
Dear Stack Exchange, Inc. - bmease
https://dearstackexchange.com/
======
xibalba
I suspect that the average user of SE will not care one bit about this whole
drama.

I do find it frustrating, puzzling, and sad how SE appears to have treated
Monica Cellio. She provides an excellent summary (from her perspective) here:
[https://cellio.dreamwidth.org/2064709.html](https://cellio.dreamwidth.org/2064709.html)

~~~
drusepth
As a self-described "average user of SE", I find this drama pretty similar to
drama I've seen circling around the Quora "community" for the last 6 months or
so: confusing.

I use both SE and Quora to get answers, especially to extremely-niche
questions. I understand that some people do use them for community and that
people do interact and know each other on both platforms, but it's hard to
understand complaints about a subpar community when the goal of the site
doesn't seem to revolve around a community at all.

To me, SE is a Q&A site. It exists to let people ask questions and get those
questions answered. If you took away the community entirely, would it be any
less useful?

This probably comes off a bit flippant to the situation, but it's meant to
illustrate that you're right: I'd say I'm a pretty average user of SE (in that
I just use it to get answers, and occasionally write my own answers when I
can, and so far it's worked perfectly well for me) and I don't care one bit
about community-based drama.

~~~
dxbydt
> If you took away the community entirely, would it be any less useful?

so for a while, due to strange quirk of circumstance, i had the inside track
of a profitable adult website. it was your standard “streaming adult videos,
no ads, charge hefty subscription” model. one morning the ceo says let’s do
community. everyone’s going social. lets have blogs, message board, the whole
shebang. Announcement made with much fanfare. The idiot audience thought
community means they could talk to their favorite pornstar :) once the ceo
clarifies that no, community doesn’t mean that, they turn on him like a pack
of wolves. what do you mean, you want us to talk to each other ?! like random
perv from oklahoma should message arbitrary perv from cleveland about which
vid gets him off ? wtf ?!! the poor ceo’s got his back to a wall. he says,
we’ll be the world’s largest adult community. the peeps are like, dude,
largest community of pervs ? fbi will have a ball. half of us are scared our
employer or our spouse or worse, teenage son hacks into our account. now you
want us to have wacky avatars & actually talk to each other on a messageboard
so whatever we say persists for posterity ? it quickly went downhill from
there. they brought in a moderator, sort of like dang. he was supposed to
police the crowds & tamp down on contentious disagreement. but hardly anybody
participated, so they had to broaden dang’s role. so now everytime a video was
posted, poor dang would have to watch the whole video and make insightful
comments like “lady featured in this clip at 7:15 is the same lady in that
other clip at 9:20” and so on. soon he became an encyclopedia of porn trivia.
people actually started showing up on the community board just to poke fun of
his wide acumen. Around that time i quit. But it was quite the experience.
Community can be a major hassle.

~~~
mekane8
This was an interesting read. If you wrote more of these stories out into a
longer blog format I'd totally read it!

------
ldigas
While, in the beginning, a very active user, I've long now given up on that
network. I can't remember when was the last time I asked a question without
being forced to defend it for a period of at least a few hours, why it
shouldn't be closed as a duplicate, offtopic or ... It used to be an excellent
network, but nowadays it's just script-kiddies-playing-admins/editors
playground. It is no longer a productive technical community, so I've gone
back to specialized forums. Pity, I really liked the sites in the beginning.

~~~
sytelus
I don't understand this cry against moderators. These people are volunteerily
giving their time to keep quality bar high without any payment. If these
people weren't there then SO will be full of duplicates, off-topic and opinion
based Q&A just like Quora. A general tendency I have seen is just to ask
(often poorly stated) questions without doing simple search to see if it is
already answered. Someone needs to respect those people picking up garbage on
the street.

~~~
wpietri
I think SO is poorly designed as a system. It certainly does encourage people
to ask not-so-great questions. It doesn't handle them particularly well. And
then expects people to clean up the mess for free. Those people of course feel
stressed and overwhelmed, so are inclined to be rude, aggressive, and hasty in
their decisions.

Like ldigas, I long ago gave up on SO because of bad moderation experiences.
I'm grudgingly willing to respect those mods as humans, but I certainly won't
as moderators. They do a poor job, needlessly offending and discouraging
contributors. They could quit any time. They could go on strike at any time.
But no, they just kept on.

I can definitely muster up some sympathy when people trapped in bad jobs are
jerks. They are doing it to survive. But people who volunteer to be jerks?
That's on them.

