I'm a mod on Academia.SE. After reading the official SE response, I'm going to temporarily suspend my mod activities as well. The disrespect being shown to a well-respected volunteer simply trying to understand what is going on, combined with the terrible handling of the actual firing, combined with the non-apology apology, are a bit over the top.

I encourage The Powers That Be™ to reconsider all their actions here, and think deeply about the types of behavior they want to encourage in their community.

EDIT 11/26: In response to SE's recent efforts to fix some of the problems highlighted here, I have resumed moderation activities. I posted more detail on my thoughts on Academia Meta.

Count me as an inactive moderator on Stack Overflow in Spanish as well.

Although lately I've been already mostly inactive for various reasons, this situation with Monica and the poor answer given by Sara Chipps yesterday makes me continue this way.

My opinion about the pronouns is that it's irrelevant on an online community where we are users and sex and gender does not, or shouldn't, matter at all.

That CoC update is one thing we all can discuss and agree or disagree about, but how they handled Monica's opinion and all this situation afterwards is clearly not acceptable.

I'm going to be resuming full moderation activities on Software Engineering effective October 12.

Although I'm still concerned by some things off-site (such as some tweets and re-tweets by staff), the stuff that I've seen on site has given me hope that SE is at least going to try more. They met all of the dates they laid out and have been starting to work more closely with the moderation team.

I think it goes without saying, though, that the ball remains in SE's court. Treating moderators exclusively as janitors, rather than taking into account their backgrounds, experiences, and expertise of various topics and the communities they represent, will likely cause me to consider if I want to continue on in the future. But, as of today, I have hope once again.

I am a moderator on Software Engineering.

As of Sunday (September 29), I significantly reduced my moderation activities on Software Engineering, after informing the others on the moderation team. Although I am not actively handling the flag queue or the review queues on Software Engineering (or any other SE site), I continue to participate as a user - asking questions, providing answers, and leaving comments - across the network. I also remain available for my fellow moderators to contact via chat or email if something critical happens and I will take action if I see something urgent and critical to the health and safety of the community arises and my fellow mods are unable to respond.

Recently, even before the events of the last month or so, I've been rather disappointed and discouraged in the communication between the company and the user base, and especially the volunteer moderators who work so hard to support each other and the communities behind the 170+ sites in the network.

Considering the recent turmoil and events, I'm going to focus less on active moderation and more on engagement. I feel like I've been engaged in the subset of the network that is Software Engineering, but it's been difficult to be engaged with the broader team of moderators and the broader network user base. I hope to spend a little more time in our moderator communities and on Meta Stack Exchange. During this period of time, I'm going to watch for official responses from staff and see how things play out.

The primary thing I will be looking for is improved communication and engagement, not only in private moderator channels but also in public on site metas and Meta Stack Exchange.

I honestly hope that things can significantly improve. I believe that my role as a community elected moderator of Software Engineering is not only a service to that community, but fulfills obligations to fellow professionals - creating a safe, welcoming space for all to share knowledge that improves the state of software engineering for the broader community.

I intend to make a final decision before the holiday season in the US commences - the time from Thanksgiving through New Years is extremely busy in many respects.

After catching up on this situation, including today's post, I have suspended all activity on Server Fault, both moderation and answering questions.

I am entirely supportive of the new Code of Conduct changes, but I am unconvinced that anything substantive is actually going to improve with the way Stack Overflow's community team interacts with moderators.

Other than the way Monica's situation was mishandled, which I do not believe is resolved as I have not seen an update about it, my remaining concerns are covered in their entirety in the Dear Stack Exchange letters, so I shall not repeat them here.

Honestly their answer and "Apology" has to be some of the most insincere robotic tripe I've ever seen. It honest to god feels like they are saying "Oh sorry we gave her the boot BEFORE the new CoC....she's still not coming back though. Too bad." Look I don't wanna be one of THOSE people. But this genuinely feels like they care more about pushing an agenda then anything else.

I Highly Recommend people stop wasting their time on this site and find alternatives if they insist on acting this way.

As a 20k user on Stack Overflow, I cannot remain silent any more. As of today, I'm stopping all my efforts on the SE network until Monica's actions are addressed. It's December 2019 now, and SE has remained silent even as Monica has made several attempts at getting the situation rectified without involving lawyers.

