The things that hurt.
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It’s been a stressful, draining, and strange week and a half on Stack Exchange.
I won’t rehash the details of what happened, partly because many of the people reading this already know them, and partly because they’ve been laid out quite nicely in a post by a fellow moderator, Monica Cellio. I invite you to read what she wrote, because it eloquently summarizes what a lot of folks are feeling right now. Throughout most of this week, in fact, I felt that it basically summarized exactly how I was feeling — about how things played out, how I felt I had been treated, and how we should all move forward.
I say “I had been treated” there as if I was one of the people involved in the mess last week. Well . . . that’s because I was. When a Twitter user retweeted a tweet complaining about certain question titles from one Stack Exchange site, Interpersonal Skills (IPS), I was the moderator from that site who stepped in to try to help — the one who extended an olive branch, as Monica put it. I was also the one told by the retweeter to “buzz off”, the one accused by them of mansplaining and sea-lioning, and the one referred to as “obnoxious” and a “troll” by a Stack Exchange employee.
This because I wrote five short tweets, trying to be nice to someone.
In the seven or eight days since everything blew up, I’ve done my best to reflect on what happened, and to try to understand things from all points of view. Everyone sees things through a different lens, so why I should I conduct my post-mortem with only my own? I’ve listened to everyone I could; I’ve read several blog posts; I’ve scrolled through endless meta discussions; I’ve ventured back onto the godforsaken no-man’s-land of Twitter.
I haven’t said much. When dozens of people are talking, you start to think that everything there is to say has already been said. But it’s been a week, and I’ve begun to realize that there are still things that haven’t been said. So far. Maybe writing down what I feel could be productive. So if you have a few minutes, and you’re not yet up to your ears in opinions, and you want to know what this person feels like, I invite you to try on my lens for a short while.
Maybe you’ll find the world looks a little clearer when you do.
Community-building and user retention
I’m a moderator on Interpersonal Skills, but I also moderate four other Stack Exchange sites, including a couple of the smallest ones on the network. Some are related to hobbies of mine; one is about the field that I hope will one day become my career. Regardless of scope, they’re all tiny when compared to the massive behemoth that is Stack Overflow, with its untold millions of users, questions, and answers.
When you’re trying to grow and develop a site, user retention is incredibly important. I’ve learned from my (admittedly few) years on the network that funneling in new users is pretty darn hard. A community can survive on the backs of a small group of people, yes, but it can’t flourish — and such a community is going to die when those people inevitably move on. Interpersonal Skills is a young site, a bit over a year old. It has a decent number of active users, but it’s not huge, and it’s extremely fragile. I don’t think it would take much to send its edifice crumbling down.
When a person on Twitter with 25,000 followers completely bashes it, I start to wonder if the foundations are finally going to cave in.
I hate to lose a single user, or possible user. I mean that. There are exceptions, sure — the spammers, the bigots, the people who aren’t there in good faith — but in general, I don’t like to see people slipping away because of some sort of misunderstanding. It was, and I think still is, my firm belief that the retweeter just didn’t understand the context of the questions she was tweeting about (partly because she hadn’t read them). I also felt that it was possible to correct her misconceptions politely and respectfully, maybe earning her respect in the process.
It seems like it wasn’t. And I found that sort of frustrating, partly because of the type of person she was. She clearly cares about inclusion and fostering environments that are welcoming to all demographics — and so do I. We need people with those ideals to make our communities stronger, more open, and, ultimately, successful.
So let’s talk about inclusion.
Why IPS can be great
A lot — not all, certainly, but a lot — of the topics covered on Stack Exchange are dominated by men. Over 90% of developers surveyed on Stack Overflow this year identify as male, and you’d have to be hard-pressed to claim that that figure isn’t representative of the site at large. In fact, something like 75% of programmers are men. If you take a field consisting mostly of men and create a website to serve that field, you shouldn’t be surprised if there’s a gender gap. The same goes for many demographic groups.
Interpersonal Skills Stack Exchange is in a bit of a different situation. Interacting with other humans is something we all do, regardless of gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc. As changes at Stack Exchange were rolled out this summer, I started to realize that this is something that makes IPS a little bit special. We are a site that is relevant to literally everyone in the world. Inclusion should, in theory, be less of an issue.
I’m not going to sit here and claim that we have solved the inclusivity problem. I would of course be quick to rebut the retweeter’s claim that we are “unwelcoming to women”, given that I know we have many genders represented amongst our top users, but we’re not yet where I want to be. There’s work to be done, maybe with regard to how we write question titles, for instance. But I’m confident we can shore up some of the holes.
I care about people who care about people. I am, I think, as much of a feminist as the person on Twitter who accused me of mansplaining. And I very much want to welcome new people who want to have a positive impact on the community culture and change harmful attitudes and ideas. I thought the retweeter was such a person, but I’m no longer convinced they were. I cannot, of course, presume to judge their character, or what change they want to bring about in the world. I hoped and hoped and hoped they would be willing to help make a difference. They weren’t.
There’s nothing like a missed opportunity to bring you down.
The bit that hurt
Stack Overflow is, on the whole, pretty supportive of us moderators, all five hundred and something of us. In particular, the Community Team — basically, liaisons between the moderators/community and the company — are a fantastic group of people. I have been very fortunate to interact with them, and to be guided by them at times. They have a human side, too (you have no idea how many times I’ve gotten hungry seeing some of Tim Post’s cooking on Twitter), and that makes them relatable. On the whole, I think I have a good relationship with Stack Overflow, Inc. Hey, they sent me a nice water bottle in return for me making a paper hat.
This week is the one time I where I feel Stack Overflow let me down.
