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.
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.
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:
> 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.
> If you get crusaders like this in your org, you should consider it an existential threat.
Completely agree. This destructive behavior alone should be reason enough to reject these people, regardless of the merits of their cause. Nobody should be excluded for questioning some rules or debating some definitions or whatever.
I won't delete my account but I will refrain from contributing to the site in the future.
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.
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.
> I'd like to think the majority of people just want to live and be kind to each other
What you're getting to is the Golden rule in almost all human civilizations: treat others as you would like to be treated. The problem is when this rule broke down because the majority's "would like to be treated" became a hate crime to a small, but vociferous, radical contingent of the population.
> 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.
Ultimately what happens is these issues don't get talked about.
People in the center would rather just have an easy life and not deal with the "cancelling", doxxing, or career consequences that come with having a strong opinion, so don't engage.
That means that the extreme voices on either side end up dominating the conversation.
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.
> the majority of people just want to live and be kind to each other
Once you realize that people's politics reflect their values and the problems they see in their world (and which side they've bought into), it becomes a lot harder to stigmatize the other side...or even take a side.
> 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.
we should have clear, rational and reasonable debate
I'm starting to wonder if part of the problem is the way debating is taught in school. Certainly when I was in school debate was taught essentially as a sport, a thing that you could win or lose and with tactics and strategies that you could use to help you defeat your opponent. The point under debate was basically irrelevant, and should be able to 'win' no matter which side you where debating, truth be damned. If you conceded ground to your opponent or admitted that you where wrong about something you'd said, you lost.
Having a clear, rational and reasonable debate was never something that was taught or encouraged.
> People are really really afraid to talk about this particular topic
I don't understand how you can say that when we have this huge HN thread (and it's interesting to see who is being downvoted here) and the huge SE threads spread out across the sites.
>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?
>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).
> Wasn't monica fired for suggesting she used gender neutral pronouns generally?
In the comments to the linked question, Monica Cellio says StackOverflow have not told her what parts of the CoC she was violating. I don't think it's public knowledge why she was demodded.
(Is 'fired' an appropriate word to use, when Monica wasn't an employee?)
It’s interesting that “we”, “our” and “community” in that quote all don’t mean what they seem. “We” are the farmers and “community” are the sheep, is what she means.
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.
I'm under the impression that you misunderstand the CoC update procedure. It has not been updated. SE is hellbent on updating it in the future, and they explicitly stated that they are not willing to budge an inch on its gender-/pronoun-related contents. This is not accidental, there is not one single dissident behind it but the entire company.
It will be the duty of the moderators to enforce the new CoC. The discussion in question arose in a mod-only forum (and later on an email conversation) and concerned what behaviors these rules sanction or disallow. It should be self-evident that moderators need to ask these questions and clarify these things in order to enforce them, and that none of this discussion is in itself to cause public outrage (because the public was not to know of any of this in the first place).
Public outrage was _only_ sparked when Monica was unceremoniously fired without any explanation to her or the public. Predictably, the context being described by those privy to it has resulted in lots of pronoun- and gender-related discussions all over the place, but this is neither the primary problem for SE (significant parts of the moderation force leaving is, as well as this being the ~6th community PR nightmare in 1-2 years) nor was it in any way avoidable or unpredictable based on the plans of SE.
At Stack Exchange, one of the tricky things we learned about Q&A is that if your goal is to have an excellent signal to noise ratio, you must suppress discussion. Stack Exchange only supports the absolute minimum amount of discussion necessary to produce great questions and great answers. That's why answers get constantly re-ordered by votes, that's why comments have limited formatting and length and only a few display, and so forth. Almost every design decision we made was informed by our desire to push discussion down, to inhibit it in every way we could. Spare us the long-winded diatribe, just answer the damn question already.
IDK, seems like Jeff Atwood no longer has much interest in SE and presumably the site is slowly imploding.
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.
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?)
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.
The problem with forcing compliance is some people are naturally going to want to resist the demand regardless of their personal opinions.
I took a technical writing class in college where I attempted to use "they/their" as a gender neutral pronoun. This was not a political statement, I just felt it sounded more natural. The professor objected and gave me a disproportionately poor grade, insisting that I use either "he" or "he or she" instead. It felt unjust that a paper could be either an "A" or "D" because a handful of instances of "he" were written "they". To me, this felt like the professor was asserting authority, not trying to improve my writing.
When I showed him that the dictionary definition of "they" from Websters website included, "used to refer to a person of unspecified gender," he opted to make fun of me in front of the entire class (by saying, "oh, well if it's on the INTERNET, it must be true") and stand his ground on my grade.
Incensed, I tried my damnedest to get the grade over-tuned. I went to the other professor who taught the class, as she was an English teacher, unlike my current professor who was an Engineer: she took the other professor's side. I went to the Dean of the College with the same outcome.
