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cellioLast week Stack Overflow Inc. fired me as a moderator. In this post I'm going to talk about their process failures, inconsistencies, and hypocrisy in doing so. The company has a fair bit of guidance to moderators (not always public) about how to deal with users who are causing trouble; it's fair to extrapolate from that to how they should handle moderators they think are causing trouble. (I dispute "causing trouble" in this case, but that's orthogonal to my points here.) Further, the company has made various public declarations about how they treat both users and moderators. I'm not adding citations for every item here; feel free to ask about specific points. Some general references:
What SO says: Take actions on users based on what they do, not what you suspect they might do (for example because you know them from other sites). Assume good intentions.
What SO did: Fired me because they think I'm not going to follow a code of conduct that doesn't exist yet -- while I was in an email discussion with an employee seeking clarifications.
What SO says: Use escalating penalties, usually starting with a warning, then a short suspension, then longer suspensions. Of note: the template for the "abusive to others" moderator message, the category that usually applies for code-of-conduct issues, is cast as a warning and does not start with a suspension. (Some other templates do start with suspensions.)
What SO did: Without warning, without saying "that thing you did violates our rules", and without taking temporary measures, they jumped straight to permanent removal.
What SO says: When a moderator leaves, we leave it up to that moderator to communicate about it, or not. (In a similar vein, we do not talk publicly about why users were suspended unless they bring it up.)
What SO did: Within seconds of firing me, announced they had done so in the private moderators' room. You might see "private" and think "what's the big deal if it's not public?", but this is a room that 600 or so moderators across the network have access to. It's like your employer calling a company meeting after they've had security walk you out the door to announce the fact.
What SO did, part 2: In that announcement, they made false claims about me. Because of server caching I would normally have had access to the room for about 5-10 minutes; after I typed one brief reply contesting the claim they immediately booted me.
What SO says: The community is "rooted in kindness, collaboration, and mutual respect", and inclusion and diversity are very important.
What SO did: Fired a Jewish moderator, known to be observant, minutes before Shabbat and two days before Rosh Hashana. This was tone-deaf, and since our last communication had been four days earlier and I'd had no possibly-controversial activity in the interim, couldn't have been that urgent.
What SO did, part 2: Posted, on many moderators' resignation posts and then later in a non-apology on main meta, false claims and character attacks that border on libel and are likely at least defamation. (See also the announcement to colleagues I mentioned earlier.)
What SO did, part 3: Made similar claims to the press. (On Rosh Hashana, by the way, when the reporter could not reach me for a response.)
What SO says: We give our moderators trust, support, agency, accountability, and autonomy.
What SO did: Showed no trust or support, took away agency and autonomy down to the level of mandating specific language in communications on-site, and punished me for something I didn't do while not punishing people who actually violated the code of conduct.
Also, they specifically say (this is in theory revisited): "Folks need high-level direction in order to thrive, but even more essential is the space to interpret goals and distill them out into a strategy that they can act on in their own very unique circumstances." My (not-so-unique) circumstances, however, were discarded as irrelevant.
What SO says: We work together with/communicate with our moderators.
What SO did: Ignored all of my email attempting to resolve this matter: two responses to the message firing me, one message to the person I'd been emailing with days earlier, and one message to the chairman of the board and then-CEO. My messages were not unreasonable; I wasn't being in any way abusive, for example.
What SO says: Stack Overflow is run by you (the community).
What SO did: Overrode the community's choices in moderators without any demonstrated reason to do so, without the involvement (or knowledge) of the other moderators on my sites, and then dismissed the community's concerns about how they handled the situation.
Edited to add some related posts:* Other people have talked about some of these discrepancies too:
HDE 226868 on Worldbuilding (and updated on Meta)
(I know there are others; will update when I find them. There's been a lot written about this on SE.)
(no subject)
Date: 2019-10-04 09:25 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-10-04 10:28 pm (UTC)It's super-frustrating. :-(