8 ms·

The title is misleading, this is not an apology. As a former operator of a (much smaller) community website, I understand the motives behind SE actions. They w

The title is misleading, this is not an apology. As a former operator of a (much smaller) community website, I understand the motives behind SE actions. They want to avoid discussions about gender-neutral pronouns and other contentious topics completely. There are only risks and no benefits for SE business in such discussions.They actually do not want discussions, just questions and answers. Jeff Atwood once wrote a blog post about their effort to stiffle discussion on SE sites. Notice how their comments are difficult to use and see. Unfortunately, SE is many people with different goals, someone made the move to update the CoC, and now SE management has to tame the public outrage. IMO, the right management decision is to silently fire or move the person behind the CoC update, remove moderator status from Monica forever and publicly define limits to SE discussions in future annoucements.

kjaftaedi 7y ago
Curious why you would remove moderator status from Monica? From my understanding it appears that she was demoted for merely posing relevant questions. As I don't believe SE has even made any specific claims backing up their decision, I'm curious as to why you suggest this is the correct decision to make.
- sam_lowry_ 7y ago
  To send the message to other users and moderators that such discussions are unwelcome. SE has to balance between the need to expand into topics like judaism.stackexchange.com and islam.stackechange.com while remaining a q&a business, not a flamebait-generator business.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - ryan-allen 7y ago
    They may need to apply separate CoC's to different SE's. You can't have bona fide Religious SE's and the compelled use of personal pronouns co-exist. If they think otherwise they are delusional, one will end up waging the other, and dogs only have one tail.
- stefan_ 7y ago
  I think they should remove many many more moderators, for no reason other than not doing so risks turning their site and resource into a Wikipedia 2.0, a place where cliquey moderators hang out to discuss their favorite flame bait topics all day, populate gigabytes of meta pages and lash out at unwitting, novel contributors. Wikipedia think a lack of a fancy SPA editor is the reason behind their editor demographics, and they couldn't be further from the truth. Ideally start with just straight up removing half the current moderators. Pick at random.
  - MauranKilom 7y ago
    Can you briefly describe what you believe moderator duties on SE currently entail? I have reason to believe that there is a misunderstanding.
  - wincy 7y ago
    The Thanos plan for fixing StackExchange, really?
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
MauranKilom 7y ago
I'm under the impression that you misunderstand the CoC update procedure. It has not been updated. SE is hellbent on updating it in the future, and they explicitly stated that they are not willing to budge an inch on its gender-/pronoun-related contents. This is not accidental, there is not one single dissident behind it but the entire company. It will be the duty of the moderators to enforce the new CoC. The discussion in question arose in a mod-only forum (and later on an email conversation) and concerned what behaviors these rules sanction or disallow. It should be self-evident that moderators need to ask these questions and clarify these things in order to enforce them, and that none of this discussion is in itself to cause public outrage (because the public was not to know of any of this in the first place). Public outrage was _only_ sparked when Monica was unceremoniously fired without any explanation to her or the public. Predictably, the context being described by those privy to it has resulted in lots of pronoun- and gender-related discussions all over the place, but this is neither the primary problem for SE (significant parts of the moderation force leaving is, as well as this being the ~6th community PR nightmare in 1-2 years) nor was it in any way avoidable or unpredictable based on the plans of SE.
- yourbandsucks 7y ago
  Why the hell are pronouns a centerpiece of a CoC? Just be nice to people. For fuck's sake.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    > Why the hell are pronouns a centerpiece of a CoC? Because aggressive misgendering including by refusal to use the subject’s preferred pronouns is currently a significant form of harassment which is actively promoted by certain groups. > Just be nice to people. The fact that people aggressively refuse to do that is exactly what pronoun policies are responding to.
    - yourbandsucks 7y ago
      I'm gonna wade in hip-deep here and suggest that, given the size of the transgender community, the heat and hype of these issues are completely unwarranted. No hate towards anyone and I'll call anyone whatever they want as far as pronouns. But why is this a top-3 culture war issue? For a bunch of combatants who are overwhelmingly not trans and shouldn't really care? We need to think of a way to rise above without throwing anyone under the bus. It'd be better for both the trans community and society at large.
Mathnerd314 7y ago
For anyone interested, I think this is the section about stifling discussion, in his introduction to Discourse: https://blog.codinghorror.com/civilized-discourse-construction-kit/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/civilized-discourse-constructi... At Stack Exchange, one of the tricky things we learned about Q&A is that if your goal is to have an excellent signal to noise ratio, you must suppress discussion. Stack Exchange only supports the absolute minimum amount of discussion necessary to produce great questions and great answers. That's why answers get constantly re-ordered by votes, that's why comments have limited formatting and length and only a few display, and so forth. Almost every design decision we made was informed by our desire to push discussion down, to inhibit it in every way we could. Spare us the long-winded diatribe, just answer the damn question already. IDK, seems like Jeff Atwood no longer has much interest in SE and presumably the site is slowly imploding.
- wool_gather 7y ago
  > IDK, seems like Jeff Atwood no longer has much interest in SE and presumably the site is slowly imploding. Well, he left the site and the (SE) company in 2012 to start Discourse, so yes. But I agree with the second half of your sentence ("imploding").