Enough is enough.

It's been far too long in to leave this situation in a "limbo" state, as it's continuing to damage Monica's name, and the promises that were made to address this situation, have fallen hopelessly short on expectations.

We were introduced to "The Loop". A closed door way of providing feedback, with almost no visibility to the community. The question upvote change was met with large disappointments, and was widely criticized as it did not consult with the community.

We've had a featured post for more than a month, that continues to receive downvotes, and has yet to go through any meaningful changes the community has addressed in numerous answers. How much more inaction does there have to be?

To Stack Exchange: You've dropped the ball. It's time to pick it back up again.

I am a moderator on Chemistry and am suspending moderating activity.

I am a small voice, but I am a voice nonetheless. I became a moderator in early 2019 and I'd been enamored with the network for some time before that. However, shortly after becoming a moderator, I was able to see how hollow and empty the support was compared to how it appeared "on the outside."

When I first joined Stack Exchange, the network was a supportive and close-knit place to build and grow. My disappointment grew and I quietly backed away, logging in only here and there to "be seen" completing my "mod-ly duties." When I saw the content license change retroactively, I knew I was done providing questions and answers and would just do simple cleanup here and there.

I'm disappointed by the lack of support and by the treatment of Monica, a lack of ownership in what happened, cold lawyer-speak about incidents, public memos that receive a "dirty delete" after a negative backlash, etc...

I hope someday Stack Exchange becomes the place I once loved years ago, but I don't see it with public memos. It's in the actions we see from SE in the community, not in cold words that come out of pg 509 section c of some law book.

Not an answer, but clearly a necessity, as someone tried to edit me into this list on the question.

1. I stepped down as a moderator before all these events.
2. I stepped down because I'm tired. Ironic, as I've spent more time on here since all this broke out than I did when I was moderating.
3. I support the Networks stance of why they demodded Monica, not how they went about it.
4. I supported Monica as a moderator on MSE and emailed Tim Post stating she should be a moderator on here.
5. The issues for the reason for Monica's dismissal predates all this public activity. I was not impressed with Monica's stance then or the moderators who supported her stance of intolerance towards minority groups, no matter what the "reason" was for it. Having said this, I still liked Monica. One thing doesn't mean the person is bad or not good at what they do.
6. If moderators flatly refuse to comply with the directives of the site's policies, implicitly or explicitly implied, I do not see how the site has a choice except to remove their modship.
7. None of us have the full details of the demodding, but it certainly sounds like it was not handled well and I do feel sorry for Monica over this. It would be good to see her back on the network if she could get past her objections.
8. None of us have the full story here. People are jumping to conclusions all over the place.
9. The reaction to this is outrageous, frankly, when we have other moderators who have left the site feeling marginalised and hopeless. These people were respected members of these communities, but bowed out silently much of the time, feeling marginalised and dehumanised. Where is the support for these people? How come only some of us seem to be aware of this? Or is that their problem and not ours? Do we select who we deem worthy of mod support?

I'm stating this, as there's plenty of injustices that occur and it seems only some select people are entitled to the support of the remainder of the moderator community, which frankly disappoints me and is why I avoid the Teacher's Lounge. I have complained at length to the Community Team that the Teacher's Lounge has the same feel that Meta Stack Overflow used to have. I warned them it was a huge problem. They failed in doing something about it.

The fall out over this and the dismissiveness of some moderators is a testimony that it's not about principles, it's about personalities. That is wrong. There's plenty of people who have put effort and care into these sites.

I'm tired of people debating semantics at the expense of human beings. This is something that needs to be addressed from the top up (referring to moderators as the top end of the user base). If there's rot in the moderator ranks, rot will be tolerated in the community. Kudos to the employees for making this step! I support them taking a stand and saying we will not support dehumanisation of people on the site. That is what this is about. People can wrap it up in justifications, but that is what this is about and the moderators affected by it will understand.

It costs nothing to be kind and mindful of another human being. You only need to look around the world to see how violent, wasteful and how unyielding viewpoints lead to misery on a global scale. These sites are supposed to attract intelligent people. There is not intelligence without compassion.

