Okay, fair-ish. Yeah, I'm unsurprised that IPS wants off the hot list, and I can appreciate the frustration of asking to be exempted and being told no, and then finally being removed as a result of a complaint. IPS wanted off because it was driving bad traffic to them; IPS got thrown off because (to a first approximation) of IPS's behavior.
Except it wasn't IPS's behavior.
Now, before you agree with me, hear me out. I know you feel IPS is being unfairly put upon because question titles from IPS were indicated to be bad, and it seems to you like IPS is being punished.
I don't at all get that impression.
The problem with those IPS question titles was not that there was something intrinsically "wrong" with them. It's that they didn't belong on the rest of the site.
Sorry, you're going to have to get the unpleasant analogy.
Imagine that there was a tech Q&A site, and it got really big and popular, and fissioned into many different tech Q&A sites, and then it branched off a few non tech Q&A sites, one of which was RehabilitatingNazis. At the RehabilitatingNazis site, very patient volunteers take questions from antisemitic race supremacism in various stages of moving away from antisemitic race supremacism, and help the ex-nazis see where they are wrong. They are doing the work of angels, truly, and have received many kudos for doing this work and providing this resource, including from orgs like the ADL and the SPLC.
Problem is, this network of tech Q&A (and not-tech Q&A) sites has a feature to drive traffic to other sites: a "hot questions" box that appears on all the Q&A sites' front pages. From time to time, this means somebody – possibly acting in bad faith – posts over on RehabilitatingNazis a question like "How can we be sure Jews don't eat babies?", it attracts a lot of response, and consequently pops up in the "hot questions" box across the rest of the site.
So, you can imagine it, some poor Jewish sysadmin googling "sendmail plus address configure", and the first hit is a page at this tech Q&A site, "How do I configure plus addressing in sendmail?"; they click through, and, in addition to the three replies telling them to use qmail instead and the one description of how it works with exim and the actual answer to the question (one vote), in the side bar, there's the question, "How can we be sure Jews don't eat babies?"
Now maybe our Jewish sysadmin does a double take, then goes to find out why this random tech site that Google just sent them to to answer a question about sendmail has a question on it speculating about the blood libel; maybe they go, "Oh, hey, that's actually kind of neat, and this whole deep network of sites is a heck of a resource", and stick around. Maybe instead they go, "Uh, thank you white supremacists who use sendmail.... I'm outta here."
If our Jewish sysadmin does stick around, they may find that they are loathe to send links to colleagues from this site, because at any moment, randomly, the site might have something horrible on it that would take explaining, and the recipient might think the Jewish sysadmin endorses that sort of antisemitism. "Yes, I know it seems like there's a bunch of antisemitic white supremacists on this site, that's because, well, there is: there's this anti-antisemitic white supremacism site, which is doing this really beautiful work helping nazis leave naziism, so, from time to time, you'll see what they're up to in what sorts of questions they get that get really popular, um..." So eventually, the Jewish sysadmin might get on the meta-site to explain, "Hey, management, you know, having the occasional hot question from RehabilitatingNazis show up in the 'hot questions' box site-wide makes this place kind of, well, unwelcoming for Jews. So maybe not have it do that?" And the Jewish sysadmin would quickly find out that a bunch of previous Jewish techies had already raised that objection, and that whenever anybody new brings it up, a bunch of entirely predictable responses ensue:
1) Jeeze, you Jewish people always complaining, always the victim, always making mountains out of molehills;
2) Jeeze, don't you want there not to be nazis anymore? What kind of self-hating Jew would object to the work of the fine people of RehabilitatingNazis?;
3) No, no, you misunderstand how the site works; you must be a n00b! Allow me to kindly and patronizingly explain to you what is happening: the questions in the "hot question box" are from across the whole network of Q&A sites. So you can see that it logically follows from this that these questions are utterly blameless and intrinsically unobjectionable – at least to any reasonable person.
