People are really really afraid to talk about this particular topic (which they don't mention in the statement), because this type of call-out to be banned happens a lot.
The book "The Coddling of the American Mind" is an amazing book that documents how this is happening in academia, and it's happening on the software world too. Most people in our industry, in the US, EU and others, tend to be moderate and/or centrists. We don't want to rock the boat; politics is fun to talk about but when that one guy and/or girl goes off in the office, everyone wants to change to topic or go back to their desks and code.
But under the surface, no one agrees with extremism; both extreme fake-left or extreme fake-right. I'd like to think the majority of people just want to live and be kind to each other, but that can lead to ambivalence when people with directional agendas want to push a narrative at the expense of everything else.
If people start talking about the hard issues, but do so respectfully and by making arguments that are sound, we should have clear, rational and reasonable debate. A decision might be made we don't agree with, but as long as the discussion happens, everyone can learn from it and we can agree to disagree and move on.
The polarization of groups of people over ideological lines has never ended well.
Saying that most people don't agree with extreme positions is a bit of a tautology, since positions are defined as "extreme" if few people agree with them. There is therefore nothing universal or fundamentally meaningful about this label, and the same position (e.g. support of interracial marriage) may be considered a perfectly normal or a radically extremist position depending on the time and place.
Eh, in some instances you can define extremeness relative to alternatives, not number of believers. Execution as a punishment is more extreme than a fine regardless of how many people favor execution over fines. I would argue that generally a position being extreme results in fewer believers, not that fewer believers results in a position being extreme.
Agreed. This is how we use the term in political science anyway. Even if an "extreme" opinion becomes majoritary, it remains just as extreme on a supposed "spectrum" of possibles. "More" than "extreme" usually takes you off-spectrum, e.g. anarchy (which is often considered beyond extreme right, at least in Europe) or "hive mind" would fit beyond extreme left ideas of collectivism (a sci-fi concept of unified minds and thinking, like colonies of ants but next level. lol.) Both are off the political spectrum though, can't describe them using the same elements.
Reality is obviously much more "blurry". Most political experts would argue (rightfully so, imho) that most "extreme" views are in fact not "left" or "right" of moderate ones; they sit in a different "plane" so to speak, a third space distinct from left/right (you'd indeed find a lot of right-ish and left-ish ideas mixed in with most "extreme" ideologies; you also find lots of moderate and extreme views in otherwise 'normal' (statistically) parties).
Left/right itself, or moderate/extreme, are also pretty poor and unsubstantial ways to define any idea or anyone, it's a poor man's shortcut to summarize a context, not ideas themselves. Most people today would sit far left of anyone in past history, for instance, while being much more individualistic at the same time.
Reality is complex. The media don't like complex (is media plural? shall I call it something else in pronoun?). Hence, theatric storytelling of the left versus the right, and/or moderates vs. extremes, iced with a general misunderstanding of statistics. I will now refrain from making any conclusion.
Reminds me of a concept called Overton window [0]. Just want to mention this describes how people behave, as in a human weakness. Not how people should behave to form optimal opinions / societies.
> Execution as a punishment is more extreme than a fine regardless of how many people favor execution over fines.
Not if you are talking about fining or destroying sentient robots. The sentient robot probably has a pretty good back-up system of his mind, so he can just respawn in a different body, his bank account, though, is singular and coupled to the identity that its brain can prove to be. So executing such a robot is not very extreme, it is at most an inconvenience. Taking his money though, is something that has a more lasting impact. At least this is what I made up.
The point I am making is that what is 'extreme' is dependent on context and there is no such thing as intrinsic extremeness.
> If people start talking about the hard issues, but do so respectfully and by making arguments that are sound, we should have clear, rational and reasonable debate. A decision might be made we don't agree with, but as long as the discussion happens, everyone can learn from it and we can agree to disagree and move on.
Ultimately what happens is these issues don't get talked about.
People in the center would rather just have an easy life and not deal with the "cancelling", doxxing, or career consequences that come with having a strong opinion, so don't engage.
That means that the extreme voices on either side end up dominating the conversation.
> I'd like to think the majority of people just want to live and be kind to each other
What you're getting to is the Golden rule in almost all human civilizations: treat others as you would like to be treated. The problem is when this rule broke down because the majority's "would like to be treated" became a hate crime to a small, but vociferous, radical contingent of the population.
> the majority of people just want to live and be kind to each other
Once you realize that people's politics reflect their values and the problems they see in their world (and which side they've bought into), it becomes a lot harder to stigmatize the other side...or even take a side.
> politics is fun to talk about but when that one guy and/or girl goes off in the office, everyone wants to change to topic or go back to their desks and code.
You're right, I just want to point out for those that aren't aware, this is on stack exchange's meta site. The rules for voting are different, downvotes are more likely than on stack overflow.
This really seems like a "respect mah authoritah!" situation followed by "oh crap it's blowing up, apply more power! This will not be re-litigated." Looking from the outside as someone who's mostly ignored SE for the last few years, this feels to me like something personal combined with making an opportunity.