I opted to make the irrational decision of standing my ground on principle in all future papers, taking a "D" in said writing class. Authority figures should keep this in mind, people have no problem acting against their own interest when you force them to do things, rather than just ask. It should be evident that I'm still bothered by this all these years later, and probably cemented my opinion on this subject for the rest of my life.
I disagree. This is an actual in-your-face challenge that trans people face - incorrect pronoun usage, both offline and online. Using the wrong pronoun for someone is akin to using the wrong name. It's ok if it happens accidentally, but being incorrect on purpose is quite insulting - in part because it's so simple to do the right thing. I don't want to work with jerks.
It matters because even if you don't think it's a big deal, it can be death by a thousand papercuts for others. Seeing "he" used as a default pronoun just reminds me that people will assume I'm a man, further entrenching this idea subconsciously that people like me don't belong in tech. When I'm misgendered online, I have an internal conversation of "Do I correct them? Do I want to be perceived as not contributing to the discussion and be punished for that? Will I be seen as a crazy SJW and attacked for it?" That's a mental stress that cisgender men simply don't have to deal with.
Use gender-neutral language by default. It's not hard, and simple mistakes are forgiven. However, if one isn't willing to put the slightest amount of effort to either avoid pronouns or use the singular they, it shows they doesn't actually care about the concerns of people unlike themselves. And that shows a lot about what kind of person they are.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.]
This is sad, but I feel it was an inevitable consequence of allowing religion-orientated stackexchanges to be created in the first place. It's practically inviting a holy war. The people running them would likely be those who care deeply about doctrine, and the chances of a headlong collision over LGBT doctrine were always high.
This is pretty bad. It would have been way better to post nothing than to post this.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Does anyone really think that the use of gender neutral language (using they rather than he or she) is mis-gendering in the absence of knowing someone’s preferred pronoun set?
The weirdest thing about this whole kerfuffle is that 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.
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.
[+] [-] xupybd|6 years ago|reply
Monica Cellio's account: 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_cont...
A list of mods fired or resigned: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333965/firing-mods-...
A mods reasons for leaving: https://christianity.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6718/b...
[+] [-] MauranKilom|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lesstenseflow|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mattmaroon|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Flow|6 years ago|reply
I searched the net for a bit and it seems the way to do it is via:
- 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.
[+] [-] matheusmoreira|6 years ago|reply
> If you get crusaders like this in your org, you should consider it an existential threat.
Completely agree. This destructive behavior alone should be reason enough to reject these people, regardless of the merits of their cause. Nobody should be excluded for questioning some rules or debating some definitions or whatever.
I won't delete my account but I will refrain from contributing to the site in the future.
[+] [-] wendyshu|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thephyber|6 years ago|reply
Don't delete your account -- that's a half-measure.
Never use the sites again. Not even the Google / DuckDuckGo SERP clips or some CopyLeft derivative.
[+] [-] djsumdog|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] xenocyon|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tenpies|6 years ago|reply
What you're getting to is the Golden rule in almost all human civilizations: treat others as you would like to be treated. The problem is when this rule broke down because the majority's "would like to be treated" became a hate crime to a small, but vociferous, radical contingent of the population.
[+] [-] kristianc|6 years ago|reply
Ultimately what happens is these issues don't get talked about.
People in the center would rather just have an easy life and not deal with the "cancelling", doxxing, or career consequences that come with having a strong opinion, so don't engage.
That means that the extreme voices on either side end up dominating the conversation.
[+] [-] chiefalchemist|6 years ago|reply
1) Context and intent matter
2) It's better not to assume the worst (of the other person's intent)
3) Just because something is uncomfortable or offensive does not categorically make it painful.
--
For those who can't be bothered with the whole book the authors did an article for The Atlantic that was so well received they did the book.
[+] [-] banana_giraffe|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dehrmann|6 years ago|reply
Once you realize that people's politics reflect their values and the problems they see in their world (and which side they've bought into), it becomes a lot harder to stigmatize the other side...or even take a side.
[+] [-] shadowgovt|6 years ago|reply
I don't think that experience is universal.
[+] [-] dagw|6 years ago|reply
I'm starting to wonder if part of the problem is the way debating is taught in school. Certainly when I was in school debate was taught essentially as a sport, a thing that you could win or lose and with tactics and strategies that you could use to help you defeat your opponent. The point under debate was basically irrelevant, and should be able to 'win' no matter which side you where debating, truth be damned. If you conceded ground to your opponent or admitted that you where wrong about something you'd said, you lost.
Having a clear, rational and reasonable debate was never something that was taught or encouraged.
[+] [-] DanBC|6 years ago|reply
I don't understand how you can say that when we have this huge HN thread (and it's interesting to see who is being downvoted here) and the huge SE threads spread out across the sites.
[+] [-] forgotmypwd123|6 years ago|reply
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?!
