10 ms·

An Update to Our Community and an Apology

308 points by SnarkAsh 7y ago

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
phnofive 7y ago
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.
- boring_twenties 7y ago
  I'm sorry you feel that way.
  - uberman 7y ago
    It seems like a correct observation to me. A nothing / false apology that seems to serve little other than to kick the hornet's nest. I'm curious, how do you see it?
    - ryeights 7y ago
      I believe he was making a joke (in agreement with OP)
    - tylerl 7y ago
      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".
      - uberman 7y ago
        ah, my bad then.
      - chrisweekly 7y ago
        agreed. using quotes and/or appending an ascii wink might have helped
adambatkin 7y ago
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.
- cmroanirgo 7y ago
  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 Edit: added 2nd comment by Monica
appleiigs 7y ago
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.
- xupybd 7y ago
  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?
  - sah2ed 7y ago
    > 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.
- P_I_Staker 7y ago
  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.
guardiangod 7y ago
Is that an apology? It reads more like "I am sorry that you are angry, but we did nothing wrong so suck it lololol" 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.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- ThrowawayR2 7y ago
  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?)
  - rolltiide 7y ago
    100% this Even empathy usually results in admitting a liability inducing stance You have to just do and let everyone else wonder why There’s no upside into explaining anything If it ever reaches discovery and testimony in a court of law, then maybe you’ll get detailed perspectives closer to the truth. Somewhere along the way users and consumers started imagining this stuff is actually collaborative. Its not.
  - cc81 7y ago
    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.
    - MauranKilom 7y ago
      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.
personjerry 7y ago
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.
- markmark 7y ago
  Why would they apologise? They aren't sorry they sacked this moderator. They fully stand by their decision.
  - personjerry 7y ago
    Well, the title of the post is "An Update to our Community and an Apology" so we should expect an apology in there.
    - markmark 7y ago
      Yep, and they're sorry for the uneasiness and confusion. I'm saying they aren't going to apologise for the sacking itself, because they stand by it.
      - humanrebar 7y ago
        Sorry has multiple meanings in context. I can be sorry you got the hiccups during a speech. That's not an apology.
  - MauranKilom 7y ago
    Well, for starters: - 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").
xupybd 7y ago
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.
tylerl 7y ago
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.
- P_I_Staker 7y ago
  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.
djsumdog 7y ago
There was a thread on this earlier today too, but it fell off the main page really quickly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21149770 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21149770
- dang 7y ago
  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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380). Not sure if that was a good idea or not.
  - guardiangod 7y ago
    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.
    - dang 7y ago
      (Yes, the software relativizes the timestamps on a thread while re-upping a submission; see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20169818 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.)
      - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
djsumdog 7y ago
-542 before it was locked. That's incredible. 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.
- banana_giraffe 7y ago
  > -542 before it was locked. That's incredible. 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.
- xenocyon 7y ago
  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.
  - pariahHN 7y ago
    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.
xupybd 7y ago
Some useful links to the situation. (You can find all these in the responses). Monica Cellio's account: https://judaism.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5193/stack-overflow-inc-sinat-chinam-and-the-goat-for-azazel 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_controversy/ 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-and-forced-relicensing-is-stack-exchange-still-interested-in-cooper https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333965/firing-mods-... A mods reasons for leaving: https://christianity.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6718/brothers-i-must-go https://christianity.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6718/b...
- MauranKilom 7y ago
  I would like to add that I found https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5765/moderator-resignation https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5765/moderato... a very comprehensive and faceted summary.
nabdab 7y ago
When did the US start weaponizing pronouns? From a European standpoint this all seems extreme to the point of absurdity.
- aeorgnoieang 7y ago
  I'm sure it'll show up on your shores soon enough.
  - dr_dshiv 7y ago
    As an American in Europe, I honestly think this is uniquely American.
    - cc81 7y ago
      It is not, it exists in Sweden in a way as well.
      - yakshaving_jgt 7y ago
        Only because Sweden is obsessed with American media and culture.
    - aeorgnoieang 7y ago
      I hope so!
- dwaltrip 7y ago
  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.
luckylion 7y ago
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.
