Open hostility from SE staff towards the community - trying to understand it

It's an "us vs. them" bunker mentality

We've seen it developing and festering for at least two years now, and in the last few months it appeared to overboil and lead to some extreme, irreversible escalations.

In Jan 2020, respected former Community Manager shog9 posted some tweets that seem to confirm that this mentality has entrenched even further to the point where, not only are the users considered the "toxic" enemy by senior management, but the company's own Community Managers are treated with similar contempt for "failing to control" the users:

...It has been ratcheting for over a year now: more and more "musts" and "must nots" - "say this AND ONLY THIS."

At this point, [the Community team] are operating under an unbelievable amount of pressure...

Your [the users'] anger will be held up as evidence of toxicity. Your frustration as evidence of noncooperation. Just as it has been for so many months past. My dear ex-colleagues will be blamed for failing to control you, and another rock will be laid on their backs.

It's not clear how much of this pressure originates from senior management or investors, or (perhaps most likely) a combination of the two.

It started as natural growing pains as the company grew. In the early days, senior community members and staff members were so close, it was difficult to remember which diamond was which. Most site changes were discussed with the community, and while these discussions weren't always smooth or constructive, there was a baseline level of mutual respect. Jeff Atwood put it like this in an interview in 2012 (thanks Peter Mortensen for sharing this quote):

This is a community-based project, and all the content comes from the people participating in the site, so in a system like that, the better you can serve the people doing all the work in the system, the better the system is. You need people who are willing to help, to curate. You need those people to scale. Listening to those people helps you form your community. And even though 90% of the feedback you get is crap, the other 10% is gold. You just have to listen and you’ll get it.

Then, in the last couple of years, a things changed:

• Around 2016-17, a conscious decision was made to de-prioritise the main Q&A service, and to focus resources on revenue-generators like Careers. This led to work that would have reduced friction and problems being cancelled: for example, a major project to help question-answering users discover questions of interest to them was dropped: if successful, it would have greatly reduced the tension, frustration and user-attrition caused by users failing to find interesting or challenging questions that underlies a lot of the friction between new and old users.
• More recently, a number of initiatives were pushed through without consultation which were very poorly received. In some cases, such as the responsive design roll-out, this led to some really excessively negative backlash from some users, which was used to justify a precedent of ploughing ahead in the face of criticism, using the worst of the "crap" feedback to justify ignoring the "gold".

This began a downward spiral of increasing frustration from users and increasingly unpopular decisions and decreasing listening from management, which, this year (but before the recent blow-up) escalated into many staff not only ignoring Meta, but sometimes actively trying shield colleagues from having to think about users on Meta, to protect them from experiencing disagreement or criticism.

Engagement and communication seem to have decreased and mistrust increased in a vicious circle: with each increasingly unpopular action taken, it appears that staff have found it easier to double-down, close ranks and ignore disagreement, building a hostile "us and them" dynamic where growing frustration is met by growing defensive dismissiveness.

Some staff members (e.g. Yaakov Ellis, Catija, Jon Ericson, Shog9*, Cesar M, Robert Cartaino* and Megan Risdal*, to name a few) have made some commendable efforts to re-engage after past disputes, complaints and problems, and ensure legitimate concerns expressed constructively are at least read, but it's rare (although some individuals have notably stepped up recently), and I've always got the impression that they do this in isolation, on their own initiative in overtime.

Take my answer here. If I hadn't gone to answer it, no one would have...

...no one is asking me to do this. It is my own initiative, but something that I have received support and recognition for internally. And if tomorrow I got fed up with it for whatever reason and stopped speaking publicly, it would be understood, and I would not be pressured to continue.

Yaakov Ellis on Chat

I always get the impression that this is done with support from peers, but little backing or interest from the higher-level decision-makers in SE who could actually solve the underlying problems. It certainly doesn't appear to be something SE/StackOverflow Inc as a company has a policy on or allocates time or resources for.

*no longer employees

We now know enough about SE staff's thinking to know that most (not all) have disengaged

There was a similar big blow-up around this time last year, which, to their credit, some SE staff responded to (example).