To be clear, I do not regard myself in any way a victim of this marginalisation. If anything I regard myself as a force to be reckoned with, as I will always stand by the underdog and help that person have safety and protection. So, yes I am angry, yes I have attitude, it's up to all of us thinking people to make a change for the better in this crazy upside down species of ours! This site is for-profit, but at least the mandate of the site currently allows us to forge a better world.

If taking a stand and sacking a moderator and then losing other moderators who find this as intolerable, but ignore the fact that some people are dehumanised, ignored and the solution was to actively segregate these people, but a refusal to address them with the same language patterns as all other people are being addressed.If you choose to overlook this, well shame on you! I agree the network handled it poorly, but it's still not ok to overlook the issues that were underlying this whole situation.

I don't need to experience or understand another person's situation to have compassion and kindness for them.

“Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.” John Stuart Mill

Regardless of the facts of Monica's situation (you can probably guess my views on them from my current byline) it's extraordinary that the director whose actions triggered all this hasn't been sacked for gross incompetence. Try to imagine what more a Director of Community could do to damage the community on which the business entirely relies.

Never mind sacking without due process one of the most respected moderators on the site for potential future breaches of a CoC that wasn't even yet in place, but then to go on to amplify that a hundredfold by allowing the company to badmouth that moderator in the tabloid tech press, and then to preside over as appalling a response as there has been since, with entirely inadequate response to Monica about her specifics, entirely inadequate and rushed introduction of an update to the process for handling sacking and reinstatement of moderators, and entirely refusing to engage constructively with the concerns of the community.

I know directors are the most senior employees but if I were the Chairman of the Board I'd be incandescent at how badly this has all been handled.

Perhaps if it does come about that the director in question gets to old heave-ho, and some amazing 180 happens then we might get a sense that the company (i.e. the Chairman and Board as a whole) is serious about cooperating with the community, but if that doesn't happen then we probably have to conclude the opposite, and bear in mind that we are contributing to a site run by an organisation that is not interested in co-operating with the community.

Now for some of us that might still be a site worth contributing to: certainly on the stack I'm active on I enjoy reading and answering questions, but that's for my own satisfaction. I certainly wouldn't consider providing any value-add such as moderating until there has been a satisfactory response. For me, that means one head in particular that I would need to see roll before I could consider contributing in anything more than an entirely casual way.

They will not do anything. In fact, in the recent past, Stack Exchange has actively encouraged its employees not to go to Meta:

I’d like to add some context to the “why” we are doing it. Tim, kindly, wanted to shield me from ire, however, in taking this job I signed up for this. I'd like to come here, own my decision, and deliver this feedback.

Stack Overflow Employees have panic attacks and nightmares when they know they will need to post something to Meta. They are real human beings that are affected by the way people speak to them. This is outside of the CM team, who have been heroes and who I constantly see abused here.

I can’t, with good conscience, force anyone to participate in a venue that causes that type of psychological damage at work. The CMs feel this is something that can be remedied, and I believe them. However, until then, I can’t sleep at night knowing that we are forcing people to participate here as part of their jobs.

We're removing Hot on Meta as I don't want to send new people to a place where people have these experiences. Full stop.

Source: Answer posted on Meta SO - Jul 24 at 17:47

If employees have panic attacks when on Meta and are thus not instructed to visit here, nothing we post here will change anything. From the standpoint of SE, the community (at least, the ones who actively are involved on the site, i.e., Meta users) just causes panic attacks to employees and hence there is no value in their eyes in reading Meta posts.

If no one reads Meta and community posts, nothing we post here will help. And even if read, employees are actively discouraged from responding to them. So the community should not expect any response. At least, that's SE's official stated policy on another Meta site.

Part 3

(link to Part 1 and Part 2)

On September 27, the Director of Public Q&A removed Monica Cellio's moderator privileges.

This post is a continuation of the Community Wiki post set up by Victor Stafusa and the Continuation set up by Mari-Lou A.

Primarily posts on Meta Stack Exchange will be listed (), and I trust someone will update it a few times per week.

Legend
✭ for every 100 upvotes (positive score)
☛ official statements
[c] closed
[d] duplicate
⚑ deleted posts
Questions with >(2K) views are bolded in parentheses.