- unionpivo 7y ago
  There is no good way to post that. (They are essentially doing nothing, but had to say something) That is why it's usually short, neutral and has little details. Anything else just adds more fuel to the fire. PS: I am not saying I agree with them.
mieseratte 7y ago
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.
- rando444 7y ago
  Monica already posted everything from her side here: https://judaism.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5193/stack-overflow-inc-sinat-chinam-and-the-goat-for-azazel https://judaism.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5193/stack-... Or is there some specific piece of information you feel she is withholding?
  - mieseratte 7y ago
    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.
    - simonh 7y ago
      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?
      - mieseratte 7y ago
        It’s a private website, not the US Supreme Court. Try applying that same standard on HN! They’ve done nothing to earn my doubt, I don’t start from an assumption of guilt as you do. Y’all are some toxic reactionary shits. Thanks for the reminder of why I quit this site the first time buddy! Stay salty, HN!
ameen 7y ago
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?
- mieseratte 7y ago
  The corporation that owns it?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- thredj3941 7y ago
  why does the stack network ( https://stackexchange.com/sites# https://stackexchange.com/sites# ) have any advantages? 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. so what's the important network effect here?
  - rmilejczz 7y ago
    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.
    - luckylion 7y ago
      > 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.
aaron695 7y ago
It's interesting how organisations seem to lead towards these awful places. It could be you only hear about the ones who allow nefarious factions gain control, but it doesn't seem to be the case. Often it's an outsider who inserts the poison then internally they melt down. It's rare organisations stand against lynch mobs like cancel culture, here it seems internally driven. It might be no more than a meme that cancel culture is powerful and has to be respected. Evidence is, if you ignore it, generally it will go away, but memes have power.
forgotmypwd123 7y ago
>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? And now "Sara Chipps" is doing exactly that?!
- kichik 7y ago
  They listened and changed it to > that behavior
  - kichik 7y ago
    Oh it's actually worse than that. The original said: > the behavior Some user named Tim changed it to "their". Full history @ https://meta.stackexchange.com/posts/334248/revisions https://meta.stackexchange.com/posts/334248/revisions Why would they let random people edit such a post? So weird...
    - etchalon 7y ago
      That random person probably had the permission level to edit posts. That’s how SO works.
- MauranKilom 7y ago
  >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).
chii 7y ago
is there a summary of events that occurred? There's lots of confusing accounts and it's impossible to piece together the facts.
- DanBC 7y ago
  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".
  - myrion 7y ago
    Thank you, this is a very good summary!
    - JeremyBanks 7y ago
      It's false. Monica is an LGBT Ally and much of the anger is that she's being publicly smeared as a bigot when we know her not to be
  - steve_taylor 7y ago
sam_lowry_ 7y ago
The title is misleading, this is not an apology. As a former operator of a (much smaller) community website, I understand the motives behind SE actions. They want to avoid discussions about gender-neutral pronouns and other contentious topics completely. There are only risks and no benefits for SE business in such discussions.They actually do not want discussions, just questions and answers. Jeff Atwood once wrote a blog post about their effort to stiffle discussion on SE sites. Notice how their comments are difficult to use and see. Unfortunately, SE is many people with different goals, someone made the move to update the CoC, and now SE management has to tame the public outrage. IMO, the right management decision is to silently fire or move the person behind the CoC update, remove moderator status from Monica forever and publicly define limits to SE discussions in future annoucements.
- kjaftaedi 7y ago
  Curious why you would remove moderator status from Monica? From my understanding it appears that she was demoted for merely posing relevant questions. As I don't believe SE has even made any specific claims backing up their decision, I'm curious as to why you suggest this is the correct decision to make.
  - sam_lowry_ 7y ago
    To send the message to other users and moderators that such discussions are unwelcome. SE has to balance between the need to expand into topics like judaism.stackexchange.com and islam.stackechange.com while remaining a q&a business, not a flamebait-generator business.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - ryan-allen 7y ago
      They may need to apply separate CoC's to different SE's. You can't have bona fide Religious SE's and the compelled use of personal pronouns co-exist. If they think otherwise they are delusional, one will end up waging the other, and dogs only have one tail.
pjc50 7y ago
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.
- sah2ed 7y ago
  Exactly. 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. 0: http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html
- jeegsy 7y ago
  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.
  - garmaine 7y ago
    The nature of SE is that each site has a very specific topic. The SE company approves which sites / topics are allowed. So yes, by consequence of how the system works they would have to explicitly approve a “Christianity”, “Judaism”, “Islam”, etc. stack exchange.
- humanrebar 7y ago
