What is going on within Stack Exchange, especially Stack Overflow?

Let me guess... All these changes come in the wake of a leadership change initiated to seek more effective ways of monetizing the platform. (Insert Austin Powers "Yay, Capitalism!" GIF)

Oh god I can’t take another of their excuse posts. “Sorry, we fucked up! AGAIN!”

You might call it evidence of an anti-pattern

This should be the top answer. People are disgruntled by the pending change to the Code of Conduct, coming off the back of the license change (which was very poorly received), but the mod situation was not because of the licenses.

Not much can be said due to confidentiality agreements, but the mods who have resigned did so to protest the completely overblown and inappropriate response by the company.

It seems like a poorly-thought out move to protest something you can't talk about.

I looked a little more into it, and it sounds like

bias: Things are getting a little too SJW for some people. To be clear, I largely agree with a lot of the social justice movements, but I do feel like some people use the movement as a cudgel to beat others into submission with, and it is often paired with a contempt for the people they are actually "speaking up for." It sounds like there was a push for "diversity" that sounds a lot like what I was talking about. It is referenced here and is about a decree issued from "on high" about gendered pronouns, with someone having legitimate concerns about the implications of one of the decrees. That person was then demodded, with the implication that it was because they dared to ask questions.

That is very concerning.

So here's a question about how this licensing shit works. Lets say a person writes a program using code they obtained for free from Stack Overflow, and the license previously said that anyone could freely use the code to write whatever program they want and then sell that program to make profit for themselves. Can stack exchange then say "oh, anyone who had previously gotten code for free off our website that is in a program you are selling, you now have to start paying us, otherwise you can't sell your program anymore and we'll sue you if you try to keep selling it"?

Sounds like a perfect opportunity to launch a competitor.

One of the resigning mods of the Christianity SE site used that “First they came for the socialists...” poem to protest the situation. 😂

To his credit, he was at least honest about the reasoning. It was because of fucking pronouns.

The new code of conduct apparently includes measures on purposefully misgendering trans people, etc.

This includes deliberately referring to someone ONLY by their name/handle if you know what pronouns they prefer and are using pronouns to refer to everyone else simultaneously. Most people who do that know what they’re doing: it’s the classic gambit of the annoying younger sibling that goes “I’m not touching you!”

A mod apparently objected and ended up being terminated.

Lots of mods went bananas and resigned in solidarity, with the usual arguments about how it’s an affront against freedom of speech and/or their religious beliefs to force them to respect pronouns if known.

Users can get away with it on most questions on most SE sites because they don’t directly involve gender, but mods are more likely to have to talk to specific individuals one on one.

From the outside (as someone who has used SO and asked questions there but was never involved in the meta), it’s yet another tantrum thrown by people with at the very least latent transphobia who are forced to come to terms with it.

SE may not have handled it the best, and there appear to have been preceding issues, but everyone in this scenario comes out looking like an asshole IMO.

Back in the day, I would've offered to buy some of that Stack Overflow merchandise from ya. Nowadays, I'm not so sure that I even want to be connected with the site at all, despite having contributed countless hours there.

for post in new_posts:
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     post.close("Closed as duplicate.")
 else
     post.close("Attracted low quality answers.")

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The difference is that WP was still open-sourced, there was a discussion about changing licenses, and folks were free to fork into another site using the old license if they wanted.

That change was legal, was made by referendum, and with good justifications — and was towards a license that the community felt was more appropriate for wikipedia.

GFDL certainly has its flaws, CC-BY-SA was felt to cover for those flaws in a way that worked well for the platform. If you disagree that’s fine, but this is totally unlike the stack overflow issue.

The classic removed for duplicated question and the duplicate they link not even being remotely similar to what you asked.

Indeed, but on the opposite side people who've dedicated ten years of their life to helping others by answering questions were suddenly being told it's all their fault, while simultaneously trying to lift their head above a never-ending torrent of identical "fix ma codez" questions that don't even include the code.

As someone who has used Stack Overflow and Super User, I will say there is more of an ‘unwillingness to help beginners’ than a ‘disrespectful unfriendliness’, but those are my own encounters.

From the experience of asking questions on the technical/programming boards when new to learning a language or software, it’s defeating to try to follow the rules of posting a question only to see it get abruptly closed by a mod without any helpful answers.

New programmers do have legitimate, random questions that aren’t senior-level, but it’s semi-difficult to get informative responses on those types of questions when they are seen as ‘too noob’.

Not all the mods are bad, though not all the mods are altruistically helpful either.

Freelancers and senior engineers can use Stack Exchange badges and karma as a “resume-booster” for a mark of how good programmers they are, so there is a present dichotomy of “The Professors” mod group who are just naturally passionate about programming and learning, and “The Career-ers” mod group who are just trying to build up their personal brands on the site in order to make more money.

forums ... discussion

This is likely where a lot of the friction comes from. They aren't forums; they're not for discussion. They're for specific questions and objective answers.