I can't help but feel that the current "Director of Community" at the core of this will be moving to a different non-community position before long. It seems like a poor place to have someone who's managed to drive out a significant percentage of the volunteer moderators for the whole network.
This is what really irritates me about moderating in general. The whole thing is an exercise in power tripping. Considering whether a decision was misguided is forbidden. You must always be dictator. Mistakes are never made.
Devil's advocate: sports referees never admit a mistake, either. There's a calculus where the upsides of correcting a mistake are outweighed by the downsides of inviting more gamesmanship of your decisions.
(I know nothing about the SO situation, purely talking generalities here.)
>Last week we made an important decision for our community. We removed a moderator for repeatedly violating our existing Code of Conduct and being unwilling to accept our CM’s repeated requests to change their behavior.
Hang on a sec...
>their behaviour.
Wasn't monica fired for suggesting she used gender neutral pronouns generally? Because they said she should use the preferred gender specific pronoun when known?
>Wasn't monica fired for suggesting she used gender neutral pronouns generally?
It's more nuanced from what I understand^. I gather that Monica expressed the desire to find an alternative to using singular they - such as universally using pronoun-free language. Mind you, this was all in discussing a future code of conduct change and its eventual enforcement.
The topic is just very delicate, and in my eyes there is no line that you can draw where both sides are univerally happy. Words spoken/written with the best intentions and utmost respect can still leave others feel hurt or insulted, simply because there are no objective answers to certain differences in perception.
^I am not privy to "insider" info, but I have followed the situation closely and consumed most of what has been said on the metas publicly (outside of chat rooms).
> Wasn't monica fired for suggesting she used gender neutral pronouns generally?
In the comments to the linked question, Monica Cellio says StackOverflow have not told her what parts of the CoC she was violating. I don't think it's public knowledge why she was demodded.
(Is 'fired' an appropriate word to use, when Monica wasn't an employee?)
> Asked to confirm that Cellio was the moderator in question, a company spokesperson said, "Cellio (she/her) would not use stated pronouns, which violates our current CoC …
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
If a corporation ever admits doing something wrong, it's admissible evidence in a lawsuit against them. That's why corporations never admit any wrongdoing regardless of how obvious it is that they did.
(And before anyone post the usual "corporations suck" rant, the exact same principle applies to individuals. Anybody who ever watched James Duane's "Never talk to the police" video knows why. Why would it be any different for a corporation?)
That is an odd statement. Corporations admit wrongdoing or mistakes all the time and not to mention there could never be any lawsuit from something like this.
It is just that they introduced a rule and still feel it is a correct one.
Them introducing (in the future) a rule (which we don't know the details of as of yet) is more or less orthogonal to claiming that Monica violated the current CoC.
It's hard to be believe that people who are brave enough to deal with LGBTQIA issues in their own lives and face actual in-your-face challenges would actually give a crap what pronoun someone used on a technical forum, and it seems absurd to regulate such behavior. If I don't want to be a dick and am aware of the preference, then I will try and use the person's preferred pronoun - but I'm certainly not obligated to do so on SO or even in person. The other person can take offense or not, it is their/his/her own choice. I suppose the problem can be solved by just always using the person's name, or using other anaphora such as "the OP", or @username, etc.
The problem with forcing compliance is some people are naturally going to want to resist the demand regardless of their personal opinions.
I took a technical writing class in college where I attempted to use "they/their" as a gender neutral pronoun. This was not a political statement, I just felt it sounded more natural. The professor objected and gave me a disproportionately poor grade, insisting that I use either "he" or "he or she" instead. It felt unjust that a paper could be either an "A" or "D" because a handful of instances of "he" were written "they". To me, this felt like the professor was asserting authority, not trying to improve my writing.
When I showed him that the dictionary definition of "they" from Websters website included, "used to refer to a person of unspecified gender," he opted to make fun of me in front of the entire class (by saying, "oh, well if it's on the INTERNET, it must be true") and stand his ground on my grade.
Incensed, I tried my damnedest to get the grade over-tuned. I went to the other professor who taught the class, as she was an English teacher, unlike my current professor who was an Engineer: she took the other professor's side. I went to the Dean of the College with the same outcome.
I opted to make the irrational decision of standing my ground on principle in all future papers, taking a "D" in said writing class. Authority figures should keep this in mind, people have no problem acting against their own interest when you force them to do things, rather than just ask. It should be evident that I'm still bothered by this all these years later, and probably cemented my opinion on this subject for the rest of my life.
I had, as a student, a row with one of my professors. We chemically hated each other and it was showing (he was mean, so I was mean as well).
Then came the exam (oral) . 6 questions, I easily answered 5 of them, the 6th was extremely difficult (neeed much more time and literature).
I told him that the first 5 one are easy but that I could not do the last one because (explanation).
To what he said "well, you see, the better, brighter students manage to do it. I will have to just give you 20/20 and not the 25 or 30/20 you could have had as a bonus".
He was looking at me as on a spit on the floor. I was looking at him as on a bird excrement on a window.
