An interesting conspiracy theory, but it doesn’t really make any sense since all the press is focused specifically on how SE is a terrible place to be: either "PC company gone mad", “Bigots rage against trans people”, or “SE is a collapsing clustercluck”. And dismissing the problems that women and trans people face as "no big deal" is just a sign that you’re not trying to engage with the situation in good faith

@divibisan Who said it was not a big deal? It is a big deal, the way SE is going about it is not likely to help it though. Flags are the best and most proven way to handle this big deal.

@divibisan Regarding your first point, see the graph. You can run it for yourself if you want, but obviously the horrors are not driving people away from Meta.SE.

@ You said “[it] can very easily be handled by flags the same way we have been doing for over a decade”. That is: there’s no problem, nothing needs to change. Now, I can’t disagree that the policy change doesn’t seem to have helped (so far). But to say it’s no big deal because you don’t see it or don’t care to listen to people who do – I think that’s a sign of bad faith.

As to the plot, meta.se doesn’t make them money – they need to turn people into regular consumers of SE sites. If you showed that new people are coming (not just new to meta.se) and that they’re using the network sites, I’d be more convinced

@divibisan Once again, I have never said it was not a big deal... flags have handled a vast majority of all hostility in the past decade, but "haters gonna hate". The current efforts by SO Inc. really just exacerbates the situation, it isn't going to preemptively stop people from being hostile because the CoC is more explicit. Really the ONLY thing that IS going to be effective are flagging and work by the mods. Right now there is more work for them and less mods to do it because of how this was executed.

@divibisan So who benefits? Not the mods, not the community with more restrictions and a confusing FAQ for CoC, not the LGBTQ+ community getting put up on a pedestal. SO Inc benefits even if it's just name recognition, after 2 weeks of publicized "bloopers" and what seems to be SO Inc fanning the flames it is really hard to credit this as an accident. I'll see about running the other graph you wanted at some point in the near future.

But it gives better tools to deal with it, since the current tools haven’t been working well enough. You may think it’s working fine, since it doesn’t affect you, but many people disagree with that, and we should be willing to engage with those concerns, rather than putting ourselves on a pedestal as the arbiter of what is or is not a problem.

@divibisan I am answering the question posed by the OP about hostility from SO Inc. I'm not here to arbitrate what is or is not a problem. I would not agree that the new CoC and accompanying FAQ are better tools. At the end of the day we are still going to have to rely on mods handling flags. The new tools made it slightly more confusing and contentious and also serves to hold the LGBTQ+ community to a different standard, that's something which is not so good IMO.

I appreciate your concerns and comments by the way

Thanks, I appreciate that. I’m really only engaging because I do still believe that most people here are acting out of anger at SE and legitimate concerns about the policy, not hatred of trans people

I just think we need to be careful about seeing things only from our own perspective and ignoring issues that are really important to others.

I agree with that. And yes I feel SE could have done a much better job with this I can no longer credit there mistakes and hostility as anything other than drumming up name recognition in the press.

Honestly I am particularly bummed about the loss of mods and engaged users working on the review queue. If this continues StackOverflow is going to turn into Yahoo answers.

Where you see a problem that was under control, and a new policy that gives LGBTQ+ people special privileges, many others (myself included) see a policy that was not working at all, and see this new policy as a step towards equality – where everyone can ask and answer programming questions without seeing their basic humanity and identity questioned.

But, yeah, it’s undeniable that this whole rollout has been a mismanaged disaster

And you’re absolutely right that the loss of some truly amazing mods and devoted users is a real tragedy