~~~
greggman2
As someone who answers quite a few quesitons on SO I'd really like to see
posts that were perceived as wrongfully closed to see if I agree (haha) and
also to see how to fix the system.

Of course I have no hope that S.O. will change anything. When they started
their "be nice" campaign I suggested the "CLOSED: This is a duplicate" message
should be changed to "CONGRATS: This appears to be a duplicates so you win!
There is already an answer [here]!"

In any case there are rules. One is "post the code you're having trouble with
in the question, not a link offsite." The offsite link is useless if the code
changes there or the offsite site goes offline. Some not insignificant percent
of the time the question will just have a link to offsite code. I'll leave a
comment saying effectively, "please add the code to the question" and then I
vote to close, reason "missing code". The person never adds the code. Are they
like you claiming S.O. is rude and unreasonable? Did they get their answer
somewhere else and never come back to follow up? I have no idea.

Actually the rule is even more specific. "Make a minimal repo and post it the
question itself". Almost no one makes a remotely minimal repo which is fine,
but in general lots of people fail at the "repo" part period. In order to help
them we'd need to download code, setup dev environments, make up test data,
etc...."

What I do know is I often spend 30 to 240 minutes writing working examples for
a single answer. I do that volunteerily for reasonable questions. When someone
barfs out a "give me teh codez" question it can be very angering. They're
basically asking for free labor. If that's not rude I don't know what is.

Here's a recent "give me free labor" question

[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58206647/removing-the-
ba...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58206647/removing-the-background-
on-this-webgl-animation)

Here's a recent "teach me an entire CS course" question

[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58165198/how-to-
process-...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58165198/how-to-process-
model-data-in-unit8array-in-webgl)

And here's an answer I spent over 150 minutes on, trying to understand their
code, trying to make a working sample, running into bugs, when I looked up 2.5
hours had passed.

[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58101753/drawing-a-
torus...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58101753/drawing-a-torus-in-
webgl)

And another more typical 30 minutes on this one

[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58111380/in-webgl-the-
pe...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58111380/in-webgl-the-perspective-
cameras-are-added-to-the-canvas-or-to-the-3d-model-its)

note I'm not trying to brag. I hear your complaint often. I just don't run
into it myself. Instead I see lots of volunteers answering questions and only
voting to close the bad ones and they are bad ones.

~~~
slavik81
> As someone who answers quite a few quesitons on SO I'd really like to see
> posts that were perceived as wrongfully closed to see if I agree (haha) and
> also to see how to fix the system.

This person[1] was getting unexpected results when calling is_integer.
According to the duplicate, the solution is that they should call
is_integer... which is what they were doing. The original close voter
commented 'sorry I didn't read your question properly before suggesting the
dupe', but it remains closed.

The question was answered in the comments: this surprising result was due to
floating point error and rounding done by the print function. However, it
could not be posted as an answer, because the question was closed. I voted to
reopen, but the vote failed.

[1]:
[https://stackoverflow.com/q/49847677/331041](https://stackoverflow.com/q/49847677/331041)

EDIT: The share link I posted takes me to a different question when I'm logged
in than it does when I open in an incognito window. WTF.

EDIT2: Apparently serving completely different pages to logged-in users and
logged-out users is by design.
[https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/271077/](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/271077/)

Here's a link to question [1] that should work for everybody:
[https://stackoverflow.com/q/49847677/331041?noredirect=1](https://stackoverflow.com/q/49847677/331041?noredirect=1)

EDIT3: It doesn't work. Sorry. I tried my best, but only logged-in users will
get the correct page from the links I posted.

~~~
dorgo
>The question was answered in the comments

It's lucky that the person who answered had enough carma to write comments.
SO's job seems to be to prevent users from answering questions.

------
ben174
It's incredible that pronouns can bring down an entire community. Pick you
battles please, we're losing good things because of this silly conflict.

~~~
blanche_
Ben would you mind then being called she/her then if that is so silly? I'm a
hetero woman and I've been called a male few times when gaming and this is not
silly, people are rejecting your identity and I can't even imagine how bad
this is for trans/NB people.

