Whatever was happening behind the scenes. The publicly available facts indicate that Monica did nothing wrong. What is sure for true is whether through malice, incompetence or arrogance SOs management have handled this situation really badly. If this was a financial institution, sports team or even a bridge club heads would have rolled for causing so much reputation damage.
I think a lot of people are on the sadness train right now. This is fundamentally good news, I am pretty sure Monica got paid out something, otherwise she wouldn't budge. Sure it sucks that they haven't given her the diamond back (they should), but that would probably come with its own problems.
The biggest issue now is what one of the 1500 people commenting said, namely that nothing has changed in SE fundamentally, and if it happens to anyone of us we'd need to bring the same caliber of big guns and go-fund-me-ing lawyers to get any semblance of fair process
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It's gonna take time to rebuild the high-profile user trust, and so far nothing that has been done can be considered an act of goodwill to earn that trust back; every single inch had to be strong-armed, argued in countless posts, and required spending hundreds of downvotes. We did great as a community, and we managed to at least tie a fight that was unfair and uneven from the start (since the SE has all the big red buttons).
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So as long as people responsible for that remain in power, we can close this one, move on, and maybe even start forgiving SE as a whole, but we shouldn't forget that this happened and why it has happened.
"In recognition of the mistakes that led us here..." Wouldn't that mean that a simple reinstatement by Stack Exchange is appropriate, and not make her go though a reinstatement process? Seem the errors are also on the Stack Exchange side, so it is their responsibility to reinstate her.
Sometimes I wonder if folks who are so strongly vocal about this issue have ever had to deal, in a managerial capacity, with somebody who was being maliciously compliant.
@ConspicuousCompiler I don't understand what you're getting at. A maliciously compliant person wouldn't be trying to point out difficulties with implementing a policy and preventative measures that it doesn't consider. Malicious compliance is, "I will do whatever you tell me to the letter, without discussing the problems that will result."
@jpmc26 Naw, quite the opposite of what you're saying. Malicious compliance involves feigning adhering to important rules while adhering to the letter, while arguing that clearly bad faith behavior is in keeping with what was stated.
People repeatedly argued that "Be nice." was a fine policy because everyone knew what that meant. Obviously, some people did not.
When these kinds of things happen on content-publishing networks it always raises the question to me of why is it -- that software developers living in a world which has more than enough mechanisms to build decentralized solutions that federate individuals on a case-by-case-basis -- why do we persist in the cop-out of putting central entities in charge in the first place.
It wouldn't matter as much what any particular person thought or did if you could just tick off boxes of who has a bozo bit in your world vs. not and go along your merry way. But here everyone has to seek some kind of centralized agreement that in the long tail will not realistically exist.