But I told him later that he is one of the most rightful people I know and despite the fact that we will never look at each other in a kind way I truly admire his fairness.
On the positive side, I did manage to convince my technical writing professor to allow they/them in my paper after showing recent style guide changes allowing it in formal writing. This was in 2016, though.
So, the solution you proposed is exactly what the moderators asked to do. Seems fair enough to me. They were told that not playing the pronoun game is the same as harassing whomever they are speaking to.
The whole situation is ridiculous to me. How have we come to a point where not only do people think I care in the slightest who or what they have sex with (or don't, whatever), but they demand I call them by some word they made up to classify themselves as something? Don't tell me what I can or can't say, and I wont tell you who/what you can and can't screw.
How do fascists not realize they are being such? "You don't have proper thoughts on matters so you aren't allowed to speak".
So, you consider it your choice to decide if people should be described using Male or female pronouns, and believe it would be fascist for someone to say "actually, I'm Male. Please refer to me as he, not she?".
It just feels impolite to me to not refer to people by their gender. Is it that upsetting to give people their name and gender? What right of yours does this infringe?
No, I'm saying I get to decide what I say, not you. If the gender neutral 'they' ,' you' etc aren't enough for you then we don't need to speak with each other.
What's impolite is demanding I conform to your view and forcing me to learn some words you made up and use them every time we speak.
And again, it's a self-applied label.
Don't force me to use your made up words, I won't tell you what to do with your life.
ps- I grew up in the 80s when gay and trans people were very much oppressed, unlike now. I stood up for their rights, got in actual fights for them on several occasions. And now im called CIS scum for being a straight male.
I have family members I've had to stand with against other family members because they were gay. I love them dearly and even to them I say 'I respect your liberties, please respect mine'.
As a trans person, it feels impolite (well, insulting) to refer to people as the _wrong_ gender. I don't see it as impolite to avoid gendered language in the case of not knowing one's gender, and only impolite in the case of knowing one's gender if great lengths are taken to avoid gendering.
There's a world of difference between using gender neutral pronouns and purposely misgendering.
And even then, intent matters. Gender does not. I dont care who or what you consider yourself, I'm glad we as a society have choices. I want everyone to be themselves, again I've had friends and family memebers whose lives were ruined or made difficult for being gay.
But to tell me if I dont use whatever flavor of the week pronoun, I am harassing someone, and taking my right to speak for not conforming is facism.
Yes, mywittyname & effingwewt -- I obviously sympathize. It's hard to believe that we are destroying the planet, we are still killing each other over tribal-like issues, people don't have access to clean water and sanitation, various groups are disadvantaged based on where they are born, etc. -- and what pronoun to use for a third party on a technical forum is what we're spending our energy on. We need a new gender-neutral pronoun -- I suggest "whoeverthefuck".
There are people committing suicide, being harassed and not being accepted as they are so using wrong gender is pretty fucked up thing to do especially because it is so easy to do right.
> being harassed and not being accepted as they are
Could you elaborate?
If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck. If it looks like a male, dresses like a male, then it's most likely a male and I'm gonna call him "he" because that's the logical thing to do. I don't think it's wrong nor there is any malicious intent for people to use these basic heuristics when determining gender considering they are going to be right 99% of the time, and it would be a big downgrade in productivity if we start wasting time debating whether someone is a he or a she while these heuristics worked for centuries and still work 99% of the time.
Otherwise, where do we draw the line? It's male and female today, how long is it going to be before someone shows up and decides that none of those apply to him and he wants to be accepted as a solar panel - should everyone accept, embrace & encourage his twisted view of reality?
I disagree. This is an actual in-your-face challenge that trans people face - incorrect pronoun usage, both offline and online. Using the wrong pronoun for someone is akin to using the wrong name. It's ok if it happens accidentally, but being incorrect on purpose is quite insulting - in part because it's so simple to do the right thing. I don't want to work with jerks.
It matters because even if you don't think it's a big deal, it can be death by a thousand papercuts for others. Seeing "he" used as a default pronoun just reminds me that people will assume I'm a man, further entrenching this idea subconsciously that people like me don't belong in tech. When I'm misgendered online, I have an internal conversation of "Do I correct them? Do I want to be perceived as not contributing to the discussion and be punished for that? Will I be seen as a crazy SJW and attacked for it?" That's a mental stress that cisgender men simply don't have to deal with.
Use gender-neutral language by default. It's not hard, and simple mistakes are forgiven. However, if one isn't willing to put the slightest amount of effort to either avoid pronouns or use the singular they, it shows they doesn't actually care about the concerns of people unlike themselves. And that shows a lot about what kind of person they are.
Is your last paragraph referring to defaulting to gender-neutral after having been made aware/requested by someone, or that gendered langauge be eradicated from the English language?
Out of 5 paragraphs of text, the only "apology" was "We’re sorry for the confusion and uneasiness that caused." which is the equivalent of spitting on someone's face and apologizing with "I'm sorry you felt spit on."
I feel like we're watching one of the pillars of modern software development crumble.