Users and moderators' frustration erupted after a site was rashly excluded from hot network questions (HNQs) in an over-reaction to a couple of tweets, when users and moderators' concerns about the underlying HNQ issues had been ignored for years. The responses revealed that:

• Many SE staff routinely ignore Meta, because they see it as overwhelmingly negative, and therefore dismiss the concerns of meta users out of hand
• They know that systems for tracking users' concerns were failing. There was vague talk about trying to bring in some new system in 2019; but that hasn't happened
• Priorities are decided by project managers in a slow process that has little room for change in response to concerns from the community
• There are "customers" and revenue streams other than advertising, whose concerns will be acted on in a matter of hours
• There has been particularly high staff turn-over recently, with many new staff less familiar with the platform

The extent of the staff negativity towards Meta varies from individual to individual. It's worth mentioning that the Director of Q&A who appears to have been initially responsible for handling this situation has a startlingly negative view of Meta Stack Overflow, posted in July this year in the context of removing "Hot on Meta" from site sidebars):

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.

This view is not shared by all current or former staff, for example:

• On that answer

  When I was an employee I've never had any problem, my posts were mostly well-received, even on controversial questions. At the same time CM posts were tanked routinely, and I even know exactly why (and it's the same reason now).

• On this answer:

  [1] ...I've been working with them [new staff] to listen more to user feedback including what comes up on meta. I'm not giving up on having a working relationship between staff and the community even though it's been rocky lately.

  [2] ...In some parts of the company, meta feedback is still valued

• And an answer from July discussing similar issues:

  ...we need to be honest and reset some expectations of what will happen with the feedback that folks provide. We value it, and we absolutely promise to listen to all of it (we read every word here and much of what y'all have to write elicits internal discussion), but we can't always take the actions that folks here might prefer. We also can't commit to communicating everything in advance, especially when we know that we're simply not open to feedback about certain things [because "decisions have been made after research, data, and users have been consulted" and they "can't always share those for privacy purposes"], because that would be wasting people's time

Also, former Lead Product Manager for Public Q&A, Megan Risdal posted a very interesting blog article after leaving Stack Overflow Inc towards the end of 2019. It's worth reading in full, these are some particularly-relevant snippets:

There are many types of people who use Stack Overflow. The main segments for Public Q&A are: Askers (including people who just look up answers to existing questions), Answerers, Curators, and Moderators...

Any initiatives that only serve one segment put the community and product into imbalance... I observed that this triggers an “us versus them” backlash which is not necessary and causes users to suffer.

...Stack Overflow is a website with a huge user base. Not taking advantage of the ability to run tests and get feedback from enthusiastic community members is a missed opportunity. Do it in complement with other research methods. At the same time, these feedback loops threaten to slow things down and can be emotionally draining. ...here are some quick tips:

• Don’t take things personally. You’ll get a lot of critique, positive and negative. As a product manager you have to emotionally separate yourself from the features you work on as much as possible...
• Delegate communication. It can be exhausting and extremely time consuming to interact deeply with a critical audience. Lean on people who are experts at this...
• Take a principled stance. Decision-making is easier when you already have clear objectives and guiding product principles...

Many staff and stakeholders don't experience the sites like core users do

Meanwhile, the cultural divide between senior figures making decisions and the moderators, regular users and community managers who understand the situation on the ground seems to be widening. It seems to be that the majority of senior SE decision-makers are now "light" users of the SE network whose participation tends to be occasionally asking questions or participating from external links or search engine results. It's good that such users are represented – but regular users who follow tags or new questions on a site's home page seem to now be under-represented.

It seems like many staff move in circles where everyone has experienced snark or negativity, but where they seldom see or appreciate the hard work that goes into maintaining quality and keeping answerers engaged. Many comments from SE staff seem to come from a place where it's considered normal to view a site's valuable but sometimes grouchy power-users as "the enemy", and to view engaging with the network's core content-creating users as an ordeal.

