adv’surd! [jatp]

too political for le métro?!

Sacrebleu!

stack explode

To say the least, most Stack Exchange communities have been quite active in the past days, not towards solving an unusual flow of questions from new or old users, but in protesting against the exclusion of a moderator who disputed on a moderator forum the relevance of a code of conduct change proposed or imposed by the private company behind Stack Exchange, now called Stack Overflow (like the honomym forum on Stack Exchange). A change about the use of gender pronouns in comments and answers (an announcement that attracted the second largest number of negative votes for the entire site). And an exclusion followed by a sequence of apologies from the company highest officers that did not seem to pacify anyone (first largest number of negative votes!) and that kept the excluded moderator excluded. And leading to close to one hundred moderators resigning or going AWOL. Including one of the most active members of X validated, Glen_b. Who posted a detailed description of the chain of events and a most rational explanation of why he was resigning from being a moderator. And then another major moderator, gung… A flak overflow as put by another report.

“We recognise that Stack Exchange is in no way obliged to take our input. We know that we are guests in the home of a private company. We don’t own the platform, and while we want to help to steer the ship, we don’t have the right to determine how it is governed. What built this network is a sense of community and common purpose, and a big part of that has always been the close relationship and communication between Stack Exchange and stakeholders, such as moderators and users. It’s a shame that we’ve lost something so fundamental.” dearstackexchange.com

What can be learned from this fiasco is that it is not a very good idea to let a technical Q&A forum such as Stack Exchange to be run by a private company. Even though many contributors may have never realised till now this is the case. And even when the company is using A/B tests, Bayesian GLMs, and Stan to decrease the number of “unfriendly comments” on the site. Companies are primarily there to make profit and report to stakeholders, rather than the millions of people contributing to the site for free, sometimes investing a considerable amount of time and energy towards making the questions answered in a constructive manner that benefits the entire audience. Despite the facade coolness as in the nerdy, geeky chatter on the company blog, the company  executives and employees obviously do not share the same goal as the volunteers in the numerous communities of the network. Dealing in public relations rather than sheer exchange and in public image rather than openness and in management rather than empowerment. And in advertising rather than sharing.

Another basic remark is that by growing into so many subjects beyond computer programming, and in particular non-technical topics, the SE platform has hit a stage where some communities goals will inevitably clash with others’. I deem it rather characteristic that the (one?) source of the crisis is the issue of using pronouns as stated by the OP (if any) or else using ungendered pronouns. (Pronouns like they which apparently works in English for both plural and singular—as does you—as early as the 14th century.) As some raised religious arguments against using one or several versions. As well as grammatical ones and further ones of being challenging for some non-native-English speakers. I do not think that a corporate imposition (with threats of exclusionary consequences) one single version of inclusion and tolerance is going to work and especially not within each and all of the communities constituting Stack Exchange, which is why working towards an alternative and decentralised network could be timely.

a political ad?!