- The moderator in question still wasn't told what they were sacked for.
- There was no warning, no attempt at allowing betterment, nothing. Established procedure was not followed.
- The moderator in question was not even informed of being let go - they noticed it incidentally while performing their duties.
- They were "terminated" on a Friday, right before a major religious holiday requiring their absence online. The "apology" partially acknowledges this in an incredibly dehumanizing way ("ship on a Friday").
Does anyone really think that the use of gender neutral language (using they rather than he or she) is mis-gendering in the absence of knowing someone’s preferred pronoun set?
If they honestly don’t know the persons gender then it isn’t clear to me why they would choose a pronoun to begin with. If I don’t know someone’s name I don’t just start calling them Bill, I ask them their name and when they say “Hi I’m William but I prefer Bill” and move on with my life knowing to refer to this person as Bill, not William.
If it was a genuine accident I personally see no problem with it and from my personal anecdotal experience the only place I’ve seen anyone get upset over an accidental misgendering or accidental dead naming was on outrage pieces done by outragePorn news sites just looking for ways to clickbait vulnerable anger-prone clickers.
If someone intentionally misgenders another I personally just assume the misgenderer is an asshole, just as I would if someone intentionally and repeatedly calls someone by the wrong name.
And even when someone has known preferred pronouns, is using gender neutral language problematic anyway?
I can understand people being upset by others using gendered pronouns that are not aligned with their own gender identity, but are there any people who've declared a preference for "she" or "he" or anything else, who'd be upset of offended by the use of "they"?
(I quite often stop and rewrite a sentence when posting places where, I don't know the readers well enough to know their prefered pronouns, and my usual approach is to reword using "they"...)
Stack Exchange as an organization might (somehow) be prohibited from releasing all of the background information that they have used for their decision making. But I am surprised that they haven't released any information, given the serious allegations made against them. And I haven't read anything corroborating Stack Exchange's "side" of the story, whereas a large number of people seem to be standing up for Monica.
I see three possibilities: 1. Monica telling the complete truth, there is a terrible misunderstanding, but SE doesn't want to lose face by backing down 2. Monica is lying 3. Monica is terribly confused
At this point, we all have to assume it's #1. If it's #2 or #3, SE really needs to come out and say something (beyond "we stand by our decision but our process needs updating") for the good of the communities. Stack Exchange is nothing without the community, since 100% of the content on SE was directly contributed by the community.
In one of the comments, by Monica it seems, she's not convinced of any wrong doing:
> "repeatedly violating our existing Code of Conduct": citation needed. "CM’s repeated requests to change": citation needed. – Monica Cellio
And later she clarifies that she doesn't know the specific thing that caused it:
> @Randal'Thor let's start with them telling us exactly what part of the current CoC they think I "repeated violated". There's a lot of discussion in that email including of deeply personal identity-background stuff, so I want to know what the charge is before I decide if that response would help. They didn't even tell me what they think I did. – Monica Cellio
SE’s actions seem heavy-handed to say the least, and to be fair it is a private platform dictated by their own rules - but what this will lead to is disillusionment within the community and honestly I feel this has been a long time coming.
If neither the mods nor users feel heard, who does this “platform” serve?
They're even using the platform to vent their frustration. A few might delete their accounts, most will put their pitchforks away after a while and come crawling back.
I see a lot of complaints, about questions closed as redundant etc, and about moderation, but what keeps someone from putting a better version up? In particular unlike quora, the reputation of the person answering doesn't seem as important. most people would accept anyone's answer as long as it works.
My impression is that the network effect comes from where people choose to go to ask questions. You go where you know your question has a good chance of getting answered. As such sites grow as "bases of knowledgeable people", they become a Schelling-point pulling people-with-questions toward them.
That's the first-order effect. The second-order effect is that people who are familiar with one of the StackExchange sites, if they have a question about something that doesn't fit there, might default to looking at the sibling list of sites to find a good place to ask their question, even if that sibling site is smaller than some out-of-network Q&A forum on the same topic. The smaller sites in the network don't quite gain cachet from being associated with their larger siblings, but they sort of gain "an expectation of having your question answered" inherited from their bigger siblings—whether it's true or not.
That is true but SE gained a critical mass of answers by encouraging one set of behaviours through its points and badges system, then pulled a bait-and-switch and told those subject matter experts that they were no longer welcome. Wrong demographic, see.
SE is dying. The quality of the questions is falling because being welcoming to new users is deemed more important now than the newcomers absorbing the culture. Questions go unanswered. The real technical Q&A is on Github now. But this is what Spolsky and Atwood wanted all along, good luck to them with their new community of newbies and SJWs.
Maybe I don't understand your question, but there's a huge network effect of people browsing the site and answering questions. Anybody can put up a Q&A site, but to gain traction the site needs answers.
It does raise the question of what happens when StackExchange shuts down. There's a lot of knowledge stored there, hopefully it's not lost.
