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Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

dearstackexchange.com

91–100 of 444 posts

Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#91
post #26

I'm totally out of the loop about what this drama is about, and I'll stay that way. These are unpaid community moderators. They are essentially volunteers doing this work because they want to. So let's ponder to ourselves and relate this to our own lives, what kind of relationship do we have with the organizations and people we do volunteer work with? If you're at a point where you're so dissatisfied that you're writ…

So basically volunteer, but if you want to change things you should just leave? SO gets the spoils of labor and you get a high quality knowledge base.

Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#92
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like they are so important they should have been compensated. I mean, if they were so critical to the success.

They've got compensated in visibility. I don't know any moderator with less than 20k points to date. And the more points you have, the upper you stay in the ranks and you can always embed their badge in your website. So, yes, they don't earn money, but they receive visibility

What does this visibility mean? Can it be converted to cash somehow?

Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#93
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe don't volunteer there. StackExchange isn't even a charity, it's a private for-profit company. This. Stop giving your time for the profit of people who don't care about you. You want to help the community? You want to be respected? Great! Find some like-minded people, start a new site, maybe even make it a non-profit or at least democratic. But above all, stop making rich people richer off your labor

Yeah, it kills me when they say they are "people who have invested a lot in the network". Sorry, kids, but investors get stock. Employees get paid. And only non-profits have volunteers. Stack Exchange describes themselves as a "a hyper-growth enterprise software company" [1]. I have no idea why anybody's giving them free labor. I'll happily volunteer for Wikipedia. But until somebody sets up a non-profit Q&A site, th…

They invested time and effort with the goal (presumably) of building/maintaining the community. You may think that is a poor decision on their part; but it is still an investment, and they are still volunteers.

Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#94
the free & freemium web have an arbitration gap and it will get worse before it gets better

stackexchange works because questions can get answered with relatively little money changing hands (AWS & advertisers mainly), but that means employees can't offer due process on disputes without erasing the company's margins.

these companies can't offer centralized due process to everyone because it would open them to being DDOS'd by competitors / trolls. Maybe justice can be crowdsourced in the same way as javascript questions by identifying neutral people in the stackexchange network, but that would be a huge experiment and open SO/SE to community backlash when it went badly.

Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#95
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this cry against moderators. These people are volunteerily giving their time to keep quality bar high without any payment. If these people weren't there then SO will be full of duplicates, off-topic and opinion based Q&A just like Quora. A general tendency I have seen is just to ask (often poorly stated) questions without doing simple search to see if it is already answered. Someone needs to respec…

I don't understand why people would volunteer to do work for a for profit entity. Especially one that will, apparently, fire you on a whim.

You work as an unpaid content author for ycombinator.

Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#96
post #26

I'm totally out of the loop about what this drama is about, and I'll stay that way. These are unpaid community moderators. They are essentially volunteers doing this work because they want to. So let's ponder to ourselves and relate this to our own lives, what kind of relationship do we have with the organizations and people we do volunteer work with? If you're at a point where you're so dissatisfied that you're writ…

"I don't know what's going on here and I don't intend to learn, but everybody upset about it should just go do something else" is never a useful take.

Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a TLDR of what happened anywhere?

Seems like there was a disagreement regarding the use of gender pronouns that resulted in 73 moderators getting "fired" or leaving. The author of that summary mentioned one thing I found especially egregious, which is a policy that stated avoiding using pronouns was out of alignment. If I understand correctly, when she asked how they would know if she was avoiding pronouns or just naturally not writing them, she was…

Is the implication that the LGBTQ+ community found it _more_ offensive to use e.g. "they" than "he" or "she"?

I'm so confused. Wouldn't "they" (the gender neutral version) be _more_ inclusive? Is there some other alternative that's even better that I haven't considered? I hope I'm not offending anyone by asking this. Just trying to make sure I understand.

Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#98
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like they are so important they should have been compensated. I mean, if they were so critical to the success.

They've got compensated in visibility. I don't know any moderator with less than 20k points to date. And the more points you have, the upper you stay in the ranks and you can always embed their badge in your website. So, yes, they don't earn money, but they receive visibility

Sounds like they gave value but got none to me..."visibility" ain't worth shit. How much SO got in the bank? What's the ratio of visibility to dollars here? I've never seen an SO badge anywhere and never mentioned in any resume.

Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#99
post #26

I'm totally out of the loop about what this drama is about, and I'll stay that way. These are unpaid community moderators. They are essentially volunteers doing this work because they want to. So let's ponder to ourselves and relate this to our own lives, what kind of relationship do we have with the organizations and people we do volunteer work with? If you're at a point where you're so dissatisfied that you're writ…

This is a shockingly unempathetic way to view the situation. These people have poured lots of their time into making SO work, and they deserve to be heard. There's no way anybody could build this service without volunteers. These things don't just spring up from the ground on their own, and as someone who uses the SE properties for personal and professional reasons, I hope these moderators can find some sort of satis…

Per Monica, a senior SO employee --Sara Chipps -- is publicly lying about Monica. Monica's claim is multiple messages went unanswered, and then...

> Sara Chipps, Director of Public Q&A, left responses on various moderators' resignation posts maligning my character. You can see an example on my Mi Yodeya post. The cut-and-pasted message included, specifically referring to me: "When a moderator violates [inclusion and respect], we will always do our best to resolve it with them privately." Both halves of that statement are false. [1]

Let's call publicly talking about an observant Jewish ex-mod on Rosh Hashana a lagniappe.

This pretty strongly seems StackOverflow saying use personal pronouns and don't question our policy, or GTFO.

Which is of course fine -- their house, their rules -- and frankly something I generally support. But given both the willingness to de-mod Monica, ghost her, and then (again, per Monica) lie about it in public, and (2) be far more responsive to a random twitter message than multiple longstanding mod requests, SO's position is quite clear.

So yes, mods saving SO millions of dollars of paid employee time per year should certainly re-evaluate their relationship with their corporate beneficiary.

[1] https://cellio.dreamwidth.org/2064709.html

Re: Dear Stack Exchange, Inc.

#100
post #17

I would love a nice couple paragraphs that said "here's what happened", otherwise taking any side in this is just taking shots in the dark, I'm basically reading "certain events happened with a certain individual and that's not okay"

As asked: https://cellio.dreamwidth.org/2064709.html

Wow, the extreme vagueness there, the perfect conviction in their rightness. I have no idea what the actual situation was, but that kind of writing makes me deeply suspicious I'm not getting both sides.
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