Is anyone here involved with Stack Exchange/Stack Overflow? How do you feel about the new moderator agreement?
First post on Tildes (though I've commented some before). I'm a mod on one of the "beta" sites, and have been for almost four years now.
I don't follow any of the other sites really, and certainly not Meta, so the whole Monica scandal kinda happened without me noticing. After the fallout (or amidst, I guess), Shog9 and several other community managers that I liked were fired, with seemingly no notice or cause.
Then after that, there seemed to be a push to create a "mod council" to create standards for behavior and for removal and reinstatement of moderators.
But the whole thing has seemed so needless, everything could have been cleared up with a few heartfelt announcements (and/or apologies), and the executive team at SE has just been so damn opaque about everything.
Then, to top things off for me personally, the community leaders were explicit in stating that the votes for members of the mod council would not be treated as binding, so what's the point? They can just be a rubber stamp at that point if they're not freely elected. The new moderator rules are "abide by the council-approved rules and whatever the community managers say." The new moderator rules also say "moderators will be removed and reinstated per the council-approved procedure for doing so, except when SE doesn't want to use that policy."
The mod council vote was non-binding, and then SE is making it a point to clearly state that the rules approved by the council don't matter.
It's this last bit that is coming as too much of an insult for me. I've told my fellow moderators that I'm not planning on signing the agreement. I don't understand why there has to be such an adversarial relationship here when I'm volunteering my time.
I don't want to leave, but everything is just rubbing me the wrong way. Please someone help me understand how I'm wrong. I just can't understand the way things have been publicly announced.
For reference, this seems to be the official post about the new agreement: The new moderator agreement is now live for moderators to accept across the network
And a direct link to the agreement itself: https://stackoverflow.com/legal/moderator-agreement
Right, but that "following the procedures you define" is what's chafing me the most about this. Please let me be specific now - from the actual moderator agreement
Like my original post said, why is it that I have to agree to abiding by the Code of Conduct (council-approved) and to "additional guidance" that doesn't need to be council-approved? Reading on:
That "whenever possible" bit is the loophole that kills me there - the moderator removal process already has an emergency removal clause, so why then do they need to write into the agreement that they're not bound to use it?
(edit - didn't actually link to the moderator agreement before)
Thanks for your rant, I found it through HN a while ago and enjoyed reading :) I can't tell you how many times I've searched for help on DDG or Google and found a StackOverflow post which has answered my question, and also has been closed for not being 'relevant'. ¬_¬
I'm starting to see downvotes as an anti-feature. If you agree with a post, you may not have anything to add, and so an upvote makes sense, it's the equivalent of a "+1" comment. But if you disagree with a post, you should always be able to explain why you think the post is wrong or low quality or whatever. Being able to downvote something without providing a reason is the equivalent of shouting "wrong!" or commenting "-1" and it does not elevate the discussion at all.
Sorry, kinda off-topic for the thread.
Upvotes serve the same purpose, though - Upvoted answers "rise to the top." The only way downvotes are helpful are if all of the other answers have a score of zero.
If it's a good question, it's got answers. If it's a bad question, leave comments asking for the user to clarify and/or vote to close it. Enough close votes will close the question without moderator intervention.
It matters to me because there wasn't a clear moderator dismissal and reinstatement procedure before. So they created a moderator council (with a non-binding election) and then had the council approve a dismissal and reinstatement procedure.
And then, after all that, to try to "prevent what happened to Monica from happening again," they took exception to being bound by that agreement with the "whenever possible" clause.
I've found it hard to sympathize with the drama around the Monica firing since it had to do with her trying to play word games to avoid following the spirit of a rule about respecting trans people's pronouns. I don't think it's too much for a site to select for moderators that will enthusiastically enforce and support their rules, and from the way you describe the new mod agreement, it sounds like they're looking for moderators that agree with that.
I feel like there's some aspect I'm missing (is there a lack of precedent of SE introducing rules or actually enforcing them?), but even then, I still question people that choose to die on a hill against a rule about referring to a marginalized group how they want to be referred to.
