Stack Exchange's growing pains
Nov. 20th, 2018 10:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cellioStack Exchange used to be able to function like a smaller company...until they couldn't. They don't seem to know how to be a bigger company yet, so sometimes they step in it badly. This time they not only stepped in it badly but they then reached for the shovel to dig even deeper.
Background: If you visit any site on the network you'll see, partway down the right column, a list of random-seeming questions from other network sites. These are called "hot network questions", and the communities have been asking for years for SE to tune the algorithm that chooses questions. (It responds to velocity, not quality, and thus optimizes for controversy.) People complained; nothing happened.
In mid-October somebody who turned out to be a troll complained on Twitter about two such questions, seen on Stack Overflow, from the site Interpersonal Skills. The title of one of them was not great (which is what edits are for); the other one was fine. But this person got a rant on and has followers. Within 40 minutes, an employee responded with something like "that's not ok; I've just removed that site from the hot list and we'll look into what's going on with that site". Great way to throw a community under the bus there. (The community wasn't notified until hours later.) Meanwhile, one of the moderators on that site, who I know to be a clueful and thoughtful person, responded to the tweet (in retrospect a bad idea) and tried to help. Other people responded too because, hey, that's how Twitter works.
So then our Twitter troll (twoll?) ranted some more because people were responding, and accused the moderator and others by name of "sealioning" (apparently a form of trolling) and generally spouted outrage, and a different employee jumped in and said something like "if those messages came from mods we'll fire them" -- without even asking first what these allegedly-trolling messages said. (The employee thought they were direct messages, meaning you'd have to ask because DMs are private.) So the employee jumped to a faulty conclusion and validated the troll without seeming to consider that maybe the facts were not as presented.
Stack Exchange is way the hell overdue for some internal education on how to do social media. They admit that, but meanwhile they have employees who've helped to malign named volunteer moderators and one entire community, and we moderators kind of thought they should do something about that. Like, maybe, apologize and say it won't happen again. Or at least retract the tweets. Or something. (Employees are allowed to have private opinions, but when you speak as an employee you need to be more careful.)
The next day Tim, a manager on the community team, posted on SE's meta site asking for ideas about how to change hot network questions. In that post he said "Some things happened yesterday that caused a need for us to (quickly) remove a site's eligibility to contribute to the list of hot network questions." "Need"? Even after the initial round of discussion, this wasn't being treated as an over-reaction. Sometime in the next few days the affected community was told that this hasty, troll-induced change would not be reversed any time soon.
The Twitter-storm started on a Wednesday. We were promised a blog post supporting moderators and clarifying policies "soon". With no motion after several days I wrote Dear Stack Overflow, we need to talk on Medium, and to get it seen I tweeted it.
We’ve had a rough few days. I get that you’re tired of hearing about it, but the damage is still there, so we can’t just ignore it, hide behind the weekend, and hope it’ll blow over. It won’t. You need to act.
Your silence in the face of bad behavior is harming your relationship with the volunteers and community members who make your sites work.
I spent almost as much time on the cartoon as on the post, by the way, because (a) I suck at graphics so it takes a while and (b) I knew both Medium and Twitter would use a graphic in their previews if present. You should click through and see my glorious art (cough).
That post caused a ruckus around the network; I saw lots of comments along the lines of "if Monica is mad enough to write that, it's serious". Another moderator made this meta post in direct response to my post, in which he wrote:
We've been really really patient, but we shouldn't need to tweet at folks to get your attention. We've been really patient. We really would love SE to grow, but not at the expense of its heart.
Tim and Jay (VP on the community team) both tweeted to say that they value our moderators, which was a good start, but it really isn't enough.
Almost a week after my post, the moderator who had been personally attacked on Twitter wrote a post of his own and tweeted it. It's a very thoughtful piece, and it generated a reply on Twitter from Jay (there's a thread there). It's a thoughtful reply but, like the earlier one from Tim, seemed to make excuses for the employees instead of apologizing for their blunders. Nobody has yet apologized officially. Team members refused to even ask the employees to clarify that they weren't speaking for the company, saying that would be throwing employees under the bus (not true).
A few days after my post (and before the other moderator's post), Jon Ericson, a community manager, made a post responding to mine. He's the only one I've seen so far who gets that SE broke trust with its moderators and communities. He went on to explain how SE can't operate the way it did when it was smaller, and he's optimistic about some of the changes they're making. I appreciate the (personal, not company-representing) response, especially coming from somebody I've locked horns with in the past, but it's necessarily incomplete.
That was all in October. The promised blog post did not appear the following Monday, or any other day that week. (Then bad things happened here in Pittsburgh and I wasn't as focused on this for a while.) Nearly five weeks later that blog post has still not appeared. It's ridiculous at this point. I don't think we're getting it (and they don't want to tell us), and I also think they've squandered the chance to use it to repair the damage they did. As I wrote in a comment on Jon's post two weeks ago:
I was expecting a blog post a few days after the incident with some navel-gazing, some after-action review, and some clear statements (like Jay's tweets) on our own site. I fear that the expected benefit from that blog post is dropping off as the weeks go by, and that too makes me sad and frustrated. I never expected weeks to go by like this. And I know this is wearing on members of your team who were already stretched too thin before this happened, so I expect there's some resentment on your team (not singling anybody out), and that doesn't feel so good either. Some of today's TL discussions were, um, not good in that regard.
