Stack Overflow Inc. fiasco: timeline
Oct. 5th, 2019 09:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cellioThis is a timeline, to the best of my recollection, of the events that have been brought up as relevant to the current moderator-firing mess. (Current tally: 73 moderator positions currently vacant or suspended.)
Preface: The Teachers' Lounge (TL) is a private room where the convention has been that people can let their hair down a little. Discussions of policies, how to handle specific moderation situations, and (often) outside politics and other hot topics are often vigorous. It's like when programmers discuss/argue about some technical design point extensively. Often it is programmers discussing some technical policy point extensively In both cases, the goal is to refine the final product. Shog9, a senior community manager, described this dynamic in more detail somewhere that I can't find right now. It's also a place where people sometimes talk about deeply personal things.
June 2018: There was a TL discussion about gender-neutral pronouns and then "preferred pronouns". (I know they're not "preferred", but this was the phrasing used by the people bringing it up.) Some moderators who are not native English speakers expressed confusion. I said I avoid singular they for that reason, 95% of the time you can write around the problem, and (on SE) I'm offended when someone edits my posts badly to solve a gender-neutrality problem. (Editing well is fine, which usually means pluralizing or using a name or something like that instead of either generic "he" or singular "they".) Some people said not using preferred pronouns invalidates the person; I said for me it's not about the person at all but the quality of my own writing (an important part of my identity). Tension rose, other people said some things I saw as bullying, and I stepped out. For a long time after, I didn't enter the room unless strictly necessary. Note: no employee said anything to me about my role in this conversation, and while some other mods disagreed with my position, none said anything like "this is a Code of Conduct (CoC) violation". Employees witnessed this discussion.
End of June 2018: I was the second-choice candidate for a community-manager position at Stack Overflow Inc.
August 2018: another moderator made some very bigoted attacks against nonbinary and trans people, targeting one moderator who was out as NB. The messages were completely inappropriate. Some mods called for that mod to be fired, and a community manager said you don't get to do that. There have been no public consequences for the rude moderator to this day.
January 2019: a different moderator (henceforth OP) asked a question, tagged "discussion", on the moderators' private Q&A site ("team"): should we require people to use people's preferred pronouns? (Again, the moderator, who is trans, used the term "preferred".) OP self-answered to say, somewhat vehemently, that we absolutely must require this and using wrong pronouns is misgendering. I answered saying that we already have a negative commandment, don't call people what they don't want to be called (like wrong pronouns), which is proper, but this question calls for adding a positive requirement to use specific language and we shouldn't do that. I talked about writing in a gender-neutral way, that we rarely even need third-person-singular pronouns in our discussions, and not using a pronoun at all isn't misgendering. This was the top-voted answer, something like +53/-10 last I saw it. Note: Three different community managers posted answers after I did, and none said my answer was inappropriate in any way. (One disagreed with it, which is fine.)
February: A community manager said, in an answer, "we're working on this; send email if you have concerns". I sent email, got no answer, pinged, got no answer, I think pinged again with no answer, and set it aside. The question wasn't getting new activity at this point and fell out of my view.
May: the moderator who was attacked by that other mod in August stepped down. I later learned that some people want to blame the departure on my conversation from nearly a year earlier, but that doesn't add up.
Late August or early September: The same community manager from February (who didn't answer my email) posted a team question asking what kinds of optional training moderators would like SE to provide, if there were to be some budget for such things, to help us do our jobs better. The question listed some things that were already in the works, including diversity & inclusion. I posted two well-received answers, one about data mining and one about intellectual property. OP posted an answer saying "D&I training specifically about trans, and require mods to take it". The tone of the answer was pretty combative and people downvoted for that reason (as noted in comments). OP interpreted downvotes as transphobia. There was another answer that said something like "cultural awareness / different cultures, as part of D&I" that was presented positively and got a lot of support. (I know gender != culture; I'm pointing out that another D&I answer, presented constructively, was well-received.)
Mid-September: I went on vacation for a few days. This isn't directly related, but there should be one happy thing in this saga of woe. Also, it means I didn't look at the TL transcript for about four days.
September 18: I got notifications of several voting events on that team post from January about pronouns. Usually a flurry of voting on a dormant post means it was linked somewhere, so I looked at the TL transcript, where I saw another mod refer to (and link to) my answer and call it "bigoted". (I would be happy to have this answer, along with its question for context, made public to challenge this claim, but I don't think it's legal for me to release even an answer I wrote myself.) I responded to that message saying something like "you falsely accuse me; please tell me what specifically you object to so I can clarify". The response persuaded me that the only problem was that this person disagreed with me.
Same day: An employee with a "director" title posted and pinned a message saying the company is changing the CoC to require use of preferred pronouns and avoiding them is forbidden. I asked questions, most importantly: would it now be a violation of this new policy to write in the gender-neutral way that I already use? And how are you judging "avoiding", which requires knowledge of intent? Other people had questions and issues too. One moderator pointed out a problem with something I was proposing to do and I agreed after it was explained and said I wouldn't do that. The employee did not stay to field questions, but came back a couple hours later to tell me "we've been as clear as we can and your values are out of alignment". Confused, I left. This transcript was leaked on Reddit over Rosh Hashana. It had been taken down by the time I got back online, but I was able to find a copy. On review, I don't see anything I said that would violate either the current or future CoC. No employee indicated to me any problems with my behavior.