~~~
koheripbal
People are not "rejecting your identity" if they use the wrong pronoun. That
is an emotional interpretation of an error.

~~~
mcv
Some people are. There are people who intentionally use the wrong pronoun,
exactly because they reject someone's transgender identity. We cis-gendered
people may not notice this, but to transgender people, it is every-day reality
to be confronted with someone who insists on denying their identity. Consider
the stupid bathroom bills in a couple of US states for example.

So against that background, it's entirely understandable that they react more
emotionally also to accidental mistakes. That doesn't mean overreaction is a
good idea, but it's a backlash against a long history of having their identity
denied. If we don't like the backlash, maybe we should work harder to address
the original hatred that it's reacting to.

------
oefrha
> We are disappointed with the lack of responsiveness to community concerns.
> On Meta Stack Exchange, bug reports, feature and support requests go
> unacknowledged, sometimes for months or years, and some excellent posts
> never receive a staff response. Meanwhile, there have been cases when staff
> have responded to complaints on Twitter almost immediately, taking action
> without due process and without consulting with the impacted sites.

It’s sad that more and more companies ignore normal support channels (a very
well established and proven one in SE’s case) and only answer to Twitter
shaming. For one thing, it’s very unfair to those of us who don’t (otherwise)
use Twitter — I have to keep an account just for tech support, and even then I
highly doubt my requests are valued as much as ones from accounts with 10k or
more followers.

------
onetime0001
I don’t understand why gender/pronouns is even being discussed. Someone’s
personal feelings don’t really have any place in a question/answers site. It’s
fine to respect a persons feelings and such when talking to a person but when
answering a question or asking the question. The gender/pronoun is irrelevant.

~~~
yitchelle
The folks moderating SE are very pedantic about the wording of passages. Once
I called SE a "forum", and I was politely told not to call SE a "forum". I
would really hate to be a person that is not very fluent in English and trying
to interact with SE.

~~~
Ixio
One of my latest questions got as first comment : "Please use English
punctuation when writing in English."

Certainly polite but a bit jarring as a non-native speaker that feels fluent.
Also a bit nonsensically-bureaucratic : I made the mistake because I didn't
know any better, after the comment I still couldn't correct the mistake
because I still didn't know any better, I wasn't even sure what rule of
punctuation I had wronged.

I would've preferred a direct edit instead of a comment prompting though I
guess that can be seen as worse by some people.

~~~
Symbiote
> ... nonsensically-bureaucratic : I ...

Maybe you put a space before a colon, and the eagle-eyed moderator spotted it
:-)

(English rarely has a space before a punctuation mark — except for a dash in
British usage. Americans—I think—do this.)

~~~
tsukurimashou
Yeah exactly, in French for example you put a space before a colon, a question
mark, exclamation mark, while in English you don't, it is quite hard to spot
for a lot of people.

------
u-dissolve
This reminds me of the time when stack exchange updated their terms of service
to include an arbitration clause. The community was in uproar over this
decision, yet the clause stands to this day.

[https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/309746/a-new-2018-u...](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/309746/a-new-2018-update-
to-our-terms-of-service-is-here)

Stack overflow's terms of service is pretty terrible, receiving the worst rank
in terms of user hostility on TOS;DR.

[https://tosdr.org/#stackoverflow](https://tosdr.org/#stackoverflow)

~~~
greggman2
That hardly seems fair. For 99.99% of users everything they do on the site is
publically available. There is no private messaging, no private anything. The
entire history of everything on all sites being public is one of the explicit
goals of the site. So "sharing with 3rd parties" means absolutely nothing.
Those 3rd parties could scrape the site or they could download the archive.

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

It doesn't seem like they should be marked as having a poor TOS for at least
half the things listed as those things are basically the known purpose of the
site.

~~~
u-dissolve
This simply isn't true - your most sensitive information _is not_ public, yet
is shared with 3rd parties. From their privacy policy:

"We collect location information about you including your IP address, your
location, browser information, and how you came to the Stack Overflow
Network."

(SO also collects your email address, interests, and employment status upon
registration - this is not mentioned specifically in the privacy policy)

"This is the case for individuals who have registered for an account, and non-
members who engage with the Stack Overflow Network by visiting our website(s)
but who have not completed an account registration."

"We share this information with certain third-parties (e.g., talent
recruiters, payment processors, and advertising providers)"

[https://stackoverflow.com/legal/privacy-
policy](https://stackoverflow.com/legal/privacy-policy)

------
King-Aaron
I remember when Stack Exchange was about fixing broken code.

~~~
ronnier
Politics have crept into every aspect of life unfortunately.

~~~
Espressosaurus
Politics is part of every human endeavor: between kids on the playground, in
the workplace, at the level of local, regional, national, and international
governments and businesses.

Politics and the negotiation of status and access between various in and out
groups is a fundamental part of being human.