Now imagine that for some reason, there comes a time of increased awareness of and concern about antisemitism; eventually the management of this site says, "Hey, we've been getting some complaints that our network of sites isn't welcoming to Jews. So we're going to be doing some thinking about how we could do a better job about that, and maybe come up with a Standard of Conduct." And things blow up. Lots and lots and lots of people say things in response to this announcement like, "How could these sites be antisemitic? Nobody knows if you're a Jew unless you say so. Everybody uses a pseudonym. So there's no way anybody could be discriminating against people for being Jews – nobody knows who is a Jew! And it's a tech site, so how would it even come up?" In response, people point out that, actually, some Jewish members use their real names as usernames, with last names like "Cohen" and "Levi"; and that some Jewish members have Jewish user icons; and that some Jewish members participate in Jewish Q&A site; so that, yes, actually, sometimes you can tell a member is Jewish; and that why should Jewish people be expected to keep it a secret that they're Jewish, just to avoid discrimination? How is that fair? And then somebody points out that incident, a little while ago, where somebody posted to the cooking Q&A site a question requesting a recipe for matzoh made from Christian babies, using the throw-away account "Jew McJewface"; and the incident over on the English Idioms Q&A site where somebody answered a question about idioms having to do with frugality and financial negotiations with the usage "jewing somebody down"; an another incident in the Unicode group, in a discussion of Hebrew characters. And then other people said they'd been wondering about whether having all those ex-Nazis, quite a number of whom were, to put it generously, early in their journeys away from Naziism, being drawn to the network of sites, wasn't causing there to be quite a lot of, well, white supremacists, or recently-ex-white-supremacists, populating the other tech sites, which might explain some of the occasional ignorant antisemitic comment, like, "but that would be a Jew way of doing that".
And, meanwhile, the small number of Jewish members who had brought up the thing with the stupid box were going, "WE TOLD YOU ALREADY. YOU DON'T HAVE TO GO DO A LOT OF INTROSPECTION. YOU DON'T HAVE TO CONVENE A CONGRESSIONAL COMMITTEE. WE ALREADY GAVE YOU THIS CLUE ALREADY ON A SILVER PLATTER ALREADY. IT'S THE DAMNED BOX. TAKE THE NAZI QUESTIONS OUT OF THE HOT QUESTIONS BOX. NNNAAARRRGGGG."
Entirely unsurprisingly, some of these Jewish members vented on Twitter. "Oh, rich. They don't listen to us when we tell them what is making this place hostile to Jews, and here's a screenshot of a question about sendmail with 'Why are Jews always complaining about antisemitism?' on it." Twitter, as it happened, was the place there had been huge rolling controversies about antisemitism; multiple times, individuals had come forward to claim they had been discriminated against, only to be shamed and harassed for making a public accusation, only to have it come out that not only were they right, things were much worse than anybody had expected. So Twitter was pretty sensitive about individuals pointing out companies behaving in antisemitic ways. Twitter is a bit of a powderkeg under the best of circumstances.
Then some of the site's volunteers saw this complaint, and "helpfully" decided to give response #3 above, "explaining" to the presumed n00b how the hot questions box worked and why there were antisemitic questions in it. And all of this popular Twitter user's followers saw... someone in a position of some authority (a moderator) doing something that looked pretty much dead-on for the minimizing and shaming responses in the past for people whistleblowing antisemitism in tech companies, something that, by now, tended to set off a wave of rage across Twitter and had been devastating to the public images of a number of companies. Now, PR consultancies advised that "you have to respond in Internet Time", and that you have to do so decisively and correctly; you must not be seen as giving any sanction to antisemitism.
And since the management of these sites takes antisemitism very seriously – heck, that's why they have RehabilitatingNazis on there in the first place! – they responded with celerity when this happened. They – finally! – immediately yanked RehabilitatingNazis from the hot questions box, and agreed the moderator (and others) who attempted to tell the Jewish member of the tech Q&A site why they were wrong on Twitter about antisemitism and the tech Q&A site was badly out of line.
Now.
I'm not saying that IPS is RehabilitatingNazis. (If it were we probably wouldn't need the analogy.) But the problem of "you have an automated system that takes potentially problematic questions, strips them of context and further explanation, and dumps them on webpages discussing sendmail" is exactly the one under discussion.
