StackOverflow CoC

[programmer5278]

Disclaimer: I started this account to make this post, but have no intention of trolling. I'm a mum of three and a programmer, and haven't posted on mumsnet since about 2011.

So...StackOverflow is question and answer site for programmers. It's the market leader, and is a top 50 website. Most programmers in the world use it regularly. Until recently, it was the sort of grown up site that many people used under their real names, and used it to advance their careers.

StackOverflow is part of a group called StackExchange, which includes question and answer sites on a variety of topics, some of which are technical and others aren't. The technical sites are OK, but the non-technical ones mostly consist of groups of self-appointed experts giving replies that are supposed to be factual but are mostly opinion-based (it's cathartic to say what I really think about them!).

Recently, StackExchange fired a volunteer from moderator duties, and apparently briefed the press negatively about her (according to what I have read on various SE sites). She posted under her real name, and this did her damage in the real world.
Apparently, they wanted to bring in a new code of conduct, and she had argued a bit too much about some parts of it (mostly grammatical, I believe).
Normally things like codes of conduct are discussed by active users, so she would have had an expectation that it was up for discussion.

The code of conduct covered trans issues. When published (meta.stackexchange.com/questions/334900/official-faq-on-gender-pronouns-and-code-of-conduct-changes?cb=1), it has proven to be VERY contentious on the site.

I'm making this post, because what I wrote on SE Meta (official discussion forum for SE sites) was deleted. I don't believe that I said anything nasty. My only "crime" was to suggest that StackExchange could look at the mumsnet CoC on trans issues, because I believe it is more balanced and appropriate than the one they have written.
Also, I politely asked people not to use the offensive terms "cis" and "TERF".
My post was called "abhorrent" (!) and deleted.

Why is the StackExchange CoC worrying?
Well, when Justine wrote the mumsnet CoC, I believe that her main concern was to prevent flame wars. That is a position that I respect and understand, and it's what I would expect from a mature, grown up company.
Everyone should be allowed to post on equal terms, and everyone must accept that they will not always get their way.

However, the SE CoC is rather different.

Firstly, it mandates gender neutral language if you haven't explicitly been told which pronoun someone prefesr:
("“Use stated pronouns (when known).”
“Prefer gender-neutral language when uncertain.”"
This means that if a user is called William, and has not specified which are this user's preferred pronouns, you must use "they" as William's pronoun, eg "William said that they use Linux"

This is not grammatically correct English, but SE explicitly says that you must use ungrammatical English rather than risk misgendering someone.

Secondly, they say
"Q12: Does this mean I’m required to use pronouns when I normally wouldn’t?
We are asking everyone to use all stated pronouns as you would naturally write. "
However, they also say
Q11: If I’m uncomfortable with a particular pronoun, can I just avoid using it?
We are asking everyone to use all stated pronouns as you would naturally write. Explicitly avoiding using someone’s pronouns because you are uncomfortable is a way of refusing to recognize their identity and is a violation of the Code of Conduct. (my bold type)

Now, this last point means that if you formulate a sentence without using pronouns, you will be in violation of the SE Code of Conduct.
This is a VERY worrying principle.
If translated to law, it would mean that people could be taken to court and fined or even imprisoned, for using sentences without pronouns.
It means that there is no space for conscientious objectors who don't want to call someone by an unwanted pronoun, but also don't want to be coerced to use language that they believe is wrong.

People may not accept a pronoun because

• they have religious reservations
• they have reservations based on scientific evidence
• they have reservations based on observational evidence

Whether you or I agree with any of these reasons, it is unacceptable to cut off the possibility of conscientious objection for any of the above reasons.
I am a child of the European Enlightenment, and there is not a snowball's chance in Hell that I will EVER accept such limits on free speech.

Because SE put in these 2 sentences that contradict each other (the one suggests that you can just write normal sentences, the other suggests you will be punished for not explicitly using preferred pronouns), the defenders of the SE CoC are brushing off all ideas that people will be forced to use pronouns by pointing to the first sentence.