~~~
tim58
Thank you. There is a tendency in tech people to dismiss politics as less than
important ("just politics", "just political"). It's a fundamental part of our
social fabric.

~~~
lukifer
Simler & Hanson provide a pretty solid explanatory framework:
[http://elephantinthebrain.com/](http://elephantinthebrain.com/)

~~~
raxxorrax
Have only read parts of that, but describing attributes to human nature mostly
fails to do so and attaches them to the author instead.

No, not everything is political. From that perspective you could substitute
the term politics with "battle for share", which can be political, but doesn't
encompass the whole set of politics. You can even generalize that further and
it gets more primitive along the way:

"Every day is a battle for survival"

Of course it is political play to attach attributes to groups and then
highlighting fault lines. But it is the most primitive form of what many
people call politics.

And since it doesn't accomplish anything productive, many people have the need
to remove politics from platforms like SE, because they just see it as a
distraction to the topic at hand and is pitting people against each other.
Pronouns do that, most of the gender discussion does that and now we have also
started a new discussions about racism that won't net positive results.

All because some people crave some validation? Maybe that is not always the
case, but it seems that people wanted a conflict and that is what they got.

~~~
crooked-v
> No, not everything is political

Name literally anything and I will point out its political implications.

~~~
raxxorrax
That would not constitute proof. But to humor you and me, what about
cornflakes?

~~~
zrobotics
The food literally created due to political beliefs?

"The story of corn flakes goes back to the late 19th century, when a team of
Seventh-day Adventists began to develop new foods to adhere to the vegetarian
diet recommended by the church. Members of the group experimented with a
number of different grains, including wheat, oats, rice, barley and maize. In
1894, John Harvey Kellogg, the superintendent of the Battle Creek Sanitarium
in Michigan and an Adventist, used these recipes as part of a strict
vegetarian regimen for his patients, which also included no alcohol, tobacco
or caffeine. The diet he imposed consisted entirely of bland foods. A follower
of Sylvester Graham, the man cited as inspiration of graham crackers and
graham bread, Kellogg believed that spicy or sweet foods would increase
passions." [0]

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_flakes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_flakes)

------
chimi
Honest Question: Why continue to support stack exchange through this? They
have shown themselves to be disingenuous at best. They are now profiting off
free labor. They started it because ExpertsExchange was hiding answers. They
rode the high horse to hypocrisy.

Why continue helping people like that succeed?

Why not just start a new one? Leave en masse to a new playground. Speak with
your answers.

Show the powers that be they can't treat the sharecroppers like this anymore.

Hasn't history shown the way? It's repeating itself all over this controversy.

Is this an inevitability? How can this be prevented?

It feels like the issue regarding Monica is just _the_ issue we are all
talking about, but ultimately, it goes _much_ deeper.

~~~
tinus_hn
Unfortunately StackExchange fell into the trap of trying to support social
justice warriorisms.

Either they will fold or they will come to realize that the only ways to deal
with users that are preoccupied with genders, religion, sexual orientations
and whatever protected class they can come up with are to lose them or ignore
them. You can’t go along with their demands because there will always be a new
demand, each one crazier and more irrelevant than the last one.

~~~
claudiawerner
I'm curious as to what part of the issue was about "social justice
warriorisms", especially since Monica herself and most of the other mods who
resigned were okay with the principle of calling people by the pronoun they
prefer to be called by.

~~~
mkohlmyr
Perhaps my reading of the situation is way off, but at the risk of making a
fool of myself:

My understanding is that Monica wanted to use gender neutral pronouns
throughout her writing as a general case, but that this was deemed "not good
enough" (or indeed hateful) in the cases where someone has chosen specific
pronouns. So I suppose this is what the GP is referring to. And I can't argue
that it seems like a rather extreme position - although I'm happy to be
persuaded otherwise.

~~~
abstractbarista
_That_ is what this is about? There is something wrong with the way our
culture is shifting. There is absolutely nothing wrong with Monica's choice.
It is literally the most pacifist choice you could make. Anyone who feels
"harmed" by her choice is only harming themselves.

~~~
mcv
I care deeply about social justice, and I'm totally on Monica's side here.
Even more so because as far as anyone can tell, she wasn't even violating a
CoC yet, and would probably have followed it if it was sufficiently clarified.
But at the most basic level, I feel gender-neutral language should always be
okay.

