...

MauranKilom5• 7 years ago

It's not as simple and linear as you make it out here, from what I can tell. The individual fact bits are right, but the story you paint is too simple.

One big point is that many mods resigned not over the future CoC change but over the plain unprofessional "termination" of the one mod in question (in multiple cases this being straw-camel-back regarding other recent missteps of the SO company). I recommend at least this interaction: https://judaism.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5197

wendyshu3• 7 years ago

What's the best alternative to Stack Overflow?

danesparza• 7 years ago

Well ... Google?

shrugs

commandlinefan3• 7 years ago

Nearly every google search I’ve done for the past decade pulls up SO first.

jolmg2• 7 years ago

Official and unofficial documentation, IRC, mailing lists, forums, and source code.

kaffeemitsahne• 7 years ago

Github issues is something I've seen mentioned in this context.

LoneWolf123• 7 years ago

Back in the day I used to be among top users on that site - they even sent me a T-shirt at some time. Left several years ago, as the site became toxic.

I'm not mentioning this "top user" thing on my resume anymore, because not relevant.

The site is still an excellent source of information about all things that were cool ten years ago, such as Java, Spring, SQL, Python.

dimillian• 7 years ago

So much politics about that. I go on on SO from Google, find solution to my problem. Sometime add my own answers. And sometime I post question when I can't find solution. End of the story. Why the fuck it need to be so complicated?

twic3• 7 years ago

The problem is, of course, the humans.

lonelappde4• 7 years ago

Because at the end of the day, SO/SE and everything is in the service of human culture, not a Platonic ideal in and of itself. So the culture wars fold back in on it.

quantguy11959• 7 years ago

I got downvoted to oblivion for reporting a bug to them, with several SO devs trying to explain it’s not a bug, this doesn’t surprise me.

chance_state• 7 years ago

Is there any detail anywhere about why Monica Cellio was fired? Will no one leak the internal chat that was supposedly the justification for her firing?

All I can see online is everyone vaguely talking around the issue.

Make the facts public and let people decide for themselves.

calibas• 7 years ago

Why did this story drop off the front page so quickly when it was one of the most popular?

Is the flag system being abused?

Havoc• 7 years ago

RIP SE

Reminds me of the company take overs where the key asset is human capital and they all just walk out the door after the deal. Congrats you bought an empty building for billions

Don't think SE is ever going to be profitable if they can't keep key figures happy

csande172• 7 years ago

This resignation notice from a moderator on the Christianity Stack Exchange appears to provide the most detail about what's going on: https://christianity.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6718/b...

wendyshu3• 7 years ago

Aha, the Jordan Peterson issue.

doordonot• 7 years ago

Yes, it's exactly the same issue; FORCING specific speech which is quite different than BANNING some speech (hate speech for instance).

9HZZRfNlpR3• 7 years ago

The whole pronoun drama that is inherently American is tearing down international communities left and right despite it not being even an issue.

chipotle_coyote3• 7 years ago

If it really wasn't even an issue, this wouldn't be coming up as often as it does, though, would it? To me, "if someone tells you they prefer singular 'they', use that" is non-controversial, just like "if someone tells you they go by 'Goldie,' use that" should be. Insisting "No, I am going to call you by the pronouns I believe are 'correct' for you" is akin to "No, your legal name is 'Marigold,' and I am going to call you 'Mary.'" Insisting that you will not, under any circumstances, call a person what they've requested you call them is -- to me -- pretty clearly being a discourteous jerk.

There are a lot of valid complaints about the way Stack Overflow moderates in general, but I don't get the impression that this particular squabble is over moderation practices -- it seems to be about upcoming changes to SO's Code of Conduct. I don't know what those changes are, so I'll reserve judgement. I am certainly hoping that it doesn't boil down to "I cannot abide being required to refer to transgender women with 'her' and 'she'," though.

tomohawk• 7 years ago

Imposing speech codes is most definitely an issue. It goes to the core of deeply held values. It replaces tolerance with intolerance as the value to be upheld.

Those imposing the CoC are getting exactly what they want - driving anyone who disagrees from the field.

johnwheeler• 7 years ago

The old system, whatever it was, incentivized bad mod behavior and ruined the experience.

rurban• 7 years ago

Without studying it thoroughly I would comment: Great, finally! Moderator abuse was the biggest problem on SO, without any oversight.

cannabis_sam• 7 years ago

The whole concept is pretty asinine:

”Collect points to gain the power to fuck with other peoples questions!”

hapless2• 7 years ago

The policy in question appears to be affirmatively requiring moderators not to (deliberately) mis-gender trans people, or allow user content to do the same.

All these ex-mods wrote these coy essays with discussions of free will and human rights in order to avoid discussing the issue at hand.

Trans people are surely a more important part of the StackExchange community and business than a few unpaid volunteers.

I am not sorry that Monica’s feelings were hurt by a demand for basic human decency.

yanderekko• 7 years ago

The policy in question appears to be affirmatively requiring moderators not to (deliberately) mis-gender trans people

This is either incorrect or relies on an unconventionally broad notion of "misgendering." Normally misgendering is understood to be the act of using pronouns other than a person's preferred pronouns, the point of controversy is that now simply avoiding pronouns can be considered an act of misgendering. This is new territory.

lilyball• 7 years ago

If you very conspicuously avoid using pronouns for someone, it’s pretty obvious what’s going on and that you’re deliberately avoiding gendering someone correctly. It’s not as bad as using the wrong pronouns, but it’s still very disrespectful.

damnyou4• 7 years ago

The line is when you treat trans and nonbinary people differently from cis people.

A large number of Stack Exchange mods resigning over new policies

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