However, if this is the case, then why do they need to say "Explicitly avoiding using someone’s pronouns ...is a violation of the Code of Conduct" at all?

It is pretty obvious that this is bigger than StackExchange, and the aim is to shut off those conscientious objectors who currently formulate sentences without using pronouns. In real life, this includes anyone who deals with the public; teachers; medical staff; family and colleagues of trans people and others.

If this were translated to law, it would criminalise a lot of people.

There is a lot of disquiet on SE about this new Code of Conduct, which has been fuelled by the twitter outpourings of one of their employees, which basically said, anyone who doesn't accept the CoC is the problem and they won't care if these people leave.

So, the aim of the SE CoC appears to be to please trans activists, rather than mumsnet's aim of preventing flame wars. I know which I prefer.

Bear in mind, SE is an internet top 50 site, and the market leader in programming knowledge. They must have investors, who are apparently perfectly happy for them to upset the users who have contributed their expertise for free in order to make the sites what they are today. They also must be incredibly certain of their market-leading position to jeopardise it like this. They are behaving with complete contempt towards the majority of their users.

As a former ordinary user, I will never contribute my technical knowledge ever again on their site. Sure, I'll browse it, because it's useful, but I'll never put anything back into a site that disrespects and despises ordinary users to the extent that SE does. And I'd anyway never risk posting on a site that threw a moderator under the bus who has given them many hours of her time for free.

If you've reached the end of this essay, thank you for reading, and thank you mumsnet for providing a platform where I can post this, hopefully without it being deleted.

First, my thanks to the OP for sparing me from having to write about this. The forced speech implications are very relevant right now to Mumsnetters and I was reading up on the Stack Exchange/Overflow debacle over the weekend in preparation to post here, but there is so much to take in and I am struggling.

There are two issues here:

• The removal of moderation privileges from a Jewish female moderator, at a time when she was offline for Shabbat and then Rosh Hashanah (so much for "diversity"). Her "crime" was to ask questions about the CoC changes, specifically whether it would be OK to avoid using pronouns completely, before the CoC had even been published. Even people who approve of the new CoC have protested and gone on strike because of the way SE treated this mod.
• The CoC changes constitute forced speech. "You must not call that biological male 'he'" is very different from "you must call that biological male 'she'", and the latter is what SE are trying to impose.

Further reading:

• Timeline of events including moderator resignations.
• Someone trolls the new Code of Conduct by putting a pronoun declaration in a question, prompting an argument as to whether to remove the pronouns as "noise". (Background: Stack Overflow has a "no noise" rule and non-informative phrases like "thanks" are routinely removed from questions.)
• Users are not happy, examples too numerous to list but andreas-he-her deserves mention for the pronoun trolling.
• The usual suspects in the IT press are covering it.

Thanks for the extra background, haXXor (love your multi-tool username!).

Totalitarianism is a good word to bring up, CharlieParley. There are problems with the total concept, sure, but some very thought-provoking features, too:

Elaborate guiding ideology.
Single mass party, typically led by a dictator. ("cult of personality")
System of terror, using such instruments as violence and secret police.
Monopoly of organised violence.
Monopoly on the means of communication. *(cf "cancel culture" following people across platforms? social media are certainly very pervasive)
Central direction and control of the economy through state planning. (cf the modern financial system?)

@haXXor - thank you for that post, and I completely agree with what you said. I only didn't add this information because my post was already too long.

They've just lost another moderator - surprisingly, as this one agreed with the company's restrictions on freedom of conscience.

Also, this question has an interesting graph on it: meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/390423/what-were-the-absolute-numbers-of-comments-18-months-ago-compared-to-now
Is that fall off a cliff at the end a genuine result from the last few days, do you think? (I have had a hard day's work, and I'm too lazy to run the query again )

Thank you very much @programmer5278 thank you very much @programmer5278 much appreciated. I have used SO for recruitment and various research for a few years now. I'm tempted to email some contacts there to clarify your very valid points.