In fact, I think it would be healthy if language in general developed in a
more gender-neutral direction. We don't use special pronouns to divide people
based on other characteristics, so why gender?

------
Causality1
It's terribly sad that StackExchange is less likely to respond to a well-
reasoned argument by informed and invested moderators like this than a pack of
idiots on Twitter hooting for blood. Cancel-culture is cancer.

------
je42
This is totally sad. I really wonder how a company could publish a year ago in
2018 "Our Theory of Moderation, Re-visited.":

> Trust people. > Supporting people should be your default reaction

and then a year later be in this current state.

Worse is, SE seems to unable to reactify the situation in a meaninful and
trustful way.

------
sqldba
Shouldn’t the CTO fire the person who was directly responsible for firing
Monica? Why isn’t that part of it?

~~~
SnarkAsh
because she has 46k Twitter followers and the company fears Twitter above all
else

~~~
zo1
Not sure I understand - who is she that you're referring to?

~~~
Kiro
Sara Chipps.

------
OedipusRex
See
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21175225](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21175225)

------
throwaway10_06
"Beware of words. The moment you look away, they will take on a life of their
own; they will dazzle, mesmerize, terrorize, lead you astray from the reality
they represent, lead you to believe they are real. The world you see is not
the kingdom seen by children, but a fragmented world, broken into a thousand
pieces by the word. It is as if each ocean wave were seen to be distinct and
separate from the body of the ocean."

------
fenwick67
I would love a nice couple paragraphs that said "here's what happened",
otherwise taking any side in this is just taking shots in the dark, I'm
basically reading "certain events happened with a certain individual and
that's not okay"

~~~
xibalba
As asked:
[https://cellio.dreamwidth.org/2064709.html](https://cellio.dreamwidth.org/2064709.html)

~~~
moneywoes
Is there a TLDR of what happened anywhere?

~~~
ALittleLight
Seems like there was a disagreement regarding the use of gender pronouns that
resulted in 73 moderators getting "fired" or leaving.

The author of that summary mentioned one thing I found especially egregious,
which is a policy that stated avoiding using pronouns was out of alignment. If
I understand correctly, when she asked how they would know if she was avoiding
pronouns or just naturally not writing them, she was fired. I may have this
wrong as I just skimmed the summary. Also it seems she had multiple
disagreements on this front before.

~~~
ShamelessC
Is the implication that the LGBTQ+ community found it _more_ offensive to use
e.g. "they" than "he" or "she"?

I'm so confused. Wouldn't "they" (the gender neutral version) be _more_
inclusive? Is there some other alternative that's even better that I haven't
considered? I hope I'm not offending anyone by asking this. Just trying to
make sure I understand.

~~~
patmcc
Yes, people will often find it offensive if you use "they" after asked to use
"he" or "she".

If someone says "I am a man, please use he/him for my pronouns" and you use
'they' \- that would generally be considered at least odd, if not
inappropriate.

I don't think that means it's inappropriate to use "they" as the default if no
other information exists though.

~~~
anon12345690
uh but using "they" as a neutral way to talk about anyone is just fine. people
have been doing that for literally centuries, its called "singular they"

this is all about people wanting to be outraged for no reason

~~~
patmcc
"Singular they" is indeed well used, but it's _not_ normally used when the
gender of the person in question is explicitly known.

If you use "they" for someone who has specifically said to you "please use the
pronouns 'she/her' when referring to me", you are being rude, not neutral.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
"Where's Dave?"

"They're in the garage, I think"

is common to hear, just as

"He's in the garage, I think"