I’ve been wondering the same thing myself lately, the only advantage I can think of this accumulated information on the site (in the form of Q&As). I’d imagine a majority of SE traffic is people reading old questions, though if anyone knows this assumption to be wrong please correct me. I also wonder if scraping the Q&As and posting elsewhere would be some sort of legal violation? It would be fairly trivial to host the current body of knowledge up to this point on a static site and then start fresh.
> I also wonder if scraping the Q&As and posting elsewhere would be some sort of legal violation?
The (unilateral) relicensing was another recent issue, but generally not. All user contributions are licensed CC-BY-SA 3.0 so I don't see legal reasons stopping you. Google won't send you any traffic, though, because it will be duplicate content and the original has a gajillion links pointing to it.
When you get militant about subtle behaviours this happens. There is too much nuance in human interactions for policing them to this degree. You will always offend someone. They had a choice of offending those who didn't like gender neutral pronouns or those in the SE community that supported that mod.
I don't really have a horse in that race but I don't see a way they could have come out of that without offending anyone. If we're going through a culture change that changes the way we address people so be it, but it's going to get messy once we start enforcing new social rules.
One way to handle these kinds of contentious moderator debates is with freedom. Since Stackoverflow/Stackexchange does not open source their code, there are a number of Free Software clones which handle questions and answers Stackexchange style.
This is sad, but I feel it was an inevitable consequence of allowing religion-orientated stackexchanges to be created in the first place. It's practically inviting a holy war. The people running them would likely be those who care deeply about doctrine, and the chances of a headlong collision over LGBT doctrine were always high.
Commingling under one umbrella, religion and sexual orientation, which are essentially identity-based communities [0], will invariably lead to a headlong collision as you say.
Allowing? Why would you not allow them in the first place? In any case, there shouldn't be any collisions if they are separate network sites except in the case of fiat decisions from the top.
But based on this drama: I'd consider SO a platform to stay away from.
Let me be clear: Acting like a professional and an adult is an essential when communicating with me. Regardless of what the subject is or how dear it is to you. If someone had an opinion on mere speech - they could take a walk and understand other people have feelings and lives to live, not just them.
I wish we began to make a standard for people to keep their composure and communicate better. I see two sides: People who are willing to spoil relationships and burn bridges over political nuance of the week, and a voiceless majority who have the same exact problems, but are willing to take a breath and work it out.
> If we have to remove a diamond in the future we will follow a published process.
Asking as a non-native English speaker. Diamond surely doesn't refer a jewel here. Is it a simile for a valuable thing (which surprises me; are moderators that valuable?) or some other figure of speech I'm unaware of?
Like you I was curious. Turns out community moderators get a small diamond symbol next to their names on StackOverflow: https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/75192
A long time ago I used to moderate on stackexchange (with a diamond) so I'd like to add some important details. That meta post covers it if you know the site well, but it might not be so obvious.
Any user with sufficient reputation can vote for some moderator action to be taken on a post. For example, 5 users can vote for a question to be closed. Users can edit. Sufficiently high reputation users can vote to delete and undelete posts as well as closing and unclosing them and get special tools to review questions.
Diamond moderators are a level above this. Their votes are immediate and binding (if a diamond moderator votes for something, it happens straight away with the exception of up and down voting, which behave as normal). They are also empowered to email users and suspend them, including practically indefinitely, and can lock a question or answer so users cannot do anything to it (even very high reputation ones) and thus have a lot of responsibility.
To get such a diamond, there are two routes: be picked to do it on an early stage beta site (where SE staff select users to do the job temporarily) or run for the job in an election. It's a thankless task, which involves dealing with the very worst of SE's users. You can also be employed by stack exchange. These users also seem to have a "staff" blob on their profile now too - very early on in the site (when it was just SO) they had two diamonds, I think, but that was removed to make the distinction between staff and community not so obvious.
On sites like reddit and here, when users complain about "the moderators" they very often mean ordinary site users using the functionality that comes with their reputation and not specifically the moderators with extra power and a diamond after their name. SE's definition of "moderator" is only those users with diamonds.
"Hand in my diamond" has in an SE sense become like "hand in my badge".
The weirdest thing about this whole kerfuffle is that gender is entirely irrelevant on Stack Exchange. Due to the Q&A format where each answer is supposed to stand alone, there's rarely if ever a need to refer to other users in content. If you do need to, eg. in the comments, long-standing convention is to use @username instead of pronouns. And if despite all this I wanted to use pronouns for some weird reason, it's genuinely difficult to figure out which ones, because most usernames are non-gendered and there's no obvious/mandatory place to look them up for a user.
The point of the issue was that it was stated that to use gender neutral pronouns was deemed to misgendering in itself. One couldn't just be neutral. By not using any pronouns at all would be the same thing ( I guess? ).
Consider the hypothetical case of a user using @usernames for some users and the preferred pronouns for selected others.
Sounds a lot like trying to force my speech. I'm going to say "the individual" or "they" and if that upsets people then I guess I'm someone who upsets people.
Did something happen to this post on HN? I swear I read these comments like a day ago. And now they're all 1 or 7 hours old. I'm honestly having a bit of sanity questioning going on here.
