Many (most?) of us were too surprised by the stupidity of the pronoun wars to notice the deeper lesson - building a "community" of non-paid volunteers on the online property of a for-profit company is asking to be stabbed in the back whenever that volunteering effort is no longer deemed necessary.

And I have to agree with you, I don't think Stack overflow will lose anything of value if all those moderator volunteers resign or are removed. Maybe it's different for other stack exchange subomains, but SO moderation can be easily codified as a set of rules and outsourced.

The saddest part is the whining from the moderators. These people actually thought they had a real relationship with the company and that they had rights... that's mindbogglingly naive. :-(

...outsourced to whom? I don't understand how you imagine the site to work without the moderators.

> The saddest part is the whining from the moderators. These people actually thought they had a real relationship with the company and that they had rights... that's mindbogglingly naive. :-(

What about being treated with basic respect and courtesy, or not having vague public allegations (to the press!) made against you over good-faith policy discussions?

And of course the company is not obligated to be communicative and helpful to the community their livelihood depends on. But it's positively stupid not to do it.

This is why there's laws by the way - they regulate what a company can do in relation to its employees and customers. Mores and social expectations don't work on companies.

SO's reputation has taken a hit on the internet, but OTOH they were already always criticized, ironically for the aggressive moderation. It's not clear they're stupid, because it's not clear that they've actually lost something yet. It is clear they're assholes.

They have a fleet of voluntary moderators with best interests right now. They work for free. This is a shareholder's wet dream, and it's real. All it would take to keep this going is them not being so incredibly tone deaf and uncaring.

The "aggressive moderation" that SO is criticized for is not even performed by the moderators that are resigning right now. It's performed by the community itself - moderators deal with the exceptional human behavior like spam, harassment, vote fraud etc.

Absolutely. What drives the attention of the execs at Stack Exchange is first and foremost Stack Overflow. Everything else seems like a liability to me, specially sites like Mi Yodeya and Christianity, where sensibilities are much shallower.

Just think how unwelcoming the community of SO is sometimes... and their just talking about code! Religion SE sites must be hell IMO.

So what's the demand, really? A better community? Creating a new site? SE derives its absolute value from the questions already answered. Community could have mattered in the beginning (you're trying to scale) but now? who cares? "I already have what I needed from you guys" is what execs are thinking.

To be clear, this (perceived) exec sentiment you describe is why moderators are resigning/suspending activities. And given that, this sentiment seems incredibly short-sighted.

This is I believe a call for self-importance. "Look at us, we matter". And execs have long being saying "no, not really". Who is right in the end, that escapes me. I lean towards those who are getting a paycheck out of it, but that's just my point of view.

1. Code of Conduct change was announced to moderators, mandating the use of preferred pronouns where known.

2. The extent of "mandating" was (and frankly remains) unclear. One point of contention being "is avoiding pronouns altogether allowed"?

3. A moderator was removed for allegedly repeatedly violating the existing code of conduct in the discussions surrounding this. There is disagreement over the justification, but it is unquestioned that the process (there was none), the lack of warnings or mediation attempts, the timing, and the subsequent communication by StackExchange were all ATROCIOUS.

4. This being yet another grave misstep of several over the past years led to about 10% of the moderators across all sites resigning over the past weeks.

More context: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333965/firing-mods-...

Wow, thanks for putting a name to something that'd been annoying me for decades! It's so frustrating having to re-calibrate your expectations of the value in a community when this happens to it.

I first saw that term used on Slashdot, but subsequently also on community sites where points weren't explicitly called karma.

I think I might prefer "Internet Point Chaser" though, because it's a bit more lighthearted.

"IPC personalities" would be people who are actually reasonably well-intentioned, but sort of "stalk" the New/Rising equivalent queues (or tags on SO) to be able to "frist ps0t!!1" a reasonable looking (but obvious!) comment or answer.

The classic "low brow dismissal" or low hanging fruit humour type comment comes to mind (Correlation is not causation, but will it run Linux, has Netcraft confirmed it, etc.).

Anyway another use of Stackoverflow is open source support by open source software authors.