In my analogy, the Jews of the site might reasonably say, "We don't mind – we even really approve of – there being a site here for recovering white supremacists to ask dumb, racist, antisemitic questions and get anti-antisemitic answers. But recovering antisemites are going to ask dumb, racist, antisemitic questions that need to not be spackled all over the rest of this place so we Jewish tech people can use the tech parts of the site in peace, and also so other users don't get the impression that this place is cool with antisemitism and then attract a bunch of antisemites. Life is hard enough configuring sendmail, don't make us deal with Nazis too."
Users of SE can reasonably say, "Okay, I suppose it's a good thing there's stacks where people can ask ignorant sexist or ableist questions, and get correction. But those questions need to not be spackled all over the rest of this place, so the rest of us can use the tech part of the site in peace, and also so people don't get the impression this place is cool with sexism or ableism."
The criticism here, as best I can tell, was not "those questions shouldn't have been on IPS". As you say, those are reasonable questions for IPS. But they are not reasonable questions to have popping up on the tech sites. And people have mentioned this problem before. It's not like SE's management hadn't been warned this was a problem.
The criticism here is of SE's management's negligence in not dealing with the problem of the hot questions box. The problem is their (apparently) not taking the problem seriously when it was just their own users trying to warn them about it. Something that's particularly infuriating in light of their previous declarations that they are going to try to do things to make the site more welcoming of and tolerant of minorities.
SE failed to deal with a problem it had been told about – my cynical suspicion is because "controversy sells" – and when people had brought it to their attention in public, other SE users minimized, patronized, and generally denied there was a problem. So it's not a surprise that a frustrated user might post to Twitter, "Look, there it goes, doing that thing again that I've complained about."
I would offer as evidence of my reading of events the response of SE's employees.
If SE's employees believed, as you think they do/did, that there was something wrong with those questions being on IPS, then they could/would have edited or closed those questions. They could have "punished" (as you have it) the questions. They didn't, did they? But they understood that was not what was wrong, and not what the complaint was about. The problem was having those questions in the hot questions box, so they removed them.
This wasn't punishing IPS. This was hastily fixing something they let go until it became a public scandal.
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Date: 2018-11-22 06:15 am (UTC)Okay, fair-ish. Yeah, I'm unsurprised that IPS wants off the hot list, and I can appreciate the frustration of asking to be exempted and being told no, and then finally being removed as a result of a complaint. IPS wanted off because it was driving bad traffic to them; IPS got thrown off because (to a first approximation) of IPS's behavior.
Except it wasn't IPS's behavior.
Now, before you agree with me, hear me out. I know you feel IPS is being unfairly put upon because question titles from IPS were indicated to be bad, and it seems to you like IPS is being punished.
I don't at all get that impression.
The problem with those IPS question titles was not that there was something intrinsically "wrong" with them. It's that they didn't belong on the rest of the site.
Sorry, you're going to have to get the unpleasant analogy.
Imagine that there was a tech Q&A site, and it got really big and popular, and fissioned into many different tech Q&A sites, and then it branched off a few non tech Q&A sites, one of which was RehabilitatingNazis. At the RehabilitatingNazis site, very patient volunteers take questions from antisemitic race supremacism in various stages of moving away from antisemitic race supremacism, and help the ex-nazis see where they are wrong. They are doing the work of angels, truly, and have received many kudos for doing this work and providing this resource, including from orgs like the ADL and the SPLC.
Problem is, this network of tech Q&A (and not-tech Q&A) sites has a feature to drive traffic to other sites: a "hot questions" box that appears on all the Q&A sites' front pages. From time to time, this means somebody – possibly acting in bad faith – posts over on RehabilitatingNazis a question like "How can we be sure Jews don't eat babies?", it attracts a lot of response, and consequently pops up in the "hot questions" box across the rest of the site.
So, you can imagine it, some poor Jewish sysadmin googling "sendmail plus address configure", and the first hit is a page at this tech Q&A site, "How do I configure plus addressing in sendmail?"; they click through, and, in addition to the three replies telling them to use qmail instead and the one description of how it works with exim and the actual answer to the question (one vote), in the side bar, there's the question, "How can we be sure Jews don't eat babies?"