Many will mix between the "he/she" and "they" in the same conversation. Quite
often referring to their closest friends and family rather than pointed
attempt to misuse a pronoun.

~~~
bmn__
> ["They"] is common to hear, just as ["He"]

> Many will mix between the "he/she" and "they" in the same conversation.

That does not match my observed reality at all. All natural languages I know
are gendered the same way English is.

Singular "they" is already exceedingly uncommon by itself; and across all the
languages, and in my whole life-time, never once I or a conversation partner
used "they" instead of the specialised pronoun, or mixed in a conversation,
_when the gender of the person in question is explicitly known_ as GP wrote.
The same is true for all written material I read in my whole life.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
All I can say is it matches mine. So we're at impasse I guess.

English speech varies. Even across the UK there are dozens of regional accents
and dialects. Now add the many regional variations across the USA and other
world Englishes. All with their own traits and habits, some more widespread
than others. A deep rabbit hole with many forks then.

Common enough that I would not think it the slightest bit unnatural on
hearing, or give it a second thought. I wouldn't give it a second thought
reading it in a natural conversation in a book - not just in intentionally
neutral business or net writing, so that's not going to be memorable. It's not
an idiom I'd single out as localised to any one group or region. It _would_ be
memorable and feel odd reading if it were all that way in a novel's quoted
conversation, or nearly all names with few pronouns like some telesales
scripts seem to encourage.

Not _as_ common as he/she certainly, but I dunno 1:4 or 1:8 or something. I
couldn't say what proportion is names not pronouns either. FWIW My people skew
international, educated, Scots and perhaps city in a part of the UK that's
well north of London.

------
loxs
Stack Exchange is now a political battleground and long are gone the days when
it was a tool for sharing technological knowledge. They are now competing who
is more oppressed instead of who knows more.

That's what you get when you let ideology become more important than the core
of the product.

This is only the beginning of the downfall.

------
awinter-py
the free & freemium web have an arbitration gap and it will get worse before
it gets better

stackexchange works because questions can get answered with relatively little
money changing hands (AWS & advertisers mainly), but that means employees
can't offer due process on disputes without erasing the company's margins.

these companies can't offer centralized due process to everyone because it
would open them to being DDOS'd by competitors / trolls. Maybe justice can be
crowdsourced in the same way as javascript questions by identifying neutral
people in the stackexchange network, but that would be a huge experiment and
open SO/SE to community backlash when it went badly.

~~~
gizmo686
If only SE could somehow get a bunch of people to work as moderators without
paying them. Except that is exactly what happened; but recently SE managed to
piss off a large number of its volunteer moderators, who have (among other
things) written the linked complaint.

------
tzfld
I have read every hn submitted articles about this drama, but I still don't
get what this is all about. Maybe because of my english not being the best.

~~~
Yen
I'll do my best to summarize the situation, at least as well as I understand
it.

When speaking in English, it often sounds awkward to repeatedly use the same
proper noun in a sentence or paragraph. So, instead of repeated use of the
actual noun, a pronoun is used.

When referring to individual people, or to some animals, the most common
pronouns to use are "he" or "she", depending on the person being talked about.
When referring to a group of people, the typical pronoun is "they". It's also
possible to use "they" as a non-gendered pronoun for a single person.

By itself, the mere grammatical fact of these pronouns is not particularly
interesting.

However, right now the United States, and other countries, are experiencing
social and political tension around a broad range of related topics - how do
we treat people of different genders? How do we treat people who are
transgender? Or people who don't feel like they're clearly masculine or
feminine? Should gender even have a great role in society?

Usage of pronouns has become a particular sticking point during this tension.
For example, let's imagine a person named "Pat". Pat was born as a male, but
wishes to be identified as a woman. When talking _about_ Pat, I have a few
options in how I talk about he/she/them, and which I choose to use will divide
me into one of two political camps.

\-----

I could refer to Pat as "she", indicating that I respect her choice and
identity, which also implies that I find her framework of gender at least
tolerable or imaginable.

I could refer to Pat as "they", which is typically not particularly offensive,
and some people prefer it. It shows that even if I don't agree with their
choice, I want to sidestep awkwardness with them. This lightly shows me as
being in the gender-inclusive camp.

I could refer to Pat continuously as "Pat". This would tend to sound awkward,
and Pat might wonder why I won't use pronouns to talk about Pat, and might be
mildly offended, but it shows I'm at least aware enough of Pat's feelings to
try and avoid serious offense.

I could refer to Pat as "he", which would indicate that I do not respect his
choice. Pat would likely feel that I don't respect him at all, and that I'm
being belligerent in opposing his framework of gender.

\-----

It seems like the inciting incident on StackOverflow in particular unfolded as
follows:

* StackExchange began to introduce a new policy, intended to promote being inclusive of people of different genders and gender expressions.

* If I understand correctly, the policy indicated that writing should strive to be gender neutral. I believe in particular that this meant that the pronoun "they" should be preferred.

* One particular Moderator (by the username Cellio) of the site attempted to clarify, about whether writing that _avoided_ pronouns rather than using pronouns, would be allowed.

* _In Particular_, Cellio was concerned that the usage of the "they" pronoun to refer to individual people could be confusing to non-native English speakers, as "they" is more commonly used to refer to groups of people.

* Drama ensued, in which the stance of Cellio was cast as ideologically equivalent to the stance of someone who would intentionally use the wrong pronouns. (i.e., because Cellio was indicating that they did not wish to refer to a hypothetical Pat as "they", the assumption was that Cellio would refer to Pat as "he", even though Pat would prefer to be referred to by either "she" or "they")

* StackExchange thus fired the Cellio.

* Other people found this firing to be unfair, with a few reasons for finding it unfair:

People who agree with the ideological framework of gender which promotes
inclusivity and sensitivity felt like the fired moderator was actually being
quite reasonable, and that this was an over-reaction or misunderstanding.

People who don't agree with that ideological framework of gender see this as
another example of an opposing political camp colonizing more spaces.

There are a handful of people who believe the firing was reasonable, but I
don't believe I can adequately express their viewpoint.

