
I'm Resigning as a Stack Overflow Community Elected Moderator - trothamel
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/390427/im-resigning-as-a-stack-overflow-community-elected-moderator
======
jasonkester
I've seen a few posts come through about the issues the Stack Overflow
Community are facing, but it occurs to me that I've never actually come across
this Community in all my years using the site.

My best guess is that deep down in the meta corners among moderator types,
there is some form of interpersonal communication going on, and sometimes
there must be difficulties there. But for me, and I assume most of the people
who will ever use the site to ask and answer silly JavaScript questions,
that's something we're never going to see.

I used to answer a lot of questions on Stack Overflow, until eventually it
became big enough that the Internet Point Chaser personalities were just too
quick on the draw to answer anything and everything. Cool. That was the plan
all along I guess. So now I just use it to google the order of arguments in
date conversion functions for languages with poor documentation, which I
assume is what roughly 100% of the people using the site do.

I don't think that aspect of the site will suffer from controversy like this
in the long run.

~~~
blub
I think you might have a point :)

Many (most?) of us were too surprised by the stupidity of the pronoun wars to
notice the deeper lesson - building a "community" of non-paid volunteers on
the online property of a for-profit company is asking to be stabbed in the
back whenever that volunteering effort is no longer deemed necessary.

And I have to agree with you, I don't think Stack overflow will lose anything
of value if _all_ those moderator volunteers resign or are removed. Maybe it's
different for other stack exchange subomains, but SO moderation can be easily
codified as a set of rules and outsourced.

The saddest part is the whining from the moderators. These people actually
thought they had a real relationship with the company and that they had
rights... that's mindbogglingly naive. :-(

~~~
ohduran
> mindbogglingly naive.

Absolutely. What drives the attention of the execs at Stack Exchange is first
and foremost Stack Overflow. Everything else seems like a liability to me,
specially sites like Mi Yodeya and Christianity, where sensibilities are much
shallower.

Just think how unwelcoming the community of SO is sometimes... and their just
talking about code! Religion SE sites must be hell IMO.

So what's the demand, really? A better community? Creating a new site? SE
derives its absolute value from the questions already answered. Community
could have mattered in the beginning (you're trying to scale) but now? who
cares? "I already have what I needed from you guys" is what execs are
thinking.

~~~
l4o
If I remember correctly, stack overflow is CC BY-SA, so were we to make a new
site we could just migrate large portions of the existing content.

~~~
james-skemp
Which, interestingly enough, was another issue before the Code of Conduct
changes. In particular, community members were asking about SE changing from
CC BY-SA 3.0 to 4.0, and what legal implications that had. I rarely check
meta, but it appears to have warmed up the distrust.
[https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333089/stack-
exchan...](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333089/stack-exchange-and-
stack-overflow-have-moved-to-cc-by-sa-4-0)

------
chx
I feel
[https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/390495/308851](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/390495/308851)
is even more important than this one. It's the answer from George Stocker to
"What could Stack Exchange Inc do to make moderators who've recently resigned
want to stay?"

~~~
ssivark
That answer from George Stocker is an absolutely fantastic portrait of how to
lead a community of people. Thanks for sharing.

~~~
personjerry
They should hire that guy

------
spectramax
Why can't the CEO of Stack Overflow comment, engage, apologize and bring
everyone together? Isn't that what a leader of a company supposed to do?
Instead of sending out your PR minions with callous demeanor, no empathy and
staying meek while your company goes into the toilet?

If I were running a company of this size, put everything aside and build trust
from the users. They built the community in the first place.

~~~
andrewxdiamond
He recently announced he is stepping down

[https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2019/09/24/announcing-
stack-o...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2019/09/24/announcing-stack-
overflows-new-ceo/)

~~~
y4mi
Why are people flagging this?

I vouched. please voice your issues if there is something wrong with this, as
it seems correct and likely plays a role here as well (new CEO might still not
be onboarded yet etc)

~~~
yorwba
It's a new account posting a comment that's mostly just a link. It probably
tripped the spam detector and got killed automatically, without anyone
flagging it.

------
vishym
Stack Overflow has really forgotten how to engage with the community and
especially so with the community of moderators. These moderators are not
getting paid. It is a huge amount of volunteer effort they put as hobby. SO
should express a lot of gratitude for these moderators who keep SO in sane
condition. But SO has been bringing one policy change after another without
getting the full support of this community. I think it started with CoC
changes that required everyone to become overly polite which many users and
moderators did not really agree with. The recent debate on gendered pronouns
has frankly been a real mess done in haste and without transparency. If SO
does not fix their ways of engaging with the community, I am afraid more and
more moderators are going to leave this place.