I've been using ByteBuddy recently (java bytecode manipulation library) and the doc is very superficial all the more so the library in itself is a gigantic net of classes and dependencies to inject (the problem with DSLs based on object oriented systems is that you're never shown the DSL's full syntax but has to deduce it from the individual bricks). Turns out the author is very active on Stackoverflow and these posts have constituted 95% of the sources I read to learn how to handle this library.

Comrade Xi is way ahead of you.

Of course there is a capitalist way to approach the same problem. Free money off vouchers at Doral Resort with every early IRS return.

SO was explicitly designed to attract those personalities to author all its content. Now it has the content they have served their purpose and this is the transitional stage where they are purged.

If I had to guess I would say they were just not a profitable demographic for SO to advertise to. If you are an expert with your own network do you need SO’s job board, for example. They are trying to pivot to sell low-end services to newbies who are attracted to the site by the aforementioned content. But how long can they sustain that with no new worthwhile content?

I think the unstated assumption that needs to be made is that the moderators that remain still do a good enough job of moderating the question so that the user contributions can be valuable.

I don't know if the point-chasing ruins the questions I see; but I still see StackOverflow in the search results whenever I'm searching for error messages. Though, I've increasingly found GitHub Issues show up in the results too.

I guess that Stackoverflow Inc. realized that the mods don't really contribute something of value.

What would be the advantage of not closing a question? I voted to close one this week that read, basically, that something unspecfied was "similar to" something correct, and asked why the unspecified thing was a syntax error. It can't be answered, why should it be left around for answerers or search engines to see?

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/imap+ruby doesn't link to any closed questions about using IMAP in Ruby, for example, and I do think that page would be worse if it included closed questions.

https://stackoverflow.com/q/57358883 (the most recent question tagged imap+ruby) links to about a dozen "related questions", and the list excludes closed questions. Again, I think that list would be worse if it included closed questions. Your opinion?

The first linke to a question (when I searched) is to https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2687566, which "is not a good fit for our Q&A format. We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion".

I can see how answers to that question will tend to be opinionated rather than factual, so... do you (any HNer, really) think SO's topic rules should have included such questions? Or do you think the such questions should be off-topic, but off-topic questions should be left alone?

Genuinely curious here. I've read so many disapproving comments about closed questions on SO, and I don't understand the substance behind them.

I can see that it's not a question which has a 'terminal' set of answers. But it's not a bad question. I also think it's less flamebait-y compared to ... say, "why do people use Emacs when vim exists" or "what's the best language".

From the perspective of coming across questions like this from searching for e.g. "learn JavaScript in a weekend": it's seeing a negative signal when looking for a positive one. If people are asking and answering things which I (and Google search) think are useful, then "Closed, don't want this" seems a bit of an obstacle.

> Why are people disapproving of closed questions?

My main interaction with StackOverflow is visiting it from the search engine result page.

The most common kind of closed question I see (from memory) is "closed as duplicate". The answers to the question I came across aren't the same as the question it duplicates. I think I'd notice this less if the answers were just merged. -- But, I'd also be concerned about if it's falsely marked as duplicate, that'd be frustrating.

(FYI, duplicate isn't the top close reason. The fuzzy trio unclear/overbroad/unreproducible accounts for very roughly 50% and duplicate 20%.)

Then they take a strong stance with company and are shocked to loose the virtual badges and titles

Here is the thing when you are a part of a community and take a strong stance they may disagree sideline you or kick you out no surprise here and that goes 100x when it’s a company

If you are working for a company in exchange for virtual badges, you are working for a company in exchange for virtual badges you are not the Shepard owner of the community

And lastly on my rant when I hear “we the stack over flow moderators” i picture a wide group of people some helpful some selfless some looking to be part of a community some thinking they own the community ...

What are you describing here? There is exactly one moderator who was let go involuntarily, and she did not take any stance against the company whatsoever. I do not get the impression that you have a clear picture of what's going on.

> spending their free time working for a company in exchange for some virtual badge

Most of the activities you perform as a moderator do not grant badges (even if they would for "normal" users). In fact, said dismissed moderator only noticed her dismissal when she suddenly received badges for her everyday moderation work.

