Part of the problem here is that it's not just IPS, but the action was taken only on IPS. The majority of SE sites are non-technical now. What SE should really be reconsidering is the decision to plaster questions from all these non-technical sites across their flagship tech product, Stack Overflow.
We have sites about gaming (more on that in a bit), politics, skepticism (validating or disproving claims, which are often sensational), lifehacks, puzzles (where question titles are part of the puzzle and, thus, all over the place), worldbuilding, and more. A few years ago some hot new video game came out (don't know which; not into that world) and we started seeing first-person questions about murder and rape -- and that wasn't enough to fix HNQ (or remove that site). We see questions sometimes from the site for role-playing games that raise eyebrows (RPG doesn't just mean wizards and elves). We have seen questions from Workplace about sexual harassment and racial discrimination, and one I remember from a manager who wanted to know how to not hire women on his team because of religious issues (super-modest team members), and one from a Muslim asking how to not shake women's hands. We have seen questions from both Christianity and Islam about why God hates Jews. (Also homosexuals, if I recall correctly.) I don't think we want any of that on the Stack Overflow front page.
The algorithm that chooses questions is fundamentally flawed, sites have no control over what goes on there short of withdrawing (valid!) questions entirely, and it's caused problems before. And now, when a problem rises to the level of "we have to do something", they play whack-a-mole instead of removing the hot list from SO until they can fix it. They're just asking for the same issue to come up next week with that controversial question from Politics about illegal immigrants, or the one from Medical Science about erectile dysfunction, or the one from Worldbuilding about switching a creature's gender (and it turns out to be a question about aliens that change based on environmental factors).
Also, since it looks like you think it's obvious but it's not to me, what is sexist about any of those question titles? Maybe if I saw that the reaction would make more sense. I see a question about discouraging unwanted sexual advances -- actually, I see two like that. I get how the autism one looks bad without the context, though to me it's not "ableist" (obviously others disagree).
As for the moderator who responded, he was trying to help and got it wrong, but was accused (validated by SE) of "sea-lioning", which ascribes malicious motive. No SE employee ever refined that implicit accusation. Nobody stood up and said "we're sorry, our ill-trained moderator was acting in good faith and we should have provided guidance". Nothing, just accused of trolling. I know the mod, work with him on one of my sites, and I am confident that there was nothing malicious in anything he wrote.
ETA: Graham shared his response in Teacher's Lounge for feedback before posting it. Nobody said anything like "hey, better not". (I don't know if any employees were present at the time.) Whatever clues were missed were missed by a bunch of people, not just the one mod, hence "ill-trained" in the previous paragraph.
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Date: 2018-11-22 06:00 pm (UTC)We have sites about gaming (more on that in a bit), politics, skepticism (validating or disproving claims, which are often sensational), lifehacks, puzzles (where question titles are part of the puzzle and, thus, all over the place), worldbuilding, and more. A few years ago some hot new video game came out (don't know which; not into that world) and we started seeing first-person questions about murder and rape -- and that wasn't enough to fix HNQ (or remove that site). We see questions sometimes from the site for role-playing games that raise eyebrows (RPG doesn't just mean wizards and elves). We have seen questions from Workplace about sexual harassment and racial discrimination, and one I remember from a manager who wanted to know how to not hire women on his team because of religious issues (super-modest team members), and one from a Muslim asking how to not shake women's hands. We have seen questions from both Christianity and Islam about why God hates Jews. (Also homosexuals, if I recall correctly.) I don't think we want any of that on the Stack Overflow front page.
The algorithm that chooses questions is fundamentally flawed, sites have no control over what goes on there short of withdrawing (valid!) questions entirely, and it's caused problems before. And now, when a problem rises to the level of "we have to do something", they play whack-a-mole instead of removing the hot list from SO until they can fix it. They're just asking for the same issue to come up next week with that controversial question from Politics about illegal immigrants, or the one from Medical Science about erectile dysfunction, or the one from Worldbuilding about switching a creature's gender (and it turns out to be a question about aliens that change based on environmental factors).
Also, since it looks like you think it's obvious but it's not to me, what is sexist about any of those question titles? Maybe if I saw that the reaction would make more sense. I see a question about discouraging unwanted sexual advances -- actually, I see two like that. I get how the autism one looks bad without the context, though to me it's not "ableist" (obviously others disagree).
As for the moderator who responded, he was trying to help and got it wrong, but was accused (validated by SE) of "sea-lioning", which ascribes malicious motive. No SE employee ever refined that implicit accusation. Nobody stood up and said "we're sorry, our ill-trained moderator was acting in good faith and we should have provided guidance". Nothing, just accused of trolling. I know the mod, work with him on one of my sites, and I am confident that there was nothing malicious in anything he wrote.
ETA: Graham shared his response in Teacher's Lounge for feedback before posting it. Nobody said anything like "hey, better not". (I don't know if any employees were present at the time.) Whatever clues were missed were missed by a bunch of people, not just the one mod, hence "ill-trained" in the previous paragraph.