Staff and users are drifting further apart

Thomas Owens, a moderator and user since the very start of Stack Overflow, wrote a very good account of how "growing pains" have accelerated into something else:

The engagement between staff and moderators was very high when I joined the moderation team, but decreased over time...  The past year or so, in my opinion, has seen the most disengagement between staff and moderators (and the broader community), …

We have what seems to be a toxic vicious circle:

• More and more regular users and moderators become jaded and frustrated, and more negative
• Staff disengage even further from core users, and occasionally lash out with excessive (ab)uses of their power
• Interactions become even more negative, and the rift deepens

This comment from August 2018, about negative responses to design changes, is highly relevant:

There is no doubt we've stopped making changes for core users and your observations about how that's gotten worse ring true to me. And we've certainly seen negative feedback on meta (downvotes being the most trivial). The result may not be what you hope for, however. Often (and more often recently) I've heard colleagues dismiss meta feedback. Nobody wants to listen to relentless negativity. Hence this meta post written in the dead of night so I can finally sleep. As an intermediary between the community and the company, I'd like to help meta feedback be less easily ignorable.

– Jon Ericson♦ Aug 19 '18 at 15:47

This was in the context of the roll-out of some design changes, which resulted in some incredibly, excessively negative reaction from some Meta users, as well as many constructive suggestions and criticisms, many of which were lost in the noise.

The part about making feedback "less easily ignorable" was about asking Meta users to tone it down so that staff wouldn't choose to ignore them (which, at the time, was sadly necessary - some Meta users really disgraced themselves and this sorry episode undoubtedly did lasting damage).

It wasn't about about ensuring staff don't choose to ignore the many users who do post constructively.

That new design roll-out wasn't nearly as bad as some users claimed, but was poorly communicated, with little consultation, leaving many bugs, issues and regressions. As far as I know, the problems that were raised constructively were only addressed much later, because Catija (a moderator-turned-staff-member) chose to make it her personal mission to sort out the mess and rebuild bridges with the users.

There's currently nothing ensuring staff listen to users

If an SE staff member outrages a hundred moderators, five hundred 10K users, and two thousand average users, if they work in one of the departments that now routinely ignore meta, there will be no consequences they will feel. It's just "Ugh, users on Meta are moaning again". They can choose to simply ignore it, and their peers and colleagues will also ignore it. It doesn't touch their circle – thanks to the fact that hostility towards users has been normalised by years of increasingly rare, increasingly negative interactions.

If that same staffer annoys one colleague, or a Twitter user who is followed by a senior colleague, however, things get socially and professionally awkward. It does touch them and their circle.

It's socially and professionally easier to ignore the users, close ranks, and double-down on something like Monica's firing. An SE staffer will never awkwardly bump into Monica in the staff canteen. They don't need to think of her as a "real person" - it's easy for them to ignore and dehumanize her. If, however, they said "Actually, I think the sacking was wrong and we should review it", this may create mild awkwardness with the colleague they implicitly criticised. Much less severe, but something they can't simply choose to ignore.

This long-festering schism seems to have reached a point where it is professionally and socially easier for staff to view users as merely irritating faceless usernames, and not "real people" who create the content the sites depend on.

This is a common, fixable problem, not unique to SE

This is obviously toxic and unsustainable – but also very common if an organisation does not take concrete steps to prevent such an "us and them" mentality from developing.

I've seen this rot in many organisations – companies where staff have open contempt for their customers; charities whose staff come to view the people the charity exists to help as unappreciative whingers because that's easier that saying "Actually, I'm sorry but your project was misguided. We should have asked what they really needed first."

There are long-term ways to reverse the rot – for example, SE could have two moderators a month act as "community reps", remotely joining meetings and reviewing documents; or a program where staff are paired with moderators for one month a year, sharing duties, to understand sites more deeply. (They should also ensure that non-US voices are represented, and particularly, non-native English speakers.)

But the organisation has to want to improve. We seem to have passed a tipping point where the individual members of staff who have the power to change this simply don't cross paths in their working day or social life with anyone who thinks it's worth engaging with the users who create the content the network is built on.

I have a theory: shame and panic.

They know there are systemic problems, they may or may not be aware that they don’t know how to fix those problems, they are on some level ashamed about both of those, and when something serious happens, they panic and act out in ways that are unfair, unclear, and hostile.

Proudly blogging about machine learning being part of a cultural fix is one example of evidence that they know there is a cultural problem and they don’t know how to fix it.

There also seems to be an assumption and message that the community has to take the lead on fixing the culture, while studies on group cultures show that culture comes from the top down, not the bottom up.