(TL is the Teachers' Lounge, the moderators' private chat room. A senior CM had basically told us to shut up about it.)
So, to recap:
- A troll got SE's attention and SE responded carelessly.
- Having had the problem pointed out, they chose to retract nothing. SE totally failed at damage-control.
- They also chose to not reverse the hasty decision about that site pending a more thoughtful discussion about what should really be done.
- They did tweet to say our mods are valued.
- Nobody has apologized publicly on behalf of SE.
- SE has not publicly clarified its social-media policies.
- Near as I can tell, they're just waiting for it to blow over and expecting business as usual from the volunteers.
I'm feeling pretty demoralized. I love some of my communities and I'm not going to let SE spoil them, but I'll admit that on the community that's the most challenging to moderate, I'm not doing much right now and I'll decide later whether to resign. Another moderator on that site quit -- not just because of this, but this contributed. Several other moderators (not just on my sites) are visibly unhappy, though we are but a small proportion of all moderators. SE can probably afford to alienate us.
I'm also feeling like I dodged a bullet when I didn't go to work there earlier this year. SE is changing from the company that had attention-span for and good collaboration with its volunteers, and I can't tell if they know how to actually manage the transition to whatever comes next.
Edited to add: I said this elsewhere and want to say it here too. I believe that all of the individuals involved have good intentions, are trying to do the right thing, and got in over their heads. Stack Exchange corporately seems unable to fix this, and I think that's at least in part because they are no longer a small, well-functioning company. I think there must be a fair bit of dysfunction in place structurally.
I wrote this post mainly to collect all the pieces in one place, because this has been happening on Medium and Twitter and Jon's blog and Meta SE. But I also wrote it because this (not Medium) is my journal, a place where I write about SE and many other things, so it belongs here.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-11-21 10:31 pm (UTC)On the other hand, I.... suspect that if I had the facts you have elided – if I were to see the titles of the originally complained-about questions, if I had seen the tweets in the Twitter argument, for myself – I would not be on your side in this. I mean, maybe I would, but...
You complained about people (a SE employee, at least) jumping to conclusions about whether something was actually bad before finding out what was actually said that they're judging. Well, just so. I prefer to know what was said before deciding how I feel about it.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-11-21 11:09 pm (UTC)Of course. I'm not asking anybody to jump to my defense; I'm sharing my perspective and frustration and trying to stay focused enough that people will read. I was focusing here on SE's handling of the complaint and the aftermath of that, rather than the original tweet (which has now been deleted), but perhaps I elided too much.
The tweeter showed three question titles in screenshots:
- IPS: How do you tell a Facebook friend that they might be on the autism spectrum?
- IPS: How to approach a friend about his girlfriend asking to sleep with me?
- SciFi: Story about aliens nicknamed "Eechees" who have created a network of tunnels on Mars
(The last was not mentioned again, so any concerns there remain unclear.)
The first question was asked by somebody who is also on the spectrum. The second was asked by somebody who did not welcome the advances. In both cases you'd need to click through to know that and I expect the askers never considered what contextless titles would look like, though I also don't see what's wrong with either of these titles coming from a site about interpersonal relations. The author of one of the questions, I forget which, edited the title after seeing that somebody had complained. Editing is usually the first response on SE to discovering (fixable) problematic content, so I'm not sure why nuking the entire site from the list is the preferred option here.
Screenshots of employee #2's tweets are in my Medium post.
I have 18 pages of screenshots (made by somebody else) that capture most but not all of the tangle of messages that Twitter calls threading.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-11-21 11:35 pm (UTC)What were the original objections re the IPS posts?
(no subject)
Date: 2018-11-22 12:17 am (UTC)First tweet: "When people seem confused about why Stack Overflow might not be the most welcoming/comfortable place for people to find answers to programming questions, show them this", with screenshots of the SciFi and girlfriend questions and one other. I got this wrong before; the autism one was in a second tweet. That additional IPS question in the first tweet was: "How do I tell students at a school I volunteer at to stop flirting with me?" This is the one where the author saw the complaint and edited (s/flirting/behaving inappropriately).
A second tweet said: "Every year I get frustrated by the release of the @StackOverflow "survey" because I don't think their user base is inclusive. And most of the time, I get pushback from folks who work there. THIS SHIT RIGHT HERE is what I'm talking about."
A third tweet included the autism question, with: "Cool ableism on the front page of a website for dev questions".
A later tweet referred generically to "offensive content".