kjaftaedi 7y ago

Curious why you would remove moderator status from Monica? From my understanding it appears that she was demoted for merely posing relevant questions. As I don't believe SE has even made any specific claims backing up their decision, I'm curious as to why you suggest this is the correct decision to make.

sam_lowry_ 7y ago
To send the message to other users and moderators that such discussions are unwelcome. SE has to balance between the need to expand into topics like judaism.stackexchange.com and islam.stackechange.com while remaining a q&a business, not a flamebait-generator business.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- ryan-allen 7y ago
  They may need to apply separate CoC's to different SE's. You can't have bona fide Religious SE's and the compelled use of personal pronouns co-exist. If they think otherwise they are delusional, one will end up waging the other, and dogs only have one tail.
stefan_ 7y ago
I think they should remove many many more moderators, for no reason other than not doing so risks turning their site and resource into a Wikipedia 2.0, a place where cliquey moderators hang out to discuss their favorite flame bait topics all day, populate gigabytes of meta pages and lash out at unwitting, novel contributors. Wikipedia think a lack of a fancy SPA editor is the reason behind their editor demographics, and they couldn't be further from the truth. Ideally start with just straight up removing half the current moderators. Pick at random.
- MauranKilom 7y ago
  Can you briefly describe what you believe moderator duties on SE currently entail? I have reason to believe that there is a misunderstanding.
- wincy 7y ago
  The Thanos plan for fixing StackExchange, really?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]

MauranKilom 7y ago

I'm under the impression that you misunderstand the CoC update procedure. It has not been updated. SE is hellbent on updating it in the future, and they explicitly stated that they are not willing to budge an inch on its gender-/pronoun-related contents. This is not accidental, there is not one single dissident behind it but the entire company. It will be the duty of the moderators to enforce the new CoC. The discussion in question arose in a mod-only forum (and later on an email conversation) and concerned what behaviors these rules sanction or disallow. It should be self-evident that moderators need to ask these questions and clarify these things in order to enforce them, and that none of this discussion is in itself to cause public outrage (because the public was not to know of any of this in the first place). Public outrage was _only_ sparked when Monica was unceremoniously fired without any explanation to her or the public. Predictably, the context being described by those privy to it has resulted in lots of pronoun- and gender-related discussions all over the place, but this is neither the primary problem for SE (significant parts of the moderation force leaving is, as well as this being the ~6th community PR nightmare in 1-2 years) nor was it in any way avoidable or unpredictable based on the plans of SE.

yourbandsucks 7y ago
Why the hell are pronouns a centerpiece of a CoC? Just be nice to people. For fuck's sake.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > Why the hell are pronouns a centerpiece of a CoC? Because aggressive misgendering including by refusal to use the subject’s preferred pronouns is currently a significant form of harassment which is actively promoted by certain groups. > Just be nice to people. The fact that people aggressively refuse to do that is exactly what pronoun policies are responding to.
  - yourbandsucks 7y ago
    I'm gonna wade in hip-deep here and suggest that, given the size of the transgender community, the heat and hype of these issues are completely unwarranted. No hate towards anyone and I'll call anyone whatever they want as far as pronouns. But why is this a top-3 culture war issue? For a bunch of combatants who are overwhelmingly not trans and shouldn't really care? We need to think of a way to rise above without throwing anyone under the bus. It'd be better for both the trans community and society at large.

Mathnerd314 7y ago

For anyone interested, I think this is the section about stifling discussion, in his introduction to Discourse: https://blog.codinghorror.com/civilized-discourse-construction-kit/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/civilized-discourse-constructi... At Stack Exchange, one of the tricky things we learned about Q&A is that if your goal is to have an excellent signal to noise ratio, you must suppress discussion. Stack Exchange only supports the absolute minimum amount of discussion necessary to produce great questions and great answers. That's why answers get constantly re-ordered by votes, that's why comments have limited formatting and length and only a few display, and so forth. Almost every design decision we made was informed by our desire to push discussion down, to inhibit it in every way we could. Spare us the long-winded diatribe, just answer the damn question already. IDK, seems like Jeff Atwood no longer has much interest in SE and presumably the site is slowly imploding.

wool_gather 7y ago
> IDK, seems like Jeff Atwood no longer has much interest in SE and presumably the site is slowly imploding. Well, he left the site and the (SE) company in 2012 to start Discourse, so yes. But I agree with the second half of your sentence ("imploding").