I registered on Stack Overflow 7 years ago. I was amazed by the site, as it put a large focus on the programming community, building a place where everyone was free to ask and answer, as long as they were civil and respected the formal rules for creating questions, answers, or comments, which, even though strict, have helped make this network professional but still open to anybody. I quickly discovered other sites in the network and tried to be a helpful member of various communities. I enjoyed being a part of any community where a person's reputation would come from their knowledge or skill, and not from their views or opinions.
Unfortunately, I was oblivious to what has been happening.
The recent actions have made it clear to me that the people who run the network and create the rules are more interested in maintaing their public image instead of the functionality of the network, and are willing to bow to anybody obsessed with imposing their opinion upon others. This is a destructive tendency and if even honest people who are willing to have a civil discussion face repercussions instead, I cannot imagine where this is going. I cannot and will not support a site that seeks to ostracize members who don't immediately agree with their views, especially when they are as petty as non-standard additions to the English language. The people who want to stay neutral and outside ideological issues are labelled, falsely accused, and persecuted.
I have seen this trend in various communities and sites, and I am saddened that Stack Exchange is the place where this is happening next, especially when this site should be open to people from all groups in the society and should be professional without pushing any political agenda on the users.
For a site of this kind, this cannot go unnoticed and must be resolved by nothing else than apologizing to the wrongly-accused members, undoing the harm that was caused by these accusations and repercussions, and promising to stay neutral and professional when it comes to controversial topics.
Unless this happens, I will be always reminded of the fact that when a question goes unanswered, perhaps somebody who could answer it was actively prevented from accessing the site just because of different opinions.
rm -rf meta/
.rm -rf meta/
They'd be letting go of their entire QA department!