Just about every reply from somebody trying to help was met with hostility and often profanity. I called troll on the tweeter because of the followup, not because of the original tweets. Indeed, it initially seemed possible that constructive discussion (that would help SE) could result, else I presume people wouldn't have bothered.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-11-22 01:34 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-11-22 01:53 am (UTC)Yeeeeeeah, that's not being a troll and I'm, like, 3/5th on the other side of this.
I'm thinking SE is in a terrible bind here, much more than I think you realize. It sounds like from your perspective, you see this as an unreasonable outsider who either doesn't understand, or doesn't appreciate (or who in bad faith is pretending not to know to score a point) how SE works, who is getting an unreasonable level of deference at the expense (throwing under the bus) of SE volunteers. Unfortunately, for non-SE outsiders? It looks like the person you're calling the troll is the reasonable party and the SE volunteers behaved not only really poorly, but really poorly in a predictable and much-condemned-on-twitter template way (which is part of why it was like throwing gasoline on a lit candle); SE employees are swooping in trying to clean up a PR fiasco which is much worse than I think you appreciate. I don't think you're going to get what you want; I don't think you can get what you want – I don't think they dare walk anything back in public.
I think SE management agrees (or more agrees) with @shanemadden than the SE moderator and users who tried to "help" on Twitter.
My heart goes out to the SE volunteers, who don't understand what was wrong about what they did, or why SE would not be on their side about this. I know that from their perspective everything they did was sensible, kind, helpful, moral, etc, and this whole thing is bewildering as much as infuriating.
(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.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-11-22 03:43 am (UTC)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?".
Yes. I know. I, however, saw the problem, and my hypothesis is that the SE employees, who responded with such alacrity, also saw the problem, in the way that precisely you and the other SE volunteers did not.
It seems you are having trouble entertaining the hypothesis that something really bad was happening, and the SE employees who responded so swiftly (and your your and other SE volunteers' vantages so harshly) were actually responding proportionately.
Yes, I know that from your perspective the criticism was mystifying and seemed to be coming from one crank, especially in light of the swearing and hostility that followed. From the perspective of the SE ledership (and from a whole boatload of tech Twitter), the criticism was very clear, very apropos, and of a piece with a whole lot of other criticism (throughout the tech industry) which has been raised and much discussed publically, elsewhere, and the swearing and hostility was not unjustified in light of the extreme lapse of respect the replies she got demonstrated.
I know you're hugely partial to SE and willing to cut it all sorts of slack out of affection. But please consider the posibility that just because you didn't see those criticisms as a big (and legitimate) detail, doesn't mean they weren't, and doesn't mean the management of SE didn't realize that they were, too.
I can give you an analogy that might illuminate the original controversy, if you like, but it will be unpleasant.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-11-22 03:52 am (UTC)I'm certainly willing to entertain the possibility that I'm not seeing something important. Without knowing what this bad thing is supposed to be, I'm not in a position to evaluate the claim. What is the thing that you see, that I don't, that is so alarming that it requires large-scale immediate action (as opposed to, say, editing a question title)? What am I missing? Are you able to explain it, or at least provide some hints, without unpleasant analogies?
(no subject)
Date: 2018-11-22 03:49 am (UTC)Also, can I ask/challenge: why are you acting like IPS (where I, myself, have participated!) getting removed from the "hot network questions" box is a terrible wrong? I'm trying to figure out how to swing that favor for a couple of other SE sites I'm partial too.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-11-22 03:59 am (UTC)Early on IPS asked to be off the hot list and was either told no or ignored (don't remember). A reasonable end state would be that any site that wants to be off the list gets to opt out. What happened, though, feels like a site being punished and publicly shamed.
There's also an element of "our requests get routinely ignored but you'll act on the basis of a tweet? We need to go to Twitter to get listened to? WTF?".
(no subject)
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.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-11-26 04:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-11-30 10:22 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-11-22 06:26 am (UTC)(no subject)
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.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-11-26 09:39 pm (UTC)Graham tweeted 4 tweets in 2 minutes to "correct" her misunderstanding of the site. That reads as aggression on Twitter. Graham has tweeted 200 times and the person who complained has tweeted > 70k times. Probably, Graham doesn't understand Twitter norms. That's SE's problem. They tried to address it (but poorly and without fully understanding the interaction; agreed there).
Graham acted in good faith, but he made the situation worse.
The SE employee who responded also acted in good faith, and ALSO made the situation worse.
Those titles are offensive because they are interjecting sex into someone's workspace. Full stop, that's the reason. Sex is an inappropriate topic at work, and SO is primarily used for work (and school).
And in tech, sex is so prevalent! It's exhausting to constantly be watching out for SURPRISE SEX TALK, so seeing it on SO and just closing your browser window and never going there again is a completely understandable experience to me.
I agree; the best reaction would have been to remove the hot questions list rather than to remove a single site from it. Perhaps they will. Perhaps we'll have to keep pointing out how stripping questions of their context alienates people from SE.
But to be honest, to see AN ACTION TAKEN in response to a complaint about sexism at a tech company (even if it wasn't the best possible action) was such a relief to me. Thank goodness a company in the tech industry (that I donated my labor to!) takes this stuff seriously!