> thinking they are responsible for a community and feel ownership

There is no ownership over any community. That's just the wrong word. But the moderators are the part of the community that is closest to the company. If the company ignores the moderators, it ignores the community at large.

I haven't seen any statistics, but it looks like only a few well known mods are leaving. So, almost all mods are remaining.

There are a little over 600 total moods on StackExchange. Over 20 mods on the StackOverflow part of StackExchange. The announced departures from StackExchange are in the tens.

For better or for worse, SO will be able to scrape by with the remaining mods.

The only real problem for SO is the lack of trust. I've lost trust in the employees of SO. With every post from a SO employee, it gets worse and worse.

Who are the direct competitors of SO, if any? I would like to use a different site, if possible.

---

On this page which is updated daily, https://stackexchange.com/about/moderators I count 629 moderators across 173 sites.

---

For example, the Wayback machine shows that on December 9, 2018, the moderators on the StackOverflow part of StackExchange were these 26:

Michael Myers, Robert Harvey, BoltClock, George Stocker, Brad Larson, ThiefMaster, ChrisF, Flexo, Ry-, Bohemian, meagar, Martijn Pieters, Jon Clements, josliber, Madara Uchiha, TheLostMind, Undo, deceze, Aaron Hall, Bhargav Rao, Andy, Cody Gray, Yvette Colomb, Samuel Liew, Rob, Ed Cottrell

Today, I see these 23. If you remove George Stocker, 22:

Michael Myers, BoltClock, George Stocker, Brad Larson, ChrisF, Flexo, Ry-, Bohemian, meagar, Martijn Pieters, Jon Clements, josliber, Madara Uchiha, Undo, deceze, Aaron Hall, Bhargav Rao, Andy, Cody Gray, Rob, Baum mit Augen, Jean-François Fabre, Samuel Liew

Yes. That's a significant drop, but not enough for the users of StackOverflow to notice a difference.

I answer quite a few question that are tagged with one low-traffic tag. Four or five people provide 90% of the answers with that tag (I've never counted exactly) and the same handful have done that for several years now. Would you be surprised if that handful of people got to know each other, in a semi-distant, pseudonymous way?

Is it any wonder you don't feel engaged, connected, or part of any community when you hold views like that?

I'm just a bit puzzled, because I can't find anyplace on the website where you could talk to another person in a way that could conceivable use a personal pronoun, and thus run afoul of this particular controversy.

As I said, my best guess is that there's a meta discussion forum someplace that moderators can use.

Are you implying that it's the main Q&A discussion that is having this issue?

Yes, and yes, it reads as "I was engaged until Internet Point Chasing Dweebs came along and took my fun away. Cool - sarcastically said, not cool at all, I'm smarting and resent the change. I guess I was a fool to think it would last and rationalise that it was a plan I should have seen and then chastise myself for not seeing it; I will pick myself up and get over it while pretending I'm not bothered at all, and leave those idiots to their stupid trivial JavaScript".

I can't find anyplace on the website where you could talk to another person in a way that could conceivable use a personal pronoun

Monica Cellio particularly is involved in Workplace.stackexchange a site where people post interpersonal questions about their workplace, and there are many comments and replies on posts and answers which have references such as "In Alice's reply, she focuses on the legal side, but I'd like to draw attention to power dynamic between blah blah", or "I'm not sure this applies, OP said she is in Canada which has different expectations about blah blah", and often with regular posters discussing the question in amongst comments and their replies.

There's also actual discussion forums (Slack-style web chatrooms) e.g. https://chat.stackoverflow.com/ which is where long comment chains get moderator-moved to for more realtime he-said/she-said discussions. I believe many chatrooms per stackexchange sub-site.

Plus moderator private chat / moderator to company chat.

As I said, my best guess is that there's a meta discussion forum someplace that moderators can use.

There is a meta site for every StackExchange site, yes. e.g. https://meta.superuser.com/ for SuperUser, and then there's meta.stackexchange.com for an overall meta-meta site.