I stayed out of TL from then on except to (1) flag something (two days later) and (2) respond to my firing (very briefly before being kicked). The discussion continued for the next two days, and on September 20 a community manager declared the topic closed, saying to send email if there's anything else you want to say. One queer moderator posted several messages objecting to this, and a CM (I can't remember if it was the same one) froze the room for the weekend. Two moderators who tried to post anyway were kicked out of chat.
I didn't read much of the transcript for the next week and don't know what was said after the room was unfrozen.
September 23: I received a reply from the CM I'd emailed back in February. It seemed to be an aggregate reply to that message and one I'd sent to the CM team on September 20 about the new policy. The email I received said some things that made me think my recent message had been misunderstood -- quite possible, as I'd written it quickly before Shabbat. I replied with questions and clarifications. The employee promised a reply "tomorrow", then got sick and said it'd be another day, then was still sick, and finally promised a reply on September 27. (The employee was definitely back to work that day and handling other matters.)
September 26: A queer moderator resigned in anger, with complaints about community managers, other moderators, and the "entrenched power structure", and vague accusations of bigotry. The notice accused employees of dealing in bad faith with queer moderators and putting them in difficult situations. The notice said a single incident prompted the resignation but did not elaborate. When I read it I assumed that incident was the shutting down of the conversation the previous week, which the resigning mod had objected to at the time, but that has not been confirmed. Edit: now confirmed.
September 27: That email response never came. Instead, I was fired because they thought I wouldn't follow the future code of conduct. I've written elsewhere about the many problems with how this went down. Moderators across the network began resigning or suspending their moderation activities. I sent (separate) email to the person who fired me, the CM I'd been having that email discussion with, and Joel Spolsky, chairman of the board and (then-)CEO. I received no replies. Sara Chipps, Director of Public Q&A, left responses on various moderators' resignation posts maligning my character. You can see an example on my Mi Yodeya post. The cut-and-pasted message included, specifically referring to me: "When a moderator violates [inclusion and respect], we will always do our best to resolve it with them privately." Both halves of that statement are false.
September 30 (Rosh Hashana): When SE knew I would be offline and unable to respond, Sara Chipps made a statement to the press saying I'd been fired for CoC violations. This is, to the best of my knowledge, the first claim of a current violation.
October 3: Sara Chipps posted a non-apology "apology" in which she said I was fired "for repeatedly violating our existing Code of Conduct and being unwilling to accept our CM’s repeated requests to change that behavior". Note the escalation here: she now says current CoC, repeated, and repeated requests. I said "citation needed". This accusation was linked prominently on the front page of every site on the network. The next day, after a bunch of other answers had been posted that called her out on various issues, I added an answer of my own.
That's where things stood right before Shabbat.
Breaking news, October 6 21:00 UTC: the CTO stepped in, accepted responsibility, apologized to the community, and promised to contact me directly to apologize and discuss next steps. Finally! I look forward to that contact.
Update, October 7 19:00 UTC: No contact yet.
Update, October 8: I received email from David Fullerton today at 15:10 UTC. I am not satisfied (and this is a vast understatement). I asked for a discussion, which was rejected.
Update, October 13: David said, in his meta post and in email to me, that they planned to develop processes for removing and reinstating moderators by this past Friday (October 11) and that I could apply to go through the latter process once it existed. They did publish these processes to moderators on Friday. As of Sunday afternoon, I have received no further contact from SE about this process and how to set it in motion. I sent David email asking about it and have received no reply yet. Further updatess.
Re: What should we do?
Date: 2019-10-14 04:04 pm (UTC)Re: What should we do?
Date: 2019-10-15 05:11 pm (UTC)The vast majority of StackExchange sites would have very modest hosting costs. For Monica's case, Mi Yodeya gets ~5,000 visits per day which would have hosting costs (not counting any admin) on the order of a few hundred (US) dollars a month. Let's round up to 1,000 USD. Mi Yodeya has, conveniently, 12,000 users. This would correspond to needing 1 USD per year on average from each user. Hiring some part-time admins may make this 10 USD per year per user on average. 12,000 USD per year is completely doable with crowd-funding. 120,000 USD per year is harder though definitely doable. Most likely you'd take volunteers at first, at least. You can also imagine amortizing these costs across clusters of StackExchange site equivalents, e.g. Worldbuilding and Writing sharing servers and admins.