Panic is evidenced by overly rushed reactions that later on seem obviously poor choices. They are acting in excessive haste and don’t even seem to be aware of their mistakes until they are called out by the community.

The following smells a bit like a conspiracy theory, but it's one possibility.

Note that the company (SE/SO) possesses an excellent knowledge base, which answers very important questions in programming, computer administration, chemistry and what not. So one possible plan for future is to sit on that, get the traffic from internet searches, and receive money from advertising. If you wanted to follow this plan, what would you do?

1. Cut expenses; slow down development
2. Reinforce legal aspects
3. Increase delivery of advertisements
4. Make the people who disagree with (1)...(3) leave

Here, (4) is possible/desirable because you don't need the community so much anymore - your content is good enough, and will benefit you during the following 10 years at least.

Also, in the context of (3): users with reputation above a certain threshold see much less advertisements. If all these people get their reputation reset to 0 (leave), they will still browse the knowledge base, out of necessity, but will see more advertisements, which will generate more money for the company.

It is a situation that swiftly went out of control.

Meta has gone from a sleepy backwater, sometimes accused of being cliquish into a powderkeg. Initiatives meant to protect vulnerable folks has turned into a magnet for trolls.

We usually put out fires ourselves with help. Folks are running around trying to put out every new fire there is and it's failing.

The core of the community is fractured and at odds with this self. If the goal was to upset the status quo - let us ask, what we are building instead.

I cannot speak for the folks who stroke the fires, within the company, from within the community or the folks attracted from the periphery by the fires burning in our little space. It might not be the shining city on the hill SO is but it's the heart of the community.

While someone did set the fires, I doubt anyone expected the depth and breadth of reaction. Times like these bring out the best and worst in and of people.

The only reason that I believe that we have any chance of fixing this, ever is I believe that folks have faith in what SE is and in the community.

If you truly believe someone is trying to kill the community - by sowing hostility and chaos, do we beat them by feeding in that or by rebuilding?

We cost them money if they don't have an excuse to close us down. The media loves a good dumpster fire and corporate messups make a greater story anyway.

Let's not call for anyone to be fired. Let's deal with the worst of the rabble we have attracted politely and firmly. Let's also identify and encourage the voices on the company that are on our side, not get out the pitchforks for those who don't care as much for us.

We win by surprise and love. Not letting us getting manipulated by hate.

Speaking for myself, I'm no more hostile toward the community than I ever have been. Like any culture, it is flawed, of course. I consider it part of my job to help correct flaws so that the community will be more resilient and effective. This is a task that induces humility as demonstrated by not just one, but two recent apologies from staff. To even think we can change culture requires a degree of hubris that would make even Larry Wall blush. I'm still trying because I believe in you, not because it's easy.

A little over a year ago, I wrote:

It's pretty clear that I and other employees of Stack Overflow see ourselves primarily as rescuers. Judging from your analogy, I'd guess that's where you put yourself too. It's generally the role that's seen as the most noble and desirable to be in. But it's important to be aware that playing any role in the drama means you are adding to the drama.

That's still where we are at and that explains, in my way of thinking, why there's so much drama.

The specific drama we are observing right now stems from this chart in our annual survey:

We've been running regular site satisfaction surveys that turn up similar results: men are more likely to feel comfortable with Stack Overflow than other people. This isn't some misunderstanding of our data or a few agitators on Twitter or whatnot. Stack Overflow culture isn't serving other gender identities as well as it could be. You'll just have to trust me that this reality plays a significant role in motivating staff including myself. (Again, we haven't gone about acting on this motivating factor as effectively as one would hope.)

One wrinkle: Stack Exchange sites probably do a better job of welcoming women than Stack Overflow, but we don't have more than anecdotal data to back that up.

In my estimation, the path forward includes designers, developers, product managers and community managers continuing to improve the systems that govern the activity on the sites. For the first time in many years, I feel that is happening as we speak. I'm personally delighted with the experimentation we are doing with close and reopen votes, vote display and the ask a question page. Some of these experiments will fail to produce better results, but others will make the sites just a little less frustrating for everyone.