Yeah, this exactly. This is the general feeling that's been growing in me - that this in particular was an action I felt was taken in bad faith, but then not only was nothing done to correct it, but that there were a lot of other subsequent actions also taken in bad faith.
Like @arp242 mentioned, there's a post Monica wrote that said, as a technical writer, she doesn't want to use personal pronouns ever. The guidance from the community managers said to use whatever personal pronouns the user says they prefer, so Monica said, "But I don't want to use personal pronouns at all," and was fired.
I'm an engineer, but not a technical writer by any means, and I still vividly remember the writing courses and feedback on project reports - write it as impersonally as possible, basically.
But to the point of my post, why did SE execs allow such a scandal to happen? If they were in the right, they could have clearly stated, "Here's what was said and why it's against the rules," and if they were wrong or made a mistake then they could also have clearly stated, "A community manager misunderstood the intent and mistakenly fired Monica, after a private discussion we're reinstating her and creating new rules so this doesn't happen again."
Instead the response was to make a new set of rules "so this doesn't happen again," and then the new rules say SE doesn't need to abide by the new rules.
I used to be a moderator on one of the network sites. I'd already resigned before last year's fallout but followed it with interest.
It might be interesting to read the thoughts of moderators who chose to stay instead of resigning.
Note that those were written in response to a meta question asked only about ten days into the debacle, which was before the then-new moderator review and reinstatement processes was posted and the new Head of Product and Community posted the company's resolve to rebuild trust. The climate might be different now. I haven't been following the happenings around SE since then, so I'll leave it up to you how to assess.
For what it's worth, my own take is that SE has realized (or decided) that it needs to make money and has resolved to do so. While it has also realized that it has to maintain a good standing with the community, when it comes down to it, SE is a corporation that will die unless it can make profit. This resolution probably led to a cultural shift that led to the letting go of the veteran community managers. I personally don't think a corporation has to operate that way, but that's their choice to make.
Aside from the money aspect, I can understand that the company would have to have the final say in exceptional cases.
What I think is it boils down to trust: do you trust the company enough to believe that it'll act in good faith? If not: do you still value your community, the content it produces, the good it does to the world, and the people? The day you get disappointed by the company may be far away yet, and until then, you might decide that it's still valuable to spend time for the community. Or you might not.
As an alternative Q&A platform, Codidact was founded by those who left SE during the fallout. I don't know about how the communities feel like or operate, but most of the sites seem to be active at least.
This is exactly the feeling I've got. I'm not saying the two are equal at all, but I feel like Monica's firing was done in the same spirit as when reddit closed a bunch of offensive sites back when Ellen Pao was in charge - to try to remove anything that could be seen as negative PR to make the site more attractive to sponsors in the ramp up to monetization. To be clear, I don't think anything Monica said was offensive like the reddit sites, but I think it was the SE executives taking a response to a fear that a moderator might not toe the line.
Similar to that time, too, Pao fired the AMA director with zero notice to anyone else, SE fired a bunch of senior community managers with zero notice to anyone else, and then a lot of veteran users are left feeling alienated.
I definitely think monetization is coming, and it makes me sad to think about. I guess I hope that there are "just" ads in the results? By which of course I mean I hope there isn't a paywall to get at the answers.
(Some context for my thoughts: I've been active on various forum sites for a long time, and have actively moderated different forums for more than 15 years. I've given SE several chances over the years, but I just can't get into the culture of the site and how pedantic every discussion quickly becomes)
I think SE like other social media sites are too concerned with doing their own thing internally rather than embracing and opening up to their communities.
As streamers, youtubers, influencers, indie computer projects and games, open alpha ane beta tests, and online culture in general becomes more and more open, it's just too counter-intuitive that social media platforms don't open up and engage their communities like everyone else is doing.
