Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

An Update to Our Community and an Apology

meta.stackexchange.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 424 posts

Re: An Update to Our Community and an Apology

#131

Post by braindeath »

ictebres wrote: post #116
nabdab wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 moder…

You can’t refuse to use someone’s preferred pronoun just because you want to. If someone wants to be called he, using them is insulting and demeaning. You would be literally not accepting how he is. Obviously this is not the case in generic writing. But I don’t think that is how 2 people want to communicate.

Yes! I absolutely can refuse to use someone's "preferred pronoun." I summarily reject your assertion that using the gender neutral and grammatically correct "they" in place of "he"/"she" (not them) to refer to anyone is ever insulting or demeaning. You can say it's insulting and I just don't agree that is true in general. Yelling loudly and with outrage doesn't make your claim stronger than mine.

I am not rejecting anyone's gender, I am simply not acknowledging it because it is usually not germane to the discussion. It's not that I don't believe people deserve respect, trans or otherwise. I just don't think it is an appropriate point for discussion in most instances.

If a white man says they wish to always be referred to as "the white guy" am I also obligated to do so? Is it not "accepting" of their whiteness if I don't use language to refer to it everytime? Especially so if they are on the internet and I can't even see them?

I don't know what color you are. I really don't care. I have no interest in referring to your race when addressing you, likewise your gender. I communicate with people everyday and gender, race, creed, and nationality just never come up.

And if someone insists on sharing their pronouns or their race or creed unsolicited, that is on them. That should not obligate me to do anything with it.

Edit: I've been downvoted. But would anyone actually like to explain how referring to someone in a gender neutral way is somehow more insulting than referring to them in a race, religion, ethnicity, or any other identity-forming aspect neutral way? Things we take for granted all the time when we use the neutral (not just gender) pronouns them/they?

Re: An Update to Our Community and an Apology

#133

Post by shadowgovt »

djsumdog wrote: post #16

-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…

> 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.

I don't think that experience is universal.

Re: An Update to Our Community and an Apology

#134

Post by zahllos »

GolDDranks wrote: post #73
jffry wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Ah, that explains it. Thank you!

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".

Re: An Update to Our Community and an Apology

#135

Post by tptacek »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #130
dang wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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.)

I don't understand why you don't have banners, on stories that have had editorial changes, to say what the editorial changes are. For example (not suggestions for text) "story reposted with different timestamps", "title changed from 'X is the best thing eva'", "link changed from 'www.superspammy.co.net'", or whatever. Is transparency of editorial actions bad somehow?

The more directly you surface moderator action, the more people want to discuss moderator actions (you can see a miniature version of this phenomenon in any comment about downvoting). Keeping this kind of metacommentary out of threads is a site goal.

Re: An Update to Our Community and an Apology

#136

Post by markmark »

ameen wrote: post #25

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?

General users don't give a shit about this sort of insider drama. They will continue to use the sites without even knowing this is happening.

Re: An Update to Our Community and an Apology

#137

Post by cc81 »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #103
guardiangod wrote: post #9

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.

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 diff…

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.

Re: An Update to Our Community and an Apology

#138

Post by markmark »

personjerry wrote: post #10

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.

Why would they apologise? They aren't sorry they sacked this moderator. They fully stand by their decision.

Re: An Update to Our Community and an Apology

#139

Post by personjerry »

markmark wrote: post #138
personjerry wrote: post #10

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.

Why would they apologise? They aren't sorry they sacked this moderator. They fully stand by their decision.

Well, the title of the post is "An Update to our Community and an Apology" so we should expect an apology in there.

Re: An Update to Our Community and an Apology

#140

Post by McGlockenshire »

steve_taylor wrote: post #39
DanBC wrote: post #35

Earlier 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'…

You conveniently omitted that the definition of misgendering had been reinterpreted to include using “their” as a gender-neutral pronoun, which (until now) is a common practice intended specifically to avoid misgendering.

> the definition of misgendering had been reinterpreted to include using “their” as a gender-neutral pronoun

Citation needed.

Post reply on HN