If all this is as it seems they've just lost a large corporate client.

If you strip away everything else, this is the situation:

Party A has a deeply held belief.
Party B does not share this belief. B's disbelief may manifest through B being opposed entirely, opposed in part or just by being indifferent.

Normal rules are that B does not insult, shame or belittle A for those beliefs, and vice versa. A is not required to agree with B's views and vice versa but both are to be respectful in doing so.

Nastiness on either side can be effectively moderated but not without some controversy or mistakes.

New rules require B to actively agree that A's views are correct. B will be penalised for disagreeing, for not playing along and for self-excluding from any further exchange with A, no matter how respectfully disagreement is expressed.

There is no reciprocal arrangement for B.

Furthermore

Party B includes group 1 who disagree with A's beliefs because they are rooted neither in material reality nor science, group 2 who disagree on free speech principles and group 3 who simply hold other beliefs also not rooted in reality or science but which reject the tenets of A's belief as being irreconcilable with their own tenets of faith.

Regardless of that, none of the groups in party B are to have their views respected.

I've yet to see an explanation why this is justified. Not even the human rights angle works, because everyone in party B has human rights that are being infringed upon by being required to agree with and manifest a belief they do not share.

Party B's opposition to the new rules is NOT about the validity of party A as people, but about their own freedom of expression and belief. (Ignoring bad actors in either camp)

Party B is many times the size of party A, which is perceived as disadvantaged, marginalised and discriminated against.

How then did party A get into such a position of power?

OP if you look at the data behind the graph you’ll see that the fall off a cliff is just because the final month is October and obviously the data for that month is for just 15 days of posting, not the full month.

@BoomBoomsCousin thanks, that makes sense. Let's see what happens at teh end of Oct. Not sure what that steep drop in 2014 is, could be the event they refer to as the Summer of Love, but I wasn't around then.

@CharlieParley - yes, that's my analysis too. Hopping on the LBG bandwagon is the answer to that one I think. This activist group is extremely powerful.

As a SO member, I got a circular type email today, and it also had the "

I just looked and it's just tacked on the end. So I googled, and lots of other people were asking too (they thought it was a bug/mistake/encoding issue)

It's just silly.

• As a SO member, I got a circular type email today, and it also had the "

While SO burble on about respect and inclusivity they also host an anime site where you can ask and answer questions like anime.stackexchange.com/questions/52772/does-tatsumaki-wear-panties. With a chatroom where creepy blokes lech over cartoon drawings of schoolgirls snogging.
chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/6697/2019/9/8.

@programmer5278 It's a T bandwagon they're jumping on, nothing LGB about it.

SO have just had a bizarre thread today where apparently it is OK to create a fictional character called "Bob" and criticise him, but not to create exactly the same fictional character called "Nancy".

I gather for feminist reasons, it is apparently not allowed to imply criticism of women, but implying criticism of white men is OK.

meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/390444/bobs-back-so-im-leaving-and-taking-my-money-with-me
Seems a tad unfair, not to say hypocritical, no?
I am as good as or better than the men at my work, so I don't need this sort of patronising "protection."

Also, this thread sums up where they are now. Apparently for some reason, pictures of attack helicopters are transphobic and very, very offensive, I think, judging from the discussion under this post.
meta.stackexchange.com/questions/335701/why-was-my-username-changed-without-notice-and-can-i-change-it-again
Frankly, this thread sums up everything that disgusts me about Stack Exchange now.
They are talking in some hidden code that nobody except woke 20-something Californians is going to understand.
This is not a serious website.
This is not inclusive.
The sooner this website dies a death the better, because software developers all over the world need a serious forum to exchange information, not this childish nonsense.

@ErrolTheDragon ha ha good point! I can't stand the way they sprinkle what are supposed to be professional communications with emojis.
It's a sort of comical millennial stereotype of playing around at work, but real life isn't like that, especially when your product is global. The rest of the world is grown up.

It's a T bandwagon they're jumping on, nothing LGB about it.

