Checking in with moderators that suspended their activity

Update 2021-09-13

As of July 27, 2021, I have picked up my moderator diamond once again. The circumstances have changed enough from late 2019–early 2020 that I can feel comfortable enough picking it up. Some of the factors in this decision were software changes, such as the moderation features in the TL; other factors were more based on changes in the company itself, such as the departure of many staff members who were involved in the community clashes and the joining of the company by several people I respect, especially the new VP of Community, Philippe (honorable mention to new hires going to Slate, my former co-mod on Literature, and V2Blast, the first mod-to-CM hire in a very long time). See my post on reinstatement on Literature Meta.

Update 2020-01-13

Given SE's firing of Shog9 and Robert Cartaino, I am no longer open to the option of returning as a moderator for the network. That ship has sailed at this point. I don't believe there is anything the company can do to redeem itself enough that I would be willing to return at this point.

So... to start off, I didn't just suspend activity; I decided to step down. That was around two months ago now.

Now that SE has started to address the defamation issue, would I consider taking back my diamond and resuming my moderator position? The answer is... it's complicated.

I'd like to quote from my resignation post a bit:

Over the course of the past three weeks, give or take, though, things have changed. Stack Exchange made a long-overdue change to their Code of Conduct to help protect minority groups, which was awesome to see. And at first, I was hopeful.

Unfortunately, this change sparked a veritable flood of anti-LGBTQ+ comments, posts, chat messages, and what have you. Meta.SE in particular was, and still is, overrun with posts expressing sentiments that make me sick. They are not all overt, but the non-overt posts couched in politeness are just as bad, if not worse.

If that wasn't bad enough, the network also became a host to a large number of anti-Jewish sentiments, sparked by a related issue on the network, in which the company in essence marked a Jewish moderator as being anti-trans and threw her to the wolves.

These sentiments have also shown up in a certain percentage of the folks in the network-wide moderator room, and their claims largely went unchallenged by the vast majority of people in the room.

I am not able to hunt down and remove all of these by myself. The pushback I received from users and other moderators while attempting to address some of the issues I saw had made it impossible for me to effectively moderate chat.SE, in particular.

[...]

I also no longer trust the company to support me as a moderator. They have shown that they are willing to defame one of their moderators in an extremely public way, exposing her to mounds of personal attacks and damaging her reputation, to the extent that they spoke to the press about it. They have, as yet, shown no sign that they are taking action to rectify this, and I can no longer trust the company to have any form of support for the moderators...

[...]

I also linked to this post about recent events endangering enby folks on this site.

As you can see, my main issue was not Monica's dismissal. I have stated previously that I disagree strongly with Monica's position, and there is context extant that muddies the water. It's not a black-and-white situation.
Instead, my problem was what happened as a result of the dismissal. These include:

• defamation
• anti-queer sentiments all over the place
• anti-Jewish sentiments also circulating
• these sentiments showing up in moderator space
• pushback from (fellow) moderators and users when attempting to call out and remove these
• there being no way to moderate the moderators

There is also an element of not trusting the company to support me as a moderator, which also involved previous context in which the company has in a sense thrown its moderators to the (sea)lions.

Now, to be fair, Stack has started to address these issues. They have made attempts to make the TL less toxic by moving it to chat.Meta.SE, allowing the MSE moderators to moderate the room. (I can't of course see how this works in practice, but it's a step in the right direction.)
They have created a no-comment policy when speaking to the press, mitigating some of the fears about defamation - although not all; I still have not heard any word about not repeating the mistake of pinning a message announcing the dismissal in the TL, for instance.
They have sort of started to address the harm they have done to Monica by putting up a sort of apology post and removed posts levying accusations at her.

That's all good, and allows for at least the consideration of starting to build trust again.

