What is on the mind of Stack Exchange management?

The new CoC did not happen suddenly. It's been a priority for the company since April 26, 2018, when Jay Hanlon posted Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming. It’s Time for That to Change, and has probably been brewing long before that:

Our employees and community have cared about this for a long time, but we’ve struggled to talk about it publicly or to sufficiently prioritize it in recent years. And results matter more than intentions.

There's nothing inconsistent about the company's behavior. (well, except for one detail. More on that later). It can be summed up in a single sentence: the company has lost touch with its communities. I've provided a detailed treatment of this phenomenon here, and suggested ways they could fix that. Unfortunately the company seems to have lost interest in engaging with the communities in this way.

Stack Exchange has definitive goals. It may not seem that way, but they do. I've been watching this for awhile now, and while they say that they want Stack Exchange to be a friendly and welcoming place, what I believe they really want is inclusion, and the way they define that inclusion is "the site surveys shall demonstrate a distribution of marginalized groups in its user base that reflects the general population." In other words, half of all participants on Stack Exchange shall be women, 10 percent shall be LGBT+, and so forth.

What could Stack Exchange hope to gain by firing one of its most respected moderators? It's possible that they wanted to make an example of her. That's certainly how it has come across. But I think it's simpler than that. One employee in a position of authority made a snap decision over a conversation, invoking the "removal for any reason" clause in the moderator agreement. That was a mistake. Stack Exchange certainly has the right to do it, but doing it this way trivializes the moderator position, undermines their moral authority, and sends all sorts of bad signals to the communities they serve. They haven't corrected the mistake because they can't see a way to do it without losing face and without their lawyers having a conniption.

Of course, this is all just speculation, and in the absence of further communication from corporate, that's all you're going to get. But don't think that there is an absence of rationale for this corporate behavior just because you find it bizarre.

I'm guessing, only.

Stack Overflow has had a reputation for nastiness and elitism for a long time. Whether that reputation is justified or deserved is for others to discuss, but I don't think anyone can disagree that it's been there.

This is a corporate problem. Now that the company is trying to make itself profitable, after a period of financial issues, and with a need to repay its investors, it is strongly focusing on its commercial offerings (Teams, Jobs). That in itself is not outrageous; it's practical.

But, to drive more customers to the commercial offerings, you have to fix the image of the site. To fix the image of the site, you have to make it more "welcoming". And it's become clear from the reaction to the whole welcoming process that some of the most prolific contributors feel victimised by this, like they're being blamed for the ineptitude of new contributors askers. This in turn leads to a level of toxicity on meta that the newest company leadership decided was not worth the effort.

So, what does a company do next, when its community hates it, but it still needs to make money from its non-free offerings? Why, of course, you bring in somebody who is, on paper, all on-board with nice, modern, inclusivity drives and such like (whether or not they actually know how to accomplish that, or even really what "inclusivity" actually means in reality).

Then, taking your new forward-thinking team, you do everything possible to get that toxicity off the most visible offering (public Q&A), even if that means leaving the public Q&A users disillusioned. Not that it matters any more, right? Thousands of drones are still pouring in, driving up ad views. It doesn't really matter any more whether the content is of any quality, because the goal of the site is no longer to produce quality public Q&A. It's to make money from the commercial offerings. They just need the public side not to look so toxic. That's it. Besides, all the interesting questions have already been asked, right? We already have our repository now. We've made our contributions. We did so freely. The company has no obligation to be "grateful", particularly not at their own expense, so they're not going to be.

The original mission is not the current, or future, mission. If you're looking for that Stack Exchange, it's in the past. It was idealistic, and it was wonderful, but it was loss-making. That's just the nature of it. We now exist only to serve as a platform for neutering, declawing, so as to repair the company's reputation in the eyes of anyone who may one day choose to become a paying customer.

Of course, even this process has not been without bumps. It's easy to see that recent efforts at increasing "inclusivity" have gone horribly wrong, not because inclusivity is bad but because the company went about it in completely the wrong way, applying stereotypically offensive enforcements rather than actually being inclusive themselves. But I'm sure that wasn't the intention. It's just what's in vogue in certain corners of society in certain countries (mainly the one in which the company is based). This community is just the most recent victim of that. Too bad.

All that being said, I still cannot work out for the life of me where forced relicensing of all our content fits into all this.

Addendum: quite aside from all the SE drama, I am genuinely concerned that — much like how social media led to a socially handicapped younger generation, that people like Facebook's cofounder and the inventor of the web think are a serious issue — all this coddling is just making a big problem in our industry even worse. Younger coders do not know how to research, because their default first step now is to ask somebody to solve their problem for them, and we're supposed to be happy about that and cheer them on with it, to be "welcoming". Is that really going to improve the world? Is it? Something else the company isn't really concerned with, apparently. So much for not doing any evil.