I'm using an extension [0] to highlight new comments, and the 7 hour old ones are all showing up as if I had already read them (which I also feel like I have).
This is pretty bad. It would have been way better to post nothing than to post this.
If you want to have a community, then treat your community like intelligent humans. And to be clear, you absolutely _depend_ on the good will of your community. This is non-optional.
Admit your mistake and fix it. And if you think that your mistake was the timing, then talk to someone who understands the situation.
This is what makes me pessimistic about the world will live in. It doesn't matter. SE will probably be just fine. Not enough people will leave for it to matter.
That one got both a software penalty (flamewar detector) and a moderator penalty (similar). But there have been so many submissions about this that it seems there's a community interest in discussing it that is more than just latest-routine-outrage. So we rolled back the clock on this one and put it in the second-chance pool (described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380). Not sure if that was a good idea or not.
Thank you for doing this. I thought i was stuck in a time loop aka Groundhog Day when I saw the thread in HN's front page, and my post was timestamped at 7 hours (instead of 2 days) ago.
I believe this is an important issue. Regardless of whether SO is right or not, they do owe their community (of which I am not a part of) an explanation. Unlike the Google's gender controversy, SO is mostly operated by unpaid volunteers. If you are a paid worker, your share of responsibility and the expectation from/to your company is very different from community driven projects such as SO.
tl:dr SO needs to be held to a higher standard than your usual commercial companies.
(Yes, the software relativizes the timestamps on a thread while re-upping a submission; see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20169818. It's confusing but keeping the original timestamps is worse and we've yet to figure out a better way to do it. I suppose this needs to go in the FAQ.)
I don't understand why you don't have banners, on stories that have had editorial changes, to say what the editorial changes are. For example (not suggestions for text) "story reposted with different timestamps", "title changed from 'X is the best thing eva'", "link changed from 'www.superspammy.co.net'", or whatever.
The more directly you surface moderator action, the more people want to discuss moderator actions (you can see a miniature version of this phenomenon in any comment about downvoting). Keeping this kind of metacommentary out of threads is a site goal.
I've observed that Stack Exchange is worse now than when it started and that the points award system moulds and warps respondents.
Now that it has gone overtly commercial they face issues which may not be solved.
What will programmers do to fix this, will they come up with an alternate architecture?
I guess programmers could take the questions they've answered. Reformulate their answers (and hopefully update them in many cases) and publish them in a distributed way, under their own control.
I don’t know about who, what, where, when or why... but the “don't ship on Friday” comment in an apology statement regarding the handling of firing someone is completely brain dead / tone deaf. In the very few official statements I’ve worked on, they are reviewed by so many people (so many that even I had to vet it). Unbelievable that “don’t ship on Friday” got through.
Just to be clear, did they fire anyone? Kicking a mod out isn't the same as firing. That's not to say it's completely harmless, just different. I'm just wondering for me own knowledge.
Looks like the mod that made that post is a developer. No offence to other developers but my personal opinion is we developers are best to leave the delicate communications to the marketing team.
There is every chance she is better equipped than most but I know my expertise do not extend very far into the realm. I've not met many devs that do have expertise in those sort of PR fronts.
On that note, I'd suggest this indicates more of an organisational issue than anything that should fall on this one person. I don't think they were (as an organisation) prepared for this sort of thing. Maybe there isn't even a dedicated PR person there?
> Looks like the mod that made that post is a developer. No offence to other developers but my personal opinion is we developers are best to leave the delicate communications to the marketing team
Not correct. Perhaps she used to be a developer, but the poster is currently “Stack Exchange director of community Sara Chipps”, according to TheRegister article linked to in this thread.
It's a bit confusing because a mod was removed, and a bunch of other mods resigned in support, and then it came out that she'd been removed for refusing to use people's preferred pronouns.
Stack Exchange is perceived by many people to be unwelcoming. There has been persistent concern that SE is even more unwelcoming to people with protected characteristics.
SE have made considerable effort to fix this.
Recently they've been looking at codes of conduct.
The most recent version of this includes a request, or maybe a requirement, to use a person's preferred pronouns.
Some people refuse to do this because God tells them it's wrong to do so. Other people refuse to do this because, well, I dunno I've never understood why calling someone "he" instead of "she" is such a burden.
Stack Exchange is telling those people that their refusal to use a preferred pronoun is not compatible with being a moderator at SE, and so they removed one mod.
She posted her version of events to one of the SE sites, and this caused a bunch of other mods to "resign" their posts in support of her.
EDIT: I've tried to word this as neutrally as I can.
To respond to a couple of comments: Bob says "please use 'he' when talking about me, and Ann says "No, I can't do that because God tells me it's wrong. I'll use 'them' instead." -- I don't see how this can be anything other than Ann refusing to use Bob's choice of pronouns. Note that I haven't used the word "misgendering".
You conveniently omitted that the definition of misgendering had been reinterpreted to include using “their” as a gender-neutral pronoun, which (until now) is a common practice intended specifically to avoid misgendering.