But. What I have not seen is anything about the safety of its users being a priority for SE. There are still hordes of anti-queer and anti-Jewish posts lingering in comments and chat posts, incurring sometimes a half-hour suspension and most of the time just silently deleted, if they are deleted at all. Some of this comes down to a lack of active moderators at the time, and I do not want to blame the moderators, so that is a smaller issue for me.

But my main problem still remains: SE endangered its users and I have not seen any attempt made to rectify that.

Stack's actions first endangered Monica, by exaggerating her position and speaking to the press about it, and further by the continued discussion around her. She has stated that she has received threats by people and invitation to join alt-right groups. That is actual harm.

Stack also endangered queer users on their platform, by making us a target of people blaming us for Monica's dismissal and a target of the bigots who amidst the support for Monica decided that this meant that they could get away with being bigots. This includes people writing hate speech, threats, and semi-credible discussion about writing scripts to identify and target queer people.

Stack also endangered Jewish users on their platform by making us a target of those who believe that Monica's Judaism caused her to be anti-queer as a result of Stack's caricaturization of her position, as well as a target for those who disguised their anti-Jewishness as support for queer people and as disavowing Monica's position.

Stack Exchange needs to address the harm they have caused, no matter how unintended, before I am willing to take up my diamond again.

My dilemma, of course, is whether or not I would be in a better position to help push through changes that I'd like to see if I did have my diamond back. Is it better for me to remain without it, because I don't want to support the company etc yet due to the unresolved issues, or is it better for me to help resolve those issues from the inside?

EDIT 2020-01-14: I'm gone after Robert Cartaino and Shog9 also lost their positions.

TL;DR: Not satisfied. I wanted to serve the community first, not Stack Exchange.

On October 23, I announced that I would be suspending activity. I subsequently logged out of my Stack Exchange account on all of my devices on October 28, plus the app (which I seldom used) on November 5. Since then I've been checking the famous meta question every now and again, probably once or twice per week, but have not logged in again until now. Reason being OP contacted me asking for an update.

Of course, I'm disappointed, but it's not just that. Stepping back for these two months has made me realize that I don't need to be participating in a platform that is intolerant to its users, especially users like Monica. It was Stack Exchange's prerogative to take a political stance and enforce a certain political viewpoint on its users, and it's my prerogative to look at that and say no thank you. It's been more than just the Monica thing, but I see this incident and its resolution as Stack Exchange's way of finally making it clear to me that I am not welcome if I don't promote their progressive American politics.

I found Stack Exchange through StackOverflow and became a moderator for Language Learning some time later. All I wanted was to write code, learn languages, and help people out. I don't give a flying flip who you are, what you identify as, or what your pronouns are.¹ I want to help people. I wanted to serve the community first, not Stack Exchange. For other people, that may be different, and that's fine. It's up to you. This is how it is to me.

I'm not satisfied. I will be if Stack Exchange admits wrong and lets the moderators do the moderating. I'm not sure the specifics of what needs to happen, but a change of direction at least is necessary, that being away from the iron fist and not towards it. Unfortunately, I doubt that will happen.

^{1 Not saying those things don't matter, but that I want to help regardless.}

I was one of the moderators who suspended their activity. I am happy that Monica managed to get a reply which she could agree on, but I am certainly not satisfied with the outcome. For me, the prime reason for dropping away from the queues was the lack of enthusiasm to continue to moderate, partly because of loss of trust and partly because of the actions of some folks at Stack Exchange.

I had mentioned this in one of the private conversations that I had with some other moderators:

The reason why I suspended my activity was because I lost motivation to contribute to the sites. Monica's incident was one of the last straws. My interest in moderation started dipping starting from the Twittergate scandal, through the removal of Tumbleweed badges, removal of HMP, and so on.

I had mentioned about quitting in the SO mod room a couple of minutes after Monica was fired, but I assumed that SE would handle it better, and so I held on. I still had faith in the CMs as they are damn good people. I suspended my activity after seeing 4 of my co-mods resign, and reading Shog's answers on a couple of those. It doesn't look like the CMs have the sway that they originally had.