127. Why was "Update: an agreement with Monica Cellio" historically locked?
128. Thank you, Shog9 ✭ x13 (36k)
129. Firing Community Managers: Stack Exchange is not interested in cooperating with the community, is it? ✭ x7 (38k) [Monica Cellio's farewell post][6] 27 Jan, 2020
130. Why is SE gutting the CM team? ✭✭ (6k)
131. I feel helpless. Is there anything we can do to help guide SE? (2k)
132. Thank you, Robert Cartaino ✭ x7 (38k)

Jan 27, 2020

1. In sadness, it is time for me to go
2. An account of my meeting with the Stack Overflow management team

^{*Please - someone else update this-- I've made the Awful First Draft to fight the blank page syndrome -- y'all can improve it from here!}

SE has grown over time. With that growth new challenges have arisen. The most important of these size related problems is that a culture of us versus them, staff versus users has arisen. This dynamic is not wholesome, but rather than faulting anyone for being a plum stuck in a pudding, consideration should be given to the simple fact that in a very large organization communication becomes so layered that simple but urgent messages languish unheeded.

Administrative structure for large organizations require special channels of fast track communications for issues that might not seem important to highly placed staff, whose POV is already colored by their take on their own areas of responsibility such that actual high impact issues with huge corporate impact go unheeded until cascade failure occurs.

For example, an Ombudsman's office (note: no alternative gender available) with a mandate to step in to act definitively to defuse hostility and redress grievance can be a cost effective and much more expedient alternative to reliance on the very tardive and cost ineffective court system. As much as an administrator might feel threatened by having a (<--this cost me, I wanted to use the possessive case) decision countermanded, but frankly, not only users can act like social morons. In the particular in the left-wingnut land of "woke" speech, there is much to say. Large corporations have more of a tendency to focus on such uber-left ideation, and also have a tendency of riding roughshod over employees, the public, nation states, the law, and anything else that gets in their way. This is also size of corporation dependent, the bigger the badder, and in the extreme, corporations become authoritarian and totalitarian, e.g., an infamous quote "What is good for General Motors is good for the United States."

I would suggest to SE that they do a bit of house cleaning and self-reflection. Whether this results in an ombudsman, an elected super-moderator(s) with the authority to impose arbitration or whatever is not for me to decide, but SE would be well advised to take this good advice and fill in the blanks before it becomes impossible for the users to support the corporation due to the cumulative effect of gaffs of the elephant versus ant type.

I seriously also suggest that Monica be reinstated and that SE listen to her. You do not have to like her, but ignoring her issue, which many see as a canary indicator, will not end well, IMHO. There are a number of structural issues with SE site organization that are being ignored related to an incomplete, and I add, rather naive understanding of democratization that cause unnecessary friction. SE should be researching these and not putting window dressing on very infrequently relevant but highly intrusive issues, like pronoun usage.

I wish to add to this discussion, and by saying this, I realize in fully that my rep might not give my words specific "umpf" and it might be buried down with negative votes. But here it is:

In market trading there is something called "short squeeze". This means that there is a lot of people who bet opposite of the market (betting that market price will fall), and at some point in time they get scared and release all their funds, making market jump violently. And I believe that this is what happened here. If my presumption is correct, this will die down in several days and SO/SE will consolidate on a new status quo.

My opinion is based on the latest "hostility/be polite" questions that I seem to find more often. First question that raises this issue seems to go back as further as 2009, and so far judging by some estimated metrics around 3.7 million complaints could be sent directly to SO from 2008 to now. This is only estimation, there is no way to know for sure. And here is where I think "short squeeze" happened.

I got this metric by getting all questions on MSE that contains specific keywords, grabbing posts view count, and dividing it by upvote-downvote ratio. More in this query.

The calculation is based on observation that most questions that contain words "hostile" , "be polite" and "nicer to new" are tied to topics that are regarding relationship between users. In SEDE (SQL query for SO/SE) every post has its view count (how many users has seen it), number of up votes and number of down votes. We can take for granted that any user who clicked and viewed the question is interested in topic, and we can see ratio of up votes/down votes as support for the topic in form of "for" (up vote) and "against" (down vote). So in reality I just took sum of people who were interested in the topic, and divided them by general support - giving me an estimate how many users are for/against "being hostile" or "being polite" to new users and therefore more likely to issue an complaint.

