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With sadness I wish to make you aware that I am stepping down as moderator from this site.

There are a number of reasons for this, but the primary immediate causes are Stack Exchange's disgraceful treatment of Monica Cellio and new mandates that will soon be added to SE's Code of Conduct. I am not willing to donate precious hours of my life in order to support a for-profit company that is so openly hostile to what "Be Nice" means to me.

I do not expect to run afoul of the updated CoC in my personal interactions on this site, so I do not intend to delete my account, but at this point I'm not sure what my future involvement here will look like.

It's been an honor to serve this community as moderator. It has been a pleasure, and to whoever replaces me, you will have two great moderators to work with in Joonas and Cerberus. Thank you.

Edit 2019-10-08

As things have unfolded, I have written a bit more about what I feel is the key issue in this debacle. I continue to bear no ill will toward those who on account of different beliefs or priorities have chosen to take a different path. Thanks!

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    This is very sad news, as is the whole sorry affair. Not really something I can 'upvote' but I do offer my support. Thank you for all of your hard work as moderator but I hope that we will still "see" you around.
    – Penelope
    Commented Oct 6, 2019 at 3:04
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    I'm sorry to see you go, Nathaniel. Gratias tibi ago for all your work making latin.stackexchange.com the great resource that it is. I have hope, though, that the current crazy-storm might blow over. Today's huge negative response here makes me think that the SE community can easily find ways for people with different views on pronouns to get along, and they might slowly drag the SE leadership back to "be nice" and useful answers. We'll see.
    – Ben Kovitz
    Commented Oct 11, 2019 at 2:37

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Many thanks for your service as a moderator and the support for your fellow mods! While I'm sad to see you leave, I fully understand your position and support your decision. I hope you will still find the time to ask and answer the occasional Latin question.

Some users might wonder what all of this means and what will follow. Here is a quick summary:

The remaining two mods are not happy with the changes either. When a new Code of Conduct is announced across the network, there will be a separate discussion on what it means to us — and whether more moderators will have to leave.

Perhaps many of our users don't follow matters network-wide, but there is a large wave of moderators stepping down over the recent behavior of Stack Exchange towards their users and moderators. My goal is to have this site run reasonably with minimal enforcement and to allow us to concentrate on Latin. Whether SE will allow that remains to be seen.

I assume a new moderator will have to be appointed at some point. There is also an option to have election on beta sites now, so that might happen. That will be handled by SE, not the local mods, and will be announced in due time. Some SE sites are in danger of losing all of their moderators, and they will certainly have higher priority than us. There's a discussion of moderator appointments on the main meta if you want to stay updated. We can handle our daily needs between myself and Cerberus, so no chaos should ensue here.

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