~~~
zaphirplane
A moderator on stackoverflow is someone that increases users engagement with
stack overflow. That is the reason moderators exist.

Having a CoC is a good thing and maybe you think it’s too SJW and maybe others
think there are offensive moderators and are leaving the site

Personally I think some moderators have confused moderator with area owner and
want to run it as they think

------
pinche2
SE/SO reminds me more and more of how a _cult_ is run. It's no secret that
they are ideologically driven, although they kept it under lid until 2015 when
they then flipped finger to their own rules and abused the platform for
political causes.

Since that time it has been going downhill - not that it hasn't had problem
before that. But I noticed a significant change in the "vibe" of the community
from that point on.

The problem is that this can not be easily fixed as it require change of
convictions. It's not about community anymore, but political wars intertwined
with international agendas (which includes Y Combinator too btw).

Personally, I passed the 100k milestone, got my mug and t-shirt and deleted my
account.

~~~
the_duke
All of this seems to be some weird Meta bubble that doesn't affect or concern
regular users in the slightest.

What users care about is not getting downvoted for reasonable questions, not
seeing everything closed as duplicate even though the other answer is 10 years
old and contains only/mostly outdated and bad answers, ...

This is what is is actually hurting SO.

~~~
thinkingemote
The things you describe are all things that volunteer moderators affect.

Do you think that moderators just chat on meta? That users do not know about
how moderators work doesnt mean that they do not work.

Remove the moderators, or downgrade them to some automated process and the
user experience will change. Moderators do not only talk on meta with each
other.

~~~
zaphirplane
Really? wouldn’t other people happy to accept the CoC step in to become
moderators and life goes on There are a few billions on this planet

~~~
the_duke
I'd argue that people should stop providing volunteer labor to a for-profit
company.

If SO wants more control over moderation practices, it should start paying
moderators.

Incidentally I also think that a better/smarter voting system combined with
less moderation could be good for the platform (note: not no moderation) .

------
rando444
_> I am not confident that moderators are seen as partners in community
building; but rather volunteers to be tightly controlled._

This is really the core of the issue IMHO.

------
jruz
I would like to see GitHub/GitLab adding a section like SO to the repos,
slowly it would build more updated content and the repo owners could moderate.
I think the amount of centralized knowledge in SO is not good for the web.

~~~
baby
This. Issues are often used as interactive FAQs and it feels weird to have to
go to SO if I don’t want to pollute a project’s issues just to ask a question.

------
pvorb
Can somebody please summarize what happened in the SO management? How did SO
lead the community in the past? What has changed?

This post is lacking some context for outsiders. I have been writing questions
and answers for several years, but I've never noticed the the SO management
has anything to do with it other than hosting it.

~~~
majjam
I think this previous discussion details the most recent cause of friction:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21286074](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21286074)

~~~
curtisblaine
Before even opening the link I _knew_ it was something having to do with the
use of pronouns. Sometimes I think we are concentrating on (and fighting over)
the wrong problems. Anyway, there's a timeline of the drama directly from
Monica:

[https://cellio.dreamwidth.org/2019/10/05/stack-overflow-
fias...](https://cellio.dreamwidth.org/2019/10/05/stack-overflow-fiasco-
timeline.html)

> "A queer moderator resigned in anger, with complaints about community
> managers, other moderators, and the "entrenched power structure", and vague
> accusations of bigotry"

>"a different moderator (henceforth OP) asked a question, tagged "discussion",
on the moderators' private Q&A site ("team"): should we require people to use
people's preferred pronouns? (Again, the moderator, who is trans, used the
term "preferred".) OP self-answered to say, somewhat vehemently, that we
absolutely must require this and using wrong pronouns is misgendering. I
answered saying that we already have a negative commandment, don't call people
what they don't want to be called (like wrong pronouns), which is proper, but
this question calls for adding a positive requirement to use specific language
and we shouldn't do that. I talked about writing in a gender-neutral way, that
we rarely even need third-person-singular pronouns in our discussions, and not
using a pronoun at all isn't misgendering. This was the top-voted answer,
something like +53/-10 last I saw it. Note: Three different community managers
posted answers after I did, and none said my answer was inappropriate in any
way. (One disagreed with it, which is fine.)"

------
ageofwant
In my experience SO has canonical answers for ~95% of all issues already.
Sure, it will tick on as new things happen but that will be almost noise with
whats already there.

I think this reality is not lost on the owners. Mods have volunteered millions
of hours of free labor to get SO to where it is today. And now that the corpus
is in place their usefulness has come to an end. They are now less of an asset
and more a liability to SO corporation.

That's how it looks like from the outside anyway.