  Yes. It's definitely better if religious people stay closeted and pass as agnostic in public. Being welcoming or officially tolerant of them is clearly too much work to be worth it. I don't see what's in it for me anyway. Before anyone gets offended, my Granny is religious, so I'm not bigoted or anything. __The above is ironic to hopefully get the point across succinctly and with impact. A dry explanation wouldn't work in the same way. Or maybe not with my writing skills anyway.__
mytailorisrich 7y ago
How much are SE moderators paid? 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.
amrrs 7y ago
Another Mod's post: https://christianity.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6718/brothers-i-must-go https://christianity.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6718/b...
nsoonhui 7y ago
To me, the most interesting thing about the whole episode is that the post was locked and unable to be voted upon after massive downvotes from users.
- MauranKilom 7y ago
  Keeping the debate even moderately civil requires constant vigilance from the moderators and community managers. There is a constant stream of nasty comments - you don't see them because they are removed quickly. There were times where no one was present to moderate, so the post was temporarily locked. It has since crossed into the four digits of downvotes.
RickJWagner 7y ago
How much easier the world would be if we just: - Don't offend people - If you are offended, be the bigger person and ignore it
- mikroskeem 7y ago
  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.
thelazydogsback 7y ago
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.
- effingwewt 7y ago
  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".
  - thelazydogsback 7y ago
    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".
    - ictebres 7y ago
      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.
GolDDranks 7y ago
> 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?
- barsonme 7y ago
  SE mods have diamonds appended to their usernames.
- jffry 7y ago
  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 https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/75192
  - GolDDranks 7y ago
    Ah, that explains it. Thank you!
    - zahllos 7y ago
      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".
9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
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.
- thinkingemote 7y ago
  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.
  - Waterluvian 7y ago
    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.
Havoc 7y ago
What an awkward post. Reads like a network outages post mortem
MikeGale 7y ago
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.
Waterluvian 7y ago
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.
- tomp 7y ago
  See dang's reply here. TL;DR: you're not wrong. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21167710 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21167710
  - Waterluvian 7y ago
    Thank you! Didn't see that among all the comments.
- gizmo686 7y ago
  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). [0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-enhancement-s/bappiabcodbpphnojdiaddhnilfnjmpm https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-enhanc... - with some local edits that shouldn't be relevent)
strenholme 7y ago
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. I will link to just one: https://github.com/ASKBOT/askbot-devel https://github.com/ASKBOT/askbot-devel Point being, there is nothing stopping someone from hosting this code and making their own Q&A board with their own moderation policies.
fencepost 7y ago
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. And my preferred pronoun this week is blergl.
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  You may have been making an interesting point, but the "preferred pronoun of the week" bit at the end kind of kills it. Have you ever met someone who changes their gender identity weekly, or asks people to use a derivation-free nonsense word to refer to them?
  - throwaway314pi 7y ago
    I’ve never met someone who uses a pronoun other than he, she, or they. Does that mean all other pronouns are “derivation-free nonsense”? My preferred pronoun is blergl.
    - dang 7y ago
      Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - xienze 7y ago
    > Have you ever met someone who changes their gender identity weekly Isn't that what "gender-fluid" is? > or asks people to use a derivation-free nonsense word to refer to them? Isn't that what pronouns like "xir" are all about? You seem more hung up on "have you personally met someone like that?" than "do these people really exist?" The answer to the latter question is yes, they do.
seanmcdirmid 7y ago
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?
- svnpenn 7y ago
  yeah, they do :( https://github.com/github/markup/issues/1258 https://github.com/github/markup/issues/1258
  - detaro 7y ago
    ... that's not what's happening in your link?
    - stevula 7y ago
      https://github.com/github/markup/issues/1258#issuecomment-475826279 https://github.com/github/markup/issues/1258#issuecomment-47...
      - detaro 7y ago
        That's correcting the previous commenter, which used "he". That's not objection to gender-neutral language.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- toofy 7y ago
  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.
XPKBandMaidCzun 7y ago
Since this is quasi-political, using a throwaway But I noticed StackOverflow in 2016 made a really good choice: Having their code snippets in MIT: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/271080/the-mit-license-clarity-on-using-code-on-stack-overflow-and-stack-exchange https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/271080/the-mit-lice... 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.
tmp20191006cars 7y ago