I think what's meant here is that T have used LGB as a stalking horse by conflating the very reasonable demands for same-sex marriage etc with demands that we ignore biological reality and dismantle safeguarding.

@haXXor That's about the size of it.

As you mention safeguarding, the minimum age for signing up to Stack Overflow sites is thirteen. So you might get banned for not mis-sexing kids. Do SO really think it's the place of strangers on the internet to validate a child who claims to be transgender? Or did they just not think at all in their mad scramble for woke points?

Another moderator gone, and another ordinary member resigned:

meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/390525/yet-another-step-down-as-moderator-post?cb=1

meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/390523/im-deleting-my-profile

It's not possible to delete content that you wrote on StackOverflow, as the agreement is that you give it to them (and that's another scandal, they changed the licence terms, also retrospectively, this year).

What angers me most, is that they are using content given by me and thousands of others to lend credibility to their support for coerced speech.
This has implications for all knowledge sharing sites on the internet.
I thought I was contributing to a business site, not to a hardline political campaigning group.

So, an update...

On 23rd October, Stack Exchange revised their new Code of Conduct.
meta.stackexchange.com/questions/336366/post-for-clarifications-on-the-updated-pronouns-faq?cb=1

The important change appears to be that using gender-neutral speech will NOT be construed as misgendering (unless someone writes a really gauche, obviously designed to annoy sentence).

My feeling is that the revise Code of Conduct gives a sufficient loophole to allow people to use gender neutral language, and therefore the coerced speech issue is solved. However, not everyone agrees with that - discussion here:
meta.stackexchange.com/questions/336765/does-the-community-consider-the-coerced-speech-complaint-largely-resolved

Also, there is another problem that Stack Exchange have done nothing to resolve.
A moderator was sacked without any warning because she expressed doubts about the original Code of Conduct. Stack Exchange then briefed the technical media against her, and accused her of breaking their previous Code of Conduct, thus implying that she was not capable of addressing others in a respectful way (i.e. implying that she was a bigot, which everyone knows her through her many, many posts on various Stack Exchange sites, knows is not true). This hurt her particularly hard, because she was on the site under her real name, as were many other people including me.

A tweet was re-tweeted by a Stack Exchange employee that thanked people who were unhappy about coerced speech for removing themselves from Stack Exchange.

The Code of Conduct was subsequently tweaked after a large backlash from SE members, however the company has maintained a baffling silence on the subject of the sacked moderator.
She is a very conciliatory kind of person, and has made various efforts to resolve the situation, apparently all in vain. She's now fundraising for legal action at www.gofundme.com/f/stop-stack-overflow-from-defaming-its-users

Hi @programmer5278. Just read through all of this on my way home and I feel ill.
I've a GC Male friend who knows "Mr SO" (I think he's the man with the most votes / posts?). Wondering if I can ask said friend to have a word..
Don't let all of this get you down.

Hi @midcenturylegs, thank you. This issue affects me in real life, which is why I am concerned. Potentially v difficult for me if this principle of coerced speech became law, for example.
MN is a rare corner of the internet where truths may be spoken, but compassion is respected - I'm lurking madly on several threads :-)

Me too OP (lurking). Have a read of things on twitter too (DM me if you want so I don't have to list names/handles here).
I use SO for work too although perhaps not so prolifically as you, as I work in quite a niche field.
It's interesting someone mentioned the high rate of trans women on the spectrum working in IT. I read somewhere that the reason behind the ease that girls and boys are convinced they're in the wrong body is that they themselves are on the spectrum - already feel they are on the fringes of life and not belonging. (Plus suffering from eating disorders etc so already suffering from body dysmorphia.) But I don't want to derail your thread sorry!
My company has not yet introduced the pro-nouns thing. I'm hoping that as a global company in many countries they'd find it hard to enforce. If it does though I am going to make my own up "AHF".

Thanks for the update, OP. I was reminded about this by the MN "rules" thread (ie lack of clarity/perceived lack of consistency of them)

I've chipped into the GoFundMonica.