~~~
oezi
The role of the mods vs. the role of the user is a big question mark to me. In
which question has a moderator helped in a relevant sense? For me they always
have just been gatekeeping (tags, close votes) which never made sense to me.

~~~
MauranKilom
Tags and close votes are handled by normal users (well, those with a bit of
rep). Moderators are for the "people stuff" like spam, vandalism, vote fraud,
rudeness/harassment and so on. They do not significantly contribute to
question closure or tagging.

------
amirathi
Can someone please summarize the core issues between SO the company & the
community?

I see lot of references to policy changes, lack of empathy & such. But would
like to know exactly what actions by the company caused this stir.

~~~
jodrellblank
AFAIK, and I don't want to go trying to find Meta threads to support all this,
but these summarise my feelings after reading quite a few over the past year
or two:

StackExchange (SE) announced that users must start being polite and welcoming
to beginners and new users, trying to address the perception of hostility and
unfriendliness. Generally coming from a well intentioned place, but without
good plans for how that would work, except declaring "be nice" and hoping that
would do it. There is a break of opinions between " _a new user should have a
welcoming experience_ " (both sides - company and users - agree) and " _there
is an endless flood of 'give me the codez' and homework questions and spam,
we're wading through the garbage to your company benefit, and now we get
criticism that we aren't doing your dirty work with a smile on top, please
acknowledge_" (many users agree, the company refuses to engage), and " _blunt
technical answers are not impolite_ " (company refuses to engage). SE's
unresponsive stonewalling or ignoring questions and suggestions annoys users.

When mods complained about the lack of support from SE, e.g. long standing
requests for moderator tools with better UIs, or more guidance from SE
employees, SE ignored them.

SE announced that they were retroactively relicensing all content. When people
objected, questioned the legality, asked for clarification of specifics, SE
ignored and did not answer. It appears they have done this once before, and
did not engage then either, but this time might be more serious.

When there was an increasing number of people sharing their bad experiences
with SE around the internet, SE more or less blamed the users, and when the
users suggested ideas to improve SE in various ways around this (e.g. changes
to the flow of onboarding new users, which SE was trialing on some sites), SE
ignored and didn't engage.

SE rolled out a new Code of Conduct and insisted everyone will respect
people's pronouns[1]. Long standing, well respected, polite, moderator Monica
Cellio stopped being a moderator in uncertain conditions, but AFAIK she tried
to use gender-neutral language when someone's gender was known, and SE
steamrollered her for it.

As a result of her loss of moderator status, several other moderators have
either stepped down in protest, or signed an open letter revealing many
complaints about how SE has been interacting with moderators - or not
interacting - in the private mod/company chatroom which normal users can't
see.

Many times through these arguments, an SE employee or two has put out some
corporate fluff feelgood non-answer which ignores all raised issues and
restates some platitudes or fiat-idealism, which users have taken as worse
than silence and/or an insult.

There is a general feeling/suspicion/conspiracy theory that SE is setting
itself up to be sold for huge piles of cash, and is trying to stamp out
rudeness, appear welcoming, "clear up" licensing concerns, shrug off squeaky-
wheel users, and absolutely not say anything controversial, and that SE either
has no coherent leadership and direction for the future, or has one they know
the users will object to and are therefore silent about it.

Involved in this, although I don't have any idea how closely involved, is SE's
spread from purely technical topics to a much wider range of sites covering
politics, religion, hobbies and more general interests.