~~~
tzfld
Thanks. This whole debate is more than strange for me, having a primary
language (hungarian) which do not use gender pronouns at all when referring to
a person/object.

------
notadev
In the early 2000s, Community Leaders (unpaid volunteers who 'worked' as
moderators on AOL) sued AOL for compensation for their work under the Fair
Labor Standards Act. They won $15 million.

All volunteers should do the same. StackExchange mods, Reddit moderators, etc.
Stop working for free to advance the financial interests of these for-profit
companies looking to exploit your labor.

------
nazka
I don't understand how they are not actively engaging with the community. It's
going to cost them every day this is not taken care of. Key people already
left, more will leave, and the damage will still be here. Even if they come
back to how it was before doesn't mean everybody will come back after that
like nothing happened.

------
_pmf_
I see the moderators as (major) part of the problem.

> There was a time when the most valuable asset of the Stack Exchange network
> was the people who freely contributed their time and energy to build
> communities in support of its mission.

Deleting valid or interesting questions is not something I consider to be a
valuable contribution.

------
dangus
I'm totally out of the loop about what this drama is about, and I'll stay that
way.

These are unpaid community moderators. They are essentially volunteers doing
this work because they want to. So let's ponder to ourselves and relate this
to our own lives, what kind of relationship do we have with the organizations
and people we do volunteer work with?

If you're at a point where you're so dissatisfied that you're writing a
sprawling open letter, a manifesto of your dissatisfaction, going as far as
buying a domain and setting up a website to publicize how upset you are, just
to complain to a place that you volunteer at, you know, maybe it's time to
just let it go. Maybe don't volunteer there. StackExchange isn't even a
charity, it's a private for-profit company.

At the end of the day, people visiting the site just did a quick Google search
and wanted their questions answered for free. They are generally unwilling to
pay for this service. If StackExchange didn't exist something very similar
would take its place. None of the general public needs to hear about whatever
moderator drama took place, even if something criminal happened. It's not our
problem.

The users don't actually implicitly value what the moderators do. So if the
moderators aren't happy, they should do something else with their valuable
time.

~~~
brian-armstrong
This is a shockingly unempathetic way to view the situation. These people have
poured lots of their time into making SO work, and they deserve to be heard.
There's no way anybody could build this service without volunteers. These
things don't just spring up from the ground on their own, and as someone who
uses the SE properties for personal and professional reasons, I hope these
moderators can find some sort of satisfactory resolution.

~~~
olingern
I agree. Without these people the site could fall into a mess of bad answers
or a self promotion answer driven platform like Quora.

~~~
edoceo
Sounds like they are so important they should have been compensated. I mean,
if they were so critical to the success.

~~~
mister_hn
They've got compensated in visibility. I don't know any moderator with less
than 20k points to date.

And the more points you have, the upper you stay in the ranks and you can
always embed their badge in your website.

So, yes, they don't earn money, but they receive visibility

~~~
p1esk
What does this visibility mean? Can it be converted to cash somehow?

~~~
bryanrasmussen
I suppose if your profile on StackOverflow is high enough you could put it on
your cv.

SO also has a jobs site, which I suppose can be linked to your profile if you
want it to.

A company I consulted at one time was trying to improve it's profile for job
applicants so they wanted people to put up their github profiles and SO
profiles in some advertisements or whatever they were doing - I think it was
on linkedIn they were doing this. Anyway I think they stopped because nobody
had a particularly high impressive number so why would you even want to do
that (but they did it)

~~~
p1esk
Lots of SO points means I spend a lot of time there answering questions
(usually during work hours). Not sure I’d want to advertise that.