Technical solutions won't solve every problem, however. I know it doesn't look like it right now, but I'm confident we'll learn as a company to work with the community rather than against it. There's been quite a bit of turnover on the staff with many employees having little to no contact with users of the sites. That's contributed in producing some of the decisions we've needed to apologize for. I think we will need to forge a fresh start that involves the community and the company getting reacquainted with each other. Even those of us who have been around for a long time could use a renewed attitude. (I wrote this post just before my sabbatical, for instance. I wouldn't have written it after.)

As Sam's old gaffer was wont to say:

It's the job that's never started as takes longest to finish.

TLDR; A possible conspiracy theory in an effort to make sense of it...

Press (positive or negative) can be seen to increase exposure and draws others into the conversation and that is good for business. Especially when it is being hosted by other platforms like Twitter or The Register.

For example, recent Meta.SE traffic as seen on Glorfindel's answer:

Consider comment count to be a quasi-accurate index of "engagement" by users (there are some flaws with this I know, but it still has merits) versus random people just doing a google search finding their answer and leaving right away.

Last month Stack Overflow had twice as much "user engagement" than all other SE sites combined.

Seeing that the majority of the world are not programmers, but still have questions, it would follow that if SO Inc. could capture more engaged users to other stacks it would exponentially increase their traffic volume without much change in their business model.

I think some of their efforts in the last couple of years has been in this direction.

Take this current pronoun situation, the tiny percentage of hostility that can be found in the tiny percentage of comments that contain a non-neutral pronoun can very easily be handled by flags the same way we have been doing for over a decade.

I really doubt it has much to do with consideration to the LGBTQ+ community. Holding them up on a pedestal for special treatment is certainly not something I have seen many advocate.

BUT it is good for exposure in the press as can be found in links elsewhere.

This does not say it is good in the long run. I personally feel somewhat burned out without much drive to volunteer time on review queues anymore. If others feel similar, that will lead to worse content over time and a resultant less traffic.

I can accept that this is a misguided effort to reason with something unreasonable.

My observation is that the meta community is just really abrasive, and at times even toxic and abusive. I think the SE employees are just fed up from dealing with it, and have slowly started ignoring it (as have I, by the way).

I wrote about this a while ago in Tired of Stack Overflow:

In general I find Meta an unfriendly place. It’s no surprise that Stack Overflow (the company) pretty much ignores Meta; the community can be borderline abusive. I still remember how Meta reacted to the Documentation effort of a few years ago. In particular I felt bad for Jon Ericson because he tried very hard to be constructive and to make it work. I too was critical of a lot of aspects of Documentation, but far too much wasn’t constructive, was just repeating the same stuff ad nauseam, or was phrased very hostile.

I also feel the community is self-selective towards this kind of behaviour as it's gone unchecked for such a long time; from The other kind of censorship:

Constructive dialogue can only happen if everyone feels respected, and can participate without the fear of being mistreated (belittling, aggressive replies, insults, etc.) If there is such a fear, then I will guarantee you that some people simply won’t post at all. Simply put, people don’t enjoy being treated like s—t. Who knew?

It's important to point out that I don't believe anyone is looking to be like this, it's just that it can be hard to realise how your words affect people, especially over text, and in absence of feedback, never mind he issue of cultural differences, non-native speakers, etc.

Mea culpa: I too have contributed to this in the past (on SE and elsewhere). What really changed for me was working remotely, where you interact with the same people extensively and get (constructive and private) feedback. Some people have even told me they thought I was a real jerk until they met me in person and realised I was actually a pretty nice and fun guy! The power of chatting to your coworkers over a few beers in Irish pubs 'ey?

This feedback is mostly absent on Meta. There are no meetups, there are no nights out, there aren't even private messages to give feedback without it being public (private feedback almost always works better).

Another reason it's hard to change meta is because criticism of the meta community (like this one) is being judged by the exact same community (via votes). In Dutch we have a saying: "a butcher grading own meat"; meaning, that you can't trust the butcher to give accurate quality gradings for their own meat. It was only after I stopped contributing to meta that I fully realised just for abrasive it is at times.

So my suggestion to the community is to reflect on their own behaviour instead of blaming SE employees. That doesn't mean I always agree with SE employees, or think they've always handled things well (IMHO they didn't), but if you really want to heal this rift then the meta community needs to change.