As they should be. Enforcing adherence to the rules is what moderators are there for.

This is true, and I think many users felt that the mods being unwelcoming and unhelpful was a real issue, but the manner in which it was addressed was ineffective and only served to antagonise people.

That said, I have also found that many of the mods and contributors certainly are very helpful even if they aren’t the most polite and welcoming. Once you get used to the way that things tend to work, it’s rarely an issue.

I had no idea. I thought some of the assholes marking my questions as duplicates or just straight up hiding them because of formatting (on a three sentence post... How much formatting can you expect?) were just incel neckbeards getting they're jollies off.

But this? I'll never ever be back to the site. Even if that means i have to explicitly ignore it in my googling.

If you get stuck, just post a question on stackoverflow and the community will tell you for which reason you should not be asking that question.

It's like if I posted asking what the main ingredients in a peanut butter sandwich are, and they asked to see a photo of my kitchen and the knife I'll be using first, then deleted the thread because somebody already asked about BLTs a year ago.

Which is it, can questions not be answered unless you provide a completely personalized use case, or is any yahoo's vaguely related question suitably redundant to yours?

The sites are not for discussion, free tutoring or anything similar. They are to provide answers to questions.

It is a bad experience for the one that ask question, but maybe that is what makes the site interesting for people looking for answer. You may find your questions interesting but don't forget mods have to deal with a shitload of shitty posts every days.

This is most internet forums honestly. I would say about 80% of threads I start have a common theme of expected problems.

Let's say you have a question, you want to know what is the most reliable domestic car, that has a lot of headroom.

This is what I would expect.

1. Many\significant number of users make a point about something already covered in the OP. (e.g. I am not considering foreign cars, replies : Honda makes great cars)
2. Lots of tone policing, side discussions (e.g. can you even afford a car right now?)
3. Attempts to redirect the conversation (e.g. Are you sure you aren't better suited for a truck?)

Stack exchange is good about this stuff, this is very annoying as an OP.

BUT IT HAS TO MAKE IT THERE AS A POST FIRST

So, yeah, I've run into this problem A LOT with ASK X posts. In pretty much all of those subreddits, I've found it impossible to ask anything. Straight up.

e.g. Try to get a discussion of pop-science topics that are treated like hard science which are only held to soft science standards (e.g. climate change).

This is something I've been curious on, it does not mean I'm "against climate change" or anything like that, but to me I see that it's given a soft science bar of treatment, but everyone treats it as hard science gospel. If people held it to the same standards they hold these threads to, they wouldn't believe in it.

e.g. easily observable trends in the world that require no scientific explanation whatsoever = unknowable. Studied phenomenon with very likely explanation = can't speculate. (Hard science position), e.g. all atheists "should actually be militant agnostics."

Yet you take something like climate change, which is well reasoned speculation and it's 100.00% certain. And guess what, it probably is, I don't even question that.

But again, try to find other things like this in science. Ask that question, good luck.

So yeah, on the one hand I sympathise with them, people on discussion forums SUCK. There are SO FEW people that aren't just injecting themselves into the discussion, rather than sorting the discussion AS THE OP HAS ASKED\THE FORUM REQUIRES.

And then those very same people who behave poorly become "volunteer mods" who try to impose their views onto the forum\org.

So yeah, I get it.

Less "I think it should run like this" and more stick to the forum and stop bothering the admins.

These people are poison on both sides of the fence IMO.

Err, I'm not sure what it means now. Will edit.

It seems like people with nothing going in the real world seek out these positions of internet power.

https://interpersonal.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3330/what-caused-this-site-to-be-excluded-from-hot-network-questions

That is not the root cause of everything, and is covered by my (currently) fifth item.

(non-public) New draft changes to the Code of Conduct are both objected to and questioned for clarity

That seems like more of a sideshow, promoted by people with a specific ax to grind.

does not believe in transgenderism

you're not allowed to do that anymore.

Gender neutral term is absolutely a reasonable compromise where one party does not believe in transgenderism and the other does

just want to point out that the mod (M. Cellio) never made statements that would appear to be trans-averse (of which I am aware); it was because her training as a writer in general emphasized writing to avoid gender.

Having a gender identity seperate from your biological sex is not a mental illness. The feelings associated with the disconnect are.

Regardless, this is off topic and unhelpful.

But, it appears to be what started everything.

Sources: https://judaism.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5193/stack-overflow-inc-sinat-chinam-and-the-goat-for-azazel (the first person who got fired)

https://christianity.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6718/brothers-i-must-go (someone explaining what happened in detail)

It is one hundred percent the spark that lit the flame