What an awkward post. Reads like a network outages post mortem
An Update to Our Community and an Apology
81–90 of 424 posts
Re: An Update to Our Community and an Apology
#82When did the US start weaponizing pronouns? From a European standpoint this all seems extreme to the point of absurdity.
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…
Why would someone, care at that others refer to them (sorry I’m talking about a hypothetical person so I don’t know preferred pronoun) by name or gender neutral? If you know that I prefer to be addresses “their royal highness”(I do btw), does that make it rude of you to refer to me by name or as OP? I get calling someone who prefers he, she is insulting. But that’s not what the supposed crime was here. It was a moderator preferring gender neutral, which seems completely reasonably.
And the language is perfectly fitting. Someone used preferred pronouns to get a moderator canned for just discussing the merits of the rules, not even breaking the yet un-published rules. That is a weapon.
Re: An Update to Our Community and an Apology
#83-542 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…
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.
Re: An Update to Our Community and an Apology
#84The 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…
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.
Re: An Update to Our Community and an Apology
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
why does the stack network ( 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…
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 t…
It's already being backed up: https://archive.org/download/stackexchange
Re: An Update to Our Community and an Apology
#86This 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.
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.
Re: An Update to Our Community and an Apology
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ). Not sure if that was a good id…
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 volunte…
(Yes, the software relativizes the timestamps on a thread while re-upping a submission; see 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.)
Re: An Update to Our Community and an Apology
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
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'…
It's ironic that you used the homograph "resign" in both words' meanings -- re-sign (soft "ess", to sign again) and resign (hard "z" sound, to quit) -- in a comment about careful word choice. Did SE mods re-sign their posts, or quit (abandon moderator role)?
That's not ironic, because no one was actually confused.
Re: An Update to Our Community and an Apology
#89-542 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…
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.
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.
Re: An Update to Our Community and an Apology
#90-542 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…
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.
The issue is the unnaturally fast push towards the extreme left ideas being presented as average/desirable. Most people are caught unprepared, and a subset of people (which is overrepresented in IT) also has an issue with authority and being forced to act a specific way, regardless of the validity of the way.