[+] [-] MauranKilom|6 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] jodrellblank|6 years ago|reply
In the comments to the linked question, Monica Cellio says StackOverflow have not told her what parts of the CoC she was violating. I don't think it's public knowledge why she was demodded.
(Is 'fired' an appropriate word to use, when Monica wasn't an employee?)
[+] [-] goatinaboat|6 years ago|reply
It’s interesting that “we”, “our” and “community” in that quote all don’t mean what they seem. “We” are the farmers and “community” are the sheep, is what she means.
[+] [-] kichik|6 years ago|reply
> that behavior
[+] [-] anon12345690|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] sam_lowry_|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] MauranKilom|6 years ago|reply
It will be the duty of the moderators to enforce the new CoC. The discussion in question arose in a mod-only forum (and later on an email conversation) and concerned what behaviors these rules sanction or disallow. It should be self-evident that moderators need to ask these questions and clarify these things in order to enforce them, and that none of this discussion is in itself to cause public outrage (because the public was not to know of any of this in the first place).
Public outrage was _only_ sparked when Monica was unceremoniously fired without any explanation to her or the public. Predictably, the context being described by those privy to it has resulted in lots of pronoun- and gender-related discussions all over the place, but this is neither the primary problem for SE (significant parts of the moderation force leaving is, as well as this being the ~6th community PR nightmare in 1-2 years) nor was it in any way avoidable or unpredictable based on the plans of SE.
[+] [-] Mathnerd314|6 years ago|reply
At Stack Exchange, one of the tricky things we learned about Q&A is that if your goal is to have an excellent signal to noise ratio, you must suppress discussion. Stack Exchange only supports the absolute minimum amount of discussion necessary to produce great questions and great answers. That's why answers get constantly re-ordered by votes, that's why comments have limited formatting and length and only a few display, and so forth. Almost every design decision we made was informed by our desire to push discussion down, to inhibit it in every way we could. Spare us the long-winded diatribe, just answer the damn question already.
IDK, seems like Jeff Atwood no longer has much interest in SE and presumably the site is slowly imploding.
[+] [-] kjaftaedi|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] guardiangod|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ThrowawayR2|6 years ago|reply
(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?)
[+] [-] P_I_Staker|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] thelazydogsback|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mywittyname|6 years ago|reply
I took a technical writing class in college where I attempted to use "they/their" as a gender neutral pronoun. This was not a political statement, I just felt it sounded more natural. The professor objected and gave me a disproportionately poor grade, insisting that I use either "he" or "he or she" instead. It felt unjust that a paper could be either an "A" or "D" because a handful of instances of "he" were written "they". To me, this felt like the professor was asserting authority, not trying to improve my writing.
When I showed him that the dictionary definition of "they" from Websters website included, "used to refer to a person of unspecified gender," he opted to make fun of me in front of the entire class (by saying, "oh, well if it's on the INTERNET, it must be true") and stand his ground on my grade.
Incensed, I tried my damnedest to get the grade over-tuned. I went to the other professor who taught the class, as she was an English teacher, unlike my current professor who was an Engineer: she took the other professor's side. I went to the Dean of the College with the same outcome.
I opted to make the irrational decision of standing my ground on principle in all future papers, taking a "D" in said writing class. Authority figures should keep this in mind, people have no problem acting against their own interest when you force them to do things, rather than just ask. It should be evident that I'm still bothered by this all these years later, and probably cemented my opinion on this subject for the rest of my life.
Humans are weird.
[+] [-] kupiakos|6 years ago|reply
It matters because even if you don't think it's a big deal, it can be death by a thousand papercuts for others. Seeing "he" used as a default pronoun just reminds me that people will assume I'm a man, further entrenching this idea subconsciously that people like me don't belong in tech. When I'm misgendered online, I have an internal conversation of "Do I correct them? Do I want to be perceived as not contributing to the discussion and be punished for that? Will I be seen as a crazy SJW and attacked for it?" That's a mental stress that cisgender men simply don't have to deal with.
Use gender-neutral language by default. It's not hard, and simple mistakes are forgiven. However, if one isn't willing to put the slightest amount of effort to either avoid pronouns or use the singular they, it shows they doesn't actually care about the concerns of people unlike themselves. And that shows a lot about what kind of person they are.
[+] [-] personjerry|6 years ago|reply
I feel like we're watching one of the pillars of modern software development crumble.
[+] [-] reccanti|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] xupybd|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] adambatkin|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tmp20191006cars|6 years ago|reply
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.]
[+] [-] pjc50|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tylerl|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fencepost|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ameen|6 years ago|reply
If neither the mods nor users feel heard, who does this “platform” serve?
[+] [-] strenholme|6 years ago|reply
I will link to just one: 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.
[+] [-] wendyshu|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seanmcdirmid|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 9nGQluzmnq3M|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thinkingemote|6 years ago|reply
Consider the hypothetical case of a user using @usernames for some users and the preferred pronouns for selected others.