~~~
bryanrasmussen
I would totally agree with that, however I have over the years developed the
suspicion that people who make hiring decisions might not be operating at the
same logical level that I am.

Given both that suspicion, and how they seem to behave about prominent github
profiles and such, I think that being in the top 20th percentile or so on SO
and a strong focus on the tags that correlate to the terms in a job
announcement might be a big draw to some HR people/managers who just really
don't want to mess up one more time! After the fifth complaint or so of
programmers we hire don't know how to code or whatever - it might be soothing.

------
ykevinator
Dear moderators,

Stop flagging stuff as dupes, then I will support your thing. And also why do
you work for free,

Love, Kevin

------
sgt
I'm confused here. What's the TL;DR of what happened?

------
anon12345690
yea these pronouns affect like 0.01% of people but go ahead and worry about
them instead of everyone else and youll ruin every community

when are people gonna figure out that you cant make everyone happy and the
people who whine about pronouns wont ever stop

nice downvotes lol, cant handle the truth?

~~~
Pfhreak
Pronouns affect most people. Most people use them. If you are talking about
trans people, it's estimated to be about 1-3% of people. That's roughly one in
thirty to one in a hundred people.

That puts it at about the roughly same numbers as the number of redheads. It's
uncommon, sure, but it's not totally minuscule.

Trans folks are also one of the most likely (if not the most likely)
minorities to suffer physical violence just for who they are. All they are
asking for is the same basic level of respect and politeness that anyone else
gets.

~~~
barry-cotter
> If you are talking about trans people, it's estimated to be about 1-3% of
> people.

Transgender Demographics: A Household Probability Sample of US Adults, 2014

American Journal of Public Health

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5227939/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5227939/)

Transgender individuals made up 0.53% (95% confidence interval = 0.46, 0.61)
of the population

~~~
Pfhreak
Health and Care Utilization of Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Youth: A
Population-Based Study

Pediatrics Journal

[https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/pediatrics/14...](https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/pediatrics/141/3/e20171683.full.pdf)

Participants included 2168 (2.7%) students who identified as TGNC and 78 761
(97.3%) students who identified as cisgender.

There's a reason I give such a wide range. Maybe I should widen it to 0.5-3%,
but I believe that in the past 5 years we've seen an increase in the number of
people who feel comfortable with a trans or gender nonconforming identity.

~~~
barry-cotter
Trans and Gender Non-Confirming != Trans

Using that article as a source for trans population is like saying 40% of the
US population are people of colour, therefore 40% of the US population is
black.

~~~
pseudalopex
The TGNC group identified as transgender, genderqueer, genderfluid, or unsure.
Cis people with unusual gender expression didn't count.

------
peterwwillis
Who else remembers the world before SE, when people just did exactly the same
thing as SE, but on mailing lists, and we found answers via web search, and we
didn't need all this moderation, categorization, voting, etc?

~~~
whatshisface
Stack exchange works a lot better for me than mailing lists did. Its greatest
contribution is the near elimination of duplicate questions.

~~~
tbyehl
Except that every new question gets shut down as a duplicate and the older
question being "duplicated" is 5 years old, full of obsolete answers, doesn't
address the subtle differences in what people are asking, etc.

They want to use the Q&A format to build something Wikipedia-like for each
site's subject areas but the incentive structure hasn't lead to Wikipedia-
level content curation.

Mailing lists, sub-Reddits, forums... they all end up high duplicative. But
people are also paying attention to all those duplicated answers, and the next
go 'round they contribute an even better answer, and maybe that ends up in a
FAQ or wiki and someone actually puts in the effort to keep it up-to-date.

Or Google figures out the best answer based on being newest, click rates,
whatever other voodoo that they do. Which, in my experience, is almost never a
Stack Exchange.

------
nabdab
Stack exchange has had issues from the beginning with absolutely horrible
people being mean aggressive and deflective, telling people they are idiots
for not providing 110% of available information in their first answer. Moving
to close questions as duplicates or irrelevant while the answer still hasn’t
resolved anything. The site supported this because it helped promote their
“one true answer high on google ranking”-value drive

It’s been an extremely toxic environment, which however was very useful for
searching out answers to common questions after the fact.

Now not too long ago I thought from their public communication that they
wanted to fix this, or at least make some serious headway towards reducing the
toxicity and vile. But no. Instead they decided to hire the assholes and have
them be assholes to the community moderators. This time over something as
silly as the right to not always actively referring to people in gendered
terms.