[1] [https://stackoverflow.com/conduct](https://stackoverflow.com/conduct)
says " _Be inclusive and respectful. [..] Prefer gender-neutral language when
uncertain._ " and " _No bigotry. [..] Use stated pronouns (when known)._ "

\----

Edit: One of many rant/complaint posts full of links you can dive into:
[https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333965/firing-
mods-...](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333965/firing-mods-and-
forced-relicensing-is-stack-exchange-still-interested-in-cooper) which leads
to things I missed - the forming and firing of a team to engage with
developers in 2017, the redesign of sites making them "worse" while ignoring
the user feedback, a single Tweet leading to taking a site off the hot
questions list an dropping 80% of its traffic without announcing anything to
the site users (" _Stack Exchange cared more about how they 're perceived by a
single person on Twitter than what effect making a change like that would have
on a site, and didn't care enough about the community to even let the general
IPS community know about the change_"), and the statement from employees "
_Stack Overflow Employees have panic attacks and nightmares when they know
they will need to post something to Meta_ " where the company defended
themselves by moving somewhere they don't have to hear the (overly personal)
criticism at all.

~~~
pascalmahe
Thank you for this!

Especially this part:

>SE rolled out a new Code of Conduct and insisted everyone will respect
people's pronouns[1]. Long standing, well respected, polite, moderator Monica
Cellio stopped being a moderator in uncertain conditions, but AFAIK she tried
to use gender-neutral language when someone's gender was known, and SE
steamrollered her for it.

I'd seen Monica Cellio's resignation and the general reaction when SE
announced the new CoC and was really weirded out when all the answers to said
CoC were of the "but do I _really_ have to use people's pronouns? And what if
they post it after/elsewhere? Can I be punished for that?" variety. It looked
(to me) like everyone was trying to avoid a weirdly specific case.

Knowing that's what happened to Monica Cellio makes it a lot clearer.

~~~
jacobush
She was also kicked out without due process, _before_ the CoC was in effect,
or its wording even known.

~~~
jodrellblank
I don't know if this is worth nitpicking, as an English person I'm less
familiar with how people use "due process" casually; I assume its casual use
means "a fair procedure was followed" and that is fine for your comment, but
it is also "the legal requirement that the state must respect all legal rights
that are owed to a person"[1]. In other discussions I've seen wording that
moderators were "fired", as if they had been employees.

If she actually was an employee, fired under strange circumstances and denied
legal rights by the state, that would be more serious issue and change many
views on StackExchange the company. I nitpick because I think it helps to keep
an appropriate context that much of this is arguing about perceptions,
experiences, fair treatment and site direction, but is not about any legal-
related accusations that I know of relating to moderators. Especially as there
_is_ legal concern about the content relicensing[2].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Due_process](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Due_process)

[2] [https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333089/stack-
exchan...](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333089/stack-exchange-and-
stack-overflow-have-moved-to-cc-by-sa-4-0)

~~~
TraceWoodgrains
There are legal-related concerns, but not precisely due-process ones. Monica
goes into it more on her blog, particularly in the comments of this post [1]
where she discusses the possibility of taking legal action against the
company. She feels that StackExchange libelled her by making public
accusations of specific & evidently inaccurate bad conduct to the press [2]
while making themselves unavailable for any sort of communication and
resolution.

As far as due process goes, there was an established process on the website
for removing moderators, which StackExchange did not follow in her removal.
Nothing legally questionable about it since they can run their site how they
will, but certainly questionable enough to burn goodwill.

[1] [https://cellio.dreamwidth.org/2019/10/15/stack-overflow-
dela...](https://cellio.dreamwidth.org/2019/10/15/stack-overflow-delays.html)

[2]
[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/01/stack_exchange_cont...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/01/stack_exchange_controversy/)

------
ddtaylor
Let's assume for a moment that SO has failed and slowly fades into obscurity.
How do we stop this same problem from happening again?

Individual Linux distros fail, as do some websites or email servers - but the
fundamental underlying protocols make sure no one entity exists that ruins
everything.

Does anyone know of a good way to do something like that here?

~~~
ben509
I've been bouncing this idea around in my head... my notion is you need to
design social media* to be heavily distributed over many small sites, with a
common fabric, a meta-media, connecting them.

So small sites will still fail, in fact they'll fail often, but the meta-media
as a whole can continue. If anything, it forces them to be responsive because
unhappy members will vote with their feet.

It also gets around many of the censorship problems that large sites have.
Large sites don't want to make their algorithms or policies clear because
there's a massive gain in gaming their system. A diverse collection of small
sites is effectively immune to this: it's easy to game one site, but it
doesn't get you much of anything.

There's still the expense of moderation, and I think it's where a meta-system
shines. If you can draw moderators from anywhere, they're naturally
disinterested. You can set up a standard set of procedures for how moderation
is done without actually specifying what the rules are. The site owner has
sole discretion as to what the rules are, and can override moderator
decisions, limited by their willingness to micromanage and upset membership.

The incentive to moderate is that if you want to appeal a decision or
otherwise request moderator attention, you must yourself do moderator duty to
earn enough "civic duty" points. It's like jury duty, only more directly tit
for tat. And I think a well designed system would help educate people as to
why certain decisions are made, leading to greater investment.

I think there are huge technical barriers to such a scheme, especially
building a UX that works across systems and dealing with not terribly
technical site admins. Hell, I'm not even sure what the "meta-media" part of
it is, whether it's discussions or interest groups or are there meta-sites
that somehow overlay multiple real sites on common topics.

But it would be a fun project...

* Is there a more generic term than "social media" that would better include SO?