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). 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. [Personally I hold no strong opinions about transgenderism, I just hate to see society splitting apart.]
- Causality1 7y ago
  One hopes that eventually it will be like mistakenly calling someone left-handed, with the reality of the situation so obvious there'd never be a need to get angry about it or create rules about it.
- Invictus0 7y ago
  Truth and falsehood and opinion are all points on the same spectrum. Typically, facts and falsehoods are mutually agreed upon by both sides, and opinion is what falls in between as cannot-yet-be-determined stuff. But we live in a world where opinion has exceeded its bounds and encompassed fact. Evolution and climate change are still hotly contested. And it is the same with transgenderism: both sides hold different "factual" views (from their own standpoint) that make their broader worldviews paradoxical and irreconcilable, just as if 2 + 2 were 5.
  - damnyou 7y ago
    This is not a both sides issue. The medical fields moved to complete affirmation of trans identities a while ago because the scientific evidence for trans affirmation is overwhelming -- literally everything from mental health outcomes to surgery regret rates indicates that. The other side is both bigoted and factually wrong.
    - 7y ago
wendyshu 7y ago
Their aim was building "a more welcoming and inclusive network". The first step towards this is... excluding people, apparently.
- MauranKilom 7y ago
  Directly from the stackoverflow.com homepage: https://i.imgur.com/XB1ORxW.png https://i.imgur.com/XB1ORxW.png Very ironic.
reccanti 7y ago
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. 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.
- michannne 7y ago
  Modifying the policies that StackOverflow enforces is very much political.
- asdjlkadsjklads 7y ago
  Sometimes i consider myself lucky that i don't know anyone seeking special pronouns - because i imagine i would repeatedly use what i visually see, not what they request. These days i seek to find a gender neutral word i can get into the habit of using (it, or they, or something similar), for fear of mis-nouning someone. Though, i also have the fear that if i use something neutral, when someone requested a specific non-neutral pronoun, i may be negatively impacted. As someone "on the spectrum" social norms are already difficult. All of this talk just makes me nervous.
  - automatoney 7y ago
    I've never thought about how changing social norms affect people on the spectrum, but it definitely seems like it would be a lot harder to get pronouns right. In my experience with trans friends, pronoun misuse would just come with a gentle reminder, and if you want, mentioning you have trouble with social norms should give you more leeway. In many left-leaning circles awareness of gender, disability and other things tend to come as a package. (As an aside I think that people might not take using "it" very well if you are referring to a person - they might see it as dehumanizing)
wendyshu 7y ago
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.
hitekker 7y ago
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/334399/summing-up-the-main-issues-the-story-so-far/334417#334417 https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/334399/summing-up-t... A supposedly neutral timeline of events.
- BrissyCoder 7y ago
  > 13. A copy of the TL transcripts was leaked. Anyone have this?
ykevinator 7y ago
2 things 1) SO mods are a-holes, so I don't care about the mod getting fired, they can find another place to hassle people, 2) 95% of not using the right pronouns is benevolent, no malice intended
lesstenseflow 7y ago
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. 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 do not tolerate ideological noncompliance. 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? Word to the wise: people like this (moral crusaders) will not hesitate to burn your organization to the ground 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. Well, off to delete my Stack Overflow account.
- Flow 7y ago
  I just deleted mine. Then I discovered on that delete page that you have to separately delete the accounts you might have on other exchanges. This is bad UX. I searched the net for a bit and it seems the way to do it is via: - https://stackoverflow.com/contact https://stackoverflow.com/contact - Select Other in the drop-down list, - Then you enter a message that you want them to do delete your accounts for you.
- wendyshu 7y ago
  In terms familiar to users of the religion stack exchanges: zealotry -> schism -> excommunication.
- mattmaroon 7y ago
  Yeah I made the mistake of reading about this. This stuff is why Republicans win elections. If the tech world doesn't realize that having only people on the left and people on the far left is not cultural diversity it will be plagued with this stuff forever.
protomyth 7y ago
Did they actually do We learned (or were painfully reminded, rather) to never ship at 6 PM (EDT) on a Friday. to a practicing Jew?
good_guy 7y ago
LOL, what a drama. fucking first world problems.
geodel 7y ago
Seems the theory I read somewhere that over time Euphemisms become dysphemisms and dysphemisms become euphemisms is getting applied here.
jlgaddis 7y ago
I miss the good old days of the Internet, when men were men, women were men, and children were FBI agents.
jrnichols 7y ago
This sounds like exactly the same slippery slope people were concerned about when Coraline Ehmke's "Contributor Covenant" showed up. 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.
kater_k 7y ago
I would like to point out the obvious. 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. 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. 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. 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.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