This will always rub those communities the wrong way because it betrays an unspoken distrust of the users of their communities: Those behind the curtains see so much abhorrent behavior and interact with it all the time that they undervalue actually showing that they embrace and believe in their platforms by using it to guide how the platform works. (even though engaging with users over and over on the same topics gets old fast)
Volunteer mods across online forums also suffer strongly from this, i don't know, "platform fatigue" ?
A pedantic community that takes itself and acts highly self-important in all conversations will require a pendantic and overly specific set of rules and guidelines.
With haughty and self-important language throughout the community, it'd only be out of character for the site guidelines not to be the same way.
That language really does something to the discussion because it's just over the top, impersonal and just doesn't convey any degree of trust. Trust is what the site needs from its users. Easy to lose, hard to regain other than by actions over time (again using and embracing their own platform).
Checking the boxes with "mod councils" rather than actually engaging and using their site is something I just won't understand social media platforms doing.
If you don't trust and believe in your own communities, why not? Why not change those things so you can embrace your own platform and use it?
As a user this'd be a very red flag for me and believing that those who work and run for the site are normal users, and that it's just not a day job. With people who spend waaaaay too much time on any social media site, and especially volunteer mods often being highly qualified people who understand the intricacies of sites in ways it takes employees who care months to reach, that creates a strange dynamic between users and employees. It doesn't ever seem like the company has control.
As a mod, the balance between staying on despite disagreements with some admin policy and walking away is always hard. It's personal. There's all the sunk time. The belief you could be part of changing the aspects you don't like, or that it's better to be some part of change rather than just giving up.
How far is too far?
To me it's depressing, but expected that SE has to put all the obvious exceptions that their employees can't be beholden to volunteer folks if it'll seriously hurt the company, or some pedant has found a technical loophole.
They must have known that'd create the reaction they got and weighed it as a necessary cost, mustn't they?
The ironic thing to me here is that this is pretty much exactly the gist of the theory of moderation post that I've tried to take to heart as a moderator - the community should run itself, with moderators only taking action in extraordinary circumstances. In that vein, I would think then the community managers should be the ones engaging with moderators to help set the direction - a battlefield general to the lieutenants. That would require some interaction between the community managers and the moderators, though, and the only community manager I ever interacted with (Shog9) was fired.
I'm not currently active in any StackExchange communities, but I've followed them ever since StackOverflow was first announced, including listening to Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood's podcast as they discussed its development, and being a user in the private beta. I was used to the horrors of the "experts-exchange" type sites and SO was an absolute breath of fresh air when it first launched.
Sadly, they seem to be falling into the trap that sooner or later befalls every site that is a) profit-driven and b) based around user-generated content.
They need content to drive the site. Not just that, but to keep their investors happy, they need to show an ever-increasing amount of content, active users, etc. All graphs must go up and to the right.
User-generated content requires moderation. And the number of moderators generally scales linearly with the amount of content - if you get twice as many posts/questions/answers/whatever, you're probably going to need about twice as many moderators.
Sooner or later, this reaches a breaking point as the moderators realize they're an unpaid labor force propping up the business, and the site could not function without them. The business people at the top tend to view those moderators as replaceable cogs in the machine (they are volunteers, after all) and don't understand that you can't simply fire the moderators and recruit new ones without fundamentally changing the nature of the site (or more likely, killing it entirely and forcing everyone to migrate to a new community platform).
I don't think you're wrong... I think SE made, and continues to make, a huge policy mistake with regard to moderators. They exist only because of volunteers.
That isn't hyperbole, the entire business model fails without free user generated content, and that content falls apart without mods.
They're big enough that they can treat their moderators with no respect and count on a long line of people willing to take their place. From a cynical perspective there's no issue there.
But they've opened the door to alternatives, almost encouraged people (many of them talented developers) to jump ship and build better Q&A sites for coders.
Maybe none of those projects will gain enough traction to compete with SA/SO but I'm hoping they do. I hate to see the kind of tone deaf corporate thinking that inevitably sets in once companies reach a certain size get rewarded.