(SRE = Site Reliability Engineer. Sorry. They're the people who keep the web sites and databases and whatnot humming along.)
As I said, the initial tweets didn't read as trolling to me; it was the venom that followed that made me re-evaluate. The accusation of "ableism" was cryptic and kind of hostile but not, yet, trolling. I know you haven't seen all the stuff that followed; do you want me to email you the pile of screenshots I have?
The reaction that I, and most people I saw comment on it, had to the initial complaints about those specific questions was along the lines of "huh? what's wrong with that?". If the first SE employee to get there had replied with something like "I'm sorry you're unhappy; I'd like to better understand so we can address your concerns; could you DM me?", we'd probably be in a much better place.
Mods have now had some internal discussions about (not) responding to complaints on social media, and SE has given us an escalation path if we see stuff. (Normally, contacting the team for help with something takes days to weeks to get a response, which obviously doesn't work in this kind of case.) It seems pretty clear that neither volunteers nor employees knew how to best respond here. (Escalation paths wouldn't have made a difference in this case; the first responders were employees, not mods.)
I don't have a problem with an "outsider" having a complaint. If the network wants to grow it's got to be accessible to "outsiders" or they'll never stand a chance of becoming "insiders", and I want my communities to grow. We need to be able to receive, understand, and act on complaints. I've long thought that the hot list, as implemented, does more harm than good, and maybe they'll actually fix some of those problems now. If the complaint was really "this stuff isn't about programming and I'm on Stack Overflow", that's a valid complaint, but it's a complaint against the hot list, not a specific site. (There are 174 sites, and probably 150 of them aren't about programming in any way.) If the complaint was "this stuff is offensive" (which seems to be the case from the later tweets), then I don't understand why the tweeter feels that way and it's hard to act on complaints we can't understand. What we shouldn't do is remove site content on the basis of one person saying "I'm offended" without some understanding of why that might be; we need to understand the issue to effect change beyond the specific post, comment, or whatever. That understanding didn't happen here; on the basis of an unclear claim, one person on Twitter got a site kicked off the hot list entirely, got SE to blame moderators for "sea-lioning" without even seeing the alleged messages, and generally stirred things up without being willing to engage in constructive discussion. And nobody from SE offered a better venue for constructive discussion, I know, and Twitter is fairly often a dumpster fire. So the whole situation is a mess.
At this point it is weeks too late for SE to meaningfully clean most of this up. All we can do is wait and see how SE handles complaints in the future. Meanwhile, it's hard for some of us (I've heard others say this too) to feel like we're trusted and supported. We need SE to show it, not just say it, and I don't know what that looks like other than waiting for the next tweetpocalypse and seeing what they do differently. At this point my focus is on the specific communities I care deeply about, like Mi Yodeya.
It would still be nice if they'd find a way to apologize to the individuals they implicitly maligned publicly. And they really ought to either restore IPS to the hot list (IPS is hardly the only site that sometimes has surprising questions on that list) or shut down the hot list entirely until they fix the algorithm. They reacted in haste in kicking the site off; ok, that happens when you feel like you need to do something *now*. They then made a (non-hasty) decision to leave it that way, which feels like picking on that site. So ok, I was wrong -- there *are* still a couple things they could do at this late time to show that they care about their moderators and communities. But I bet they won't.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2018-11-22 02:59 am (UTC)As I said, the initial tweets didn't read as trolling to me; it was the venom that followed that made me re-evaluate. The accusation of "ableism" was cryptic and kind of hostile but not, yet, trolling. I know you haven't seen all the stuff that followed; do you want me to email you the pile of screenshots I have?
The reaction that I, and most people I saw comment on it, had to the initial complaints about those specific questions was along the lines of "huh? what's wrong with that?". If the first SE employee to get there had replied with something like "I'm sorry you're unhappy; I'd like to better understand so we can address your concerns; could you DM me?", we'd probably be in a much better place.
Mods have now had some internal discussions about (not) responding to complaints on social media, and SE has given us an escalation path if we see stuff. (Normally, contacting the team for help with something takes days to weeks to get a response, which obviously doesn't work in this kind of case.) It seems pretty clear that neither volunteers nor employees knew how to best respond here. (Escalation paths wouldn't have made a difference in this case; the first responders were employees, not mods.)
I don't have a problem with an "outsider" having a complaint. If the network wants to grow it's got to be accessible to "outsiders" or they'll never stand a chance of becoming "insiders", and I want my communities to grow. We need to be able to receive, understand, and act on complaints. I've long thought that the hot list, as implemented, does more harm than good, and maybe they'll actually fix some of those problems now. If the complaint was really "this stuff isn't about programming and I'm on Stack Overflow", that's a valid complaint, but it's a complaint against the hot list, not a specific site. (There are 174 sites, and probably 150 of them aren't about programming in any way.) If the complaint was "this stuff is offensive" (which seems to be the case from the later tweets), then I don't understand why the tweeter feels that way and it's hard to act on complaints we can't understand. What we shouldn't do is remove site content on the basis of one person saying "I'm offended" without some understanding of why that might be; we need to understand the issue to effect change beyond the specific post, comment, or whatever. That understanding didn't happen here; on the basis of an unclear claim, one person on Twitter got a site kicked off the hot list entirely, got SE to blame moderators for "sea-lioning" without even seeing the alleged messages, and generally stirred things up without being willing to engage in constructive discussion. And nobody from SE offered a better venue for constructive discussion, I know, and Twitter is fairly often a dumpster fire. So the whole situation is a mess.
At this point it is weeks too late for SE to meaningfully clean most of this up. All we can do is wait and see how SE handles complaints in the future. Meanwhile, it's hard for some of us (I've heard others say this too) to feel like we're trusted and supported. We need SE to show it, not just say it, and I don't know what that looks like other than waiting for the next tweetpocalypse and seeing what they do differently. At this point my focus is on the specific communities I care deeply about, like Mi Yodeya.
It would still be nice if they'd find a way to apologize to the individuals they implicitly maligned publicly. And they really ought to either restore IPS to the hot list (IPS is hardly the only site that sometimes has surprising questions on that list) or shut down the hot list entirely until they fix the algorithm. They reacted in haste in kicking the site off; ok, that happens when you feel like you need to do something *now*. They then made a (non-hasty) decision to leave it that way, which feels like picking on that site. So ok, I was wrong -- there *are* still a couple things they could do at this late time to show that they care about their moderators and communities. But I bet they won't.