308 points by SnarkAsh 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

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.

boring_twenties 7y ago
I'm sorry you feel that way.
- uberman 7y ago
  It seems like a correct observation to me. A nothing / false apology that seems to serve little other than to kick the hornet's nest. I'm curious, how do you see it?
  - ryeights 7y ago
    I believe he was making a joke (in agreement with OP)
  - tylerl 7y ago
    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".
    - uberman 7y ago
      ah, my bad then.
    - chrisweekly 7y ago
      agreed. using quotes and/or appending an ascii wink might have helped

adambatkin 7y ago

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.

cmroanirgo 7y ago
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 Edit: added 2nd comment by Monica

appleiigs 7y ago

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.

xupybd 7y ago
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?
- sah2ed 7y ago
  > 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.
P_I_Staker 7y ago
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.

guardiangod 7y ago

Is that an apology? It reads more like "I am sorry that you are angry, but we did nothing wrong so suck it lololol" 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.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ThrowawayR2 7y ago
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?)
- rolltiide 7y ago
  100% this Even empathy usually results in admitting a liability inducing stance You have to just do and let everyone else wonder why There’s no upside into explaining anything If it ever reaches discovery and testimony in a court of law, then maybe you’ll get detailed perspectives closer to the truth. Somewhere along the way users and consumers started imagining this stuff is actually collaborative. Its not.
- cc81 7y ago
  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.
  - MauranKilom 7y ago
    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.

personjerry 7y ago

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.

markmark 7y ago
Why would they apologise? They aren't sorry they sacked this moderator. They fully stand by their decision.
- personjerry 7y ago
  Well, the title of the post is "An Update to our Community and an Apology" so we should expect an apology in there.
  - markmark 7y ago
    Yep, and they're sorry for the uneasiness and confusion. I'm saying they aren't going to apologise for the sacking itself, because they stand by it.
    - humanrebar 7y ago
      Sorry has multiple meanings in context. I can be sorry you got the hiccups during a speech. That's not an apology.
- MauranKilom 7y ago
  Well, for starters: - 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").

xupybd 7y ago

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.

tylerl 7y ago

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.

P_I_Staker 7y ago
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.

djsumdog 7y ago

There was a thread on this earlier today too, but it fell off the main page really quickly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21149770 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21149770

dang 7y ago
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380). Not sure if that was a good idea or not.
- guardiangod 7y ago
  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.
  - dang 7y ago
    (Yes, the software relativizes the timestamps on a thread while re-upping a submission; see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20169818 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.)
    - pbhjpbhj 7y ago

djsumdog 7y ago

-542 before it was locked. That's incredible. 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.

banana_giraffe 7y ago
> -542 before it was locked. That's incredible. 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.
xenocyon 7y ago
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.
- pariahHN 7y ago
  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.

xupybd 7y ago

Some useful links to the situation. (You can find all these in the responses). Monica Cellio's account: https://judaism.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5193/stack-overflow-inc-sinat-chinam-and-the-goat-for-azazel 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_controversy/ 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-and-forced-relicensing-is-stack-exchange-still-interested-in-cooper https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333965/firing-mods-... A mods reasons for leaving: https://christianity.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6718/brothers-i-must-go https://christianity.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6718/b...