In Monica’s blog post, she mentioned how an employee of Stack Exchange — not someone on the Community Team, but a developer — made some unfortunate, and incorrect, assumptions about what had happened, which led them to tweet in as many words that I should be removed as a moderator. I won’t be naming this person, or linking to that tweet, because they’ve apologized to the mods in general and have probably had a shitty past week. I also have no desire to drag someone’s name through the mud over a mistake.
What hurt me was that there has been no public response from the company. Again, Monica talked about this, and I’m rehashing it just to emphasize that it still holds true almost a week after she wrote her post. We’ve had an unofficial supportive tweet or two from Tim (who is also unfortunately having a crappy week), which was great, and I’m expecting a blog post from Stack Overflow soon. But that’s been it. The dirty laundry is still there; the Twitter thread still shows me being accused of sexism and ableism, and there has been no clear response to that from the company.
If I didn’t know better, and if I didn’t trust the amazing people at Stack Overflow better, I would take that to mean they agree.
I hate making demands. I really do. I don’t feel like I have the right, frankly, to make demands of people. So I won’t make any ultimatums, or threats, or whatever. I’ll just say that I want one very, very simple thing:
I want you to say that this won’t happen again.
I’ll never find myself in this precise situation, because I really don’t foresee myself ever again using Twitter to talk with someone about Stack Exchange. After all, we’ll soon see a new social media policy, both for the company internally and for the moderators, which is really awesome. I’m also still not convinced that I did the right thing. But there are always going to be times when someone on the Internet maligns a Stack Exchange site and/or its users without cause.
I want Stack Overflow to promise me that they will never enable slander like that. Period.
Now, there are good ways to respond to people’s concerns. A lot of the listening I’ve been doing this week has taught me about this. For instance, as a bunch of smart people have said in recent days, there are ways to show that you empathize with someone and assure them you’ll investigate a possible problem instead of jumping the gun and essentially telling them that they’re right without actually . . . investigating. That’s not something I did a fantastic job at; in this case, I don’t think the company did, either. So it’s a starting point, as we all go forward — just one idea out of many.
The final problem
Interpersonal Skills has been a headache for me many times in the past year. We’re one of a breed of Good Subjective sites, a category that is increasingly an important part of Stack Exchange. We have complicated policies aimed at reducing clutter and poorly-thought-out advice and improving answer quality in general. We deal with topics that are often uncomfortable or problematic, ranging from sexual relationships to interpersonal religious conflicts. Despite these hurdles, though, we’re not doing as terribly as we might have.
Now, these questions do cause some problems when they show up elsewhere on the network, especially if they feature poorly written or contextually lacking titles. Some people reading this might note that I’ve been a bit of a broken record about that this week, but it’s true, and the retweeter wasn’t all wrong. A title is often the only thing about a question a user sees before clicking on it, and poor titles can be turn-offs to potential new users. This is one reason IPS was removed from the Hot Network Questions list.
Nonetheless, there are other sites like us, and I still think that non-tech-oriented, non-work-related sites are going to be massively important to the network in the years ahead. It’s just a hunch. But as someone on the ground, so to speak, it feels that way. So we’re going to continue to see sites like this rise up, and we’re going to have to figure out more sustainable ways to manage integrating them into the network than just removing them from view.
In the present, though — and regardless of what policies regarding cross-site promotion are implemented network-wide — IPS is a massive headache for me at times. There are days kinda like today where it seems like we’re everyone’s punching bag. Everyone on the network, it seems, likes to talk about our problems and our dramas and our continuous growth and development. As a representative of the site, that’s exhausting to keep up with and, from time to time, join in with.
We do seem to breed drama on IPS. I don’t know if that’s an inherent part of our subject matter or what. I hope it isn’t. I’ve spent a year thinking about ways to reduce it. Perhaps removing us from the Hot Network Questions list is a way to stop it from spreading. But it won’t stop people talking, in chat, on Twitter, and presumably elsewhere on the Internet. I wish it did.
A year of dealing with wildfires has kind of taken a toll on me. This Twitter mess is just the latest, and arguably the worst. I find myself enjoying moderating the site less and less with each day, and grumbling about it more and more. For the first time in my almost four years of moderating, I’m considering stepping down from a site, just for my own sanity.
As a certain mod on Stack Exchange likes to say, you only have so many spoons to spend on things. And moderating IPS takes up a lot of spoons.
The takeaway
This turned out longer than I expected. Maybe it’s because I haven’t spent much time talking this week — and I’m glad of that. I learn so much more when I listen to others than when I talk, and I really wanted to learn this week. I hope I’ve come away with some good lessons, and good advice for the future.
I’ve written down my feelings, raw as they are. I’ve written them down honestly just to write them down, to put them into words, to give form and depth to them. I wanted to turn something visceral into something coherent, and I hope I succeeded.
Maybe you agree with what I said. Maybe you don’t. I’m fine with both; I know I don’t agree with everyone. And that’s fine. That’s precisely what encourages discussion and debate and productive conversations. Months from now, I don’t want to view this incident as a stumbling block, but as a stepladder to solving some really tough problems we’ve been facing.
That’s only going to happen if we actually commit to change. It’s one thing to be outraged — at IPS, at Stack Exchange, at me — and it’s another thing entirely to turn that outrage into something productive. By setting out how I feel, I hope that I’m making a first step. I am sitting here and saying I don’t like the current state of things, and I will go further and say I want to help solve the problems of inclusivity and company-moderator communication and cross-site promotion and site growth and whatever-the-hell-happened last week. I commit now to do more writing and talking and listening and thinking — whatever I need to to help the network.
I want to put in the work to fix what I don’t like.
Let’s do this.