These were the same people who were once entrusted with most of decisions regarding the site, and one of them had even earned the title of "ultimate authority". The fact that CMs were spending more time with legal, helping them remove certain links from user profiles, instead of with the community, was a bit disappointing.

I have continued to tag along with the sites, because I like the user base and because of the occasional bright spots. Be it Yaakov handling a lot of the minor bugs (and accepting my challenge), Megan spearheading the effort to reduce the number of reviews needed for the CV queue, updates to the moderator dashboard which was hanging for years, and so on, all were ample proof to show that there is at least some work going on.

That being said, I hadn't found much interest to get back to full time moderation like I used to do before. I did try to get back to moderation as I did not want to disappoint those who elected me, I even cleaned the entire Stack Overflow queue on a couple of occasions, but I couldn't continue the pace due to seeing the "reinstate monica" user names everywhere which reminded me of why I suspended my activity. Now that Monica has received some reply, I would probably be getting back to handling flags, but I don't think that I would be getting back to the same levels of activity (especially wrt tags) as I was before.

As an aside, one of the motives of Stack Exchange was to get a better reputation online, which resulted in them kowtowing to Twitter, other media, and eventually starting all this. Now, when we search for "Stack Overflow Moderator" in Google, the recommendations aren't that pretty. Ironic, isn't it?

Thanks for asking.

I want to come back very badly. I miss this place. But I don't feel like I can yet. If ever.

There were two things I needed to feel like this issue was resolved enough for me to return to full-on moderation duties.

1. That SE addressed their defamation of Monica. I don't know the details of what they did, aside from the recent Meta post, but Monica has ended her lawsuit and the matter is closed. While I might wish for more, it's not up to me and I consider this condition satisfied.

2. That SE fully restored Monica to every moderation position she held before this nightmare began. SE still refuses to do this. What's worse is they blame Monica for it.

They've "invited" her to "apply for possible reinstatement." Because she knows it's a trap and refuses to walk into it, they claim her not having diamonds is her fault. But the only reason they'd force her to "apply" and say things like "possible" is if they're going to deny her. It's an insult to every one of us, not just Monica.

This isn't over.

SE can issue apologies and regrets a hundred times over and they'll all be meaningless without action to back them up. Until they reinstate Monica to her former moderator positions (no guessing games, no maybes, no making her beg for it), then nothing they say can ever restore trust.

Without at least some level of trust, I can not move forward. I'm still hopeful, but I'm not holding my breath. There's only so much a company can do to its volunteers before they break.

While Monica is being forced to go through a "process" to regain her moderator status, then my diamond stays in the drawer. I am very disappointed that despite everything that has happened, Monica is still being treated like a perpetrator.

I am happy (enough) that Monica and SE have reached an agreement, and whatever that was, it remains private and is no concern of mine or anyone else's, but Monica is refusing to go through the process of applying for her diamonds again, and the fact that she is being forced to, tells me that this is still a very grudging step forward by SE.

None of us wants to see this happen to anyone again, be they a moderator or a member of one of our communities. So until that aspect has a visible and appropriate conclusion (whatever that may be), then my diamond stays off.

I never really resigned; I just said I was disengaging.

What is the difference? Logging onto SE and moderating was once part of my daily routine. Now it isn't; I log in maybe once a week or so.

Ideally, a moderator probably ought to stay more connected to the community than I currently am. On the other hand, though, I've seen moderators keep their diamonds for a long time even after they were rarely logging on.

I'm still disappointed with the direction SE is heading in as a whole. The latest non-apology garnered over 1000 downvotes yet again, largely because it was perceived as well over a day late and a dollar short; however, at least it served a purpose by reassuring me that I have much better things to do with my time than support this place and help keep it running smoothly on a day-to-day basis.

So, to answer your question I'll probably stick with what I'm doing now: check in on occasion, maybe handle a flag or two, and then get back to whatever else I was doing for a week or so.