MauranKilom 7y ago
I would like to add that I found https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5765/moderator-resignation https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5765/moderato... a very comprehensive and faceted summary.

nabdab 7y ago

When did the US start weaponizing pronouns? From a European standpoint this all seems extreme to the point of absurdity.

aeorgnoieang 7y ago
I'm sure it'll show up on your shores soon enough.
- dr_dshiv 7y ago
  As an American in Europe, I honestly think this is uniquely American.
  - cc81 7y ago
    It is not, it exists in Sweden in a way as well.
    - yakshaving_jgt 7y ago
      Only because Sweden is obsessed with American media and culture.
  - aeorgnoieang 7y ago
    I hope so!
dwaltrip 7y ago
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.

luckylion 7y ago

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.

unionpivo 7y ago
There is no good way to post that. (They are essentially doing nothing, but had to say something) That is why it's usually short, neutral and has little details. Anything else just adds more fuel to the fire. PS: I am not saying I agree with them.

mieseratte 7y ago

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.

rando444 7y ago
Monica already posted everything from her side here: https://judaism.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5193/stack-overflow-inc-sinat-chinam-and-the-goat-for-azazel https://judaism.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5193/stack-... Or is there some specific piece of information you feel she is withholding?
- mieseratte 7y ago
  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.
  - simonh 7y ago
    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?
    - mieseratte 7y ago
      It’s a private website, not the US Supreme Court. Try applying that same standard on HN! They’ve done nothing to earn my doubt, I don’t start from an assumption of guilt as you do. Y’all are some toxic reactionary shits. Thanks for the reminder of why I quit this site the first time buddy! Stay salty, HN!

ameen 7y ago

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?

mieseratte 7y ago
The corporation that owns it?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
thredj3941 7y ago
why does the stack network ( https://stackexchange.com/sites# https://stackexchange.com/sites# ) have any advantages? 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. so what's the important network effect here?
- rmilejczz 7y ago
  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.
  - luckylion 7y ago
    > 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.

aaron695 7y ago

It's interesting how organisations seem to lead towards these awful places. It could be you only hear about the ones who allow nefarious factions gain control, but it doesn't seem to be the case. Often it's an outsider who inserts the poison then internally they melt down. It's rare organisations stand against lynch mobs like cancel culture, here it seems internally driven. It might be no more than a meme that cancel culture is powerful and has to be respected. Evidence is, if you ignore it, generally it will go away, but memes have power.

forgotmypwd123 7y ago

>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? And now "Sara Chipps" is doing exactly that?!

kichik 7y ago
They listened and changed it to > that behavior
- kichik 7y ago
  Oh it's actually worse than that. The original said: > the behavior Some user named Tim changed it to "their". Full history @ https://meta.stackexchange.com/posts/334248/revisions https://meta.stackexchange.com/posts/334248/revisions Why would they let random people edit such a post? So weird...
  - etchalon 7y ago
    That random person probably had the permission level to edit posts. That’s how SO works.
MauranKilom 7y ago
>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).

chii 7y ago

is there a summary of events that occurred? There's lots of confusing accounts and it's impossible to piece together the facts.

DanBC 7y ago
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".
- myrion 7y ago
  Thank you, this is a very good summary!
  - JeremyBanks 7y ago
    It's false. Monica is an LGBT Ally and much of the anger is that she's being publicly smeared as a bigot when we know her not to be
- steve_taylor 7y ago

sam_lowry_ 7y ago

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

kjaftaedi 7y ago
Curious why you would remove moderator status from Monica? From my understanding it appears that she was demoted for merely posing relevant questions. As I don't believe SE has even made any specific claims backing up their decision, I'm curious as to why you suggest this is the correct decision to make.
- sam_lowry_ 7y ago
  To send the message to other users and moderators that such discussions are unwelcome. SE has to balance between the need to expand into topics like judaism.stackexchange.com and islam.stackechange.com while remaining a q&a business, not a flamebait-generator business.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - ryan-allen 7y ago
    They may need to apply separate CoC's to different SE's. You can't have bona fide Religious SE's and the compelled use of personal pronouns co-exist. If they think otherwise they are delusional, one will end up waging the other, and dogs only have one tail.

pjc50 7y ago

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.

sah2ed 7y ago
Exactly. 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. 0: http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html
jeegsy 7y ago
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.
- garmaine 7y ago
  The nature of SE is that each site has a very specific topic. The SE company approves which sites / topics are allowed. So yes, by consequence of how the system works they would have to explicitly approve a “Christianity”, “Judaism”, “Islam”, etc. stack exchange.
humanrebar 7y ago
Yes. It's definitely better if religious people stay closeted and pass as agnostic in public. Being welcoming or officially tolerant of them is clearly too much work to be worth it. I don't see what's in it for me anyway. Before anyone gets offended, my Granny is religious, so I'm not bigoted or anything. __The above is ironic to hopefully get the point across succinctly and with impact. A dry explanation wouldn't work in the same way. Or maybe not with my writing skills anyway.__

mytailorisrich 7y ago

How much are SE moderators paid? 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.

amrrs 7y ago

Another Mod's post: https://christianity.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6718/brothers-i-must-go https://christianity.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6718/b...

nsoonhui 7y ago

To me, the most interesting thing about the whole episode is that the post was locked and unable to be voted upon after massive downvotes from users.