I know this is hard, but I did it, and I'm still friends with some people who called me "jerks" before (even though I quit that job back in February). You just need to be willing to listen.

I sincerely hope that there is a more innocent explanation that is logically consistent

To start with, I think that the (elected and pro-tem) site moderators are told that they can expect to be compared to Nazis -- that that is, "a rite of passage".

If you do any moderation -- close a question, delete a comment -- then, "you're a Nazi".

That -- i.e. "being called a Nazi" -- is apparently normal.

It's not common -- i.e. the vast majority of users sympathise with moderators -- but given how many users there are, it happens.

So ... "you can't please everyone", is a lesson you learn. Also, "sticks and stones", and so on.

Instead of "pleasing everyone", as the metric you use to decide whether an action is right, perhaps you judge based on:

• Your own conscience -- "do I think I did the right thing?"
• Feedback you get from the people who matter to you

In the case of a site moderator, the people who matter might include:

• Fellow site moderators
• The community-majority view, as expressed on the site-specific Meta
• Plus, knowing that CMs might review any official mod messages that you write

In the case of an SE employee the "people who matter" might be rather different -- i.e. to an employee it might be only "my boss" whose opinion matters (i.e. is of any consequence).

So when you see an SE employee, you (perhaps and/or sometimes) don't especially see them caring about the opinions of site moderators, nor of the community-majority view as expressed on Meta -- why should they even?

So employees don't have the same motives, nor the same peers -- nor the same background, experience, history, communication styles -- as your site moderators do.

I don't know the specifics of SE internals, but I think that the default behaviour of a good boss is to support their employees and their decisions, and to provide top cover for them.

So if an employee's only scruple were, "Would my boss disapprove of this decision?", then IMO the default answer is likely to be -- "My boss will support my decision."

Thus, an employee's decisions aren't necessarily "moderated" at all (instead they're supported or reinforced).

And if they are moderated -- "Look now, that was a mistake, better not do that again!" -- that moderation might not be visible/public.

An employee might be judged on other metrics or KPIs -- for example on the quarterly traffic statistics for Stack Overflow. And decisions which don't adversely affect (and/or don't immediately affect) those "KPIs" aren't especially reprehensible -- are relatively unimportant from an overall business point of view and as a measure of the employee's performance.

Someone who's a "manager" might be expected to take swift and decisive decisions. It's what they're paid for, what they're rewarded for!

Lesser mortals such as you or I might be prone to some analysis paralysis, whereas a Boss -- a mover and shaker -- makes big, bold decisions ... and then sticks to it or stays the course.

Such, might be the temperament of anyone who is a manager -- it's how they got to that position, and the behaviour for which they were rewarded.

There's even a (IMO regrettable) human tendency to make "tears of our enemies" a measure of our success.

Some managers might be inclined toward publicity too -- promotion of their business, and self-promotion.

Some people -- perhaps even a lot of people to some extent -- occasionally experience maybe paranoid fantasies.

I think this is one example of that -- it's kind of human, perhaps a stage of human development, an ordinary phenomenon (and not something which the author considered too shameful to publish).

Being "in the public eye" might be stressful, participating in online discourse might be stressful.

And so people might:

• Respond in unexpected ways (e.g. over-react)
• Not respond at all -- be averse to engaging or re-engaging with the community -- even, be discouraged or advised not to
• "Act out", elsewhere, kick the dog, and other so-called "defence mechanisms" (ego-defence)

In summary I imagine that aspects of human behaviour are caused by aspects of (sometimes unenlightened) human nature.

A perhaps more urgent or important question is how to respond to what you perceive.

Is it, for example, wise to respond at all, let alone to respond with hostility of your own? To nurture a grudge? To apportion blame? To see other people's behaviour through the filter of your own political value-system? To join a "mob"?

In an interview, Joel Spolsky openly talked about his goal of making millions with Stack Overflow. So it seems safe to assume that making money influences how SE Inc. run the sites.

Joel Spolsky has been outspoken about equality repeatedly. So it seems safe to assume that sexual politics influence how SE Inc. run the sites. Joel has hired Sara Chipps, who implemented a CoC that is in accordance with his views.