As a person who is 100% supportive of trans choosing he/she pronouns to fit their identity, and someone who hates the idea of "non-binary" people demanding a "they" pronoun, - I can kind of see a point, depending on how singular they is used. If it is always used regardless(as the demodded person claimed they do), then I see no problem with it. If it is only used to avoid someone's preferred pronoun, then I can see it being discriminatory behavior. E.g. every cis female in a class is referred to as she or they, every cismale is referred to as he or they, but every trans male or female is only referred to as they.
Perhaps I just don't want to fucking be bothered with a gender label and will use the perfectly acceptable gender-neutral pronoun. God tells me that this is a reasonable thing to do.
It's funny that this pronoun debate in the US is so anglocentric, too. Just shows the level of critical thinking these agenda pushers really have. Why? Why is it only the 3rd person pronouns that are special. Why are 1st and 2nd person "as-is"?
> it came out that she'd been removed for refusing to use people's preferred pronouns.
That's not true. She was removed for asking whether, after the not-yet-current CoC was made official (which asks to use preferred pronouns) it would be allowed to use third person pronouns to circumvent the issue. Neither was preferred pronoun-usage a rule, nor had she disobeyed that rule (yet).
She wanted to write in a gender-neutral style. No one should be forced to use gender pronouns. It is true that you should use the right gender pronouns if you use pronouns, but why fire her for asking about using gender-neutral writing styles in a not yet released CoC.
I ask this as an honest question, and not as a form of bait. But the virtue of using “they/their” is that you’re being respectful of the fact that you’re not assuming anything. My problem with this suddenly becoming offensive is that I don’t see how I’m supposed to remember the additional meta of an individual’s pronouns - I already have enough trouble remembering names! Is it not creating too much of a meta minefield for...well I’m actually not sure what the gain is. Isn’t this just looking for offense where none is intended?
Sometimes people exclusively use "they/their" to refer to trans people who prefer "he" or "she" as a way to try to publicly demean the person's transness. This isn't a rare/unheard-of occurrence.
Most people understand that using "they/their" is a good default when you're talking about a specific person who you happen to not know the gender of. People get that using "they" isn't necessarily an attack, but if you for example do it in response to a message where their gender is made apparent, or if you only do it when talking about trans people, then it quickly starts looking rude.
I don't disagree on the facts, but neither was there a rule (yet) that says you have to, nor has she done that. She has asked whether it would be against the future CoC not to.
No comparison is perfect, but it feels similar to me asking a cop whether it's going to be illegal to do X under the new law that is being discussed, and them arresting and charging me for doing X. Neither is X currently outlawed, nor have I committed X, I have merely inquired about the legality of X.
The StackExchange staff did clarify elsewhere that they believe the old CoC prohibits misgendering and that the CoC changes are just meant to clarify the matter.
They claim she repeatedly refused to change CoC violations, she claims she was just asking about using gender neutral language.
It seems to me that there were likely several misunderstandings that lead to increasingly heated discussion and then the SE staff decided to remove a moderator without following their own established process for doing so.
It's ironic that you used the homograph "resign" in both words' meanings -- re-sign (soft "ess", to sign again) and resign (hard "z" sound, to quit) -- in a comment about careful word choice. Did SE mods re-sign their posts, or quit (abandon moderator role)?
I beg to differ. The relevant part of the top-level story boils down to "Someone was fired, and others resigned in protest / solidarity". Do you really believe that "no one" was confused? I think it's hard _not_ to read the wrong "resigned" there in this context.
More relevant to the subject matter, your confident assertion, speaking for everyone, belies a lack of empathy. Finally, I find it interesting that none of this would have been confusing or even ambiguous except that we're using written language to communicate.
They'd "(re-)sign" their profiles with "preferred pronoun" designations, eg "he/his" or "she/her". A visible (but less extreme) show of support, vs quitting -- which for moderators who aren't even employees of SE per se, isn't even really an applicable concept.
All of which underscores the point of my original (and annoyingly if predictably downvoted) comment about there being ambiguous -- hence ironic -- use of a particular homograph.
There’s an apology for ‘causing confusion’ due to bad timing and a promise to update the community, but no news here. Just seems like a link to a heated fight.
Ya...that was a joke. "I'm sorry you feel that way" is the classic apology-free use of the word "sorry". It means "I pity you for your plight" rather than "I recognize my mistake".
I don't know the details of the stackexchange case linked above. But, in general, it doesn't seem that complicated to me. The language you are using -- "weaponized pronouns" -- is pretty distorted.
If one is aware of how someone prefers to be called and the preference is completely reasonable (such as a trans individual preferring their transitioned pronoun), then one is simply being an asshole by refusing. Not only that, they are doing so to a group that has historically been treated terribly by most of society -- essentially kicking someone while they are down.
Innocent mistakes are one thing, but stubborn refusal to treat someone decently is inexcusable.