The above is likely the sensible approach for smaller sites. For SO or other large StackExchange sites, the story is fairly different. Wikipedia illustrates that it is possible for a non-profit to operate sites at that scale and beyond. The upfront costs and critical mass needed though, make it a much more difficult coordination problem. It's not unrealistic to imagine the core of the Mi Yodeya SE community moving and financing a new independent Mi Yodeya site, and then growing organically from there, quite possibly to the point that it eclipses the Mi Yodeya SE site. I don't see a realistic way any of that could happen for, e.g., SO in a bottom-up manner. There are top-down approaches like competitors or mega-donors to a new non-profit. If things like the Brave browser take off, a more bottom-up approach might be feasible. All of these approaches would require a significant marketing blitz to start to unseat SO and, for the latter two, maintain their own viability.
Re: What should we do?
Date: 2019-10-15 05:35 pm (UTC)The communities I care about, and would love to see move elsewhere, are smaller. Writing is another one that's dear to my heart and where core users are now upset. Forget about SO levels of scale; what would it take to build a Q&A site for Writing (~10k visits/day), for example, including pulling content from the SE site periodically (permitted under the license) and augmenting it with new Q&A? What would it take for that new site to endure? Is this at GoFundMe levels or "incorporate and hire people" levels? And who's going to actually write the code and build a solid database and bullet-proof the site (security, resiliency, etc)?
Re: What should we do?
Date: 2019-10-15 07:13 pm (UTC)If you want it to endure, you're definitely talking about a business that needs a business model. You'd want a few developers and IT guys on staff as FTEs, you'd want a few community managers, and management to tie the whole thing together. To really do it right, I'd conservatively estimate the salaries at somewhere in the vicinity of $600K/year, minimum. Probably more.
No one's formally confirmed this yet, but general consensus seems to be that these recent changes are probably to make some external third party happy because this third party is paying for stuff. And I think this is where we come to the crux of the issue. It's a fairly well-known truism on the web that "if you're not paying for the product, you are the product." So far on SE, by and large we've been just fine with that, because the product we're a part of is directly helpful to us. But now we're starting to see the downside to it: when money talks, they stop listening to us.
Seems to me the only way to avert this is to have the money that's talking, that the company ends up answering to, be the community. Everyone loves having a free service, but this is where it ends up. (See also: Facebook.)
SO was originally conceived as "like Experts-Exchange but without the evil", and their subscription model was a big part of the "evil" problem that SO was created to solve. I don't think that going back to what they were doing--especially the part about using black-hat SEO to force people to pay for answers--is in any way a good idea. How does "keep it free to browse, but if you want to ask or answer questions, you need a subscription" sound as a basic business model?
Re: What should we do?
Date: 2019-10-15 07:27 pm (UTC)Money will absolutely be needed for it to endure; I'm wondering how long we can put off making binding decisions about that. Do we want to end up with a non-profit at the center (e.g. Wikipedia), or something corporate (e.g. Stack Overflow Inc), or open-source distributed (e.g. Stack Exchange 1.0, when people ran Q&A on their own servers with licensed software), or something else? A subscription model for heavy use, with some amount of free activity (and browsing always free!), seems like something users could be sold on, if the economics work.
I don't know that a comment thread on this blog post is the right place to have the conversation about site succession, but I'm not sure where else would be right either. Anybody have any ideas? It kind of feels like we need... a Q&A site, or a wiki maybe.
Re: What should we do?
Date: 2019-10-15 08:28 pm (UTC)Re: What should we do?
Date: 2019-10-16 12:52 am (UTC)It's probably worth looking at https://physicsoverflow.org/ which, as far as I can tell, hasn't done any kind of donation drive or anything. It looks like an individual paid for hosting out of pocket between 2014-2017 and then it switched to a university to host it, but, again as far as I can tell, the university is just letting them run the software on their servers and is not providing any kind of IT support. It may be worth talking to the founders to get the actual details. The open source software they use is https://www.question2answer.org/
I'd probably form a 501(c)(3) (or equivalent) instead of just leaving it to individuals like PhysicsOverflow, but it illustrates the costs can be extremely low.
My ideal setup would be a federated approach. Individual communities could sort themselves however they like, but I'd typically expect them to form 501(c)(3) corporations to collect donations for hosting costs and potentially financing changes to an open-source solution. The open-source solution would likely itself have a much more substantial 501(c)(3) to finance development. This corporation may also provide optional paid hosting so that the federated sites, if they use that hosting, would be a source of income for this non-profit.
It would also make sense for that solution to be handled by a for-profit corporation. As long as that corporation's solution can be hosted off-site and optionally provides paid hosting but is not the gateway, this seems like it would not be problematic. The key points would be 1) if the company fails you can still use the software and host yourself (ideally the software is open-source or releases the source on dissolution so you can also continue to modify it), and 2) the for-profit company (beyond a basic "don't put illegal things on our servers" Terms of Service, is not involved in or responsible for the content of the sites, i.e. a situation similar to a hosted WordPress site. When looking to see if there were other open-source Q&A solutions besides the one PhysicsOverflow uses, I found Scoold (https://scoold.com/) and its underlying Para (https://paraio.com/) which seems like it would be a perfect example of a potential for-profit corporation for the setup just described. Scoold and Para are open-source, but the former has a closed-source "premium" edition and the latter provides paid hosting if you don't want to host it yourself.