"a garden without many non-gardening visitors would work just fine as a garden" - yes, if the goal of the garden is just to exist as a place purely for content creators. But if that is where we come to, and end up existing in a place where visitors are actively being excluded, then in some ways we have failed.

I totally agree with you about the expert content. And the beauty now is that one question like this can reach thousands or even millions of people who benefit from it. So I still posit that the overall success of garden depends on maintaining accessibility to all who can benefit it, while still being an awesome place to be a gardener. We aim for both, not one or the other.

"What exactly is your plan for this site if the gardeners stop contributing?" - we do not have any plans for this, and if that happened, and we didn't have any sort of system in place that would encourage new gardeners to move up in the ranks, we would have in many ways failed on the Public Platform. Yes, the happiness of gardeners is a prerequisite for success and growth. And it is an end unto itself, but it is also a means to an end of the greater success and mission of the sites.

Regarding point III: yes, we still have more work to do in the areas relating to diversity and other issues that you are touching on. A new reinstatement policy is about to be released, and we have been working behind the scenes for some time on a response to the Lavender Letter that is more than just words. And we are planning on including the Mod Council (and all mods, when feasible) in discussions and actions relating to these issues.

But this comment thread is not the place to relitigate what happened with Monica. You are representing one viewpoint on what happened, and there are others as well. But I cannot open up that issue here for further discussion here.

@YaakovEllis I appreciate how engaged you are here, how responsive, and how much effort you’ve put in. That said, again, I still see no explicit acknowledgement — the opposite in fact — from SE that the goals of the gardeners and the causal visitors are at odds, & advancing the “ultimate goal” is directly detrimental to the “secondary goal”. The visitors leave trash all over our garden. They walk on the grass now matter how many signs we put up. They plant seeds for invasive species even though we tell them that will long-term destroy the other plants. You cannot have it both ways. Pick.

@DanBron I do not think that the goals of the gardners and the casual visitors are at odds. They are all focused on sharing knowledge. I think that the average visitor wants just that, and from what we have seen, that is what they get. The vast majority of visitors visit to find an answer to a question, find that it was answered, and leave satisfied. They do not plant invasive species or try to destroy.

@DanBron Now, if we get into the subset of visitors who do try to contribute content, and then do so in a way that curators deem to be destructive or invasive, I would divide them into two groups. (1) Users who are not contributing in good faith. In this case, let's bring out the pesticide, and give the gardeners better tools to deal with this.

@DanBron (2) Users who are contributing in good faith, but for different reasons (many of which are due to the rules set up in the beginning) find themselves unintentionally making things more difficult for the gardeners. Here is where we want to find some way to make everyone happy. Make things easier to understand for these users, allow them to be instructed more efficiently as to the norms of the garden, without chasing them away. These are aspirational Community members. Let's find a way to let them in. And give more tools to allow gardeners to help in this way as well.

@DanBron From what we have seen and heard (both anecdotally and through different measurements and surveys), the real bad actors here are relatively few, and are dealt with efficiently already. The problem is that the second group is often hard to distinguish from the first. This is where we come to what I talk about above - finding ways to help both groups. And including those who even contribute minimally in our definition of the Community - since they have already taken the first step and expressed interest, let's help them along, in a way that is beneficial to all. That's the goal anyway.

@YaakovEllis I can see that’s the goal. I just think it’s misguided because that second group has no desire to become part of the community, they want an instant, free, help desk, they will always see curation as criticism or outright hostility, and they outnumber the gardeners 1,000s to 1. No matter what tools you put in the gardeners’ hands, they still have to use their hands (human judgment on a case by case basis), which will never scale vs the 2nd group. You need automated systems, and that starts by recognizing the 2nd group is bad for the garden, and at odds with the gardeners.

@DanBron "second group has no desire to become part of the community" - this is where we disagree. What we have seen (again, lots of anecdotal, lots of surveys, etc) is that a significant percent of the second group (post minimal content, but in good faith) would be interested in participating more and becoming part of the Community. This is not to say that we also done need better automated systems. But we are not just going to write them off either.

@YaakovEllis I see Dan distinguishing the bad faith visitors from the good visitors who could with help become contributors. Perhaps three categories would help make more sense of how the site communities function: contributors, learners, and exploiters. We work to integrate the learners into the system, while limiting the damage of the exploiters, and similarly, both learners and exploiters need to be considered by SE devs.

@curiousdannii nice, I like the breakdown and the labels

It's not just gardeners and visitors, but also vandals who come looking for plants to steal or a tree to carve their initials into. Or for a more modern metaphor, SE is like an art gallery, with artists and curators, art aficionados and students, and Instagram influences who are just after the one photo and don't care who they bump into on the way. Hopefully the vandals/exploiters will never be more than 0.1% of the current passive visitors, and if we focus too much on them it gets depressing (and would discourage visitors from contributing), but we can't ignore them either.

@curiousdannii it might also be worth deciding the learners into technical learners, and site learners. Those who have technical knowledge require different support to turn into contributors from those who do not yet have the conceptual understanding of how there problems generalise.

I think it important not to automatically deny prejudice, for the same reason it should not be considered unforgivable. Quoting your link, "problems" where the actor "meant no harm" could still be sexist, or transphobic actions. More than one trans user stuck their neck out, and worked hard trying to de-escalate that mess. Their choice not to mention the word "transphobic" could be interpreted as tact or tactics. I know I hold prejudices; I cannot claim to avoid acting on them. Just as your allegation doesn't say SE dismissed a woman with the explicit justification that she was a woman.