Some useful links to the situation. (You can find all these in the responses).<p>Monica Cellio's account: <a href="https://judaism.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5193/stack-overflow-inc-sinat-chinam-and-the-goat-for-azazel" rel="nofollow">https://judaism.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5193/stack-...</a><p>A news paper article on the situation: <a href="https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/01/stack_exchange_controversy/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/01/stack_exchange_cont...</a><p>A list of mods fired or resigned: <a href="https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333965/firing-mods-and-forced-relicensing-is-stack-exchange-still-interested-in-cooper" rel="nofollow">https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333965/firing-mods-...</a><p>A mods reasons for leaving: <a href="https://christianity.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6718/brothers-i-must-go" rel="nofollow">https://christianity.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6718/b...</a>
Reading some of Monica’s commentary on this, it pains me to conclude that she doesn’t know just how bad the situation is. She appears to have approached the issue in question respectfully and highlighted her concerns diplomatically, and she believes there must be a “big misunderstanding” because of the extreme response with which she was met. Surely all parties are interested in reaching an outcome everyone can live with, right? Wrong.<p>The reason her questions and were met with summary punishment was due to the fact that the moral crusaders she was attempting to engage with <i>do not tolerate ideological noncompliance.</i> There was no “misunderstanding.” Chipps and the rest could detect that she was likely to continue to ask questions about the policy, and anyone who dares question such policies is clearly a “bigot” and a “transphobe,” and why would you want someone like that to be a moderator?<p>Word to the wise: people like this (moral crusaders) will not hesitate to burn your organization <i>to the ground</i> if they don’t get their way. They’ll run coups (like this), condemn you on Twitter, and scare everyone into first being silent, then leaving the org, either out of fear of being the next to be condemned, or just the exhaustion of dealing with it all. I have seen this happen to non-profits, conferences, even private school boards (take a look at Oberlin for an example). If you get crusaders like this in your org, you should consider it an existential threat.<p>Well, off to delete my Stack Overflow account.
-542 before it was locked. That's incredible.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>The polarization of groups of people over ideological lines has never ended well.
>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.<p>Hang on a sec...<p>>their behaviour.<p>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?<p>And now "Sara Chipps" is doing exactly that?!
The title is misleading, this is not an apology.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
Is that an apology? It reads more like "I am sorry that you are angry, but we did nothing wrong so suck it lololol"<p>I don't know if the SO mod (Cellio) is in the wrong, but they did not give any explanation why Cellio was removed. I am unconvinced by this update.
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.
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."<p>I feel like we're watching one of the pillars of modern software development crumble.
Some of the responses to this article showcase opinions that I see a lot on Hacker News and which make it really hard to be on this site as a trans person sometimes. There’s a lot of attention being paid to the people who resigned, or whose moderator status was revoked—and how accommodating they may or may not have been—but it seems like very little of them are focusing on the people who this preferred pronoun policy was designed to help in the first place.<p>I know lots of people in my life who are genderfluid, or who use nonstandard pronouns. They aren’t the caricatures that some of the people in this thread are making them out to be, they’re real people who are out there doing their best and live as themselves, and it’s really difficult seeing this thing they struggle with every day be labeled a “political” issue.
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.<p>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.
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 <i>any</i> 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.<p>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<p>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.
I've never seen a code of conduct that makes calling someone by the wrong first name a bannable offense. So why is it so with pronouns? IMHO it's because this issue is politically unsettled -- it is not universally resolved across society. A fair percentage of people do not accept the concept of transgenderism, and instead see a transgender woman as a mentally ill man (and vice versa).<p>While this issue is politically unsettled, it cannot be correct to enforce one side's view by banning people on the other side of the argument if they don't tacitly concede the argument via enforced pronoun usage.<p>[Personally I hold no strong opinions about transgenderism, I just hate to see society splitting apart.]
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.
This is pretty bad. It would have been way better to post nothing than to post this.<p>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.<p>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 <i>really</i> 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 <i>making</i> an opportunity.<p>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.<p>And <i>my</i> preferred pronoun this week is blergl.
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.<p>If neither the mods nor users feel heard, who does this “platform” serve?
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.<p>I will link to just one: <a href="https://github.com/ASKBOT/askbot-devel" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ASKBOT/askbot-devel</a><p>Point being, there is nothing stopping someone from hosting this code and making their own Q&A board with their own moderation policies.
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?
The weirdest thing about this whole kerfuffle is that <i>gender is entirely irrelevant</i> 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.
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>I</i> had to vet it). Unbelievable that “don’t ship on Friday” got through.
> If we have to remove a diamond in the future we will follow a published process.<p>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?
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've observed that Stack Exchange is worse now than when it started and that the points award system moulds and warps respondents.<p>Now that it has gone overtly commercial they face issues which may not be solved.<p>What will programmers do to fix this, will they come up with an alternate architecture?<p>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.
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.
It really sucks that if you run a site where people talk, you take on the responsibility to police what they say. The legal system seems to handle scale relatively well but community standards of niceness may not be easy to formalize/scale.
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.
Since this is quasi-political, using a throwaway<p>But I noticed StackOverflow in 2016 made a really good choice: Having their code snippets in MIT: <a href="https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/271080/the-mit-license-clarity-on-using-code-on-stack-overflow-and-stack-exchange" rel="nofollow">https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/271080/the-mit-lice...</a><p>But based on this drama: I'd consider SO a platform to stay away from.<p>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.<p>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.
This sounds like exactly the same slippery slope people were concerned about when Coraline Ehmke's "Contributor Covenant" showed up.<p>People are starting to get pushed one direction or another, and it might not necessarily be the decision that they really wanted to be pushed.
I would like to point out the obvious.<p>Say you are a girl, but you really would rather be a boy. Your real, legal, name is Susi, but you prefer to be called "he" and "him". So you create a Stack Overflow account. Why not just call yourself John and not tell anyone that you are a girl? Is it really so important to let everyone know you're "transgender"? If you call yourself "John", no one will say "prove that you have a penis. I don't believe you". How could they? We just see a screen name. Or do you rather have a name that implies you are a woman, but still want people to "see" you as a man, although if they look with their eyes they will see you are a woman, your name says you are a woman, but then you want to go by the pronoun "he". It just seems like you're trying to be complicated.<p>I cannot understand what people are talking about when they say "hey, it's really bad if you assign the wrong gender to people." Heck, we're talking about an internet community! I cannot assign a gender to anyone who doesn't assign it to themselves first. If you call yourself Gabriella, be prepared that I think you are a woman. If you call yourself Peter, be prepared that I think you are a man. If you call yourself Andrea, you're a woman. If you tell me you're an Italian, and Andrea is a male name there.. okay, I can accept that.<p>Making up pronouns and saying "i only feel good if people call use klu/kla as pronouns" - that is ridiculous. I learned my pronouns because my parents told me what they are. There is a form of humbleness when you accept that you are not the center of the universe. End of story. I don't like people who feel entitled to make others worship their whims. You are not the center of the universe.<p>There are only usernames!! It is irrelevant to discuss here if it is legitimate to equate physical appearance with gender, because that's not an issue when all you see is a screen name.
There was a thread on this earlier today too, but it fell off the main page really quickly:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21149770" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21149770</a>
Perhaps the most striking thing here is the surety of all these responses, it’s all nefarious, lies, sleight of hand.<p>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.
How much are SE moderators paid?<p>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.