MauranKilom 7y ago
Keeping the debate even moderately civil requires constant vigilance from the moderators and community managers. There is a constant stream of nasty comments - you don't see them because they are removed quickly. There were times where no one was present to moderate, so the post was temporarily locked. It has since crossed into the four digits of downvotes.

RickJWagner 7y ago

How much easier the world would be if we just: - Don't offend people - If you are offended, be the bigger person and ignore it

mikroskeem 7y ago
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.

thelazydogsback 7y ago

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.

effingwewt 7y ago
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".
- thelazydogsback 7y ago
  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".
  - ictebres 7y ago
    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.

GolDDranks 7y ago

> 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?

barsonme 7y ago
SE mods have diamonds appended to their usernames.
jffry 7y ago
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 https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/75192
- GolDDranks 7y ago
  Ah, that explains it. Thank you!
  - zahllos 7y ago
    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".

9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago

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.

thinkingemote 7y ago
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.
- Waterluvian 7y ago
  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.

Havoc 7y ago

What an awkward post. Reads like a network outages post mortem

MikeGale 7y ago

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.

Waterluvian 7y ago

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.

tomp 7y ago
See dang's reply here. TL;DR: you're not wrong. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21167710 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21167710
- Waterluvian 7y ago
  Thank you! Didn't see that among all the comments.
gizmo686 7y ago
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). [0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-enhancement-s/bappiabcodbpphnojdiaddhnilfnjmpm https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-enhanc... - with some local edits that shouldn't be relevent)

strenholme 7y ago

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. I will link to just one: https://github.com/ASKBOT/askbot-devel https://github.com/ASKBOT/askbot-devel Point being, there is nothing stopping someone from hosting this code and making their own Q&A board with their own moderation policies.

fencepost 7y ago

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. And my preferred pronoun this week is blergl.

shadowgovt 7y ago
You may have been making an interesting point, but the "preferred pronoun of the week" bit at the end kind of kills it. Have you ever met someone who changes their gender identity weekly, or asks people to use a derivation-free nonsense word to refer to them?
- throwaway314pi 7y ago
  I’ve never met someone who uses a pronoun other than he, she, or they. Does that mean all other pronouns are “derivation-free nonsense”? My preferred pronoun is blergl.
  - dang 7y ago
    Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- xienze 7y ago
  > Have you ever met someone who changes their gender identity weekly Isn't that what "gender-fluid" is? > or asks people to use a derivation-free nonsense word to refer to them? Isn't that what pronouns like "xir" are all about? You seem more hung up on "have you personally met someone like that?" than "do these people really exist?" The answer to the latter question is yes, they do.

seanmcdirmid 7y ago

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?

svnpenn 7y ago
yeah, they do :( https://github.com/github/markup/issues/1258 https://github.com/github/markup/issues/1258
- detaro 7y ago
  ... that's not what's happening in your link?
  - stevula 7y ago
    https://github.com/github/markup/issues/1258#issuecomment-475826279 https://github.com/github/markup/issues/1258#issuecomment-47...
    - detaro 7y ago
      That's correcting the previous commenter, which used "he". That's not objection to gender-neutral language.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
toofy 7y ago
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.

XPKBandMaidCzun 7y ago

Since this is quasi-political, using a throwaway But I noticed StackOverflow in 2016 made a really good choice: Having their code snippets in MIT: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/271080/the-mit-license-clarity-on-using-code-on-stack-overflow-and-stack-exchange https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/271080/the-mit-lice... 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.

tmp20191006cars 7y ago

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). 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. [Personally I hold no strong opinions about transgenderism, I just hate to see society splitting apart.]

