I'm really getting the feeling someone in upper management has made it their pet project to make the site more inclusive and fitting with sillicon valley tech culture by any means necessary and will burn it down if they have to to achieve that
You've got a million programmers in India and other places who aren't going to care about whether or not the brand is ruined, but they're not going to be loyal. They're going to just go to any site that has a textbox that allows them to type in a programming question. It won't be here unless they're getting high-quality answers, and they won't be if we can't attract and retain experts.
@Magisch Fun fact: "inclusive" is not Silicon Valley Tech Culture
@YaakovEllis Thanks. I alerted Shog in the SO moderator chat room a while back. He said he poked the appropriate person, but that it might take some time for them to put together an answer. I imagine that ball has since been dropped, so thanks for picking it back up.
@YaakovEllis you must have some insights then that I don't, because even trying my hardest to assume good faith (a requirement that was struck from the coc, natch) I can't see another view on it
The CoC changes definitely smacked of that. But it could also be explained by good intentions and an utter failure to consider the reality that you aren't going to change the entire Internet overnight.
But I don't see much else going on that jives with an interpretation of "inclusivity".
it feels like I'm in the twilight zone of the moral busybodies, and the fact that it's here is stirring people up in opposition. Suddenly, outing yourself as autistic means people will track you down in other spaces and mob you for it. I've never had that before on here
@Magisch All I can say is that things look different when you have access to both sides, and can hear and talk to people when they are able to speak freely (which people can't do on meta). And also when you have access to "the big picture", and more medium/long-term plans. I totally hear how things feel to y'all. And am also upset at how some things have been handled. But I have the advantage of a perspective that most do not.
@Tinkeringbell I assume that whoever posted that wasn't there to say thank you but just to express anger at the company. Yet, the image I was talking about would at least suggest that the ones who left (don't know on what terms) went to a better place.
@Tinkeringbell oh, well, then I don't know. The dog said "actually I think the blog post vanished too" while we were talking about Shog9 so I thought it was somehow linked.
Yeah, I got as much... a dwaallichtje can be a soul of a departed person, but not necessarily angry. One part of the folklore does have them be devillish though, tempting travellers to stray of the road and drown in e.g. a swamp/get lost.
@GhostCatsalutesMonicaC. it's too long to articulate in the comments. It's like there's been a revolution and the people didn't win. — Yvette Colomb2 hours ago
@JohnDvorak fun fact: few realize that that is probably a reference to this
about two years ago... a customer was looking for some "intranet site that they could use to build a wiki of questions and answers". I suggested looking at Stack Teams, they chose a SharePoint wiki site.
Shog wasn't even given the time to say goodbye. He popped into the TL and left one goodbye message but then his diamonds were removed before we had a chance to talk to him.
It just seems super ice cold. Laid off on a monday apparently with no advance notice or severance. No blog post to wish goodbye, no acknowledgment of 10 years of iron commitment to the mission. And this weak as hell vaguely threatening PR speak response that feels like it has been written by Dr. Evil himself.
People don't "suddenly" start looking for a new job unless they were fired or something so bad happened that they had no choice but to immediately resign. Either way, it's bad. — tvanfosson19 hours ago
^ to be fair, I have to agree that everything seems to point to the fact that whatever the reason behind this are, they didn't leave on good term.
Yeah, perhaps... though other people also aptly observed that removing special privileges is often done almost immediately when someone is fired... as a matter of procedure.
I do hope those friends manage to find Shog's answer to his own appreciation post.
@Magisch Yes... and no. I can almost understand the 'no blog post' part... if a company lays you off like this, writing an appreciation post can also come across as unnecessary hypocrisy.
@Tinkeringbell Again, this is shog we're talking about. He practically built this place and all of a sudden you don't trust him enough to give him a few days to put his affairs in order? Screw you and the high horse you rode in on!
I honestly expected that if shog ever resigned (I never thought they'd be inconsiderate enough to fire him) that they'd let him keep his diamonds as recognition of the entire damn decade of hard and draining work he sunk into making this place viable
For what it's worth, as a mod myself I don't feel pressured. And I also feel that George has won the right to say things like that since he was a mod himself for a very long time.
I'm on the fence, myself. I've resigned 2 of my 3 diamonds, and I'm thinking of dropping the last one too. But on the other hand, I don't think it would actually achieve anything useful. It sure as hell won't put any pressure on the company, they clearly don't care.
It won't put pressure on the company, and it will harm the community. But at this point I'm wondering if there's any point in preserving the community if it's all going to sink soon.
@AndrasDeak Recognizing that most mod's don't go on twitter, that's a serious question from me. If this doesn't make you resign, what would? Would anything? Everyone has their principles and their breaking point, what is it?
So I'd end up with even less of a voice than I have now, and would be abandoning my community to the madness of SE. At least now I can still focus on my site and try to ignore the company as best I can. I certainly don't see it as my job to act as a middleman between the company and the community any more.
I'm quite close to resigning. The reason I haven't done so yet is because I've got quite a bad feeling about the network sites and figure that if my sites are at the risk of being shut down, I'd rather stay onboard until they do. I can't do anything to change minds in the company, but it would show the people who use the sites that at least the mods care, even if the higher-ups don't.
@HDE226868 The reason I ask the question is that at this point, any positive action taken to care for the community reinforces that the company is doing the right thing, by all the metrics the company cares about. So counter-intuitively, if we stick around to help, we're tacitly approving of the actions the company takes.
@GeorgeStocker Is that true though? I can think of several positive actions whose entire point would be to separate the community from the company and/or shield the community from the company.
We don't ask for features, we don't do bug reports, we accept that nothing will change. So we let them do their BS thing and post their blogs or whatever, and we get back to Q&A.
@terdon think of it this way: a landlord does not care who cleans the building. If a landlord cares about his tenants, he'll hire a top notch cleaning crew. If a landlord doesn't care about his tenants, he may hire a bottom-of-the-barrel cleaning crew, and have the community pick up the slack. He is a landlord in New York City, there will always be new tenants. By sticking around and cleaning up the building, the people are tacitly approving his actions, even as it hurts them.
We should think of Stack Exchange the way people think of Medium or Blogger or whatever. They just host us, we shouldn't look for, expect or ask for anything more.
user316129
@AndrasDeak yeah, I've got a few for them as well, all four letters long
@GeorgeStocker I would believe that if I had reason to think the company gets any value from the Q&A sites. I don't think they do. The respective communities do, yes. But the company? Not much, if any.
Which is why they don't care. And which is why whether we stay or not will make little difference.
user316129
1:51 PM
If SE just hosted us, that would be one thing @terdon but they've turned into the thought police
And even SO, we're not needed to drive traffic any more. There is more than enough content to keep it going for years. And even if it closes, who cares? What they are interested in is Enterprise, Teams and Jobs.
user316129
1:52 PM
All you need to know about this company is that an executive can publicly libel someone, and keep her job.
@RichardsaysReinstateMonica OK. But, again, that doesn't mean they care about public Q&A. That there is any way we, as public Q&A users can exert any pressure at all on the company.
So the only way forward I can think of is that we completely ignore them.
We make our own rules, just as we always have. If they don't like it, they can shut us down.
@AndrasDeak that is just comedy. The song I posted... there is an horrific dissonance between the happy words and the fake, forced smiles... it is just unnerving.