I continued to keep my mod activity suspended, and remain mostly disengaged. To this point Stack Exchange has done a marvelous job of sapping my desire to continue contributing. That said, they haven't extinguished it completely yet, so no promises that I'll disappear completely. We'll see. This isn't a long and well thought out answer, but at this point, SE isn't worth any more of my time and energy.

I'm pretty vocally unhappy. I would sign the open letter again if I could. Most of this is a repeat of what I've said before in other threads, many which are linked below.

I think that SE has destroyed the concept of community on SE. I think they have done as little as possible to address the problems we've been facing. There are still legal issues regarding content that SE fails to address, and so long as we don't have a satisfactory answer it means that contributors are not valued as people, only sources of content (the old "we're just a number to them, not a person" stance).

The only conclusion I can make from The Corporation's actions is that they emphatically do not care about us as people. We don't matter. We are not a remotely significant portion of the 9,302,325.5 median daily visitors* to Stack Exchange, Inc. websites.

I don't know how I'm meant to contribute, given the following issues:

• All of these issues occurred after we'd had numerous promises from The Corporation that they would do better, would be transparent, and would earn our trust. During the scandal with the arbitration agreement, we were told "More transparency is coming so that we continue to earn your trust.", and one of the very next times we had a major issue it was handled in a way that systematically went about breaking trust and removing transparency. Now, that situation is so locked-down that we can't even attempt discussing it with The Corporation anymore.
• The Corporation has decided it can unilaterally vandalize my content without warning, ignoring the licensing agreement.
• The Corporation has demonstrated its willingness to continually ignore internal policies which they've communicated to us, to the detriment of moderators, meaning that any action I take could be used against me by the next employee that is unhappy about something. Moderators have been threatened with being fired and disciplined by employees via Twitter, and disparaged by employees across meta and to the press.
• There's no grievance policy in the terms of service. None of the new announced policies regarding moderators (removal, reinstatement, not badmouthing them to the press) are part of any agreement, meaning they have no value or weight. Unless The Corporation includes such policies in an agreement (that is, a contract), then they are literally meaningless words which we have already seen The Corporation ignore under the excuse of "they didn't know", with no redress given to those affected.
• Aside from vandalism, our contributions are also not being handled properly with regards to the license under which we agreed to provide the content to The Corporation. With over 9 million page visits a day, The Corporation is monetizing our content with with increasingly invasive and disruptive ads. So, now I have to weigh each and every future contribution with the following considerations:
  • What rights am I actually giving to The Corporation?
  • What rights am I keeping?
  • What rights am I forfeiting?
  • What guarantee do I have that The Corporation will respect my rights, given recent examples where they've violated them with impunity?
  • What types of businesses are going to benefit monetarily from my content existing? Will I potentially be supporting privacy-violating ad networks, or businesses I find immoral?
• Does The Corporation actually need "volunteer" moderators? If the activities we perform are actually necessary for the proper functioning of the website, then can we actually be volunteers, or are we displacing employees and perhaps circumventing labor laws? Worker and labor rights are very important to me, so the uncertainty here is debilitating for me.
• What's The Corporation's actual goal now? I used to believe I was contributing to a source of knowledge, for a company that was fundamentally invested in fostering a community that could build such a knowledge base. Now, I don't see any investment.
• There's no way to retract the content you own, because you licensed it indefinitely to The Corporation, and they'll maintain they're right to own it even if they refuse to properly attribute it and mark changes. They can continue to make increasingly political, biased, and unethical statements and decisions, and our work will be associated with them regardless. Even Facebook, Twitter, Google, et al let me delete my contributions.

So what am I even supposed to do as a moderator? I can look into the help, but...