Now maybe our Jewish sysadmin does a double take, then goes to find out why this random tech site that Google just sent them to to answer a question about sendmail has a question on it speculating about the blood libel; maybe they go, "Oh, hey, that's actually kind of neat, and this whole deep network of sites is a heck of a resource", and stick around. Maybe instead they go, "Uh, thank you white supremacists who use sendmail.... I'm outta here."
If our Jewish sysadmin does stick around, they may find that they are loathe to send links to colleagues from this site, because at any moment, randomly, the site might have something horrible on it that would take explaining, and the recipient might think the Jewish sysadmin endorses that sort of antisemitism. "Yes, I know it seems like there's a bunch of antisemitic white supremacists on this site, that's because, well, there is: there's this anti-antisemitic white supremacism site, which is doing this really beautiful work helping nazis leave naziism, so, from time to time, you'll see what they're up to in what sorts of questions they get that get really popular, um..." So eventually, the Jewish sysadmin might get on the meta-site to explain, "Hey, management, you know, having the occasional hot question from RehabilitatingNazis show up in the 'hot questions' box site-wide makes this place kind of, well, unwelcoming for Jews. So maybe not have it do that?" And the Jewish sysadmin would quickly find out that a bunch of previous Jewish techies had already raised that objection, and that whenever anybody new brings it up, a bunch of entirely predictable responses ensue:
1) Jeeze, you Jewish people always complaining, always the victim, always making mountains out of molehills;
2) Jeeze, don't you want there not to be nazis anymore? What kind of self-hating Jew would object to the work of the fine people of RehabilitatingNazis?;
3) No, no, you misunderstand how the site works; you must be a n00b! Allow me to kindly and patronizingly explain to you what is happening: the questions in the "hot question box" are from across the whole network of Q&A sites. So you can see that it logically follows from this that these questions are utterly blameless and intrinsically unobjectionable – at least to any reasonable person.
Now imagine that for some reason, there comes a time of increased awareness of and concern about antisemitism; eventually the management of this site says, "Hey, we've been getting some complaints that our network of sites isn't welcoming to Jews. So we're going to be doing some thinking about how we could do a better job about that, and maybe come up with a Standard of Conduct." And things blow up. Lots and lots and lots of people say things in response to this announcement like, "How could these sites be antisemitic? Nobody knows if you're a Jew unless you say so. Everybody uses a pseudonym. So there's no way anybody could be discriminating against people for being Jews – nobody knows who is a Jew! And it's a tech site, so how would it even come up?" In response, people point out that, actually, some Jewish members use their real names as usernames, with last names like "Cohen" and "Levi"; and that some Jewish members have Jewish user icons; and that some Jewish members participate in Jewish Q&A site; so that, yes, actually, sometimes you can tell a member is Jewish; and that why should Jewish people be expected to keep it a secret that they're Jewish, just to avoid discrimination? How is that fair? And then somebody points out that incident, a little while ago, where somebody posted to the cooking Q&A site a question requesting a recipe for matzoh made from Christian babies, using the throw-away account "Jew McJewface"; and the incident over on the English Idioms Q&A site where somebody answered a question about idioms having to do with frugality and financial negotiations with the usage "jewing somebody down"; an another incident in the Unicode group, in a discussion of Hebrew characters. And then other people said they'd been wondering about whether having all those ex-Nazis, quite a number of whom were, to put it generously, early in their journeys away from Naziism, being drawn to the network of sites, wasn't causing there to be quite a lot of, well, white supremacists, or recently-ex-white-supremacists, populating the other tech sites, which might explain some of the occasional ignorant antisemitic comment, like, "but that would be a Jew way of doing that".
And, meanwhile, the small number of Jewish members who had brought up the thing with the stupid box were going, "WE TOLD YOU ALREADY. YOU DON'T HAVE TO GO DO A LOT OF INTROSPECTION. YOU DON'T HAVE TO CONVENE A CONGRESSIONAL COMMITTEE. WE ALREADY GAVE YOU THIS CLUE ALREADY ON A SILVER PLATTER ALREADY. IT'S THE DAMNED BOX. TAKE THE NAZI QUESTIONS OUT OF THE HOT QUESTIONS BOX. NNNAAARRRGGGG."