P.S. I understand a very small number of vocal individuals may take things past requests for treating people decently, but let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Why would someone, care at that others refer to them (sorry I’m talking about a hypothetical person so I don’t know preferred pronoun) by name or gender neutral? If you know that I prefer to be addresses “their royal highness”(I do btw), does that make it rude of you to refer to me by name or as OP? I get calling someone who prefers he, she is insulting. But that’s not what the supposed crime was here. It was a moderator preferring gender neutral, which seems completely reasonably.
And the language is perfectly fitting. Someone used preferred pronouns to get a moderator canned for just discussing the merits of the rules, not even breaking the yet un-published rules. That is a weapon.
You can’t refuse to use someone’s preferred pronoun just because you want to. If someone wants to be called he, using them is insulting and demeaning. You would be literally not accepting how he is. Obviously this is not the case in generic writing. But I don’t think that is how 2 people want to communicate.
Yes! I absolutely can refuse to use someone's "preferred pronoun." I summarily reject your assertion that using the gender neutral and grammatically correct "they" in place of "he"/"she" (not them) to refer to anyone is ever insulting or demeaning. You can say it's insulting and I just don't agree that is true in general. Yelling loudly and with outrage doesn't make your claim stronger than mine.
I am not rejecting anyone's gender, I am simply not acknowledging it because it is usually not germane to the discussion. It's not that I don't believe people deserve respect, trans or otherwise. I just don't think it is an appropriate point for discussion in most instances.
If a white man says they wish to always be referred to as "the white guy" am I also obligated to do so? Is it not "accepting" of their whiteness if I don't use language to refer to it everytime? Especially so if they are on the internet and I can't even see them?
I don't know what color you are. I really don't care. I have no interest in referring to your race when addressing you, likewise your gender. I communicate with people everyday and gender, race, creed, and nationality just never come up.
And if someone insists on sharing their pronouns or their race or creed unsolicited, that is on them. That should not obligate me to do anything with it.
Edit: I've been downvoted. But would anyone actually like to explain how referring to someone in a gender neutral way is somehow more insulting than referring to them in a race, religion, ethnicity, or any other identity-forming aspect neutral way? Things we take for granted all the time when we use the neutral (not just gender) pronouns them/they?
It's a Q&A site, is it stubborn refusal to be decent? It doesn't seem so to me.
I don't see how neutrality could possibly be offensive on a gaming or programming sub-site, or dozens of others. Neutral writing is both common and should be inoffensive to all readers, whatever their preferred terms. That's rather the point. That shouldn't affect being able to helpfully answer their esoteric question. I don't expect to form a friendship, or even converse again, just to answer the question asked. Adding @dwaltrip or he/she/they as you prefer, doesn't affect that answer, or my intended, and hopefully perceived courtesy. So by principle of least harm and for avoidance of mistakes I'd aim to keep my replies neutral.
If there are SE sites where it really does matter, perhaps trans or gender related, yes I can easily see that it might be important to choose more carefully, and for different and more precise terms to apply to those boards.
1) easy, theoretically. See below for practical. 2) no matter how you these days, someone is always offended. Either because they are unable to create a proper perspective for themselves (I am sorry if this is wrong pronoun for you reader, I am not aware what you prefer), or they don't want to create one.
I'm amazed by how professional PR/Community Management/marketing people can be so tone-deaf. Especially when they don't post this by themselves, but on behalf of, and most certainly with a lot of discussion in, the company.
Perhaps the most striking thing here is the surety of all these responses, it’s all nefarious, lies, sleight of hand.
I can at least sympathize with not being told what you did wrong, but this is still a he-said-she-said case. Until either SE or Monica releases details, the only two people who know are SE and her.
She posted her side of the story, with no material backing information making, as I’ve said, a he-said-she-said tale. We don’t know anything material of the exchange. Yet everyone feels compelled to assume bad faith on SE’s part.
Monica’s defence is proving a negative at this point. She claims she was removed without just cause. She has provided evidence that she was removed. However, it is difficult for her to prove there was no just cause. Maybe she could provide transcripts for her N years at stackoverflow detailing all her interactions with the community then we can be sure she was removed without good reason.
This is basically guilt determined by a closed court in which the accused has no representation and no reason is given for the judgement, and in fact even the rule they've been found guilty of isn't disclosed, even to them.
So what is it exactly that they've done to earn any benefit of the doubt?
A few dozen long-time moderators vouching for the one that was fired and stepping down should inspire some doubt. Personally, vague judgements that say "she totally, repeatedly overstepped the lines, and didn't want to change after we confronted her, but we won't comment on issues like these" always sound fishy to me. If they won't comment, they wouldn't have commented. It looks like "we're inventing reasons that make people shut up about it because we don't have an actual case that we could present".
Should I understand that people do that for free and then that this drama ensues when they are thrown away? If so, I'm not sure whether my reaction should be to laugh or to cry.
Monica Cellio's account: https://judaism.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5193/stack-...
A news paper article on the situation: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/01/stack_exchange_cont...
A list of mods fired or resigned: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333965/firing-mods-...
A mods reasons for leaving: https://christianity.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6718/b...
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