• "Moderators are human exception handlers, there to deal with those exceptional conditions that could otherwise disrupt the community."
  • But, what's the community? The page visitors that generate ad revenue, or the regular contributors that browse daily looking for ways to assist others or to be assisted? If my goal is to deal with exception conditions that disrupt the community, how do I deal with the exceptional condition of employees' being able to do whatever they want?
• "Moderators act as a liaison between the community and Stack Exchange the company."
  • It certainly doesn't feel like I'm a liason. Aside from having access to a historically hostile and toxic chat room, moderators mainly have the same tools to contact employees as anyone else: emailing them. Our requests get put into the same queue as any other person's. It's been common in the past year for us to be told that we can't actually get information from The Corporation, either, because the team in charge of the feature can't/won't talk to us (commonly it's been the ad team or marketing teams that are insulated from us).
  • The communication to moderators is fragmented and inconsistent. Will it be in a chat room, or a moderator Teams post, or a Meta post, or an email? We don't know until it happens, and generally the information we receive is either made public at the same time or we're told we're not allowed to talk about it. Meaning, we're not liaising, we're simply given a heads-up that we may be receiving disruption, but we're never empowered to be the ones to deliver such news to the sites we moderate.

So, right now I feel like The Corporation only wants to take things from me. They want me to be a keyboard jockey to click around some interfaces, so they don't have to. They want me to give them content to monetize without any benefit to me, so they don't have to generate it or pay someone else to do so. They want to take my rights away, and take my trust, so that they can operate however they see fit.

The relationship between The Corporation and moderators is effectively parasitic, when it should be symbiotic. I wish it were different, but I've been around the block long enough to know when I'm being used, and I can't currently think of solutions that don't involve major changes to the Terms of Service, Code of Conduct, and Moderator Agreement.

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I am very conflicted. At this point it seems unlikely that I will ever feel SE is the place I want to donate my time to support the communities I care about.

I monitor the site I moderate, for very blatant misdeeds, but am not overly attentive to the minor transgressions. Currently my goal is to keep the community afloat without providing undue support for corporate SE.

Replacement sites are in the works, and at least one has launched See it here. My focus is just keeping the community alive until we have a better place to commune.

I suspended my moderation activity on Oct 2nd and resumed my activities on Nov 14. A lot of my thoughts are summarized and crystallized in this post. And I certainly participated in Monica's GoFundme campaign.

Many users and moderators already expressed very good points in general, so here I would say what was and is important to me as an individual, for my "egoistic" purposes.

I am still extremely disappointed in StackExchange as a company. In how the original conflict was handled, in the attitude towards Monica, in the announcements that were made here and, especially, in press and Twitter, and now, with the way SE handled the legal proceedings (at least judging by the available public information).

With all that, I do not feel safe here. I always participate in online discussions and moderate using my real name and will continue to do so. However, it actually can backfire. It already did backfire, just not for me. Yet. A lot has to change in practice for me to feel safer (notice, not safe) in many areas: legal (example), information dissemination (example, The Loop, the role of Meta), ways the company surveys and considers users' opinions, overall atmosphere.

With all that being said, I mostly participate in the life of relatively small Computational Science community. And I haven't found any other place with such a great community, convenient features, and organized knowledge in this field. I feel responsible to help to keep it running and directly help as many people as I can simultaneously learning new things in the areas of science I am particularly interested in. That's why I made a tough decision to return to moderation, despite my increasing disappointment and, let's be honest, fear.

So, for now, I am continuing to be the moderator of Computational Science and actively participate in StackExchange's life. To the best of my abilities and time that I have, I will try to make it a better place. But (and this is a big one), I am actively starting to look for other places, and, potentially participate in the development of the new ones that are not affiliated with StackExchange. That decision I have not made yet, nor that my narrow-focus experience can be too helpful in the early development stages. Who knows.