Entirely unsurprisingly, some of these Jewish members vented on Twitter. "Oh, rich. They don't listen to us when we tell them what is making this place hostile to Jews, and here's a screenshot of a question about sendmail with 'Why are Jews always complaining about antisemitism?' on it." Twitter, as it happened, was the place there had been huge rolling controversies about antisemitism; multiple times, individuals had come forward to claim they had been discriminated against, only to be shamed and harassed for making a public accusation, only to have it come out that not only were they right, things were much worse than anybody had expected. So Twitter was pretty sensitive about individuals pointing out companies behaving in antisemitic ways. Twitter is a bit of a powderkeg under the best of circumstances.
Then some of the site's volunteers saw this complaint, and "helpfully" decided to give response #3 above, "explaining" to the presumed n00b how the hot questions box worked and why there were antisemitic questions in it. And all of this popular Twitter user's followers saw... someone in a position of some authority (a moderator) doing something that looked pretty much dead-on for the minimizing and shaming responses in the past for people whistleblowing antisemitism in tech companies, something that, by now, tended to set off a wave of rage across Twitter and had been devastating to the public images of a number of companies. Now, PR consultancies advised that "you have to respond in Internet Time", and that you have to do so decisively and correctly; you must not be seen as giving any sanction to antisemitism.
And since the management of these sites takes antisemitism very seriously – heck, that's why they have RehabilitatingNazis on there in the first place! – they responded with celerity when this happened. They – finally! – immediately yanked RehabilitatingNazis from the hot questions box, and agreed the moderator (and others) who attempted to tell the Jewish member of the tech Q&A site why they were wrong on Twitter about antisemitism and the tech Q&A site was badly out of line.
Now.
I'm not saying that IPS is RehabilitatingNazis. (If it were we probably wouldn't need the analogy.) But the problem of "you have an automated system that takes potentially problematic questions, strips them of context and further explanation, and dumps them on webpages discussing sendmail" is exactly the one under discussion.
In my analogy, the Jews of the site might reasonably say, "We don't mind – we even really approve of – there being a site here for recovering white supremacists to ask dumb, racist, antisemitic questions and get anti-antisemitic answers. But recovering antisemites are going to ask dumb, racist, antisemitic questions that need to not be spackled all over the rest of this place so we Jewish tech people can use the tech parts of the site in peace, and also so other users don't get the impression that this place is cool with antisemitism and then attract a bunch of antisemites. Life is hard enough configuring sendmail, don't make us deal with Nazis too."
Users of SE can reasonably say, "Okay, I suppose it's a good thing there's stacks where people can ask ignorant sexist or ableist questions, and get correction. But those questions need to not be spackled all over the rest of this place, so the rest of us can use the tech part of the site in peace, and also so people don't get the impression this place is cool with sexism or ableism."
The criticism here, as best I can tell, was not "those questions shouldn't have been on IPS". As you say, those are reasonable questions for IPS. But they are not reasonable questions to have popping up on the tech sites. And people have mentioned this problem before. It's not like SE's management hadn't been warned this was a problem.
The criticism here is of SE's management's negligence in not dealing with the problem of the hot questions box. The problem is their (apparently) not taking the problem seriously when it was just their own users trying to warn them about it. Something that's particularly infuriating in light of their previous declarations that they are going to try to do things to make the site more welcoming of and tolerant of minorities.
SE failed to deal with a problem it had been told about – my cynical suspicion is because "controversy sells" – and when people had brought it to their attention in public, other SE users minimized, patronized, and generally denied there was a problem. So it's not a surprise that a frustrated user might post to Twitter, "Look, there it goes, doing that thing again that I've complained about."
I would offer as evidence of my reading of events the response of SE's employees.
If SE's employees believed, as you think they do/did, that there was something wrong with those questions being on IPS, then they could/would have edited or closed those questions. They could have "punished" (as you have it) the questions. They didn't, did they? But they understood that was not what was wrong, and not what the complaint was about. The problem was having those questions in the hot questions box, so they removed them.
This wasn't punishing IPS. This was hastily fixing something they let go until it became a public scandal.