~~~
carapace
> Is there a more generic term than "social media" that would better include
> SO?

World-Wide Web.

As in, the WWW should be "heavily distributed over many small sites, with a
common fabric, a meta-media, connecting them."

;-P

See also Project Xanadu
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu)

------
mscasts
The problem isn't really the site or the admins, it's mainly the community and
moderators.

They almost instantly lock new questions if they're not very specific, they
are hostile and they're elitist. If you haven't researched your qustion for
hours before, be prepared to get a lot of downvotes for your ignorance.

I used to post somewhat regularly on SO, I never post anything anymore since
there is no idea because the community and moderators are too unfriendly.

The site itself is very nice though and many answers are still very good.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
> If you haven't researched your qustion for hours before

Is this not the point though? I generally spend hours chipping away at a
problem until I'll resort to asking StackOverflow. There's no point wasting
everyone's time if the information is already out there.

~~~
Kaiyou
Why not, though? There are enough helpful point-chasers out there who will
gladly help you save time.

------
fendy3002
Looks like SO execs need to open question on SE at "how to run and manage
community site"

~~~
jacquesm
Closed, duplicate.

------
0xdead
As a person who has been a user of StackOverflow for years and still unaware
of what these "Community Elected Moderators" are, can someone explain what's
the role of these guys exactly?

~~~
MauranKilom
Their job is to stay on top of the usual exceptional behavior you will find on
the internet: Spam, vandalism, rudeness/harassment, vote manipulation,
sockpuppetry, user bans, ban disputes and so on.

Contrary to popular belief, moderators have no special impact on questions
getting closed (or downvoted) - that's handled by the "normal" users.

------
fierarul
What's stopping all these people to group up and start another website? Now
it's the perfect moment to announce an URL.

~~~
makapuf
Well it takes more than an url to make stackoverflow. You need a critical mass
of content and people in it and a source of revenue, or whatever is needed to
support hosting. Also, you need to code and design and support the site. And
make it attractive regarding stackoverflow and Google search.

------
Simulacra
I think this is a good thing, a fresh start for the community.

------
ykevinator
Good riddance, find another place to put people down and get paid in magic
beans while the boss gets paid in cash ( I will never understand people who
get paid in self esteem to work for profitable companies).

------
throwaway13337
Problems with user created content sites are all the same:

The default license is always that the user grants only the site they post to
the ability to host the content.

It would be nice if the default, by law, was that user created content posted
publicly was available for re-hosting. Otherwise, the company would have to
ensure the user understands that they are gifting the company future control
in a specific way.

The result of the current climate is that these companies go against who gave
them their power and because of their content arsonal are immune to reprisal.

With a default public license enforced by law, we'd see so much more
innovation and cooperation of content hosts. The balance of power between
content creator and platform would shift.

This would essentially solve most problems with Facebook, reddit,
stackoverflow, linkedin, and more all at the same times. They'd have to try
harder to do right by their users or risk losing them to a competing platform
with the same data.

~~~
fabian2k
Content on Stack Overflow is CC-licensed, so anyone can host it somewhere
else, if they want to.

~~~
throwaway13337
I didn't realize. Well then it's a terrific solution for upset moderators.
Take their ball and go compete.

~~~
pinche2
Actually, anyone can download their entire [anonymized] database (or select
only some sites) from Archive.org via torrent or directly:

[https://archive.org/details/stackexchange](https://archive.org/details/stackexchange)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
I thought content there was cc-by, how then is it anonymised?

~~~
pinche2
Good question, I have wondered about this myself.

Also because after I deleted my account all of my 2000+ answers are now
attributed some user012345, not my username.

Seem they do whatever they want with the license. They just changed it from v3
to v4 of the cc by-sa with attribution required and without mine and many
other's permission...