I agree with the sentiments of the other folks who've already posted here. Personally, a while ago I put together a short list of what I hoped we'd leave the situation with before I fully returned to work:

• Something resembling trust in the company
• Signs that they fully understand the problem
• A roadmap for the future

One thing I've said before is that I continue to have the utmost respect and trust for certain employees within the company (largely, members of the Community Team). I know that there are folks who have worked long hours to fix a problem that they individually may not have contributed to, and they've done so professionally. These same feelings do not extend to the company as a whole. Like others have said, I'm not confident that Stack Overflow will not commit some of the same errors in the future - perhaps in different guises, but nonetheless based on the same poor judgment. The Register article comes to mind, of course, but that is for me merely one of the more public missteps.

Mixed thoughts on whether Stack Overflow, Inc., understands the problem. I can't see inside anyone else's head, and all I have to go on are particular Meta posts. David Fullerton's apology was certainly an indicator that the company has its head screwed on mostly properly. A response by Cesar M was also, in my opinion, well-written and cause for hope. So I'm inclined to say that, yes, they have a general idea of the issue, and they are listening to some of what's being said - maybe not all of it, partly out of the sheer volume of feedback, but some of it. (Ironically, one of the ways I think they're still falling short is when it comes to working with the community.)

Looking to the future: There are some contingency plans in place to at the very least reduce the odds of another crisis à la this one. In particular, there are now painstakingly presented procedures for removing and reinstating moderators (with flowcharts!). There have also been other efforts (some of which have happened in private, so I think I'll avoid details for now) for the mod community at large which I think have the potential to reduce the chance of even getting to the point where Stack Overflow has to consider removing a moderator or revoking their privileges. These give me confidence.

So . . . let's say we're at maybe 50-75% of my goals, somewhere in that range. If I had to put together a revised list, it would be along the lines of

• Something resembling trust in the company (!)
• A commitment to working more closely with the community to solve problems (and no, I remain unconvinced that The Loop is the best route forward, and it certainly won't scale downward)
• Some sort of more human concluding message about the situation, rather than the current statement, although as I understand it, legal issues may prevent this.

I have found myself slowly trickling back to moderating - just a wee bit, like handling sockpuppets, abusive users, etc. Maybe not normal flag-handling. I care quite a lot for my sites, which is part of what made stepping back such a difficult decision. But I think I may put off a final decision until after the holidays, when I'll be refreshed and ideally ready to make a better assessment of it all.

I suspended duties aside from some cleanup and assistance when it seemed necessary, and have been following events to decide whether I wanted to restart activities or not. I wasn't too happy with how the Monica debacle was handled, so I remained in suspension.

Right after the new year one of the CMs sent such a lovely message I had started to ramp up my moderation activities again, but this latest action of firing CMs when Stack Exchange is in dire need of more just doesn't fit with a company doing the right thing.

Today is the one-year anniversary of Monica's firing without cause or process. This still has not been corrected. It is time for me to go. I have asked to have my diamond removed. I suspect SE won't miss me.

I sleep a lot better now that I don't suffer the angst and conflict that I did when I was a user-moderator here.

I'm at peace with myself and the decision to leave was the right one for me - and seeing what's happened since then only reinforces the validity of that decision.

Before I left, I felt positive - I wanted to be a part of a postive, forward-looking change that would heal and rebuild confidence in the site and start serving the users once again.

A post of mine about about supporting elections to cover the loss of so many moderators was met with resistance and a clear intent to derail any elections. Hurting SE was seen as a valid form of protest - but as we see, that didn't work, and it's still not working. From what I've seen of Shog's and Robert's twitter posts, the toxicity here contributed to the culling of the CM staff

Your 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.

https://twitter.com/shog9/status/1217543503867076608

I died on the hill of trying to move forward. Faced with unrelenting and unapologetic negativity both on the part of users and moderators, I saw that I couldn't make a positive contribution to the network no matter how hard I tried.

The toxicity has to end. People shouldn't be allowed to complain unless they offer a declare how they want that situation to improve.

To paraphrase a TWP closure reason:

Complaints require a goal that we can address. Rather than explaining the difficulties of your situation, explain what you want to do to make it better.