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Comment by chimi | Hacker News Reader

Honest Question: Why continue to support stack exchange through this? They have shown themselves to be disingenuous at best. They are now profiting off free labor. They started it because ExpertsExchange was hiding answers. They rode the high horse to hypocrisy.

Why continue helping people like that succeed?

Why not just start a new one? Leave en masse to a new playground. Speak with your answers.

Show the powers that be they can't treat the sharecroppers like this anymore.

Hasn't history shown the way? It's repeating itself all over this controversy.

Is this an inevitability? How can this be prevented?

It feels like the issue regarding Monica is just the issue we are all talking about, but ultimately, it goes much deeper.

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Unfortunately StackExchange fell into the trap of trying to support social justice warriorisms.

Either they will fold or they will come to realize that the only ways to deal with users that are preoccupied with genders, religion, sexual orientations and whatever protected class they can come up with are to lose them or ignore them. You can’t go along with their demands because there will always be a new demand, each one crazier and more irrelevant than the last one.

I'm curious as to what part of the issue was about "social justice warriorisms", especially since Monica herself and most of the other mods who resigned were okay with the principle of calling people by the pronoun they prefer to be called by.

Perhaps my reading of the situation is way off, but at the risk of making a fool of myself:

My understanding is that Monica wanted to use gender neutral pronouns throughout her writing as a general case, but that this was deemed "not good enough" (or indeed hateful) in the cases where someone has chosen specific pronouns. So I suppose this is what the GP is referring to. And I can't argue that it seems like a rather extreme position - although I'm happy to be persuaded otherwise.

That is what this is about? There is something wrong with the way our culture is shifting. There is absolutely nothing wrong with Monica's choice. It is literally the most pacifist choice you could make. Anyone who feels "harmed" by her choice is only harming themselves.

I care deeply about social justice, and I'm totally on Monica's side here. Even more so because as far as anyone can tell, she wasn't even violating a CoC yet, and would probably have followed it if it was sufficiently clarified. But at the most basic level, I feel gender-neutral language should always be okay.

In fact, I think it would be healthy if language in general developed in a more gender-neutral direction. We don't use special pronouns to divide people based on other characteristics, so why gender?

It was a matter of one party being insufficiently SJWist for another party. SJWism is a continuum, not a binary.

I've read elsewhere that if a radical lives long enough he'll eventually be chastised for being insufficiently radical. I don't know if it's true, but I for one will find it hilarious in a decade or two when today's SJWs are having to apologise for deriding the idea of human-animal marriage or for opposing lettuce rights in the backwards years of 2019. Or will, anyway, if I haven't died in a re-education camp by then.

I consider myself a 90’s Clinton-era progressive, which means I’m pretty much dead to the 2019-era left. Just like Reagan-era conservatives are unrecognizable to “true conservatives” today. The camps are moving so extremely to each side it’s hard to identify with anyone politically anymore.

>Why continue to support stack exchange through this?

To exploit the new rules and demand everyone refer to you by your preferred pronoun of "God". If you're into that kind of thing.

"Master" would also work well. Or "Daddy" if you're into that kind of thing. Hmm, I'm starting to actually like this policy...

"Don't confine me within your normative definition of 'pronoun'!"

SO has so much information already, I think it would be frustrating for people to have to walk away from it and start from scratch, and a huge loss to the community (or anyone who has ever googled "how to do X in lang Y"). However when your community is built on top of a VC-funded for-profit company this is always a risk you take. Maybe the only solution is starting over with a non-profit model.

> I think it would be frustrating for people to have to walk away from it and start from scratch

All the StackExchange Q&A content is covered by a Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike license (CC BY-SA). You can start your own website and use all the content. The only sense in which you'd be starting over is with building the community; the existing questions and answers are free to use.

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333089/stack-exchan...

Didn't know that - thanks!

what do you mean by support? I google and sometimes use their content and that's it. There are other sources.

By support I mean, continue to moderate their website for them. Answer questions for them. Ask questions of them.

Continue to give them time and help them create the product they are going to sell to someone else and keep all the money for themselves.

And also support by voicing concerns. Showing them what their user base wants when they clearly don't care what their user base wants, only what they want in their wallet.

I ask questions there because I get good answers quickly. Sometimes I see questions in my field of expertise and I answer them. Which other site should I go to instead to have that?

This is the last straw for me. The ads were also out of control.

Real documentation is better anyway!

> Real documentation is better anyway!

If SO was the alternative to real documentation to you, you’re probably part of the reason why SO quality has declined so much and why moderation got heavy-handed over time, with collateral damage: lazy ass users asking RTFM / I-can-haz-code questions.

(Years ago I answered questions for a while on SO, accumulated a few thousand points, and participated in modding queues. I know how bad the bottom 30% or more of SO questions are.)

Even with the quality slipping from the early days I think it's quite remarkable how high the quality is when you consider the distribution of quality of questions that get posted. The low quality review queue on stack overflow is just brutal. Part of what makes it a good resource is that the worst of the questions just don't get seen by many people.

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