IN SHORT: I estimated how many users are willing to issue a complaint

I believe that SO/SE gets a bunch of complaints on a daily level, and it must prioritize and graph normal levels since they will get complaints no matter what. When some type of complaint jumps/dumps below normal level such complaint type then it gets priority. How exactly they do this, I have no idea, but every company has some manner of separating valuable from not valuable information.

In my personal experience, when a person sends a complaint to email of SO, a support ticket is generated, but often no answer is given. It is reasonable to presume that the company that thrives on knowledge base for developers, would have some way to sort and prioritize those support tickets.

Here the query described above is graphed:

Now, data isn't exact, since keywords can be used out of context, and more keywords than 'hostility' and 'be polite to new' would be beneficial with added post body search.

We can see a massive drop from 2008-2009, followed by a large spike in 2012-2014 as a sign of trend consolidation, but that is troublesome (and perhaps reason for all this mess) is last two spikes that predict trend change. Up to 2018 the trend should've vanished, but at 2019 we have an larger spike (of +19.8% increase) that indicates rising, and perhaps is notion of people migrating away from SO/SE.

But why is this a "squeeze"? Well, from 2013 up to 2016, we have much happier place here. Fewer complaints means more cohesive society, and in that moment it is normal for humans to think that everything is better, and let their guard down. With mods and privileged users calm, the sudden (but normal) hit of users who are ignorant,arrogant and childish generates tension which then in turn results in aggressive/passive aggressive behavior - which generates a lot of complaints.

From time of peace (peace-ish) one can notice a lot of comments/answers that are short, pesky one-liners with no actual value, and questions that are dumb as hell. Which in turn generates separation. Active moderators (and ex ones) often retreat in their job, and all smaller stuff such as public relations are left behind to privileged users. And that is like giving a kid a machete, it is fun at start, but someone will lose an eye.

Here we have unregulated privileged users who are main face of SO/SE, that take full hits of beginner questions with less experience/patience than those with moderator experience. New users that are under attack, they don't know yet about difference between mods and privileged users (since this hierarchy is quite unique) and they complain about moderators.

I believe that SO/SE gets bunch of complaints on daily level, and it must prioritize and graph normal levels since they will get complaints no matter what. When come type of complaint jumps/dumps below normal level such complaint type then gets priority. How exactly they do this, I have no idea, but every company has some manner of separating valuable from not valuable.

So when change deviates from the norm, they hit the one they deem responsible (and in this case all users shout "moderator" even though they aren't at fault). And here is where a hammer comes to play.

If I were in place of SE/SE I would be scared by this raise. Since any raise in tension in the community means SO/SE loses members, have negative publicity and loosing revenue. To stop this I would show extensive use of force, scaring any new users to slowly and patiently learning about the website and community, and scaring moderators to be more diligent and patient with new users. Of course, random termination of moderators wouldn't yield any result, so moderators that were terminated probably have some complaints (justified or not justified) issued against them.

It has passed several months since my complaint to SO/SE, and only in last week most of users who followed me around with down votes and flags have been terminated or penalized. After some research, I have found that those users didn't exhibit that behavior only on me, but across exchanges - which then prompted this way of thinking.

Now, what was expected on severe action as this, mods around the world united and started fighting back. Some of them started researching on how they can be compensated for their work, some came in support of fallen mod ... etc. The emotional impact has already happened, and it can't be erased. Which prompts me to think about this as sort of emotional manipulation, with easy resolution in the end.

This happens a lot in business, first you get the lawsuit, and then you settle out of the court.

And main thing here is, what is next?

Judging by the pattern described in the graph, the tension in community often lasts 2 years, with apex in the middle. So that would mean that we are currently at impasse, where the tension will probably slowly start to release in the next year.

But a lot can change that, as mentioned above, we have raising trend poking its ugly head for the first time. Which means that if community pipes down most of what happens will die down and perhaps terminated mods can be reinstated, but if tension erupts, we will have an permanent trend reversal - which would mean at its worst scenario - cancellation of SO/SE.

I have upmost faith in SO/SE, and I wish to believe that this will die down in 2020, with the next peaceful period of several years. Then terminated moderators can regain their badge, and all this can be an disciplinary slap in the face, with no larger repercussions.

But people will be people. Some of us will react turbulently and leave, some will be reserved and publicly slander, some will defend... but I will wait it out.

And one thing is sure, since we are now in a rising trend, there are some changes coming.