Causality1 7y ago
One hopes that eventually it will be like mistakenly calling someone left-handed, with the reality of the situation so obvious there'd never be a need to get angry about it or create rules about it.
Invictus0 7y ago
Truth and falsehood and opinion are all points on the same spectrum. Typically, facts and falsehoods are mutually agreed upon by both sides, and opinion is what falls in between as cannot-yet-be-determined stuff. But we live in a world where opinion has exceeded its bounds and encompassed fact. Evolution and climate change are still hotly contested. And it is the same with transgenderism: both sides hold different "factual" views (from their own standpoint) that make their broader worldviews paradoxical and irreconcilable, just as if 2 + 2 were 5.
- damnyou 7y ago
  This is not a both sides issue. The medical fields moved to complete affirmation of trans identities a while ago because the scientific evidence for trans affirmation is overwhelming -- literally everything from mental health outcomes to surgery regret rates indicates that. The other side is both bigoted and factually wrong.
  - 7y ago

wendyshu 7y ago

Their aim was building "a more welcoming and inclusive network". The first step towards this is... excluding people, apparently.

MauranKilom 7y ago
Directly from the stackoverflow.com homepage: https://i.imgur.com/XB1ORxW.png https://i.imgur.com/XB1ORxW.png Very ironic.

reccanti 7y ago

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. 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.

michannne 7y ago
Modifying the policies that StackOverflow enforces is very much political.
asdjlkadsjklads 7y ago
Sometimes i consider myself lucky that i don't know anyone seeking special pronouns - because i imagine i would repeatedly use what i visually see, not what they request. These days i seek to find a gender neutral word i can get into the habit of using (it, or they, or something similar), for fear of mis-nouning someone. Though, i also have the fear that if i use something neutral, when someone requested a specific non-neutral pronoun, i may be negatively impacted. As someone "on the spectrum" social norms are already difficult. All of this talk just makes me nervous.
- automatoney 7y ago
  I've never thought about how changing social norms affect people on the spectrum, but it definitely seems like it would be a lot harder to get pronouns right. In my experience with trans friends, pronoun misuse would just come with a gentle reminder, and if you want, mentioning you have trouble with social norms should give you more leeway. In many left-leaning circles awareness of gender, disability and other things tend to come as a package. (As an aside I think that people might not take using "it" very well if you are referring to a person - they might see it as dehumanizing)

wendyshu 7y ago

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.

hitekker 7y ago

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/334399/summing-up-the-main-issues-the-story-so-far/334417#334417 https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/334399/summing-up-t... A supposedly neutral timeline of events.

BrissyCoder 7y ago
> 13. A copy of the TL transcripts was leaked. Anyone have this?

ykevinator 7y ago

2 things 1) SO mods are a-holes, so I don't care about the mod getting fired, they can find another place to hassle people, 2) 95% of not using the right pronouns is benevolent, no malice intended

lesstenseflow 7y ago

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. 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 do not tolerate ideological noncompliance. 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? Word to the wise: people like this (moral crusaders) will not hesitate to burn your organization to the ground 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. Well, off to delete my Stack Overflow account.

Flow 7y ago
I just deleted mine. Then I discovered on that delete page that you have to separately delete the accounts you might have on other exchanges. This is bad UX. I searched the net for a bit and it seems the way to do it is via: - https://stackoverflow.com/contact https://stackoverflow.com/contact - Select Other in the drop-down list, - Then you enter a message that you want them to do delete your accounts for you.
wendyshu 7y ago
In terms familiar to users of the religion stack exchanges: zealotry -> schism -> excommunication.
mattmaroon 7y ago
Yeah I made the mistake of reading about this. This stuff is why Republicans win elections. If the tech world doesn't realize that having only people on the left and people on the far left is not cultural diversity it will be plagued with this stuff forever.

protomyth 7y ago

Did they actually do We learned (or were painfully reminded, rather) to never ship at 6 PM (EDT) on a Friday. to a practicing Jew?

good_guy 7y ago

LOL, what a drama. fucking first world problems.

geodel 7y ago

Seems the theory I read somewhere that over time Euphemisms become dysphemisms and dysphemisms become euphemisms is getting applied here.

jlgaddis 7y ago

I miss the good old days of the Internet, when men were men, women were men, and children were FBI agents.

jrnichols 7y ago

This sounds like exactly the same slippery slope people were concerned about when Coraline Ehmke's "Contributor Covenant" showed up. 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.

kater_k 7y ago

I would like to point out the obvious. 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. 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. 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. 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.

deleted 7y ago
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